Aaron Elkins: Make No Bones

“And check her bag,” John said. “She might have another one stowed away.”

“But what the hell happened?” Honeyman asked. “What was this all about? All I saw was-I don’t know what I saw. What did I see?”

“Just do it, okay, Farrell? Trust me, I’ll explain later.” He glanced sideways at Gideon. “When I know what the hell happened,” he said under his breath.

When the dubious but eventually cooperative Honeyman began to read Callie her rights, before a subdued, growing crowd, John gestured with his chin toward the open lawn, away from the others. “Let’s go someplace where we can talk. My cottage.”

Gideon and Julie followed him there, Gideon wiping potato salad from the sleeve of his shirt. He caught Julie’s hand. She turned to look at him.

“Thanks,” he said.

She laughed, her face flushed and excited. “I’ll never complain again about having to take a forcible-restraint class. Oh, boy, my heart’s still in my mouth.”

John smiled at her. “You did good, Julie.”

“We all did pretty good,” she said, laughing.

Nobody said anything else until they got to the cottage. Then John closed the door behind them and studied Gideon for several seconds, his hands on his hips, head cocked.

“Plastic wrap?” he said.

“The plastic wrap, Gideon explained, was what had made it all come together. But it was the blinds, those up-and-down blinds, that had been the key. Those, and that twenty-four-hour period during which Harlow had dropped from sight. And of course that faint smell of insecticide in Harlow’s cottage.

“What smell of insecticide?” John asked.

“Well, I didn’t bother to mention it,” Gideon said. “I didn’t think it was important.”

John leaned forward. “You didn’t-!” He fell back in his chair with a wave of his hand. “Ah, what the hell, it wouldn’t have told me anything anyway. It still doesn’t tell me anything. What does insecticide have to do with anything?”

“The blowflies,” Gideon said. “She had to get rid of that first infestation.”

John made a visible effort to process this. “Doc, just what are you telling us, that Tilton had it wrong-that you had it wrong-that Harlow wasn’t killed when you said he was, when Callie was in Utah?”

“Nevada,” Gideon said. “And, yes, that’s right. She killed him before she ever got on the plane. He was murdered on Tuesday, not Wednesday. The time of death was faked. Brilliantly, I might add.”

“The time of death was faked,” John echoed woodenly. “Brilliantly, he might add.” He sighed. “I can’t wait for Applewhite to read my report.”

“Well, it was brilliant. Let me tell you just what I think happened, just how I think she did it, and see if it makes sense to the two of you.”

“This involves blowfly infestations?” Julie asked. “Yes, it does.”

She reached for her sandwich. “I think I’d better finish this. I have a strong suspicion my appetite is about to disappear.”

They were sitting around the table in John’s tiny dining area, an exact duplicate of Julie’s and Gideon’s. Spread out in front of them were the meager but welcome results of foraging in both their refrigerators: Cheerios, milk, baloney, Wonder bread, a six-pack of ginger ale. They had thought briefly of retrieving their barely touched steaks from the cookout area, where the picnic now continued in even higher spirits than before, but had decided that it would be better for them to keep to themselves for the time being. Besides, John had the impression that Gideon’s headlong dive across the table might have knocked their plates to the ground, a possibility also suggested by the condition of Gideon’s shirt.

“First of all,” Gideon said, “I think Callie decided Harlow had to go as soon as she saw how shook up he was when we found the burial-and we know Harlow had good reason to be shook up; he was the one who fudged the dental charts to cover up Jasper’s murder. I think it’s pretty safe to assume Callie was involved too, and that she got rid of Harlow before he cracked completely and gave everything away.”

“Ahem,” said Julie.

They looked at her.

“I believe I expressed this very hypothesis only yesterday, and was told by a certain eminent authority that it was out of the question.”

“Well, it was. Yesterday it made no sense at all. Today it does.”

“Yesterday it was my idea. Today it’s your idea.”

He laughed. “All right, credit where due. For the record: It was Julie who first fingered Callie, within hours after Harlow was found.”

“It was Julie who fingered Callie before Harlow was found,” she pointed out. “I knew right away there was something fishy about that horse thing, didn’t I? Even if the aforementioned authority took pains to point out the impossibility of that too.”

“That’s right, I’d forgotten. You sure did, Julie. We should have paid more attention.”

She nodded gravely. “Thank you.”

“But you have to admit that at the time it really didn’t stand to reason.”

“Oh, sure, that’s easy to say-”

“Look, folks,” John said, “can we straighten out who gets credit for what later? I’ve got to get over to Bend and tell Farrell what the hell is going on, and at this point I still don’t have a clue.” He looked pleadingly at Gideon. “Doc? Please?”

Gideon slowly chewed thick-sliced baloney and soft white bread while he got his thoughts together. “All right. Understand, I don’t know whether she had all of this planned ahead of time, or came up with it after she killed him, but I think I know how she pulled it off.”

Not, he explained, that he had everything straight yet himself. She really had been extraordinarily clever, coming up with a plan that had missed being foolproof by a hair. First, she’d realized that her best bet for getting away with it was to make it seem absolutely certain that she’d been hundreds of miles away, at her prearranged meeting, when Harlow had been killed.

“My guess is that she made sure a whole lot of people saw her in Nevada, and on the airplanes,” Gideon said, “and probably at the airports too.”

“Yeah,” John allowed, “a lot of people saw her. Look, Doc, I need to know how she did it. How could she fool a pro like Tilton? I mean, you’re saying he was off by over twenty-four hours. How could that be?”

“She fooled me too, John.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t want to mention that.”

Gideon got up to wrench some ice from the freezer tray for his ginger ale. “Let’s go back to basics for a minute,” he said.

And the most basic axiom of forensic pathology was that the processes of decay began at the instant of death and advanced through time in a reasonably regular and predictable progression until decomposition was finished. The second most basic axiom was that this progression could be altered by “When did you learn all this stuff about forensic pathology?” John said irritably. “Every time you get near a fresh corpse, all I hear is how it’s not your field.”

“He’s just making up that business about axioms,” Julie said matter-of-factly. “He thinks that’s how professors are supposed to talk. Admit it, Gideon.”

“Okay,” Gideon said, smiling, “but what I was about to say is true anyway. Decomposition can be affected by a lot of things, with temperature being number one. The hotter it is, the faster it goes; the colder it is, the slower it goes.

Which is why refrigeration keeps things fresh, of course.”

It was this principle that Callie had applied. The blinds had been lowered not just to keep out prying eyes, but, more important, to keep out that blazing sun. She had lowered them as soon as she had killed him. No doubt, she had also turned the air conditioner on full-blast. Then she had hung out the do-not-disturb sign to keep unwanted visitors away. Then she’d left for Nevada.