Aaron Elkins: Make No Bones

“And when she got back on Thursday morning she went to his cottage, raised the blinds, and turned off the air conditioning. Then she went horseback riding.”

John rolled up a slice of baloney and bit off half of it, “So in came the heat, in came the sun, shining right on him. Tilton naturally went on the basis that it’d been like that all along, that the body’d been sitting there in that heat since the murder.”

“Right, we all were. But it was only that way for about ten hours. The rest of the time, another forty hours or so, it’d been under refrigeration, so to speak. All those changes Tilton talked about-bloating, discoloration, everything else-were slowed way down during that time.”

He leaned against the sink, sipping ginger ale, wrinkling his nose at the bubbles. “So naturally Tilton’s estimate of the TOD was quite a bit more than ten hours, but a whole lot less than the fifty that it really was. Nineteen to twenty-four hours, remember? Between four and ten P.M. Wednesday.”

“During which time Callie was provably off doing her thing in Carson City,” Julie said pensively. She fingered her can of ginger ale. “But where does the plastic wrap come into it?”

“Oh, that was even trickier. You can slow the internal bodily changes way down by lowering the heat, but there isn’t much you can do-not with just an air conditioner about the fly larvae. And there was no question the flies were going to find Harlow in a hurry.”

“In about five minutes, according to Tilton,” John said.

“That’s right. And finding fly larvae at the two or three-day stage of their development, instead of the one-day egg stage, would have given it away. So she-”

“Do I really want to hear this?” Julie said nervously. She had stopped eating, but she stayed where she was.

“It’s not that bad. She wrapped him-probably him and the chair both-in plastic before she left, to keep the flies off. When she came back to turn off the air conditioner two days later, she took off the wrap, and the flies got right to work. Result: eggs in their first-day level of development when we found him ten hours later.”

“Ugh!” Julie said emphatically.

“I knew there was something funny about that tear-off strip; I just couldn’t figure out what,” John said regretfully. “She must have taken the box with her, but she forgot about the strip. It’d fallen into the crack between the table and the wall, remember? Easy to miss.”

He downed the rest of the rolled baloney slice and wiped his fingers. “Hey, what about the insecticide smell, what was that all about?”

“Well, I’m guessing she had to run over to the general store at Camp Sherman to buy the plastic wrap. That’s a good twenty minutes, back and forth, and she knew the flies would probably start laying in that time. So she had to kill that first batch. She probably picked up the spray at the store, too, along with the plastic wrap.”

“Yeah, good point,” John said. “I can check over there, see if someone remembers her.”

“Wouldn’t that mean it wasn’t planned ahead of time?” Julie suggested. “If she knew she was going to use it, she’d have had it with her when she went to Harlow’s cottage. And she wouldn’t have needed the insecticide at all.”

“What, walk in with a box of plastic wrap all ready to seal him up in?” Gideon said. “Right in front of him?”

“Yes, why not? Normal people don’t jump to the conclusion they’re about to be murdered because somebody comes in carrying a box of plastic wrap.”

Gideon smiled. “You’re right. Normal people don’t.”

“Wild stuff,” John said. He drained his ginger ale and crumpled the can. “Well, I guess I ought to go fill Farrell in and see what kind of a case we can make.”

“Wait a minute, John.” Gideon came back to the table and sat down. “What kind of a case can you make? Look, we’re assuming Callie killed Harlow to keep him from talking about Jasper’s murder, right? But what evidence do we have to connect her to Jasper’s murder? No credible motive or anything else. No more than anyone else had. For that matter, we don’t have any proof it was Callie who actually killed Harlow. Any of the rest of them could have done it the same way.”

“She pulled a gun an hour ago,” Julie said. “That’s not bad for starters. And the whole thing-the blinds, the plastic wrap, everything-revolved around juggling the time factor. Callie is the only person who benefits from that.”

Gideon looked at John. “Is that enough, do you think? In a court of law?”

“In a court of law, who knows? That’s Farrell’s problem, or rather his DA’s, but I think we’re doing okay; the investigation’s just revving up. Oh, and we do have something on motive. For killing Jasper, I mean.”

Julian Minor’s research skills had paid off again, John told them. Minor had hunted down Marie Tustin, the retired secretary of the anthropology department at Nevada State, who remembered Jasper’s mysterious telephone call very well. Jasper had demanded that Harlow mail him the department’s copy of Callie’s workbook-the record of measurement data and statistics for the dissertation project she’d begun under Jasper and completed under Harlow. Harlow had asked Ms. Tustin to retrieve and mail the copy for him, and Ms. Tustin had done so. She remembered, however, that Callie had been extremely obstructive, even underhanded, in unsuccessfully trying to keep Ms. Tustin from carrying out her commission.

And why, Minor had asked her, would Callie have behaved that way? At this, Ms. Tustin had emitted a condescending flutter of laughter. She was revealing no secrets in telling him that Harlow Pollard was not the most exacting or interested of dissertation supervisors. Those students lucky enough to draw him tended to go their way without unduly rigorous guidance. And it had been remarked behind the back of many a hand-Ms. Tustin could not say if it was true or false-that Callie Duffer had taken more advantage than most of this circumstance and had been somewhat free in statistical manipulations. Did Ms. Tustin mean that Callie had faked her dissertation, Minor had asked. Ms Tustin had coughed discreetly. Well, as to that, she was hardly in a position to say. She was merely reporting what was common gossip.

“So what do you make of it, Doc?”

“Interesting,” Gideon said. “You think Jasper suspected that Callie fudged her results? Maybe went over her workbook and satisfied himself that she had? Confronted her at Whitebark?”

“Could be. The workbook disappeared, along with his clothes and everything else. Everybody figured they were burned up in the bus crash. But of course he never got on the bus, did he?”

“You’re saying she killed him for that?” Julie said. “Why? She already had her degree. Jasper couldn’t take it away, could he?”

“Maybe not,” Gideon said, “but she was just beginning her career. She had a new assistant professorship at Nevada State. Her dissertation was being published as a major monograph. If Jasper went public-and he was the sort of man who would have-it would have ruined her, right at the start. No decent university would touch her.”

“All right, I can see that, but why would Harlow get involved? He was already established. Being a little careless wouldn’t have cost him his career.”

“You know,” Gideon said, “my guess is that Harlow had nothing to do with the actual killing, that Callie came to him afterwards and got him to fake the dental records.”

“Why in the world would he agree to that?”

“Well, she could easily have cornered him the next morning, after they heard about the bus crash, and told him: ‘Look, I gave him a little push and he hit his head and died. Now help me! I saved your reputation too-you were supposed to be overseeing my dissertation. Anyway, he’s dead, isn’t he? What difference does it make?”’