The Moai Murders

10

"SNAKE VENOM," Fuentes said.

"Snake venom!" I exclaimed. "Are there poisonous snakes on this island?" I thought about the miles of long grass I'd put my sandaled feet through and the tons of rocks I'd climbed over.

"Apparently not," Fuentes said. "No snakes at all, in fact, which explains why snake venom was the last thing they were looking for in the senorita's case."

"Is there an antidote for this snake venom?"

"There is, I am happy to say, and it will be here tonight, or perhaps in the early hours of the morning. The question is whether or not there has already been too much damage to the senorita's internal organs."

"Where is the antidote coming from?" "Australia, where the snake normally resides." "Australia to Rapa Nui would be a long swim for a snake," I said.

"It would," Fuentes agreed. "Which is why I am operating under the assumption that someone had either the snake or the venom in a vial and brought it with them. I am to it is used in minute quantities to treat certain conditions which ones I have no idea, but it means it is possible to obtain it."

"From Australia," I said.

"Yes," Fuentes said. "Which, as I'm sure you know, where Gordon Fairweather lives at least part of the year where he teaches."

"But poison his own daughter? I saw him when I to them last night. He knew it was a risk, and he made the phone call anyway."

"Yes," he said. "But there are, shall we say, issues regaining that daughter, and he would look more guilty if he d not make the phone call. I trust you would have told me I about the tattoo, if he didn't."

"Yes, I would have," I said. "I wouldn't let Gabriela d without doing something I knew might save her."

"I am most happy to hear that," he said. "Are you going to tell me what gave you the idea of poison in the tattoos?

"If I told you, you'd think I was crazy," I said.

"Tell me anyway," he said.

"I dreamt it," I said.

"That's a relief," he said. "I was afraid you were going tell me that your friend the Mountie knew it all along, little professional jealousy, you see, even if I've never m him."

"That's your way of telling me this whole mess is about professional jealousy?" I said. "I have a question for you Does Gordon Fairweather know how to do tattoos?"

"I don't know that," Fuentes said. "These tattoos we not particularly well done, I'm told, so perhaps not by an expert, like the cameraman's wife Eroria, for example. We are having a little chat with her, right now. So far, I'm told she has been helpful about the tattoos."

"Her husband has been at this congress the whole time," I said.

"Yes, but does he know Gabriela, other than as a waitress at the hotel? Does he really know anyone but Jasper?" he said. "We must find someone with ties to all three victims and who has been to Australia recently, although that is not necessary in this day and age. One could purchase snake venom, I'm sure, from anywhere."

"It seems to me that lots of people on this island go to and from Australia," I said.

"It is interesting that you should say that. This observation of yours about the tattoos gives new direction to our investigation. There are several people here who have been to Australia in the last several months. There is only one, however, who knows all three victims."

"Fairweather," I said. Fuentes said nothing. "But Fairweather didn't know Dave Maddox, did he?" Again, Fuentes said nothing.

It was Gabriela who had thrown the spanner in the works, to use Jasper's term. Fairweather taught in Australia and knew Jasper and Gabriela, but there was no indication he knew Dave Maddox. The rest of the Moaimaniacs knew Dave and Jasper, but how on earth would they know Gabriela? There were very few people who knew all three of the victims: Moira and I and Cassandra de Santiago, who was a fake through and through if you asked me. I couldn't speak for Cassandra, but I knew neither Moira nor I had been to Australia. There was only one person I could think of that knew all three and who I knew for certain had been to Australia.

"Rory Carlyle," I said. Fuentes smiled. I took that to be a yes.

"Motive?" I said. "What could possibly be his mod You'll say professional jealousy of Jasper, but that would hardly apply to Dave and most certainly not Gabriela."

"We're working on it," Fuentes said. "And by the way, should you be wondering where your friend Senora Meller is, she is being questioned at the station."

"What?! What possible reason could you have for questioning her?" I said, indignantly.

"I shouldn't tell you, but I will, given you have been helpful to me. You may need to see that she gets some legal assistance of some kind. I did not make the same mistake this time. When we went to talk to Dr. Carlyle, we had someone covering the back door. Your friend was caught going out that way."

"So what?" I said. "Visiting a friend is hardly a crime and leaving the back way because a police car pulls up at front isn't necessarily, either."

"It is, if she takes the San Pedro rongorongo tablet with her when she leaves," he said.

"I don't believe it!" I said.

"Believe it," he said. "And yes, our case against Dr. Carlyle does hinge in some respects on his possession of the rongorongo tablet. I do not think your friend stole it in the first place, nor do I think she murdered anyone, you'll be happy to know. But there is no denying she was aiding and abetting, as it were, and she did have stolen property in her possession. It was you, was it not, who told me about this rongorongo tablet?"

Hadn't that been a brilliant idea? "I want to talk to her I said.

"You will have that opportunity when we have finish questioning her," he said.

"Moira!" I said about three hours later. "How could you?" She looked exhausted and was swallowing some kind of medication when I was allowed to see her.

"How could I? This from the person who helped you know who get to you know where and then brought this same person food and water? You believed in him, and I believe in Rory. The difference is I got caught, and you didn't. When we saw all the police cars pull up at the guest house where he's staying, he had just shown me the tablet. It was right there. So I tried to get it out of the house because I thought it would look bad for him to have it."

"It does look bad for him to have it," I said.

"He says that Jasper agreed that in exchange for doing an interview for the documentary that was more positive than not, Rory could have it for a few hours to have a closer look. Rory did the interview, saying something reasonably nice, thinking that if he found that it was fake, then he would simply retract what he had said. But then he couldn't find Jasper in the morning to return it, and when Jasper ended up dead and obviously murdered, he didn't know what to do with it, and really in all the confusion, he simply forgot about it."

"I see," I said, pulling pen and paper out of my bag as I did so. That is the official version, I wrote, careful to shield the paper as I did so. Where did he really get it?

"You don't want to know," she murmured, looking toward the guard on the door.

"Yes, I do," I murmured back.

She took the pen. Gordon F. she wrote.

"I don't believe it," I said.

"I told you," she said. "You know what else?" She took the pen and paper again. Rory thinks it's real, she wrote.

"No kidding?" I said.

"No kidding," she said. "Here we are, right in the middle of this mess. I want to go home, Lara."

"Okay," I said. "I'm on this. I'll go talk to Gordon's lawyer and see if he'll take your case. Just hang in there. You don't look well."

"I'm fine," she said, but I knew she wasn't. I had this vision of all the times I'd seen her taking pills of some sort— sleeping pills, pills she told me were vitamins, but now I wasn't sure, pills for headache; pills for stomach upset. I suddenly realized, with absolute certainty, that Moira had not been entirely truthful about the state of her health. And now she was in police custody very far from home.

Up until now I had tried to keep telling myself that this was all none of my business. I'd let myself get drawn into it when, acting more on instinct than good sense, I'd helped Gordon get out the back door of his place, which I suppose was exactly what Moira had been trying to do for Rory. Once Gordon had his lawyer and was out of the cave, though, I'd gone back to my none-of-my-business mantra, however imperfectly. Now Moira was going to be spending a lot of time in Chile if it was found that Rory was guilty of murder. This was now very much my business.

I didn't think Rory had killed two people and tried to kill his friend Gordon's daughter. Nor had I changed my mind about Gordon, despite this latest revelation. Clearly what I had to do was find someone who had ties to all three, make that four, victims. I had to assume that Seth's suicide was tied into all of this. He'd said he was sorry, that he wanted to make amends. He obviously knew Dave and had told me Dave and Jasper went back a long way.

I could think of many people who had reason to hate Jasper and perhaps even be capable of killing him. Dave was more difficult, because the only person I could think of who could want to silence him was Jasper himself. There had to be something else going on here.

I went back to the hotel with a lot on my mind grabbed a couple of things Moira wanted and dropped them off at the carabineros headquarters before going into town. I had decided there were several areas where my lack of knowledge was a serious impediment to figuring this all out. I made a list of them, and I gave myself twenty-four hours to find out what I had to do to get Moira out of jail.

At the top of the list was the small matter of the rongorongo tablet and Gordon's having had it in his possession, according to Rory. Second was the question of Gordon and Gabriela's relationship and where Gabriela had been found. I needed to talk to Victoria or Gordon about a lawyer for Moira, anyway, so I decided I could kill two birds with one stone by paying the Fairweather household a visit.

"It's simple, in a kind of complicated way," Victoria said, after I'd phoned the lawyer—who was unfortunately back in Santiago—and convinced him he needed to help Moira now. "Gordon and my sister were together for a number of years and had two daughters, Gabriela and Edith. Edith was born just about the time my sister and Gordon split up. I'm not able to have children and desperately wanted a child. This will sound very strange to you, but my mother insisted Edith be given to me when she was born. I was single, and I suppose I still am. Gordon is still legally married to my sister. No doubt this all sounds very incestuous to you. I hope you'll let me explain. My sister has many children. She had six before she married Gordon, two with him, and she has had two more since with her current partner. The women in this society are very strong. The men may head the families theoretically and hold public office like mayor, but believe me, the women make the major decisions for the families. My mother made the decision and insisted Edith be given to me. I love her as my own daughter.

"Gordon and I got together about five years ago, and while my mother does not entirely approve of the arrangement, I think he and I will be together forever, and she approves enough that she lives part of the time with us. And now he has one of his daughters with him. Gabriela chose to stay with her mother. She was old enough to make that decision. Before this horrible poison business happened, though, she was at our place all the time."

"The serum is on its way," I said.

"I pray every minute that it gets here on time," she said. "I do not understand this, Lara. Why do this to a child? The carabineros say that whoever it was drugged her and then started to tattoo her. They think that someone interrupted the murderer before the tattoo was finished. Are the tattoos all little birds?"

"Yes, they are," I said.

"I wonder why," she said.

"Where was Gabriela found?" I said. "At her home?"

"At the hotel," she said. "We assumed she had gone back to see her friends there, or to pick up something she'd left. As I told you, she'd quit her job there. The manager was doing a walk around the property before he left the hotel, around midnight I think. He found her on the edge of the garden."

"Did he hear anything, or see anything?" I said.

"We never thought to ask," Victoria said. "Why would we? Who could even imagine something like this happening?"

"Maybe I'll talk to the manager," I said.

"Let us know what you find out and if we can help. Gordon hasn't heard yet about Rory. I'm sorry about Moira. We seem to keep drawing the two of you into this mess."

"Did Gordon know Rory had the San Pedro tablet?" I asked.

"If he did, he didn't mention it to me," she said.

"Where is Gordon now?" I said.

"Back up on Poike," she said. "With his students. He'll be back before dark."

I wasn't going to attempt to retrace the route to Poike by myself, and I decided I had many other things to do while I waited for Gordon to come back. It was difficult seeing where Gabriela fit into all of this, even if she was Gordon's daughter, and even if he was the one who'd stolen the rongorongo tablet. I had a feeling that if I could find her relationship to the others, I would have the answers to all my questions. With all the horrible events that had taken place since, I had forgotten about Gabriela's nasty engagement with Cassandra. It was not all that long after that that Gabriela had been found unconscious. I decided it was time to reopen that unpleasant subject.

I was roaring along the main street in the four-wheel-drive, hastening to get back to the hotel and find the vile Cassandra de Santiago, when a sign caught my eye: Eroria's Tattoos, it said. One of many huge gaps in my comprehension of what was going on here was the subject of tattoos. Moira hadn't said much about hers other than it hadn't hurt as much as she thought, and she couldn't go in the pool until it healed. How did these people get their tattoos? The trouble was, ever since I'd started dreaming about them, and since I'd seen dead people with them, I was terrified of the thought of having one. Get over it, I told myself. How bad could it be? After all, I'd seen Daniel and his wife Eroria at the police station while I waited to visit Moira, and she'd seemed a reasonable-looking person, not somebody who put snake venom in your tattoo. I parked and stood outside the place for a minute or two, summoning my courage. Get on with it, Lara, I told myself. Just walk in there. It took a couple of minutes, but at last my feet started to move.

"Hi," she said. "I'm Eroria. Are you here to book an appointment for a tattoo?"

"I guess so," I said, looking around.

"What did you have in mind?" she said.

"I'm not sure," I said. "Something discreet, small, somewhere nobody can see it."

"Nobody?" she said.

"Well, nobody who isn't really, really close," I said.

"Base of the spine? Something small on the bum?" she said.

"Did you do these?" I said, pointing to photographs on the walls.

"I did," she said.

"Some of them are beautiful," I said. "If you like tattoos, that is."

"Thank you, I think," she said.

"Does it hurt?" I said.

"A little," she said. "If you're worried about that, you're better to choose a part of your body that is, um, fleshy."

I didn't think in my case that narrowed it down much. "Okay," I said. "That doesn't sound too bad. Can I pick a design, or something?"

"Of course," she said. "I have stencils, or you can have a custom design."

"Will it take a long time?" I said. In other words, how long had it taken to tattoo Dave and Jasper and put a partial tattoo on Gabriela?

"Not for something very small and discreet," she said. "Maybe an hour. Are you sure you really want a tattoo?"

"Er, no. I mean yes," I said. "What I mean to say is that my friend Moira got one here, and she thinks it's terrific and that I should have one done, too. But it's not something I've ever considered, really. I suppose I had my ears pierced on a whim, and I haven't regretted that, but I don't know what my partner would think about this." Stop babbling. Lara. I thought. You are making a fool of yourself. It's just a tattoo.

"Moira, yes. She got a little hummingbird if I recall. Rory Carlyle brought her in."

"That's her," I said. "You can have them removed, right? Tattoos, I mean."

"Yes, you can," she said. "But it's more difficult and more expensive—a lot more expensive—than having it done in the first place."

"Oh," was all I managed to say.

"Would you like to come in and see the equipment?" she said. "I could explain the procedure to you better, and that might help you decide. I have someone coming in for a big job in about an hour, but I'll show you my setup, and you can think about it."

"That's good of you," I said. "That would be helpful." I didn't say helpful for what, but followed her into the back room. It was very nice and clean and professional-looking, for want of a better term—sort of like a dentist's office. It would have to be. It had, after all, passed the Meller Spa test.

"This is the tattoo machine I use," she said. "It's very carefully sterilized, and I'll open the package of needles right in front of you. I don't reuse the needles or anything, and the equipment is always sterilized before it's used again."

"A machine," I said.

"Yes," she agreed. "What did you think? A bone chisel or something? That hasn't been popular in a long time."

"You have to plug the machine in," I said.

"It's electric, right," she said. She was looking at me as if I was some nutbar, which maybe I was.

"I really didn't know that," I said. That certainly meant that Dave hadn't been tattooed on Tepano's Tomb, Jasper at Ahu Akivi, and Gabriela at the back of the hotel grounds.For Jasper in particular that would have required a longer extension cord than would normally be available.

"This machine has been around for more than a hundred years," she said, laughing. "An early version of it was invented in the late 1880s."

"But people got tattoos before that," I said.

"Oh, yes," she said. "There are Egyptian mummies with tattoos, and I've heard that people were tattooed in the Stone Age. In this part of the world, tattoos are very much a part of tradition. In the old days, both men and women here covered their bodies in tattoos. And people here still get them, only not quite as elaborate."

"I'll bet they didn't use this machine," I said.

"You've got that right," she said. She did not, however, volunteer what they did use.

"You look familiar to me," I said, feeling we were beginning to establish some rapport despite my babbling. "Did I see you at the police station with Daniel Striker, by any chance?"

"Yes," she said. "Daniel's my husband. The police asked me to come and help them with an investigation. I saw your friend Moira there, too, didn't I?"

"Yes," I said. "The police are questioning everybody at the hotel again, I guess. That's why I was there. Were they asking you about tattoos?"

"Yes," she said. "But how would you know that?"

"I found the body at the hotel," I said. "Dave Maddox. After that I was out at Ahu Akivi when the group found Jasper. I happened to notice they both had a similar tattoo."

"How awful for you," she said. "But those tattoos! That was the worst tattoo job I've seen in a long, long time."

"You saw them?"

"Photographs," she said. "The police showed them to me.

Looked as if they'd been done in a back alley somewhere."

"They didn't look anything like these," I said, gesturing again at the photos in the room.

"Most certainly not," she said. "To do a tattoo properly you need the right equipment, and if I may say so, a good deal of skill. This machine vibrates up to several hundred times a minute, moving the needle up and down, so you have to know what you're doing." This sounded unbelievably complicated to me and not a way to go about killing somebody.

"If I were giving you a tattoo," she said, "we'd decide on a design, I'd do an outline, either from a stencil, as I said, or freehand on your skin. Then I'd use the machine to redo the outline, permanently, I mean, with the needle. After that, we'd fill in the design, with color if that is what you wanted. The skill is in how well you use the machine. If the needles go too deep, there is excessive pain and bleeding, too shallow and the line will look kind of uneven when it's done. You have to get it just right. These tattoos on the dead bodies were done by a butcher, without a machine. Whoever did them simply used some sharp implement to scratch the skin surface, rather deep, too, I'm afraid. It would have hurt, but maybe they were dead at the time."

I knew, from the traces of blood on the tattoo, that they'd all been alive when it was done, but we could hope they were unconscious.

"Then the ink—and I'm not sure what was used for the color or whether or not it would be permanent—was just rubbed into the scratch." It was permanent, all right, for Jasper and Dave. I could only hope it wasn't for Gabriela.

"Horrible job, and really very, very unsanitary, I'm sure," she said. "This is the kind of tattoo procedure people in prisons use to give each other tattoos and kids try out on their friends. Very bad idea." Obviously the police had not bothered to mention the snake venom. That was about as unsanitary as it gets.

"So it's possible to do tattoos without this machine?" I said.

"Of course. Even now people use an empty pen into which they put a sharp wire of some kind, and they just use the ink you'd use in a fountain pen. I shouldn't have told you that," she said. "I've probably put you off. Really, people have been getting tattoos for thousands of years, and they are now very trendy. It's quite safe, and it hardly hurts at all. If you want something small and not too fancy, I can do it right now. You know what I'd suggest for you? I don't know if you've been to Ana Kai Tangata, the cave…"

"I have," I said. I was trying to remember to breathe and not have a complete nervous collapse at the thought of this tattoo.

"Then I'm sure you recall the wall paintings. There is a bird motif there that relates to the cult of the bird man. I could do that. It's pretty and it's discreet. It would be a good souvenir of your trip; and you never know, maybe having a little tattoo would make your life more exciting. Why don't you go for it?"

I managed to stop myself from commenting that finding three bodies so far on this trip was more excitement that I could stand and that right now a bird tattoo was out of the question.

"I guess if these tattoos were done in such a primitive fashion, it is difficult for the police to narrow down their search," I said.

"It is," she said. "I was able to tell them one thing, though. I'm almost certain the person who did this was left-handed."

"How would you know that?" I said.

"You draw an outline of the design you want on the skin first, so you start at a point, and go in a direction, that prevents you from smudging the design. If you're right-handed, as I am, you will tend to start at the top and go around the design counterclockwise, and if you're left-handed you go clockwise."

"But if they're finished you can't tell. You're talking about Gabriela's, then."

"Yes," she said. "It wasn't finished, and the person who did it stopped in the middle of piercing the skin. I'm almost certain I'm right," she said. "Now, how about it? Maybe just a little bird?"

"Could I think about this overnight?" I said. "Maybe email my partner, Rob, for his opinion on this subject?"

"I'll bet he'd find something small and strategically placed rather interesting," she said.

"I suppose," I said. Apparently all that is necessary to make life both interesting and exciting is a little tattoo. I wondered if that is what Moira thought, a tattoo and a little fling with Rory.

Nonetheless, I was feeling positively euphoric that I had managed to get that much information without actually having to get a tattoo, even if I had proven to myself without a shadow of a doubt that I was the most boring person on the planet. No guts, either. Never mind: I now knew it was possible for someone to use something as simple as a ballpoint pen and a sharp piece of wire to do a tattoo. It was possible I was the only person in the world up until that moment who hadn't known this. The point was, now I did.

My second visit of the afternoon was to the hotel manager, one Celestino, by name. I managed to corner him in the garden, so that it would look like a chance meeting rather than my having to make an appointment. I casually introduced myself and commiserated with him about the events unfolding at the hotel he managed. I told him I'd been to see Gabriela in the hospital because I knew her father and stepmother and how appalled I'd been to hear about the poison.

"I found her," he said. "Right over there. It was dreadful. I live just down the street with my family, and I was doing a last-minute check of the property before I left for the night. I heard a moan, and there was some shuffling around. Her body seemed to fall out of the hedge, although I must have been imagining it. I thought at first someone had tossed her there, but that couldn't be the case, could it?"

"I certainly hope not," I said, but of course it could. This was probably the person who had inadvertently saved Gabriela from instant death.

"I thought at first she was drunk, you know, so I didn't call the police right away. But then, when I couldn't wake her … I'll be glad when this is all over," he said. "I've never seen anything like this in the ten years I've been here."

"I'm sure we'll all be on our way very soon," I said. I sure hoped I was right.

Cassandra proved more elusive. In fact I was beginning to wonder if she was hiding out somewhere, but she did like her food, and I eventually found her in the dining room. "I need to talk to you," I said pulling up a chair without being asked.

"I don't need to talk to you," she said.

"Fine," I said. "I was just coming to warn you. Have the carabineros interviewed you yet?"

"Why would they want to do that?" she said, giving me the evil eye.

"I guess you haven't heard," I said. "Gabriela, the young woman from the hotel, was poisoned, deliberately, by someone. The police are treating it as attempted murder now."

The gypsy turned green. "Oh," she gasped.

"Yes," I said. "It would probably be best if you talked to them about that night before I do. What is your real name by the way? I'm sure they'll want to know that."

"Muriel," she said. "Muriel Jones. My friends call me Mu. That's how I got interested in the goddess Mu and Lemuria." She had completely dropped her pseudo-Hungarian gypsy accent. I'd say she was from the Midwest somewhere.

"Have you got any other names, like Anakena, maybe?"

"Anakena? No," she said. She looked as if she were going to throw up.

"Have you ever met this Anakena?" I said.

"I suppose I must have," she said. "Anakena is here."

"But you don't know Anakena for sure," I said.

"No. I don't know why all these questions about Anakena," she said. "It wasn't what you thought, you know, that night."

"How was it then, Muriel?" At least she wasn't trying to stick to her story that I was mistaken about seeing her with Gabriela.

"It was the cards. They predicted this."

"Oh, please," I said.

"It's true," she said. "I read her cards. It cost me a lot to get here, but given my years of study of Lemuria, I felt I couldn't pass up the opportunity to come. I rather needed a little spending money while I was here, though, so I started reading cards in my room for anyone who cared to pay me. A lot of the girls on staff came. There's nothing illegal in that."

"I'm not sufficiently familiar with the laws of Chile to comment," I said, rather acidly. She turned even greener, if that was possible.

"The thing about Gabriela was that bad news kept coming up. She came two or three times. Do you know the tarot cards?" Cassandra asked me. I shook my head. "I won't get into the technicalities, but Gabriela's cards were not good.

Death, number 13, showed its face every time I did them. That is not necessarily bad in the tarot, but it was in the context of the other cards. She got absolutely hysterical about it. I mean truly hysterical. It was during the filming of my interview. They were adjusting something or other, and so I went back to my room for a bathroom break. Gabriela was there, insisting I read her cards again. At this point, I wasn't charging her or anything. Then the tower, reversed, turned up, signifying unavoidable calamity. I tried to soft pedal it, but essentially the cards said that her chosen course would lead to someone's death. She went crazy. I think they are very superstitious people here."

And Cassandra, nee Muriel, wasn't? "Go on," I said.

"She went out the back door, and I followed her. I was afraid she was going to pass out or something. I remembered hearing you should slap a person to bring them around. That's what I was doing when you saw me. Honest. You do believe me, don't you?"

"I'm not sure," I said. "Perhaps you should tell this story to the police rather than to me." Cassandra looked as if she was about to faint dead away. I didn't care. I did, however, believe her story, pathetic though it might be.

At ten that night I went back to the police station to pick up Moira, who was being permitted to go back to the hotel. I found her sitting with Rory in a room with bars on the windows.

"I'm going to wait with Rory," she said.

"No, you aren't," he said gently. "You are going with Lara. You're going to have a good night's sleep. I will be out of here in no time."

"I don't want to leave you here all by yourself," she said.

"I'll be fine. Get her out of here," Rory said to me.

"You can come back tomorrow, Moira," I said. "Right now, you're coming with me."

I wanted to ask Rory about the rongorongo tablet, but I knew doing so here was a very bad idea, and I also knew Moira needed some rest. I decided I was going to get her something to eat, then into bed, feed her one of those sleeping pills of hers, and get on with my job. I tried not to watch as they kissed each other good night.