Aaron Elkins - Make No Bones

“You noticed the arthropodal deposits in the nostrils, the mouth, the wound?” Tilton asked.

Gideon nodded, fighting off a shudder. He was beginning to think he should have gone with Julie.

“Sure,” John said, “all over the place.” He helped himself to a fistful of Tilton’s popcorn.

“Well,” Tilton went on, “I’m sure you observed the stage of development of the deposits-”

“Eggs,” John said knowledgeably. “Not larval stage yet.”

“Right, yes, true. Bluebottle fly, Calliphora vicina. And I think we can take it for granted they were laid about the time he died, because in this kind of weather, with those kinds of nice, juicy wounds, the flies would have found him and started laying in about five minutes. Kapish?”

John and Gideon both nodded.

Tilton nodded back at them. “So what does that tell us, hm?” Bright-eyed, chipper, in his element, he looked at them, twirling the toothpick, his jaw muscles working vigorously. He chewed the gum in the front of his mouth, Gideon noticed, like a hamster, repositioning it with quick, twiddly movements of his lips. Was that his secret? Popcorn on the molars, chewing gum on the incisors?

“It tells us,” he continued, as Gideon had no doubt he would, “that those li’l suckers were laid sometime in the last twenty-four hours because that’s how long the egg stage lasts, and even that’s pushing it. Well, now; we can knock twelve hours off that straight out, because we already know your man was killed more than twelve hours ago, that is, before four this morning-”

“We do?” John said.

“Rigor, rigor,” Tilton said. “It’s already had time to loosen up.”

“Right, I forgot.”

“And, likewise, we can rule out any possibility of those eggs being laid after, oh, mm, nine o’clock last night-” “We can?” said Gideon.

“Sure, because the lights in the cottage were off, and that’s about the time it gets dark, and flies don’t lay eggs in the dark. They don’t do anything in the dark.”

“They don’t?” Gideon said.

Tilton laughed. “You ever hear a fly buzzing around in a dark room?”

“I guess not.”

“I know not,” Tilton said. “So there you have it, my friends. Death occurred no earlier than four yesterday afternoon, no later than nine yesterday evening. Nineteen to twenty-four hours.” He grinned happily at them and mopped his forehead with a wadded handkerchief. “Whoo. God-o-mighty. Ain’t science wonderful?”

“How positive are you about all this?” John asked. One of his more frequently employed questions.

“Let me put it this way. On a scale of one to ten, we’re up at about a forty, okay? I mean, maybe- maybe -I’m off by three or four hours at the far end, but that’s it. And I don’t think I am.”

John tilted the bottle for a thoughtful swig of beer. “Scratch Callie,” he said to Gideon.

“Unless she wasn’t really in Nevada,” Gideon said. He told them about his talk with Julie and raised the possibility of Callie’s trip being faked.

John was more receptive than he’d expected. “It’s possible,” he said reasonably. “She could have fudged it. Julian Minor’s going to give me a hand from up in Seattle. He loves to get into stuff like that. If there’s anything funny about it, he’ll dig it out.”

Gideon agreed. Julian Minor was another special agent who was often teamed with John. A reserved, methodical black man of fifty who spoke like a 1910 secretary’s handbook (“At the present time…” “At a later date…” “In regard to your request…”), he was a whiz at unearthing facts and pinpointing contradictions. And somehow, he did it best from his desk on the seventh floor of the Federal Building in downtown Seattle.

Tilton had followed the conversation restlessly. “Who’s Callie, one of your anthropologists?”

“That’s right,” Gideon said, “one of the few who was here for both murders.”

“Nape, uh-uh, forget it. If a forensic anthropologist did this, I’ll eat my hat. My fur-lined hat with earflaps, the one I wear when it snows.”

“What makes you say that?” Gideon asked.

“Well, the method,” he said, as if it were obvious. “I mean, really-simple blunt-force trauma?” His mouth curled contemptuously around the toothpick. “What kind of way is that for a forensic scientist to kill somebody?”

“Too unsubtle?” Gideon asked.

“Too physical, too risky, too much likelihood of getting caught. All that blood. Whoo.” He shook his head. “No, sir, these people are trained, just like you and me. They know things your everyday killer doesn’t.” He leaned forward, jiggling the gum between his front teeth. “Knowing what I know, I could come up with half-a-dozen ways to commit an absolutely perfect murder if I had to. Untraceable. Couldn’t you? And don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”

“I haven’t,” Gideon said truthfully, “but I see what you’re getting at. If I wanted to get away with murder, I certainly wouldn’t bludgeon somebody with an old table leg and then just leave him sitting in his chair, waiting to be found. Along with the table leg.”

“You’re darn tootin’ you wouldn’t. And neither would any of the rest of them.” Tilton twirled his toothpick, brushed popcorn from his paunch, and got to his feet. “Well, gentlemen, I leave you to it. John, I’ll have a report to you by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Okay, thanks, Dr. Tilton. I’ll be in touch.”

John watched him go. “Doc, you buy this expert-murderer bit?”

“I think he’s got a point.”

“Well, I don’t.” He stood up and yawned, stretching. “Let me tell you, smart people do the goddamn dumbest things all the time.”

“You said a mouthful there,” Gideon said with a smile. “Great God-o-mighty.”

“No, the last time I saw Harlow would have been…oh…” Callie jutted her long chin out and up, and whooshed a sizable lungful of smoke at the ceiling. “…a little after noon. Probably about twelve-fifteen.”

“This was Tuesday?” John asked.

“Tuesday. In his cottage.”

“Would you mind telling me what you were talking about?”

“No, why should I mind? We were discussing his reason for not flying back with me for the curriculum meeting.” “Which was?”

She looked at her hands, running her thumb over the tips of her polished fingernails. “He said he wasn’t feeling well.”

“What was the matter with him?”

“What was always the matter with him. His stomach.” The guy’s just been murdered, John thought, and she’s mad because he didn’t make it to a meeting.

“Did he seem pretty sick to you?”

“Do you mean generally speaking, or Tuesday afternoon in particular?”

“Both.”

“No and no.”

John didn’t like it when interviewees got cute. It led to misunderstandings. “You want to explain, please?”

“Frankly, I think the main thing wrong with his stomach was all the worrying he did about it. He didn’t have anything worse than an intermittent generalized gastritis.”

That sounded bad enough to John. “Are you saying he could have made the meeting if he wanted to?”

“If he wanted to,” she said.

“Why wouldn’t he want to?”

Her upper lip bulged as she scoured the inside of her mouth with her tongue. “I don’t believe in speaking ill of the dead.”

“Uh-huh,” John said. He’d heard that a whole lot of times in his career. Nine times out of ten it was followed by a “but.”

“But I don’t think it’s any secret that Harlow was thoroughly burnt out. He was serving out his time; he didn’t give a damn. Frankly, his being on the curriculum committee was my idea. I hoped it might create some interest in the educative process-you know, as a synergistic function and as a source of personal renewal as well. But of course that kind of interest has to come from within.”