Aaron Elkins - Skeleton dance

Afterward, he and Joly had been shown to the snack room to wait until the statement was typed up for his signature. Gideon had gotten a Coke from the machine; Joly had chosen only to smoke. While they waited Gideon had started filling him in on the highlights of his interviews. The inspector had sat quietly, seemingly not very attentive, and not stirring until the rifle was mentioned.

"You don't sound all that surprised about it," Gideon said.

"No. I've been devoting quite a bit of thought to Professor Carpenter, as a matter of fact."

"You don't mean as a murder suspect?"

Joly gave one of his whole-body shrugs.

"Lucien, the fact that he owned an air rifle doesn't mean it was the same one that killed that guy. Other people own air rifles."

"I have the report from ballistics," was Joly's answer. "Listen." He removed a slim wallet from the inside pocket of his suit coat, slipped a folded sheet of paper from it, set a pair of reading glasses on the prominent, angular bridge of his nose, shook out the paper, and read aloud, translating into English as he went.

"'The projectile, though deformed, is identifiable as a wasp-waisted. 22 caliber, 34-grain ultra-magnum lead alloy air-rifle pellet. This projectile, which is among the world's heaviest commercially available. 22-caliber lead pellets, is manufactured especially for the South-Korean-produced"-a ponderously meaningful look at Gideon-"Cobra Magnum F-16 five-shot repeating air rifle, an expensive, compressed-air-powered, high-velocity sporting/hunting weapon charged with pre-compressed air from a standard 3,000 psi diving tank and capable of generating a muzzle velocity of almost 400 meters per second when used in conjunction with this pellet. It is the opinion of the examiner that such a projectile, fired within a range of five meters, could well have caused the injuries previously described.'"

Joly removed his glasses-he wouldn't wear them a fraction of a second longer than he absolutely had to-and slipped the report back into his wallet. "Now, it may be that I'm leaping to conclusions," he said. "It may be that there are many expensive, high-velocity Cobra Magnum F-16 air rifles firing wasp-waisted. 34-grain magnum rounds here in Les Eyzies to choose from; one in every stone cottage, for all we know."

"Well… okay," Gideon said, "but even if it is the same rifle, that hardly means it was Carpenter who did the killing. Look, what if you found a window broken with a Mesolithic hand chopper, would that mean it had to have been a Neanderthal that did it?"

Joly studied him. "Am I mistaken, or are we a little defensive this afternoon?"

"No, it's just that-Lucien, are you actually, seriously considering the possibility that Ely Carpenter himself committed that murder?"

"Why should I not?"

"Well, because… "

Because what? What was he supposed to say, that distinguished archeologists, directors of respected scholarly institutions, didn't go around bumping off people who annoyed them? Maybe they didn't, but they also didn't go around getting themselves involved right up to their eyeballs in outrageous frauds either, did they? So where did that leave him? Of course it might have been Ely. Joly had every right to consider the possibility.

He had, when it came right down to it, more than he knew. "There's something else you need to know," Gideon said reluctantly. "I just hated to… oh, hell, it's just that…"

Joly watched him attentively, his eyes narrowed against the cigarette smoke curling from both nostrils and drifting up his cheeks.

"Remember when I told you Ely had gotten pretty paranoid after the hoax broke? Well, it was worse than I realized. Audrey told me he took to keeping a weapon near him whenever he was off in the boondocks working on one of his sites."

"Oh?" said Joly, his interest quickening.

"And the weapon she remembered seeing was… well…"

"His favorite Korean air rifle."

Gideon nodded.

"So," said Joly with evident satisfaction, and then, after a pause: "I have a little news for you too. I've been in touch with the aviation authorities about Carpenter's death." He looked levelly at Gideon. "It seems there are some rather dubious aspects to it."

Gideon frowned. "I don't follow you."

"Frankly, I'm not convinced that Carpenter's dead."

" What?" The Coke can smacked down on the table, spattering Gideon's hand with fizz. "That's crazy."

"Consider the hard facts," said Joly. "Or rather the lack of them: no corpse, no wreckage-"

" What? But I thought-"

"So did I… because that is what you told me." He smiled sweetly. "But the plane, having apparently gone down, not on land but in several hundred meters of water-"

" What? But-"

Joly exhaled twin jets of smoke. "Gideon, are you going to permit me-"

"But he did go down over land," Gideon said hotly. "Over Brittany. That's what everybody said."

But if that was what everybody said, then everybody was wrong. Carpenter's plane, a single-engine Cessna 185, had gone down off Brittany, or so the authorities had concluded. He had taken off at night from the small airport at Bassilac, near Perigueux, heading north along the French coast to Brest, some 320 miles away. Not long afterward, however, he put in an emergency call to the air route traffic control center at Lorient, saying that his engine was faltering, his gauges were malfunctioning, and he was rapidly losing altitude over the Bay of Biscay. A brief, hurried communication, cut off in mid-sentence, ensued, and Ely Carpenter was never seen or heard from again. A search for his plane produced no results. The reasonable inference-and the official verdict-was that he had plunged into the great bay in darkness, somewhere near the sparsely inhabited Isles de Glenan, about sixty miles short of his destination.

"…reasonable inference…" Gideon echoed. "I had no idea… I was sure… "

"So you can see," Joly said, "there's plenty of room for doubt. How can we know that he didn't merely pretend to crash his airplane into the sea and then continue, in darkness, to some isolated farmer's field along the coast at which, with a little advance preparation, he might easily have landed so small a craft in secret?"

Gideon got up and went thoughtfully to the window, leaning on the sill and looking over the town square and the main street, directly on the other side of which the cliffs loomed in the slanting sunlight, white and pocked with shadowed abris for the first few hundred feet, then darkening to gray-brown and curving outward into their picturesque, protective overhang. Little wonder all those Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons had found this temperate valley such a comfortable place to live.

"Now wait a minute, Lucien. I don't know anything about flying airplanes, but even I know that if they're within range of air traffic control, they're on somebody's radar screen. There's a gizmo on the plane that sends out some kind of identifying signal-"

"A transponder, yes," said Joly, grinding out his cigarette while he arranged his thoughts. "Imagine this. Carpenter leaves the Bassilac airfield fully in accordance with a previously filed flight plan. Then, once out over the sea he begins to descend and, in apparent distress, informs the air traffic control center at Lorient that he is inexplicably losing altitude. Their radar confirms that this is so. Carpenter continues his descent, utters his heart-rending 'last' words: " Dites-leur -"

"- que je suis desole," said Gideon.

Joly looked at him. Gideon shrugged. "Pru McGinnis told me. This morning."

"Utters his last words," Joly continued, "drops to thirty or forty meters above the water, and turns off his transponder. The radar signal disappears, contact is lost. To all appearances, the worst has occurred, the airplane and its pilot are no more."