Aaron Elkins - Make No Bones

“Hard to say.”

John turned irritably. “Are you gonna come and look, or not?”

Gideon sighed. “Yes, I’m going to come and look.” But he moped over, taking his time about it.

“Jesus,” John said, “you are the most squeamish guy I know. How’d you ever get into this line of work?”

“I was just wondering the same thing. As I recall, you had something to do with it. And those are eggs,” he said, finally looking but not quite focusing-an ability he’d perfected only since getting into this line of work. “They haven’t hatched yet.”

“Which means what, timewise?”

“John, my line is bones, not bugs. Aren’t you going to call in the ME?”

“Yeah, or rather you are. I don’t want to touch the phone in here, so I want you to go over to your place and call Honeyman. But first tell me what you think. About the bugs.”

“Well, I’m not sure how long these things take to hatch either. A day or so, I think. If that’s right, he’s been dead less than twenty-four hours.”

“Uh-huh.” Crouching, John pushed experimentally against the freely hanging arm with a finger. It swayed limply back and forth. “Maybe a lot less?” he suggested knowledgeably. “Rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet.”

John, whose many strengths did not include forensics, never gave up trying. Unfortunately, he rarely got things altogether right.

“Urn, not exactly,” Gideon said. “I think it’s already set in and gone.”

“In less than a day? How the hell could-”

“It’s hot, John. In this kind of weather all the degenerative changes are speeded up. Besides, look at his hand.”

He gestured at Harlow’s dangling hand, suffused with the bruiselike purple of well-advanced liver mortis, the slow after-death settling of the blood due to gravity. “That’d take eight or ten hours at least.”

John nodded and straightened up. Hands on his hips, he studied the body. “Boy, that is what you call a massive head wound. Three separate blows. Look at that; you can see the damn dents, one, two, three.”

Gideon stood a couple of feet away, studying the toes of his jogging shoes. “I guess I ought to go call Farrell.” “Right.” John began walking with him toward the door. “So he’s been dead eight hours minimum, twenty-four hours max, is that what you said?”

“About,” Gideon said uneasily. “But go with what the ME says.”

“So he got killed somewhere between yesterday afternoon-Wednesday-and early this morning.”

“I guess.”

“So where was he from Tuesday morning to Wednesday? Nobody saw him all that time.”

“According to Callie, he was sick.”

“Is that right?” John strode into the kitchen, inserted a ballpoint pen into the handle of the refrigerator, and pulled it open. He did the same with the two cabinets. All were empty of food. There were no used plates or silverware in the sink or dish drainer, no wrappers in the lidless kitchen garbage can. There was no sign of anything edible in the cottage.

“So sick he didn’t even come out to eat?” John said. “For over a day?”

Gideon shrugged. “Maybe he came out and nobody saw him.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“I think we’ve got something funny going on here, Doc. I think if he was that sick he wouldn’t be sitting up in a chair, dressed in his clothes, wearing his shoes.” He gestured with his head toward the open bedroom door. “I think his bed wouldn’t be all made up.”

Gideon nodded. “You’re right. That is odd.” John might misconstrue a forensic indicator here and there, but all the same he never failed to notice some things that got by Gideon.

John’s eye was caught by something else. “Now what the hell is that?”

Gideon followed John’s line of sight. At the back of a small table near the door, caught between the edge of the table’s surface and the wall, was a foot-long strip of cardboard about a third of an inch wide, with scalloped edges and a slight curl to it. One side, the outside of the curl, was plain gray cardboard with some dabs of dried glue on it. The other was bright yellow, with a few printed messages in blue and red: “Clingier, clearer, stronger”…“250 sq. ft. (1 ft. x 83.3 yds.)”…“E-Z Open. Just pull off, starting here.”

They leaned over it, not touching it. “It’s just a tear-off strip from a box of plastic wrap,” Gideon said.

“Yeah,” John said thoughtfully. “Now that’s interesting.” Gideon looked up. What was getting by him now? “What is?”

“Well, for one thing, does Harlow strike you as a guy who’d just tear open a box and toss the strip onto a table? I mean, look around.”

John was right, of course; Harlow wasn’t the kind of man who had much effect on his surroundings. Except for the table leg-and Harlow himself-nothing was messy, nothing was disturbed. Even the living-room wastepaper basket was empty.

“For another thing,” John said, “what would a guy who doesn’t have any food want with a box of plastic wrap?” After a moment he added: “And where’s the box?”

“I don’t know, but what does it matter? For all we know, this has been here for months. Whitebark isn’t the best-maintained place in the world.”

“Mm.”

“John, does this have some sort of significance I’m not seeing?”

“I don’t know, Doc. It doesn’t fit, that’s all.”

Gideon straightened up, his head swimming. He’d been leaning over too long. He felt suddenly empty, drained of energy and acutely aware of Harlow behind them, of the caved-in skull and the wide-open mouth, and the hideous splatter.

He moved wearily toward the door. “I’d better go call Farrell,” he said.

As soon as he’d given Honeyman the unwelcome news, Gideon did what he’d been wanting to do since the moment he’d stepped into the bloody nightmare of Harlow’s cottage. He got under a hot shower, his second of the day, and scrubbed himself remorselessly down, sparing only his scraped shoulders. This urge to wash was something that asserted itself whenever his work took him away from dry, brown bones and brought him anywhere near the more gruesome bodily remains that too often came along with forensics. Gooies, anthropologists called them among themselves in moments of macabre but sanity-saving levity; gooies, or greasies, or sometimes crispy critters, depending on the particular kind of messiness involved.

Harlow most assuredly fit into the gooey category, but he was far from the worst case Gideon had seen. Yet the need to get himself clean had been unusually strong, a crawling, physical itch. He’d have tried some sandpaper on himself if he’d had it, and he’d never even touched Harlow. He stepped out of the shower stall and toweled himself dry, feeling better. Then, also for the second time, he changed clothes, unwilling to put back on what he’d been wearing. He shivered slightly when the cool, fresh cloth of the shirt touched his skin, and turned the air conditioner down a little.

It hadn’t been just the physical ugliness of the scene that had gotten to him, he thought, although that had been awful enough in its own right. But this time there was more. The butchered corpse was no stranger, but someone he’d eaten with, laughed with, played poker with. True, Harlow had never been one of his favorite people, but a day or two ago he could have truthfully described him as an old friend. Today, of course, things had changed. In less than two hours the bumbling, plodding Harlow had metamorphosed into a cunning and resourceful murderer-and now into a murder victim himself.

Which brought up an almost equally disturbing thought. Whoever had killed him was surely an old friend as well, or at least an old acquaintance. There couldn’t be much doubt that Harlow’s murder was connected with Jasper’s, and the list of suspects in Jasper’s death was a small and circumscribed one.