Aaron Elkins: Where there's a will

“Well, remember,” John said, pleased, “I roomed with Axel at college and he used to talk about this stuff a lot. And I still see him every few years. And then I spent a couple of summer vacations working on the ranch.”

“No, I didn’t know that. So you must know quite a bit about ranching, then.”

“Well, I wouldn’t… that is, I’m not any kind of… well, yeah.” And then, as he often did with little or no reason, he burst into laughter. John had a wonderfully infectious laugh that crinkled up the skin around his eyes, made his eyes themselves gleam, and rarely failed to make Gideon laugh along with him, as he did now.

“They brought over their sister Dagmar a couple of years after they got here,” John went on, “and all four of them worked like dogs to make the ranch go. Andreas, the oldest one, he died before I met any of them, but I got to know old Torkel and Magnus and the rest of them pretty well. Real well, in fact.”

They had climbed to two thousand feet-never a switchback, just one long, steady rise along the flank of the range-and while John nodded to himself, remembering, Gideon gratefully took in the prospect around them. The afternoon shadows had lengthened, adding texture and depth to the rolling countryside. Trees were still sparse, but the duns and ochres of the lowlands had given way to green, healthy pasturelands. The temperature had gotten more comfortable still, and there were veils of mist in some of the hollows and around some of the peaks-if you could call these lovely, rounded, hummocky rises “peaks.” Over his right shoulder, he could look back down the slope and see the coastline all the way to Kona, as John had said. The whole scene was very beautiful. It surprised him that he’d zipped through it a few years ago, hardly noticing it.

John surfaced and went on. “The two brothers were kind of crotchety by then. You know, two old bachelors, living in the same house together with their old-maid sister, always carping at each other; not real easy to get along with, but they loved the ranch, they ran a tight ship-Jesus, did they-and somehow they kept it all together, until…”

He was still smiling, remembering days long past, but now he sobered. The smile faded. “Until Torkel got murdered-”

Gideon stared at him. “Murdered?”

“-and Magnus disappeared.”

“He disappeared? ”

“Took off into the night in the ranch plane, never to be heard from again.”

“You mean they never found out what happened to him?”

“Not until just this week, as a matter of fact. Tuesday. A couple of skin-divers found the plane. Axel was telling me about it. It crashed in the lagoon of some rinky-dink island in the Pacific. They think he never got where he was going, that it went down the night he left.”

“Was there anything in it? Any remains, I mean?”

John nodded. “Yeah, some bones, apparently.”

“Are the Torkelssons having them brought back?”

“I don’t know. They’re gonna talk about it today-they get together for dinner once a month or so to hassle out any problems-and figure out what they want to do. Why, you want to volunteer your services?”

“Sure, if they want someone to look the bones over, see if maybe there’s something to confirm it really is Magnus. You know people appreciate that kind of closure.”

“They do, yeah, but my impression is they just want to put it all behind them. My guess is that if they bring the remains back they’ll just want to bury them. That’ll be all the closure they need.”

“Huh. Well, go on back to the story. What was it all about? Did Magnus kill his brother? Is that why he ran?”

“No, no, no. I wasn’t around anymore by then, but from everything anybody knows, it was some kind of vengeance thing… you know, retribution, payback.”

“For what?”

John shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. All they know is somebody shot Torkel to death and burned down the main ranch building. They tried to get Magnus too, but he managed to get away, make it to the airport, and take off. That’s it.”

“And nobody knows who did it?”

“Nope. There were plenty of candidates, more than they knew what to do with. See, these old guys weren’t that easy to get along with, and they drove a hard bargain besides. Shrewd, you know? There were a lot of people with grudges. Lemme see… oh, there was a neighboring ranch, part of a consortium, that wanted right-of-way access for a water line. When Torkel and Magnus said no way, the place went bust, wound up having to sell for next to nothing. And who do you think bought it? The Torkelssons, of course, who immediately laid in a water pipeline.”

“That would have gone down hard,” Gideon said.

“You’re not kidding. And then there were some kind of famous cattle negotiations in Honolulu, where they supposedly aced out one of the big Kauai ranching syndicates. There were threats against them on record, there was even-”

“But nobody was ever convicted?”

“Nobody was ever indicted. The cops never even brought charges. There just wasn’t any evidence, Doc. Nothing to tie anybody to it. Remember, they burned the place down. That doesn’t make the job any easier.”

Gideon leaned back in his seat and thought it over. “John,” he said with a shake of his head, “I have to say…”

John glanced at him. “What?”

“Well, you have a case where one brother is murdered and the other one takes off. You have to wonder-”

“You have to wonder if Magnus didn’t kill Torkel.”

“Well, don’t you?”

“Sure, and naturally that was where the cops looked first, but that angle petered out inside of a couple of days. For one thing, the autopsy on Torkel showed that they did him in classic gangland execution style. Two shooters, the whole bit. This wasn’t just one ticked-off old geezer killing his geezer brother.”

“You mean, hired killers.”

“Exactly. A professional hit all the way, very smooth.”

“But why couldn’t Magnus have been the one who hired them?”

“No way. He was too cheap.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously, what kind of sense does it make? If he wanted to have his brother killed, he’d have had it done when he wasn’t around, when he had some kind of alibi, over in Honolulu or something, wouldn’t he?”

“That’s a point,” Gideon said. “He sure wouldn’t have done it this way, putting himself right in the middle of it.”

“Another thing, too,” John pointed out. “No motive. None at all. Also, if he arranged for a couple of hitmen to do it, why would he run? No, he’s not the one who killed his brother.”

“Okay, that I can buy, but if these killers were after him, why didn’t he just go to the police for help? Why leave everything-his family, his ranch-and run for his life?”

“Well, all I can tell you is, that’s what people do when hitmen are on their tail. And between you and me, it’s a pretty good idea. Besides, the Waimea PD would be in way over their heads on something like this. They probably get, like, one homicide every ten years, and then it’s just some out-of-his-skull meth-head.”

“Then why not go to the state police in Honolulu? Or the FBI?”

“Look, people do funny things when they’re scared; you know that. Anyway, that was the last time anybody ever saw him. Or heard anything about him, until this week.”

They had reached the outskirts of Waimea now, a pretty little 1950s Western town with feed and grain stores, and stores that sold farm equipment, and rugged-looking men in Stetsons, and even a little white church with a wooden belfry. The only thing that told you you weren’t in Kansas or South Dakota were the tropical red and blue tin roofs. That and the impossibly lush green hills in which the town nestled.