Make No Bones

CHAPTER 21

“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.

“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?”’

“Yeah, I could see it happening like that,” John said. “In fact, it could be she really never did mean to kill Jasper. Maybe she went to see him after the roast to make a last try at keeping him quiet; you know, throw herself on his mercy.”

“With Jasper?” Gideon said. “Good luck.”

“Well, that’s what I mean. Maybe she just lost control; shoved him or something. Or maybe he fell; he was pretty drunk, from what everybody says. You said those cracks in his head were from a fall, didn’t you? Could have been unintended.”

Gideon nodded. “But not the garroting.”

“No, not the garroting. And not what happened to

Harlow.” John stood up. “Thanks a million, Doc. I’m gonna get over to Bend and see where we go from here.”

Gideon stood with him. “John, this thing about her motive, the dissertation. It sounds good, but, you know, at this point it’s just-”

“Unverified supposition.”

Gideon laughed. “Well, yes. Maybe even unverifiable, what with the workbook gone.”

John grinned back at him, the skin around his eyes crinkling. “Well, as a matter of fact, the great Julian has turned up a little something that might help. A copy of her dissertation in the library stacks-with a 125-page appendix full of statistics. In small print. I was hoping I, uh, might convince some trustworthy, public-spirited anthropologist to, uh, sort of go through it in the next few weeks and see if he could turn up anything. You know, see if the statistics match what she says, or whatever the hell you do.”

“I hate statistics.”

“It’d really be helpful. It might make or break the case, Doc.”

Gideon wilted. “How long is the dissertation?” “Long.”

“What’s it about?”

“Good question.” John took his notebook from his shirt pocket, opened it, and handed it to Gideon. “Here’s the title,”

It was printed in careful block letters. Cephalometric Sexual Dimorphism in Four Related Populations (n= 572): A Multifactorial Study Using Discriminant Function Analysis.

Gideon sagged back down into his chair with a moan of self-pity. “Great God-o-mighty.”

By the time they walked slowly back to their own cottage it had gotten dark. Another rainstorm was building; they could feel it in the heavy, damp air and see occasional pallid flickers of lightning in the northwest, probably up around the stark, lonely lava flows of McKenzie Pass. It was a long way off. The rolling booms of thunder were like echoes, faint and grumbling, and reached their ears long seconds after the lightning had flared.

They stood on the porch, looking out toward this distant display, Gideon’s arm around Julie, Julie’s head tipped to his shoulder, her hand resting in his back pocket. To their left they could see the shimmer of firelight through the trees and hear night-muffled murmurs of conversation and laughter. A few diehards were still in the cookout area, perhaps unwilling to leave before they were sure that every weird thing that was going to happen, happened.

“Gideon?”

“Mm?”

“Do you really have to stay through tomorrow?”

He tilted his head to look at her and smiled. “Had enough rest and relaxation already?”

“I don’t know if I could stand any more. Wouldn’t it be nice to go home tomorrow morning?”

“Mal.”

“Is that yes?”

“Yes.”

She hugged him. “Let’s get an early start, so we can drive in the morning. How about eight?”

“How about seven?” Gideon said.