Aaron Elkins - Make No Bones

“I really couldn’t say.”

Leland had a way of looking at people as if he were examining them through a lorgnette. Callie was briefly subjected to this scrutiny before he spoke again.

“Well, then, where’s he been?”

Callie’s attention had returned to her notes. With a sigh she closed the binder. “Leland,” she said between set teeth, “I already told you-”…

Gideon got up and left the room, crossing the lawn and taking the footbridge over the pond toward Harlow’s cottage. Halfway there he hesitated, changed his mind, and made for John’s cottage instead.

“Harlow hasn’t shown up at the meeting,” he told him. “I think we ought to check his cottage.”

John had come to the door with a legal pad in his hand and his mind obviously elsewhere. “I don’t know, maybe he’s-”

“Nobody’s seen him since Tuesday. Two days.”

“I thought he went to, where was it, Utah, with Callie.” “Nevada. And she says he never went.”

“Well, maybe he-”

Gideon blurted it out. “John, I’ve got a hunch he’s killed himself. I think he may have realized it was all over when we found the burial,”

John eyed him. “What’s this, another ‘feeling’?”

“I guess that’s what it is, yes. I’m telling you, he looked like absolute hell when we found the grave. And he practically started shaking when we talked about bringing in the police. Nobody’s seen him since, and-look, I’m probably making too much out of it, but let’s check it out anyway, all right?”

John looked gravely at him for another moment, tossed the pad onto a sofa, and closed the door behind him. “Let’s go. We’ll get a key from the office first. Just in case we need it.”

Most of the cottages at Whitebark Lodge were on the main lawn, in a cluster that curved around the big pond, but an additional half-dozen trailed away from these along the first few hundred feet of the bridle path; into a clump of woods, then out again into the sun, beside the stream. Harlow’s cottage was the last in this row, all alone on a grassy, creekside bank, forty feet from its nearest neighbor on one side, and with nothing but ponderosa forest on the other.

“He sure got himself an out-of-the-way place,” John said as they approached it.

“That’s why we had our poker game there, remember?” “How can I forget?”

As if by agreement, they stopped before climbing onto the porch. Behind them the creek burbled happily over stones and gravel, and from the woods on the opposite side floated a lovely, fluid trill of bird song, but the cottage itself seemed hunched in its own aura of torpor and decay. Sunlight glinted dustily from dirty windowpanes. Around the knob on the door a flyspecked “Please-do not disturb” sign had been hung.

“Who’d he think was gonna disturb him?” John said. “We’re not getting any room service.”

Gideon pointed to a stack of linen on top of the firewood box. “They changed the towels and things yesterday.”

“That’s right. Except it looks like they didn’t get in here.” He blew out a long breath. “Well, we better have a look.”

They stepped up onto the porch and John thumped on the door. “Harlow! Hey, Harlow!”

The footsteps, the thump, John’s voice all seemed unnaturally loud. There was no answering sound from inside, and none expected. Had Harlow actually answered John’s call, Gideon would have jumped.

John tried again. “Harlow, you in there?”

Gideon went uneasily to the front window beside the door, putting his hand against the dusty pane to shield his eyes from the glare. Near his ear a comatose fly roused itself, buzzed thickly, and fell back into a crack in the casement. Gideon’s view into the room was hampered by a basket of dried flowers at eye level, just on the other side of the window. Whatever color they had originally been, years of exposure to the thin mountain sunlight had bleached them a ghostly white. They looked as if they might crumble to dust at a touch.

He moved his head to try to peer around them. “See anything?” John asked.

“No, I…oh, Christ, yes.”

Wordlessly, he stepped back to allow John room. The FBI agent took a long, sober look, his mouth tight.

“Well, I tell you one thing,” he said. “He sure as hell didn’t commit suicide.”

The armchairs in the cottages were of walnut-stained rattan, with white seat cushions and relatively high, broad backs. In one of these battered but handsome chairs, about fifteen feet from the window and in full sunlight, Harlow Pollard was sprawled, head thrown back and to one side, eyes closed, mouth hanging open.

In the immediate aftermath of death, Gideon had noticed, people tended to look smaller than they had in life; shrunken, imploded, somehow less substantial. “As if someone let the air out of them,” he’d once heard someone say. But in Harlow’s case the opposite was true. The anthropologist’s limbs were outflung with an expansiveness never exhibited when he was alive. His legs were extended, feet spread, heels on the pine flooring, one brown shoe half off. One hand lay in his lap, palm up; the other dangled extravagantly over the arm of the chair, the loosely curled fingers almost resting on the floor.

Gideon’s eyes shied instinctively from the bloodied head, but even glimpsed briefly through the unwashed window and the screen of dried flowers, the cause of death was unmistakable. His skull had been bashed in with sickening force. The right-front upper quarter of his head simply wasn’t there. Where it should have been was a bowl-shaped, stomach-turning concavity, almost down to the eyebrow.

“No,” Gideon said tersely, “he didn’t commit suicide.” “Let’s have a look,” John said, turning the key in the lock. “Don’t touch anything, doc. Especially the body.” “Don’t worry,” Gideon said under his breath.

He steeled himself as the door swung open. If Harlow had really been lying there since Tuesday morning-well over fifty hours in ninety-degree temperature-the decomposition process would be well along. They stepped over the threshold.

More flies buzzed, their bright blue bodies shimmering handsomely in the sunlight. Bluebottles, he’d called them when he was a kid, and he’d had fun catching them in his hand and letting them go. Now he knew them as blowflies or flesh flies, and he no longer caught them in his hand. He shuddered as he brushed them away.

“There’s the weapon,” John said matter-of-factly. He pointed at a heavy table leg lying on the floor a few feet from the chair. There was a similar one in Gideon’s cottage, propped against the fireplace to serve as a poker. This one, like his own, was coated with ash at both ends. One end, however, was overlain with ugly smears that left little doubt about what it had last been used for.

“Mm,” Gideon said. He hadn’t yet gotten himself to look directly at the body again, but he drew a tentative breath as they neared the chair. He smelled nothing but a general staleness. That and a faint residue of insecticide, barely perceptible. And no longer doing its job, judging from the flies.

“He hasn’t been dead two days,” Gideon said.

“How do you know that?”

“If this body’d been sitting here two days, you’d know.” “Oh, the smell. Yeah, that’s true.”

John was leaning over the corpse, peering attentively at the ruined head, his wide back blocking Gideon. “Blood’s pretty well dried out, though,” he said. “And there are some maggots here. Doesn’t that mean he’s been dead a while?”

“Eggs, or larval stage?”

“How the hell do I know?” He looked more closely, getting his face nearer to Harlow’s than Gideon would have cared to do. “Gray little guys. They don’t have any legs. Does that tell you something?”