Uneasy Relations

THIRTEEN

Breakfast in the hotel dining room the next morning was somewhat strained, at least from Gideon’s perspective. It’s hard to relax and enjoy your kippers and eggs when you keep sneaking looks around the table wondering just which one of your merry companions has been trying to cut your life short. And – just in case it wasn’t your now-completed and demonstrably harmless lecture that had elicited the attempts – whether he (or she) would be giving it another shot today.

The day before, while he and Julie had breakfasted on their balcony, everyone else had gone down to the dining room, pulled a couple of tables together, and eaten as a group. Apparently, this was to be the pattern for the rest of their stay, inasmuch as the pulled-together tables were waiting for them this morning, covered with tablecloths, with menus and place settings laid out, and everyone there.

If anyone noticed that Julie’s and Gideon’s moods were subdued, it wasn’t apparent. The conversation around them mostly concerned a controversial paper presented at the conference the day before, in which the author asserted, by means of a complicated mathematical model, that, had the Neanderthals been vegetarians instead of meat-eaters, their ecological niche would have been more bountiful, and they would have survived, possibly out-competing the invading Homo sapiens and causing their extinction. Audrey and Pru thought it made sense; Adrian and Corbin asserted it was poppycock. The discussion was spirited, peppery, and somewhat dogmatic, in the usual manner of academics quarreling over the arcane details of their discipline. Julie and Gideon were allowed to eat quietly without participating.

Midway through the meal, Rowley Boyd came in, slipped without saying anything into the vacant chair next to Adrian, and shook his head when the waiter asked if he wanted breakfast. Although the subject matter was something he’d ordinarily have jumped right in on, he sat, silent and grave, his chin in his hand, his forefinger slowly, meditatively tapping his lower lip, his downcast eyes on the table. His trusty pipe peeped unused from the breast pocket of his tweed jacket. Eventually, Adrian, apparently thrown off his rhythm by the mushroom cloud of gloom that had settled in beside him, asked with an impatient sigh if something was wrong.

“Yes,” said Rowley, looking somberly up. His normally affable face was startlingly haggard and pinched.

The arguing came to an abrupt halt. A chill washed over the table like a surge of cold sea water.

“Wh… what is it?” Corbin said after a moment.

“Ivan’s dead.”

“Ivan Gunderson?” Corbin asked stupidly.

“No, Ivan the Terrible, for Christ’s sake,” muttered Pru out of the side of her mouth.

“But he was just here the other night! We were all talking to him!”

It struck Gideon, not for the first time, how often people responded like that to news of a death. “But I had dinner with him yesterday! ” “But I just saw her this morning!” As if it was impossible for someone to be alive one minute and dead the next, although that was precisely the way it was. And yet he felt some of the same dull, hopeless denial. Gunderson dead? Impossible! He was here just the other day, wasn’t he?

“How did it happen, Rowley?” Audrey asked tonelessly.

Rowley was searching the room for their waiter. “I, ah, believe I should like a cup of coffee after all.”

“Take mine,” Gideon said, sliding over his cup and saucer.

The cup was full, but Rowley drained it without setting it down, in two long gulps. “Thank you.” He placed the cup on the table and breathed slowly in and out. His exhausted eyes were now focused on his hands, lying clasped on the table. “It happened the night before last, or rather very early yesterday morning, only a little while after I drove him home from the dinner. I learned of it only last night. I couldn’t believe it. He’d been fine when I left him – well, perhaps a little disoriented, as you know, but-”

“Rowley,” Gideon said. “What happened?”

“Sorry. He was smoking in bed. He did that, you know. He smoked a pipe too; he had a rack of Meerschaums, beautiful things that he used to get from…” He jerked his head and massaged his temples so hard the rubbing was audible. “His bedclothes were full of little burn holes. I warned him about it. His cleaning woman warned him about it. He promised to stop, but no, not him, he-”

“Rowley!” Audrey commanded. “ Will you get on with it?”

“I’m trying to tell you!” cried poor Rowley. “There was a terrible fire. He died in his bed. By the time the fire people got there, his cottage was completely destroyed.”

Julie and Gideon exchanged a quick glance – the fire Fausto had been called away to look into yesterday. Fausto’s opinion to the contrary, it seemed that interconnected monkey business had apparently struck again.

While Rowley did his best to deal with his own emotions and the ensuing storm of questions, Gideon went up to the room to call Fausto. When he got there, the message light on the bedside telephone was blinking. The voice mail message from police headquarters was classic Sotomayor:

“Gideon. Fausto. Call.”

Gideon reached him on the first ring. “Fausto, this is-”

“Gideon, sorry, can’t tell you for sure if the lamp was messed with or not. Has to go to the lab in London. I express mailed it and put in a call to them to say it was urgent, but, you know, Gib isn’t exactly at the top of their list, so I’m not sure how long it’ll take. But we did lift some prints off it here. Four different sets, all pretty clear. Do you remember whether you ever touched it yourself?”

“I don’t think I did… but I’m not sure. Maybe.”

“Then I better get yours, just in case.”

“Okay, I’ll come over there a little later. But Fausto-”

“Now, I talked with that tech guy at the cave, Derek? Who says the work crew all swear to God they never moved that mat, that they don’t know-”

“Fausto, that’s not what I was calling about.”

“What, this isn’t important enough for you? Okay then, tell me, what did you call about?”

“The old man that died in the fire yesterday?”

“Yeah?”

“He was Ivan Gunderson, right?”

“Yeah. So how do you know his name? Is it in the paper already? ”

“Ivan Gunderson was an archaeologist. He was one of our group. He was the one we had the testimonial dinner for the other night.”

“No, uh-uh, this guy was an archaeologist, all right, but he was a resident of Gib. He lived here, had a house in the South District. ”

“It’s the same person, Fausto. He owned several houses. One of them was here. It’s where he spent most of his time the last few years.”

Gideon heard – almost felt the breeze from – the long whoosh of Fausto’s let-out breath. “So…?”

“So, with Sheila Chan,” Gideon said, “that makes two people connected with the dig who’ve now died in ‘accidents.’ Neither one with witnesses, let me point out. Add that to what now looks like an attempt to electrocute me, as well as-”

“But what’s the dig got to do with you? You weren’t on it, I thought.”

“No, but I did the analysis of the bones from it – of Gibraltar Boy.”

“Aw, jeez,” Fausto said.

“Fausto, is there anything at all that caught your eye about the fire? Anything that made you think it might not have been an accident? ”

“No, nothing, but I have to admit, I wasn’t looking that hard. No reason to. According to Burkhardt – this lieutenant, fire department – it started on the bed, that much is for sure. And he was smoking, that’s for sure too – or at least, what was left of his pipe, which wasn’t that much, was right next to what was left of him, which also wasn’t that much, which was on what was left of the bed, which was practically nonexistent. The whole cottage burned down to the ground, you know? Place was full of these glues and solvents-”

“He spent his days gluing pots.”

“-so there were accelerants all over the place. Neighbors said it was more like an explosion than a fire. You know, whooof! Never saw a body burned like that. He looked like a piece of burned wood, all black and shriveled. I mean, this one gives new meaning to the term fried to a crisp.”

Which is rapidly becoming one of my least favorite metaphors, Gideon thought. “Where is it now?”

“The body? In the morgue. The ME just finished the postmortem.”

“Already?”

“Told you, we don’t have much call for postmortems. Did most of it yesterday afternoon, wrapped it up this morning. Don’t have his report yet – Figlewski, his name is – but he called me five minutes ago, soon as he was done. It’s the usual. Died of smoke inhalation. No reason to think it’s anything but what it looks like, he says.”

“Uh-huh.” Gideon hesitated. “Do you suppose I could have a look at it?”

“You want to look at the body?”

“Yes.”

A dry, one-note chuckle. “Trust me, there’s not a lot to look at.”

“Still.”

“Sure, why not? But what are you looking for?”

“I don’t know, but I’d like to have a try. What shape is the skull in? Is any of it left?”

“Ah, you want to know if somebody bashed him over the head or something first, then started the fire to cover it. Am I right, or am I right?”

“You’re right.”

“Well, I can answer that for you right now. The answer’s no.”

“Uh-huh. And how did you establish that? If I’m not being too inquisitive. ”

“I established it,” said Fausto, “with state-of-the-art, high-tech information I received at this seminar I once took from this famous professor.”

“Ah, well, then it must be reliable. Come on, Fausto, explain.”

“What is this, a test? Okay.” He paused to gather his thoughts.

“In this seminar I learned that, in a fire, a skull can explode from the heat. But only if it wasn’t broken to start with, you know? Because if there was a hole or a crack in it already, there would be a vent for the steam pressure from inside to escape?”

“Yes, that is what I said, but-”

“Well, there sure as hell wasn’t any vent, because his skull looks like an exploded coconut. The top’s completely blown off, all the way down to the, what do you call ’em, right under the eyes, the cheekbones-”

“Malars.”

“Right, all the way down to the malars in front, and in the back, all the way down to the bone in the rear-”

“The occiput.”

“I know, dammit, I was just gonna say that. Let me finish a sentence, will you?” He waited to see if Gideon meant to comply, then went on. “The occiput, what’s left, you can really see how it just burst open, you know, because there are these kind of flaps of bone, bent outward, like-”

“And from all this you surmise?”

“I surmise,” said Fausto, bristling at Gideon’s tone, “that since the skull exploded, there was no preexisting opening in it to vent the pressure, and therefore no preexisting cranial trauma. Would that be correct, Professor Oliver?”

“No, that would be incorrect, Detective Chief Inspector Sotomayor. ”

“Whaaat?” This exclamation was followed by a few seconds of aggrieved silence, and then a shouted: “You’re the frigging guy I learned that from! I was practically quoting you! I still got my notes, I-”

“Yes, but things change, my good fellow. New things are learned. Old assumptions are discarded. That is the nature of science. That is the essence of empiricism. One must be ready to cast off even the most cherished beliefs if they are contraindicated or unsupported by the evidence.”

“Yeah, right. In other words, you screwed up. When you were showing us all those fancy diagrams with those line-of-force arrows that explained everything? You didn’t know what the hell you were talking about. That’s what you’re telling me.”

“You could put it that way,” Gideon agreed.

He was far from the only one who’d been wrong. For decades the “exploding skull” hypothesis had been a cornerstone of forensic investigations involving burned bodies. The idea was that steam pressure built up inside the skull from the boiling (or rather, roasting) brain, eventually blowing apart the sealed vessel that was the cranium, much in the way that an unpunctured potato explodes in the microwave. But if the cranium was not sealed, that is, if there were preexisting openings – bullet holes, blunt force fractures – then the steam would safely escape through these vents without blowing up the skull – in the same way as it safely escapes through the skin of a fork-punctured potato. Thus, the reasoning went, while an unexploded skull was not proof positive of the lack of preexisting injuries – the effects of fire were not that predictable – an “exploded” skull was a good indication that it had been whole to begin with.

But when this intuitive, reasonable-sounding hypothesis was finally put to the test only a few years ago in a study involving the experimental burnings of scores of cadaver heads, it turned out not to hold up. Skulls did not explode like hot potatoes. They might fragment or warp because the heat had deformed them and made them brittle, or because a stream of cold water from a fireman’s hose hit the sizzling bone and cracked it, or because debris fell on them, or because they broke while being recovered. But explode – no, not a one.

“Well, that’s a hell of a note,” Fausto grumbled when Gideon had finished explaining. “So how much else of what you told us am I not supposed to believe anymore?”

“Fausto, except for this one thing, I promise you, you can rely with implicit faith on every word I uttered.”

“Uh-huh. Until they turn out to be contraindicated or unsupported by the evidence.”

Gideon nodded. “I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

“Okay,” Fausto said with a sigh, “so where does all that leave us?”

“Right where we were before. Would it be all right for me to have a look at the body?”

“Pick you up in twenty minutes,” Fausto said and clicked off.