Aaron Elkins - Where there's a will

“Yes, it seems that way to me, too,” Gideon said, suppressing his smile.

“I’ll be damned.” Fukida wasn’t looking at the bones, he was rocking lightly back and forth in his tilting chair, looking through a window behind them at the compost piles and snapping a rubber band that was around his wrist. The look on his face was part befuddlement, part amusement. “And so that’s how you identified him as Torkel? That’s the whole bit?”

“That was the main thing, yes,” Gideon said. “There were some other things, but… why? What’s the matter? Is there something funny about it?”

“Oh, yeah. Hilarious.” He stopped rocking, gave the rubber band one more vigorous snap, and looked directly at Gideon. “The corpse in the burned building, that’s how they identified him as Torkel. Otherwise, he was unrecognizable.”

“I don’t understand.”

“ He was missing two toes, too. The same two frigging toes, I’m pretty sure.”

“But Magnus didn’t… but Torkel was the one…”

“Right you are, champ,” said Fukida. “And what does that tell us, I asks myself? It tells us, I replies, that we got ourselves one too many Torkels.”

“And not enough Magnuses,” said John after a moment. He rolled his head back, working his neck muscles the way Fukida had. “I could sure use a cup of coffee.”

In the snack room, over cardboard cups of watery vending-machine coffee (“Can you believe it?” Fukida said sourly. “Here we are in the middle of the goddamn Kona Coast, and this is the crap they expect us to drink.”), they talked about what was to be done and agreed that the place to begin would be to do what Gideon had come for: to look at the case’s medical records to see what he could make of them.

“Okay, but between us,” Fukida told them, “the guy who did the autopsy, old Doc Meikeljohn, he’d been having a serious affair with the bottle for a while, so by that time he was maybe, let’s say, a couple of tacos short of a combination plate, you know? What I’m saying is, those two missing toes might have been in his head. I mean, considering the fire and all, the body was in pretty bad shape. Could have just been sloppy work. Or maybe the toes got burned off.”

“But those exact two toes?” John said. “The same ones Torkel was missing? How likely is that?”

“Not very,” Fukida admitted. “But then, the autopsy wasn’t performed for a couple of days. By that time they had the old lady’s deposition and everybody, including Meikeljohn, knew… well, they thought they knew… that it was Torkel. For all I know, he also knew Torkel was missing a couple of toes-he probably did. So, I mean, when you consider the condition of the body, and the fact that Meikeljohn wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer-”

“He jumped to the wrong conclusion,” John finished for him. “He expected amputated toes, and so that’s what he found. Yeah, Doc says that happens to him all the time.”

“John, when did I ever say-” Gideon began, then laughed. “Never mind.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me, Johnny,” Fukida said. “But if you want to know what I think, I think we got ourselves a whole’nother scenario.”

“Which is?” John asked.

“That Torkel Torkelsson-the real Torkel-cut those two toes off his dead brother before he took off so that everybody would think he was the dead one, and the shooters would forget all about him.”

“Yes, we were thinking along the same lines,” said Gideon.

“One thing, though,” John said. “How do we know for sure that the guy you autopsied is really his brother Magnus? Okay, it’s not Torkel-Torkel was in the plane, we agree on that-but this guy here could be just about anybody, couldn’t it? I mean, he was unrecognizable, right?”

“Real doubtful, sport,” Fukida said. “Who else could it be? That was the last night anybody ever saw old Magnus alive. He sure hasn’t been around since, and we don’t have anybody else who’s missing from then. No, I think we can be sure it’s Magnus, all right.”

“Yeah, like until twenty minutes ago you were sure it was Torkel.”

Fukida scowled. “Wise guy. That was because-”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Gideon interjected. “That’s what I’m here to try and clear up. If there are any clear photos of the foot, and there’s not too much damage from the fire, I might be able to tell for sure that the toes were lost after he died. That’d give us a starting point. And who knows, maybe I might come up with something else.”

“Okay, chief,” Fukida agreed with a shrug. “Do your shtick. What do you need?”

“Any pictures you have. The crime scene photos, the pre-autopsy photos, and the photographs from the autopsy itself, if there are any.”

“No problem,” Fukida said.

“And I probably should look at the autopsy report itself, even if you think it’s suspect. The coroner might have noticed something helpful.”

“I wouldn’t count on it.” He stood up and poured most of his coffee into the sink. “Look, I have to run into Kona for a while, but I’ll set you guys up in a quiet room and have Sarah bring it all over to you.”

“How about sending the whole case file while you’re at it?” John said. “I wouldn’t mind looking through it.”

“You’re talking about a lot of paper.”

John shrugged. “It’ll give me something to do.”

“Okay, but I can’t let you guys take anything away with you, you understand that. It all has to stay here.”

“No problem,” John said.

Fifteen minutes later, with Gideon and John deposited in a pleasant conference room with comfortable fauxleather chairs, a dark, gleaming table, and windows whose views artfully managed to avoid the compost heaps and wrecked cars, instead looking over the lava fields, past the Boeing 717s floating down to the nearby airport, and onto the massive, cloud-wreathed hump that was Maui, an affable, carrot-topped clerk lugged in a rolling cart bulging with hanging folders and set it next to the table, between their chairs. A thick, yellow nine-by-twelve clasp envelope was plopped on the table as well.

“There you are, boys. The case file’s in the folders. The envelope has the crime scene photos. If you need anything else, pick up that phone and dial forty-four. I’m Sarah Andersen.”

“Is the autopsy report in with the case file?” Gideon asked.

“No, it wouldn’t be in there. His Majesty didn’t tell me you wanted it. Be back in a sec.”

In the envelope was a stack of black-and-white eight-by-ten photos and a neatly printed log numbering and describing them; a hundred and sixty-five in all, as usual starting with the exterior of the building and working inward, gradually going from long- and intermediate-range shots to close-ups. Gideon was at the hundred and thirtieth before he got to the first relatively close full-length image of the body, which had been found lying half on its side, half on its face.

It made him close his eyes.

Where There's A Will

Aaron Elkins – Gideon Oliver 12 – Where There's A Will

Bones were one thing: smooth, clean, ivory-colored, usually suggesting little that brought one up against agony or violent death. A nick here, a tidy, round hole there, a few harmless-looking cracks. Even when there was more extensive breakage bone seemed to have more in common with broken pottery than with bloody, broken heads and spilled brains. His most timid, queasy students had no trouble glueing together a shattered skull or a crushed pelvis. But horribly maimed bodies like this one… crispy critters, his colleagues called the burned ones, and while Gideon had no quarrel with the use of black humor to distance oneself from horror, for him it didn’t work. Neither did anything else.