Aaron Elkins - Make No Bones

“Yeah, I can see that,” John said. “Were the tickets nonrefundable?”

“What?”

“The flight tickets to Nevada and back. Were they nonrefundable?”

“Well, I don’t-yes, I suppose they must have been.

Mine were, and the same secretary made the arrangements for both of us.”

“Who paid, the school?”

“Of course it did.” A glimmer of defensiveness. “It was university business, wasn’t it?”

“The reason I’m asking about them-”

“I understand the reason. And you’re right. Harlow wasn’t the kind of person who would throw away several hundred dollars-of his money or the school’s-because he wasn’t in the mood to attend a meeting.” She brushed her hair back with a tentative flick. “It’s conceivable I may have been wrong.”

“About what?”

“About his being ill. He may have been sicker than I thought.”

“But that wasn’t the impression you got?”

“To be perfectly candid, no,” she said, frowning, “but he did seem…”

John waited.

…worried…frightened…almost as if he sensed what was going to happen to him. But he didn’t say anything.” She drew thoughtfully on her cigarette, staring through the window over John’s shoulder at the soft gray rain that had broken the heat wave during the night and had been drifting down all day onto the Whitebark Lodge lawn. “My God, maybe if I’d been more receptive, more empathetic, instead of being tuned in to where I was coming from, I could have done something to prevent it.”

Her dark eyes, earnest and glowing, settled on John’s face. “I cared about him, you know, John. We had our professional differences, but I cared about him as a human being.”

Lady, you’re a phony, he said to himself. Right down to your socks. Harlow was a pain in the butt to you, and you couldn’t be happier about the guy’s being out of your hair.

He leaned back, studying her. Happy about it or not, she hadn’t killed him. That was one of the things Julian Minor had already established from his Seattle desk. The man at the Budget car-rental counter in the Bend-Redmond Airport had verified by telephone that Callie had turned in her Dodge Colt at 2:10 P.M. on Tuesday, sat around the airport lounge drinking coffee and working on her laptop for half an hour, and boarded the commuter plane to Portland. He’d reserved another car for her and had it waiting when she got off the first plane from Portland at 6:00 A.M. Thursday. And yes, he remembered seeing her actually get off. It wasn’t what you’d call a real big airport.

On top of that, her presence in Carson City as late as 5:00 P.M. on Wednesday had been confirmed. Unless she’d taken a private plane, there was no way she could have gotten back to Whitebark Lodge inside of Tilton’s 9:00 P.M. time-of-death deadline. And Julian had found no such flight.

Whatever Julie had seen or not seen on the trail ride-and John’s own brief interviews with several people who’d been on it had turned up nothing to support her-Callie was several hundred miles away when Harlow had been murdered.

So, once again: scratch Callie.

“Would you have any idea where he was between the time you saw him and late Wednesday?” he asked.

“No, I don’t. What’s so important about late Wednesday? Is that when he was killed?”

John nodded. “Between four and nine o’clock.”

Callie shuddered suddenly. “Is it true that his skull was crushed?”

It was true, all right, John said. Did she have any idea what might be behind the murder?

She dragged hard on her cigarette. “It has to have something to do with this bizarre thing with Jasper-with Jasper’s murder.”

That was true too. “Tell me a little about Jasper.” “Jasper?” Her mouth thinned and set. “Jasper was a son of a bitch.”

Not just your everyday sonofabitch either, John noted, but a son of a bitch; three fat, separate words dripping with venom.

Well, CaIlie had good reason for hating him. According to Gideon, Jasper had made her life as a graduate student miserable. He had chipped away and chipped away at her doctoral dissertation, making her process big chunks of her data over and over, until she had quit in frustration after four years and transferred to Nevada State. Thereunder the less-demanding Harlow-she had her degree in a year and a half.

“Enough of a sonofabitch for one of his ex-students to want to kill him?” he asked Callie.

“Albert Jasper was awful,” she said. “Cynical, condescending, ruthless, uptight, paternalistic in the worst sense of the term…” John thought she had run out of words, but she was only pausing for breath. “Arrogant, inauthentic, self-centered…all in all, a horrible person. You don’t have to take my word for it either; the others will tell you exactly the same thing.”

So they had, so far. “And yet you put on a big party for him when he retired.”

“Nellie put it on. He did the organizing, and I think most of us came to please him, not Jasper. And, well, to tell the truth, in my case I was flattered to be invited. I wasn’t a very big fish at the time. And I was excited about the idea of a forensic anthropology conference. But the whole retirement-party bit was Nellie’s concoction; no one else’s.”

“And yet you all came.”

Callie laughed shortly. “A big mistake.”

Especially for Jasper, John thought.

Callie drew herself up. “Are we done? There’s a session I’d like to attend.”

“Just one more thing,” John said. “I’d like you to take a look at this.” He removed a sheet of paper from the folder at his elbow and passed it to her. On it was a copy of Albert Jasper’s telephone bill for June 1981-more of Julian Minor’s work, obtained by Telefax a couple of hours earlier.

“Look at the circled number, the call to Nevada.” She looked. “Yes?”

“Do you know that number?”

“Well, it’s the university’s prefix-”

“I know that, but the extension isn’t in use anymore, and so far no one’s been able to tell us what it was. You don’t recognize it?”

“No. Wait, yes. It’s the old anthropology department extension. We haven’t used it since 1989.”

“So it would have been a call to the department switchboard?”

“The department secretary. There were only six or seven faculty offices back then, and a secretary could handle it.”

“The call was made just two weeks before the meeting-two weeks before Jasper was killed. You wouldn’t happen to know what he was calling about?”

“No.”

“He wasn’t calling you?”

She laughed. “Jasper wouldn’t call me.”

“All right, who would he call?”

“Well, Harlow, probably. I mean, I don’t think he knew any of the others. They were all cultural, or linguistics, or archaeology. But I’m just guessing.”

“What would he be calling Harlow about?”

“I have no idea. They weren’t exactly in close contact, so it’s a bit of a surprise, actually.”

John looked up as a head poked through the open doorway of the lounge.

“Manager said you wanted to see me.” It was one of the lodge staff, a sleepy-looking teenager with a bad complexion and long, stringy blond hair under a turned-around baseball cap. He took an unwilling step into the room.

“Thanks, be with you in a second.”

“I can come back later.”

“No, I’m just leaving,” Callie called to him. She ground out her cigarette and stood up. “I really think I would have heard about that phone call if it were anything significant,” she said to John. “I can’t imagine it was anything important.”

Maybe not, John thought, but it was the only call listed on Jasper’s bill to any of the people John was now concerned with. And they had talked for thirty-nine minutes. That was a long time for a long-distance call. Especially for people who weren’t exactly in close contact.