The Moai Murders

9

THE QUESTION WAS, sorry for what? Making amends for what? Most people at the conference thought poor Seth was confessing to the murder of Jasper Robinson. One or two voiced the idea that he, too, had been murdered. Generally, however, that notion was pooh-poohed as soon as it was uttered. There was no question, however, that Seth's death and the note he left threw Fuentes into a tizzy. Gordon's fancy lawyer was all over this one, and within a few hours, Gordon was back home, although his passport was still in the possession of the carabineros.

Seth had gone to a lot of trouble to kill himself. According to the guard who had been on duty at Seth's door until recalled after the meeting, Seth had closed and locked the door shortly after I left. The guard had knocked on the door to tell Seth that he was going off duty and that Seth was free to leave his room. Seth had not answered and it may well have been too late, even then.

It was not easy to hang yourself in that room. I would have thought it would be simpler to slash your wrists with a razor in the bathtub. But Seth was a tidy sort of man, and I suppose the idea of all that blood would have distressed him even more. You could tell that from his room, which was in sharp contrast to the mess that had once been Dave's.

He'd tried a couple of things, apparently. There was evidence he'd attempted to hang himself from the light fixture in the main room. The bed had been moved, and the light was half out of the ceiling, which explained why it hadn't worked when I flipped the switch. Somehow, though, he'd managed to rig something up in the bathroom. I had a feeling he'd stood on the edge of the bathtub and then stepped off.

I didn't think Seth had killed Jasper any more than Gordon had. I was very troubled by his death, much more so than the others. I had been the last one to have a conversation with him, and I felt I should have recognized the symptoms, the calm that had descended upon him when I'd said I thought Dave was murdered. In some way I had confirmed something for him, and then he'd taken his own life. I kept thinking that if Fuentes' meeting had just been a little sooner, then Seth would be alive. But maybe not. Perhaps knowing he no longer had police protection—albeit in the form of house arrest—had upset him so much he'd taken his own life. Seth, it seemed to me, had been frightened to death.

It was possible, I suppose, that he had been murdered, that this Anakena person had got into the room once the guard had left and strung him up. But there had been no sign of a struggle and, as Fuentes told me later, no sign of drugs in his blood.

Fuentes was in a snit about something else. His pathologist had finally issued a report and said that the blow to Dave's head had occurred after he'd died. The pathologist had not determined the actual cause of death. That meant that Fuentes might have to concede that Dave, too, had been murdered, which surely must have set a new record for Rapa Nui.

I didn't actually intend to go on looking into this Anakena business, but I inadvertently found myself right back into it as a result of a conversation I had with Kent Clarke. Kent and her daughter were in the midst of something of a dustup when I happened upon them. Brittany took one look at me and left.

"Sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to interrupt."

Kent threw up her hands. "Kids!" she said.

"She'll grow out of this phase," I said.

"I hope so," Kent said. "Do you have kids?"

"I have a stepdaughter of sorts. She was a teenager when I met her father."

"Then you know what having a teenage daughter is like. She wanted to get a tattoo. I said no. She got one anyway. I completely lost it. She said it was no big deal. I told her it was a question of trust. I'd asked her not to get one, and she'd gone behind my back. She went and had another one done. Shows pretty much what she thinks of my opinion. I'm afraid a tongue stud will be next."

"Either that or she'll run away to the circus," I said. I detected a hint of a smile.

"Did your stepdaughter do these annoying things?"

"Jennifer went through various phases. At one point she talked backwards," I said. "I don't mean whole conversations, or anything, but phrases. She was in this class for gifted kids, and her teacher thought this would be a good exercise for her. There'd be this pause while she thought through the answer to one of our questions that she didn't like, and then she'd come out with this gobbledygook, and between us we'd try to figure out what she'd just said to us. It was very annoying. We thought she'd never get through that period and that we certainly wouldn't. Her father kept threatening to go to the school and throttle the instructor."

Kent laughed. "You've cheered me up," she said. "Which is hard to do right now: my daughter with her tattoos and of course this documentary, with a director who drinks like a fish and a cameraman who is not only picking up the director's bad habits and who spends half his time making fun of me and the production, but also is the individual who persuaded my daughter to get a tattoo! Why don't you come to my office and sit for a few minutes. I could use some company right now, if you're free. You can watch me pack up."

"Lots of kids have them," I said as I followed her into the hotel. "Tattoos, I mean. They seem to be quite the rage. That and piercing."

"That's what she said. Her father is going to be livid. He already is. Did I mention my revolting ex? She lives with him. I get her for vacations and, when I'm in town, every second weekend. He would never have stood for this. I didn't intend to bring her down here, but when I saw the moai, Orongo, and all this magnificent history, I phoned her father and suggested he take her out of school for a week and put her on a plane. He agreed, much to my surprise. But now she's been here more than a week, and he's threatening to take me to court for kidnapping her or something ridiculous like that."

"That won't work," I said. "All you'd have to do is get a statement from the carabineros and that would be that."

"I know, but it would be a lot of trouble, and it wouldn't help with the tattoos. Welcome to the site office of Kent Clarke films, better known as the garden shed," she said. "It's where the manager used to keep that little tractor thing he uses to cut the lawn. But it has electricity, and it keeps us away from the hotel bar, important for reasons I believe I have already mentioned. Here, have a seat."

"This is rather impressive, all this equipment, although I'll grant you it's small," I said. "What's going to happen to the documentary now that Jasper is, well, dead?"

"Good question," she said.

"Whose idea was it to hold the Moai Congress?"

Her lip curled. "Jasper's, who else? At least he said it was, although it may actually have been one of us, now that I think about it. There isn't a good idea out there that Jasper hasn't claimed as his own. He was a great one for ideas on how to promote himself. Please tell me you didn't think some prestigious organization was behind this, inviting Jasper as their guest of honor, did you?"

"I guess not," I said. "Was it Jasper who suggested inviting the Moaimaniacs?"

"The what?" she said.

"The Internet group on Jasper's Web site."

"I guess so. He just handed me a list of email addresses and told me to make it so."

"I never did get to see the rongorongo tablet up close," I said. "I had a migraine and had to leave. I suppose I never will now, unless you finish the documentary, that is. Then I might see it on TV."

"I can't even think about that right this minute," she said. "There's footage of it here somewhere, but I'm not sure where, or I'd show it to you. I'm just the money person, you know."

"Did Jasper bring the rongorongo tablet with him?" I asked.

"Jasper?" she said. "Of course not. The man could barely tie his own shoelaces."

"So how, then?" I knew what Seth had said. It would be interesting to see what Kent did.

"Dave Maddox brought it. We—Jasper—needed someone here early to help get everything set up as far as the actual presentation was concerned."

"Do you know where it is now?"

"No idea," she said. "The last person to have it was Jasper, I think. That's what I told the police. He had it under his arm when he left with Gordon Fairweather."

"He left with Gordon Fairweather? I thought they weren't speaking."

"I wouldn't know about that," she said. "I'd like to get my hands on the tablet, though. I'd like to have it tested, by a real expert, by which I don't mean Jasper or Dave."

"You don't think it's authentic?"

"I don't know. This is hardly my area of expertise. But Dave came to see me and told me he thought it was authentic, but just not from Chile. He said he and that other fellow, the one who hanged himself…"

"Seth Connelly," I said. Seth obviously had not made a big impression other than by his death.

"Right," she said. "Dave said he and Seth thought it was authentic."

"Did you believe Dave?"

"I'm not sure," she said. "There was a lot of smoke and mirrors around Jasper. In my opinion, Jasper was the biggest fake of them all."

"Why would you say that?"

"He just was," she said. "He was an all around jerk, too. I'm pretty well ruined, you know."

"You filmed a lot of Jasper's adventures," I said. "I guess this pretty well ends it."

"It was over anyway," she said. "Even before he died. You put up your savings, you give up custody of your daughter so you can do something, and what happens? You get screwed."

"That's too bad," I said. I waited. She seemed to be in a confessional frame of mind.

"I've been with Jasper for years. Kent Clarke Films was there in the early days, when he swam the Straits of Magellan," she said.

"Did he actually swim the Straits of Magellan?"

"In a manner of speaking," she said. "We just didn't show the time he spent in the boat."

"Seriously? He got out of the water and took a boat?"

"Yes and no," she said. "He had to be pulled out several times, warmed up and put back in the water."

"But that's fraud, really."

"Look, I was desperate. I was recently divorced, my husband wanted alimony, if you can believe it, and child support for Brittany. And it wasn't as if Jasper was the first person to swim the Straits. I might have had some qualms about faking that. I had a little film company, and Jasper helped make it a bigger film company. I've never made a lot of money on these expeditions of his, you understand. They are incredibly expensive to film. But I got something of a reputation and therefore other work. The thing was, Jasper started to believe his own publicity. He thought he was a real-life adventurer. He had a bit of amnesia where the early going was concerned. And perhaps because he came to believe in himself, things started happening for him. That fortress he found in northern Chile, for example. He did that. That was the real thing. Nothing like creating your own mythology, I suppose.

"And he did find the rongorongo tablet. I was there. I have it on film. I'll even show it to you if I can find it. And no, I didn't help him hide it. I thought this was the one, the one where I started to make decent money. Then Dave Maddox came to see me. He said that he'd had a good look at the thing, that he had a book on forgeries, and he was pretty sure that Jasper's rongorongo tablet wasn't one. I wasn't quite sure why he was telling me it was authentic. I thought maybe it was to make me feel better about it. Then he got to his second point, which was he was almost certain it hadn't come from Chile. Something about the wood."

"Didn't you just say you were there when Jasper found it, and you hadn't helped him bury it? Wouldn't that be a fairly elaborate fake for a guy who couldn't tie his own shoelaces, to hide it in a canyon in the Atacama Desert so you could find it on film?"

"For the man who faked swimming the Straits of Magellan?" she said, sourly.

"Point taken," I said. "What did you do when Dave told you about his concerns about the tablet's origins?"

She hesitated for a second before answering. "I told Jasper, of course."

"And what was the reaction?"

"He laughed. He said Dave had been a loser as long as he'd known him, 'a bloated bag of wind,' I believe the expression was. He said he'd talk to Dave."

"And did he?"

"I'm not sure, but I do know it didn't matter after that because Dave wasn't saying anything to anybody."

"Do you think it's possible Jasper killed Dave?"

"The idea did occur to me, but the police kept saying it was an accident. Apparently, if the gossip in the bar is right, they're not saying that anymore. But what does that mean? Let's assume for the moment that the tablet is a fake, or even that it's real, but didn't come from Chile. Then Jasper might kill Dave to keep him from telling anyone else. I have a feeling Jasper would be capable of it, to save his reputation, but Jasper died, too. Who killed him? Fairweather? That Seth person?"

"I don't know," I said. "Does the name Anakena mean anything to you?"

"Sure," she said. "It's a beach. I took my daughter there just before we were confined to barracks. You should go if you haven't been. There are actually palm trees there, several of them, rather refreshing after all this rock and grass."

"So is this the end of the documentary?"

"Yes, and it is also the end of Kent Clarke Films," she said. "I'll be filing for bankruptcy soon, unless a miracle occurs."

"You didn't make money on these escapades of Jasper's?"

"Far from it," she said. "We broke even on the last one, the one about the fortress in Chile. This one would have done it, I think. The trouble was it was going to be the last. Jasper was moving on. He said he'd had an offer from one of the large companies in California, and his next big adventure was going to be a feature film. He seemed to think an award of some kind was in the bag. He dropped that little detail on me when he got out here. I could have killed him."

Her face colored. "That would be a figure of speech," she said. "I didn't do it. I wasn't sorry when he died, though, far from it. I'd scrambled to find the money in the early days. He put up some, but not much. He wasn't for spending his own money, you see. I mortgaged my house because I believed in the jerk. Then when we finally started to get somewhere, he moves onwards and upwards. I still have to pay the director and the cameraman, even if they're losers."

"Why do you keep hiring them," I said, "if they are such a problem for you?"

"Fire them? Are you kidding? Believe me, I'm not in a position to do that as both of them very well know. We are all complicit, aren't we? We're irrevocably joined, tarnished by the myth of Jasper Robinson, an illusion we prostituted ourselves to create. It doesn't matter anyway. The point is that now that Jasper's dead, the project is dead, too. Too bad, because this was some of our best work."

"This may sound like an awful thing to say," I said. "But is it not possible there would be more interest in this documentary now that he's dead?"

Perhaps in reply, Kent went searching about for a minute, and then she pulled out a cassette and inserted it in a VCR. "Here, be my guest. Have a look," she said. "It's a bit rough still, but you'll get the general idea. I'll even cue it up for you. It will never make it to air. Just press this button when you're done, and if you don't mind, make sure the door is locked when you go." With that, rather mysteriously, she was gone. I pressed PLAY.

Kent Clarke had not been entirely forthcoming about the videocassette she'd shown me. This was not a documentary. This was revenge. What appeared on the screen was not Rapa Nui: The Mystery Solved, not by any stretch of the imagination. Instead, it was the expose of a con man, one of the most vicious hatchet jobs I'd ever seen. And it was artfully done. It could have been used in a film studies program to show what could be achieved with several hours of footage and some careful editing.

For starters, there was the interview with Cassandra de Santiago, who came across as a complete flake, emoting about Lemuria and visitors from outer space. Jasper was shown talking and smiling to her, and the way it was put together, it somehow implied he agreed with her outlandish theories, that she was one of the people he consulted. The scene with Gordon Fairweather at the quarry was edited in such a way that Gordon did not come across as an aggressive, to say nothing of arrogant, academic, but rather as someone who knew enough about the subject to be able to call what Jasper had to say horse manure.

During Jasper's presentation the evening he died, his grand finale, I suppose you could call it, although swan song might be more accurate, Rory was shown shaking his head in despair as Jasper spoke. Rory's name and his credentials appeared on the screen as he did so. When Jasper quoted Rory and Gordon, rather than show Jasper, the camera had caught the two academics. Again their qualifications appeared on the screen. Jasper looked like a complete idiot.

The one straightforward interview, and the only one you could really call reasonable, was one that featured Rory. His opinion was that the rongorongo tablet needed more study, but that if it proved to be authentic, then this was a find of great significance.

"So what do you think?" a voice behind me said, and I jumped. Mike Sheppard was leaning against the door jamb.

"It's, um, interesting," I said.

"By which you mean vicious, libelous, what else?" he said. "Vindictive?"

"Pretty much," I said.

"You know what they say about a woman scorned," he said.

"Hell hath no fury?"

"Exactly," he said.

"Did you do this?" I said. "Edit it, I mean?"

"I did the actual work, I suppose," he replied. "With considerable direction from the producer, shall we say. I knew what she wanted, and I worked at it until it did just that."

"That must have taken some doing," I said. "You are very creative. I think there's a job for you teaching film editing."

He laughed. "It's just a matter of going over and over it, looking for the spots where one can cut. Choosing the angles. Once we knew what Kent wanted, I was able to direct Daniel's camera accordingly."

"Did you think it was fair?"

"It doesn't matter what I think," he said. "Kent pays the bills."

"So what now?" I asked. "Are you and Daniel out of work?"

"Temporarily," Mike said. "Kent's been very good about seeing we get paid for our time to this point, I'll say that for her. But there's lots of film work in New Zealand and Australia these days, so we'll be fine. I may actually try my hand at something different after this."

"So what do you think about the San Pedro tablet?" I said. "Is it real?"

"Haven't the foggiest," he said. "Not my area of expertise. J. R. must have gone to a lot of trouble to fake it if he did."

"That's what I was thinking," I said. "He'd have to hide it and then find it and look surprised. Kent said she was there and thought it was the real thing at the time."

"Ah, yes," he said. "Kent Clarke Films was on hand for the great event."

"Were you?"

"I was. What can I say? We're in this canyon in the middle of nowhere. The sun is blasting down on us. The air is a trifle thin. We're having trouble with filters to get the light right. But Jasper has found this mummy, a nasty little bundle that was once a person, and there's what I think is a stick of old wood with it, but Jasper is panting over it, and we have to capture the moment as it were."

"But was the tablet tested or anything?"

"I really don't know. Jasper said the mummy was."

"Surely that's not the same thing. You can't say two objects are the same age just because you found them together. You might assume they were the same age, but you wouldn't know for sure."

"I really can't recall if Jasper said anything about that. You could ask Daniel, next time you see him. He may recall."

"So Daniel was there, too?"

"The Kent Clarke Films team in its entirety was there, yes."

"Anybody else from this group here that was on site when the tablet was found?"

"I believe what's his name, Albert, was there," he said. "And that unpleasant woman who looks like Lotte Lenya as Rosa Klebb in the James Bond movie."

"Edwina Rasmussen," I said. I had to smile. "But not Dave Maddox?"

"Not Dave, no. Not when I was there, anyway."

"Kent thinks now that the tablet might be a fake," I said. "Or maybe not from Chile."

"She would, wouldn't she?" Mike said.

There was a lot to chew on, which might explain why I couldn't sleep that night. There was something really bothering me. For one thing, I knew the minute I went to sleep that Rob would be there telling me I was missing something really obvious. I did not recall Rob ever being that annoying in real life, which was just as well, because if he had been I would no longer be with him. In my dreams, however, he was persistent as can be.

What bothered me more than anything, though, was the thought that no matter how unwittingly, I had played some part in Seth's decision to kill himself. Rob had told me once that people would be much less likely to try hanging themselves if they knew that, unlike official hangings where the victim's neck is broken, those who step off chairs endure a slow death by strangulation, sometimes taking as long as half an hour to die. If Seth had stepped off the edge of the bathtub as I suspected he had, he could easily have swung himself back if he changed his mind, but he hadn't. It was a horrible thought.

The trouble was that none of this made sense. Dave told Kent he thought the San Pedro tablet was real, but not from Chile. Kent told Jasper. Given that the Chile connection was absolutely key to his theory, Jasper presumably went to talk to Dave, and it is possible he killed Dave to prevent him from telling the world. Then what? Jasper didn't bash his own head in. Seth decided Jasper had killed his friend Dave and took his revenge? Seth had gone all quiet when I'd said I thought maybe Dave was murdered. He'd said he was sure he was. How could he be sure? Was it because he knew something the rest of us didn't? Was he not really sure a) first, did he have doubts about killing Jasper in revenge doubts that I had inadvertently assuaged?

Or maybe Jasper killed Dave, and Kent killed Jasper be cause he was leaving her for another film company. I thought she hadn't been truthful about her relationship with Jasper. I was willing to bet her marriage failed because she fell for her star in a very big way. It would certainly ex plain her willingness to help him fake his early adventures She was paying alimony, and she'd lost custody of Brittany That meant some court somewhere thought she was more a fault than her former husband.

There was always the possibility that Gordon killed Jasper, I suppose. Fuentes had been right when he said that Jasper had set out to deliberately embarrass Gordon and Rory. It would have been quite possible to present the Sai Pedro tablet without making it nearly so personal. But if Gordon had been humiliated, so had Rory. Was Gordon the suspect because he had a temper and Rory didn't? Perhaps Rory had an alibi and Gordon didn't. Kent said that Jasper and Gordon had gone off together, Jasper with the table under his arm. Was that the evidence—that Gordon was the last person to see Jasper alive? I very much doubted that Fuentes was going to discuss the case with me in this kin of detail.

And where exactly was this San Pedro tablet, fake or otherwise, and what was its place in all of this? I could see it as reason for Dave to die, but Jasper? Gordon kills him because he faked a rongorongo tablet's find spot? Kent killed her because he faked a rongorongo tablet? Why? Why not It the truth come out, as Kent intended in her documentary and let him suffer the public humiliation that would ensue What if it was a fake, start to finish? Just how did Jasper fake this thing, if indeed he did? I couldn't have done it, and I've read The Art Forger's Handbook from cover to cover. I could have found the wood, all right. I'd have done a better job on that, something native to northern Chile, some kind of tree that would have been there for a very long time. Algarrobo, maybe, although I'd have to do a little work on its particular properties. But I could find something. And I could age it, so to speak, put the little worm holes in it and so on. As someone who sold antique furniture, I knew what to look for in wood. The rongorongo, however, would have posed a major problem for me. From my visits to the shops and markets of Hanga Roa, I could see that lots of people carved rongorongo-type symbols onto their particular work. But Seth had said someone had gone a long way toward deciphering rongorongo, so it would not be enough to just carve a bunch of symbols; you'd have follow whatever conventions the ancient carvers had.

Did Jasper know enough about rongorongo to do that? Maybe. Maybe not. The man was a cypher to me, really. I hadn't been one of the women attracted to him like moths to his flame. I'd seen him in action a few times, up at Rano Raraku, and then at some sessions at the congress, and finally at his big announcement. He hadn't endeared himself to me any of those times. Maybe he paid someone to carve it for him. Seth might have been that person, and maybe it was one of the people of Rapa Nui. Did this mysterious person kill Jasper because he or she didn't get paid, or because he or she didn't realize that Jasper was going to present the work as authentic, and worse still from that perspective, from Chile?

Or maybe, and this was a different thought, Jasper had been the butt of a practical joke that had got out of hand. Maybe someone planted it deliberately to deceive him. If so, who? Albert or Edwina perhaps? They were there. None of the other Moaimaniacs had been, as far as I knew. Maybe Seth was a part of it, somehow, and that was what he was sorry about, the deed for which he was trying to make amends.

And maybe… if I didn't stop thinking so hard about all these maybes, I was going to give myself another migraine. At least Moira had a pharmucopia that she could put at my disposal.

At the end of the day, the other disturbing aspect of this was that on an island with three thousand plus inhabitants and a congress with about forty attendees, there were two murderers. It seemed statistically excessive, if nothing else. What was also alarming was that in a group of eleven—or was it twelve?—members of an Internet group on this island, three of them were dead.

What was it I wasn't noticing? All this thinking was making me toss and turn, and at some point in the night Moira asked me if I was okay. I realized I was keeping her awake, too. So I lay very still until I knew she'd gone to sleep, and then I pulled on my clothes and went out to look at the stars.

I'd done this once before with painful result, when I'd found poor old Dave. This time I saw no dead bodies. What I did see, however, was a light in what had been until yesterday Seth Connelly's room. It was just a little light, a flashlight most likely. I positioned myself so that I could see the door, without, I hoped, being seen. It was a bit of a wait, but eventually the light went out, the door opened, at first just a crack, and then someone slipped out. That someone looked a lot like Poikeman to me.

I intercepted him just before got to his room. "Taking an evening stroll through a dead man's room, are we?" I said. Lewis jumped about a foot at the sound of my voice.

"I guess I've been caught," he said.

"I guess so," I said. "I don't suppose you'd care to share your reasons for this expedition while I consider whether or not to tell Pablo Fuentes about it."

"I would prefer you didn't," he said. I waited. I wasn't too nervous. He was in his underpants, and although he had his hands behind his back, I didn't think he was hiding a weapon.

"I lent Seth a book," he said. "And I figured I'd just go and get it before they cleared out his room. I thought if I asked for it, they wouldn't believe me."

"I see," I said. "Did you find it okay?"

"Yes," he said, showing me. He didn't tell me which book it was, but I knew anyway. The Art Forger's Handbook was making its way around the place pretty well. I wondered if the rongorongo tablet was, too.

"Albert was supposed to be on lookout duty. Not very good at it, is he?" Poikeman said. We found Albert in his candycane-stripe pajamas, seated on the ground, his back against a tree, snoring.

"I've been caught, Albert," Lewis said when we'd roused him. "We have to persuade this young lady not to rat me out."

"Would you two care to join me for a little libation?" Albert said. "I have some rather good cognac."

"Why not?" Lewis said. "We're up anyway."

Why not, indeed. We must have looked quite the picture, Lewis in his underwear, Albert in his outrageous pajamas, and me with jeans over my nightie. Albert reminisced about his life as a PR consultant in Washington, and he was hilarious.

"I have a question for you, Albert," I said, well into my second tumbler of cognac.

"Fire away, my dear young lady," he said.

"I'm wondering about this Moai Congress," I said. "I get the impression that Jasper Robinson himself came up with the idea for this event."

"Possibly. And your question is?"

"Is that normal? To create your own event when you ha an announcement to make?"

"Where I come from it is," he said. "Long and dishonorable tradition. Suppose you're a congressman who wants make an announcement of some sort. You could look around to see if there is an event in your neighborhood that would suit—a hospital opening, for example, if you wanted to talk about health care, let's say. So you get one of your staff, or my case your PR consultant, to phone up the hospital and put out feelers out as to whether they'd like to have you a tend, if there would be enough media there to suit you, they would give you enough time to make a long-winded-to say nothing of self-serving—speech. Or, if you ha something on them, if they need your client's support on vote soon on their funding, for example, you tell them your man will attend. Or you could ask some supporters if the organizations they are involved with would like to host the event at which your client, the congressman could speak.

"But you might be a little nervous about that. Your opponents might show up, the hospital administrator might be thinking of running for your job, unbeknownst to you .You never know. So what do you do? You create your own event somewhere."

"Really?" I said. "How… ?"

"Disillusioning? You don't strike me as that naive," I said.

"I guess I just never thought about it," I said. "So Jasper wanted an event he could control to make this announcement of his."

"Perhaps," Albert said.

"Picked a good spot, if you ask me," Lewis said. "Thousands of miles out in the Pacific has got to get you some control."

"Except that he's dead," Albert said.

"Yes, and except that he came right to the lion's den, didn't he? Right where someone like Gordon Fairweather is sure to hear all about it."

"True," they agreed.

"Maybe Jasper's ego was such that he rather relished the battle," Lewis said.

"Now about your little excursion into Seth's room," I said.

"Oh dear," the muffin said.

"That would be The Art Forger's Handbook you went in to find, would it?"

"Caught in the act," Albert said. "It really is his book, though. He didn't steal something that didn't belong to him."

"And you brought the handbook to Rapa Nui because… ?"

"Just because it sounded interesting. I picked it up in a rare book shop a few months back, and this was the first chance I had to read it. After Jasper's presentation, Albert had his doubts about the tablet," Poikeman said. "We were hoping to get a close look at it."

"And did you?" I asked.

"I'm afraid not," Lewis replied.

"I think she's asking us if we stole the tablet," Albert said to his pal.

"I see. No, we didn't, but I did have a wee look around for it while I was in the room," Lewis said. "I rather thought that Seth was the most likely person to be hiding it. He was nuts about rongorongo. I figured he had to be the one who stole it. I was just taking a look to see anything the police had missed. If I had found it, I'd have turned it over to the police right away, you understand."

I wasn't sure if that was what I understood or not. "You didn't happen to see a photograph lying about, did you?" I asked.

"A photograph? No," Lewis replied.

"Weren't you there when the tablet was found, Albert?" I asked. "You and Edwina?"

Albert paused for a moment before answering. "I was, dear girl. I was. It was a great moment."

"And he didn't even tell me about it," Lewis said, feigning indignation.

"We were sworn to secrecy. Not allowed to spoil Jasper's big moment. I think I may have mentioned that in my retirement years I volunteer at dig sites. I do whatever menial tasks they give me, but this was very exciting. Jasper was excavating what he thought was a tomb. We'd been working for several weeks, and then he found some mummy bundles, and lo and behold, this tablet that he pronounced to be rongorongo. Not often you get that kind of experience on these digs, you know."

"You do when you go with Jasper. He seems to have an unerring instinct for the spectacular finds," I said.

"Perhaps he's not weighed down by too much education," Lewis said, giggling.

"That does seem to be an issue," I said.

"You can't argue with success," Albert said.

"You can, if the tablet is fake," Lewis replied. "And you did say you thought it might be."

"Jasper was not the easiest person in the world to like," Albert said. "Perhaps my suspicions had more to do with that than the tablet itself. It just seemed very out of place there, I must say. Edwina, however, was enchanted by it, but then she shares Jasper's view of the world, about Rapa Nui anyway."

"Do either of you know who Anakena is?" I asked.

"I was hoping it would be you or your equally lovely friend, Moira," Albert said.

"I was sure you were, that first day on the bus to Rano Raraku," Lewis said.

I left the two of them there, swigging on the brandy, and slipped back into my room. They were both kind of cute, it had to be said, in their underwear and pajamas, but Albert had worked for years in a pretty cutthroat business. He couldn't be nearly as nice as he seemed, and they were, after all, breaking into a room.

The cognac had taken hold, however, and this time I slept. Rob was there as usual. "You're off your game, hon," he said. "It's that vacation thing. You don't do vacations. You have to look for links, for the unusual detail that will reveal the murderer. You have to see what both these murders and Gabriela have in common. You know what it is. It's that niggling detail."

I woke up and thought about it. Rob assumed I knew what this elusive whatever was. I didn't. I went back to sleep. This time Rob wasn't there. Instead I found myself being grabbed by Cassandra de Santiago and dragged along the ground. Someone with a hood over their face watched from a distance. "I am taking you to Hanga Roa to get a tattoo," she said, cackling like a wicked witch. "Anakena is going to give you a tattoo of a little bird."

"No!" I screamed, or at least I tried to. I was trying to get the attention of Moira and the others, but Moira was showing Rory her own tattoo and didn't seem to notice what was going on. The others were all standing with their backs to me, watching for an airplane. I knew with absolute certainty that if I went with Cassandra and got this tattoo, I'd be dead by morning.

"That's it," I yelled, sitting right up in bed.

"What? What happened? Did somebody else get killed?" Moira said, completely confused.

"There's only one murderer," I said.

"That's a relief, I'm sure," she said in a soothing tone. I think she thought I was talking in my sleep just like Seth a few nights earlier.

"I have to phone Rob," I said.

"It's the middle of the night," Moira said, but I was ready trying to use the phone. The trouble was, it would allow me to make a long distance phone call to Canada pulled on shorts and a T-shirt and headed for the reception desk. There was no one there. The lights were dimmed the phone, which I tried to use, was shut off.

"Where are the car keys?" I said, coming back to room.

"You're crazy," Moira said, as I dashed out. I blasted I town, right up to Gordon and Victoria's door, which started to pound on. A very sleepy-looking Victoria open it.

"I've got to make a phone call to Canada," I said. "It's or death."

Question to Rob: Is it possible to poison someone with a tattoo needle?

"Are you all right?" a very confused Rob said.

"I am," I said. "But I have a really important question you."

"It's four in the morning here," Rob said.

"It's four in the morning here, too," I said.

"Okay, just so we have that straight. What's the question?" I told him. I heard Victoria gasp as I asked it.

"Yes, it's possible," Rob said. "There was a very hi profile case a few years back in which some guy claimed he’d been poisoned by someone poking him with an umbrella Everyone thought he was nuts, but he died a while la poisoned, and sure enough there was a puncture hole in leg."

"Do you remember what the poison was?" I said.

"Not really," he said. "But I can find out. What are up to, Lara?"

"I'll explain all later, but I'm not planning to poison a body. Somebody here, three people in fact, have been poisoned. What I don't understand is why the pathologist or the doctors haven't figured this out. Don't they have machines now that tell you in minutes what's in a person's bloodstream?"

"You watch too much television," he said.

"Maybe," I agreed. "But I'm not off my game."

"Of course you aren't," he said in a somewhat mystified, but soothing, tone.

"Forget I said that," I said.

"I knew I should have gone with you on this trip," he said.

"I feel as if you've been with me all along," I said.

"I'm not sure what that means exactly."

"I'll explain later," I said.

"It sounds to me as if you'll have rather a lot of explaining to do later," he sighed. "Be careful."

"It's the tattoo," I said, hanging up and turning to Gordon. "There was some kind of poison in the tattoo. Dave had one, Jasper had one, and Gabriela has the start of one. She didn't die because she didn't get as much poison as the others. She must have managed to get away, or the killer was interrupted. You have to tell Gabriela's doctors right now. There's a pathologist working on what killed Jasper and Dave. Maybe he knows already, or maybe if the doctors tell him about Gabriela, he can piece it all together, figure out what it is."

Gordon was reaching for the telephone when Victoria put her hand on his arm. "Gordon," she said. "Think for a minute. If all three of these people are poisoned with the same thing, then it may well point to you, especially because of Gabriela. You are already a suspect, even if Fuentes had to let you go for now."

Surely Gabriela isn't that close a relative, I was thinking.

"She's my daughter, Victoria," he said. "I'd die for her." "His daughter?" I said, as he dialed. "I'll explain later," Victoria said. "But yes, Gabriela is his daughter."

I guess we all had some explaining to do.