Aaron Elkins: Make No Bones

John pulled out his small notebook as the kid eased warily into Callie’s chair. “What’s your name?”

“Vinnie.”

John looked up.

“Stoller.”

John wrote it down. “And you’re the one who changed the sheets and towels Wednesday?”

“Not all of ‘em. I did Cottage 18.”

Harlow’s cottage. “Do you remember what time that was?”

“About 4:57.”

John put down the pad. “About 4:57?”

“I remember because it was the last one in the row, and I was like back for my dinner break at 5:00.”

John wrote down 4:57p. “Tell me exactly what you saw at the cottage, exactly what you did.”

The boy shrugged. “I didn’t do nothing. There was a do-not-disturb sign on the door, so I left everything on the wood box, under the eaves.” His hands were circling one another. They were already the hands of a man; square, work-scarred, thick-jointed.

“You didn’t have a passkey?”

“Sure I did, but we’re not supposed to go in if there’s a sign. So I left it, that’s all.”

“You didn’t knock?”

“Well, yeah, I think I did.”

“And?”

“I told you. Nothing.”

“You didn’t look through the window?”

“There wasn’t no point. I’m telling you, you couldn’t see nothing. Can I go now? I gotta get back to work.”

“Sure. Thanks for your help, Vinnie.”

Vinnie ran his tongue over his lips as he got up. “Was the, uh, guy already, like, dead when I was there?” “Looks like it,” John said.

And that was about the only concrete thing he’d learned in over four hours of interviews: The do-not-disturb sign had been put out by 4:57 P.M. Wednesday. Assuming that the killer had hung it there to put off the discovery of the murder, that had to mean Harlow was already dead by then. And with 4:00 being the earliest possible time of death-Tilton was awfully damn sure of that-the murder had to have happened after 4:00 and before 5:00.

He picked up a molded-glass paperweight that sat on the table as a decoration. Inside was a miniature desert scene with cactuses, a tiny bleached steer skull, and a rail fence. He shook it, and instead of the usual snowstorm effect, there was a swirl of brown particles; a sandstorm. Very Western.

He held the weight in his palm and watched the particles settle. One thing he had no shortage of was motives for wanting to see Jasper dead. Callie wasn’t the only one. As Gideon had told him, they all had similar stories. Jasper had told Les Zenkovich flat out-after three years of graduate work-that he didn’t have the brains to make it as an anthropologist and he’d do better looking for a field that made less stringent intellectual demands on its practitioners. Like Callie, Les had transferred too, and wound up getting his Ph. D. at Indiana with little difficulty.

Miranda Glass had been told much the same thing, also after three or four years under his thumb, but she had lost heart and thrown in the towel on her doctorate. She’d become a big name in museum work, but in this crowd, with only an M.A. to her credit, she was one of the undereducated.

Leland Roach had a different kind of grievance. Although he’d suffered the usual hard time under Jasper, he’d stuck it out and managed to get his degree without having to go elsewhere, and to do it relatively quickly. All the same, he had been unable to get a satisfactory academic appointment for five years. Then he had learned that it was because Jasper had been blackballing him behind his back, smilingly agreeing to serve as a reference whenever Leland had asked, then denouncing his competence, his resourcefulness, his personality, and, at least in one case, his sense of humor. When Leland had dropped Jasper from his list of references, he had quickly landed an assistant professorship at San Diego State, then moved on to the prestigious Colorado Institute of Technology.

All these accounts, Gideon had reminded John, had to be taken with a grain of salt. The sources, after all, were the aggrieved parties themselves, and the tales had been told during various late-night rounds of war stories at one conference or another through the years. But whether accurate in their specifics or not, they left no doubt that there hadn’t been much love lost on Albert Evan Jasper in this group.

Only Nellie Hobert, Jasper’s first student, had gotten through his apprenticeship with his admiration for the old anthropologist intact. Maybe it was because Jasper had been kinder in those days, or maybe it was because Nellie had been the best as well as the first. Either way, Nellie had never, in Gideon’s hearing at least, expressed the hard feelings the others had.

But seen from another angle, it was Nellie who’d had the best reason for wanting him dead. Not out of revenge or bitterness, which had never been high on John’s list of homicidal motives anyway, but from personal ambition, a much more likely incentive. For it had been on the older man’s death that Nellie’s own career had bloomed. He had, as everyone had expected him to, succeeded his mentor as Distinguished Services Professor of Human Biology at Northern New Mexico, as president of the National Society of Forensic Anthropology, and, in effect, as top gun in his field.

So none of them could be ruled out. Not on grounds of motive. Not by a long shot.

He upended the paperweight one more time and set it swirling back on the table. The one bright spot in all this was that nice, tight little time range; one hour, from four to five o’clock Wednesday afternoon. A little checking on who was where at that time was going to narrow things down, speed things up.

And speeding up was in order. Applewhite had given him until Monday, three more days, to do what he could to help Honeywell. After that, the case would be handed back to the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office. John wasn’t going to solve it for them in three days, but it’d be nice to tie things up a little more for Farrell, who would still have another week to go before his sergeant of detectives got back.

He stood up, yawning, and slid his papers into his folder. Jasper’s telephone bill caught his eye again. That unexplained call to Harlow was interesting too, a link between two men murdered a decade apart. He needed to call Julian Minor and pass on what little Callie had told him about it, then let Julian run with it. The guy was amazing. You never knew what he’d turn up.

Mrs. Gelbert, the resort manager, tapped on the doorjamb. “Mr. Lau, telephone. Gideon Oliver. You can take it up front.”

“Hi, Doc, whatchagot?”

Gideon took the receiver from the crook of his shoulder, where he’d wedged it while pouring himself a cup of coffee and waiting for John to come on the line.

“It checks out, John. It’s Jasper, all right. No surprises this time.”

He had spent the last two hours in the Justice Building’s small conference room, scraping the clay from Jasper’s skull, comparing the dentition against the newly received chart (and x-rays) from Dr. MacFadden, and going over the skeleton as a whole.

“Good,” John said. “I’ve had enough surprises for a while.” “And Nellie’s report is fine, as expected. I agree with everything in it.”

“Glad to hear it. All the same, I’d appreciate it if you’d do one up yourself.”

“Why? It’d say just what his says.”

“Yeah, but we better have it anyway. I mean, what if Honeyman winds up charging him? Is he supposed to use the guy’s own report as evidence? Does he call him as an expert witness to describe those broken neck bones? It wouldn’t work.”

“Okay,” Gideon said resignedly. It would mean getting the bones back out of the evidence room, out of the labeled paper sacks in which he’d put them, laying them out on the table again, and going over them one more time. “I’ll take care of it. I just wish you’d told me before.”