Where there's a will

TWELVE

“Something’s screwy,” Gideon said.

John laughed. “You’re telling me.”

“No, I mean even screwier than it looks.”

With Gideon behind the wheel of the pickup this time, they had just left Fukida’s office, turning north onto the Queen Kaahumanu Highway to head back into the uplands, toward Waimea and the ranch.

“I know,” said John, nodding. “Every time we find out something new, it just gets more confusing. Not supposed to work that way.”

“It’s the timing that doesn’t make any sense, John. It’s impossible for it to have happened the way we think.”

“How so?”

“Well, when would Torkel have had the time to do what he did-cut off Magnus’s toes, leave the ring, switch clothing with him, and the rest of it?”

“How do you know he switched clothes? That’s not so easy with a dead guy. You ever try to move a dead guy? Dead people are heavy.”

“Well, at least we know Torkel got a boot back on his foot after the toes came off, and he wouldn’t have been dumb enough to put Magnus’s own boots back on him. I’m guessing he also dressed him in the rest of his own clothing.”

“Yeah, I see what you mean. And he must have switched wallets and any other identifying things, too, but they probably got burnt up-except for the ring.”

“Probably so, but when did he do all that? How could he get it done between the time of the shooting and the time they burnt the place down? Did they kill Magnus, then conveniently go away for an hour or two, leaving Torkel alone to tinker with his brother’s body, and then come back later, at their leisure, and burn the place down?”

With his eyes closed and his face pushed out the open window to derive the full complement of pleasure from the oven-hot breeze, John thought about that for a moment. “Pretty doubtful,” he agreed, bringing his head back in. His stiff, black hair was hardly mussed. “So what’s your theory? I know you have to have one.”

“Oh, hey, I’m not about to call it a theory. At best we’re talking hypothesis or-”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” John said, waving a hand. Finer academic distinctions were not his forte.

“Let’s call it a speculation, I’d be more comfortable with that,” Gideon said. “A supposition that’s unverified to this point, but one-”

“Doc, I swear-!”

“Sorry, sorry. John, what I’m wondering is if the killers never burnt the place down at all. I’m wondering if Torkel’s the one who came back and set the fire himself.”

“You mean to cover the identity switch.”

“Exactly.”

“Yeah, could be.” He nodded to himself. “Could very well be. Fits.”

“It goes along with cutting off the toes, doesn’t it?”

“It also goes along with putting his face right on that oil-soaked matting so there’d be nothing left to recognize.” He turned things over in his mind for a moment. “And what about his fingers? Remember the photos? His fingers were-well, his hands; he didn’t exactly have any fingers, did he?-his hands were positioned up by his face, too, where they’d get all that heat. No fingerprints that way.”

“Well, possibly, but that just might be-”

“Oh, right, right, where the muscles tighten up… the… what do you call it again?”

“The pugilistic attitude,” Gideon said. “The muscle fibers dehydrate and shrink, and pull on the tendons, so the forearms flex and the hands come up around the face like a fighter covering up. The knees bend and the feet come up, too. Remember how his feet stayed in the air when they turned him over?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Okay, scratch that idea. But the rest of it holds together.” John was getting into it now. His hands were starting to chop the air. Gideon shifted left to give himself a little more protection. “The shooters kill Magnus. Torkel gets away. He knows, or thinks he knows, that they don’t know which one they shot. So after they’re gone, he comes back, chops off his brother’s toes, leaves his ring, and burns the place down. Everybody figures the bad guys did it, and the bad guys-and everyone else-think it’s Torkel’s body laying in the barn.” He nodded, agreeing with himself. “I like it.”

“That’s one scenario,” Gideon said gingerly. “I have another one, too. Another possibility.”

“That nobody else was involved at all? That there never were any ‘bad guys’? That Torkel not only burnt the place down, but killed his own brother?”

“That’s right,” Gideon said, surprised. “Is that what you think?”

“No, that’s not what I think. I just know the way you think. You got this bug in your ear. First it was Magnus who killed Torkel, and since that didn’t work, now it’s Torkel who killed Magnus. What have you got against these guys?”

“John, I’m just-”

“Doc, we’ve been all over this. There’s all kinds of evidence against it. The slick, two-man execution, the statement from Dagmar-”

“Sure, but wouldn’t Dagmar have lied if it helped her own brother get away with murder?”

“Of her own other brother? I don’t know, but, yeah, okay, it’s possible. Theoretically. But look, the main thing is- why would Torkel shoot his brother? Give me one possible reason.”

“How would I know that? Because of the will, maybe? To get full title to the ranch?”

“No, how does that add up? If that’s what he wanted, why pretend he was dead? How would that get him the ranch?”

Gideon nodded, worn down by John’s more than reasonable arguments. “Yes, you’re right about that, too. Okay, forget it. One more unverified supposition bites the dust.”

“One more crackpot theory,” John said.

They were climbing now. The breeze flowing in the driver’s-side window was laced with pine and eucalyptus, and was refreshingly cool. John, finding the chill unwelcome, rolled up his window, leaned his head against it, and settled his body as comfortably as he could. After a few minutes he began to slip into a doze but then sat up with a sudden “ Damn! ” He turned with an earnest look at Gideon.

“Doc, maybe you’re on to something after all. They have been lying to us. I just realized it. Well, holding back, anyway.”

“Who are we talking about?”

“The family. The whole damn family. They knew it was Torkel in the plane all along!”

Gideon frowned. “How do you figure that?”

“Look, when we told them the body in the plane was Torkel’s, how come nobody mentioned the ring? How come nobody jumped up and said, ‘No, that’s impossible, it can’t be Torkel; we know the one that burned up was Torkel because he was wearing Torkel’s ring’? Or at least brought it up?” He pounded his thigh with a fist. “Wouldn’t you have said something? But there was nothing, not a peep. Why not?”

“Is it possible they didn’t know about it?”

“No, it isn’t. The file said it was family members that identified it, remember?”

“Well, yes, but it didn’t say which family members.”

“What’s the difference? Even if it was only a couple of them, why would they keep something like that to themselves? No, I’m telling you, somebody should have said something.”

“Somebody should have,” Gideon agreed.

“What do you say we go talk to Axel about it?” John suggested. “I’d like to hear what he has to say.”

For the next few minutes they retreated into their own thoughts. At the gate to the Little Hoaloha, it was John who got out to swing it open. When he climbed back into the truck, Gideon wore a look on his face somewhere between confusion and exasperation, with emphasis on the former.

“What?” John asked. He had the worried expression that meant he knew in his heart that his friend was about to complicate things even more.

“None of that makes any sense either,” Gideon told him.

John exploded. Out shot his arms. He banged an elbow hard into the doorpost and winced. “I knew you were going to say that. I knew it’d be too simple for you. What’s the problem, not enough loose ends?”

“No, I’m serious. Look.” He waited for John to settle down before going quietly on. “If they all knew what really happened-that Magnus wasn’t Magnus and Torkel wasn’t Torkel-then why would they ask me to look at the autopsy report? Why did they ask me to go out to Maravovo Atoll and check the plane in the first place? They’d have to be crazy to take chances like that. There was no reason they had to do that. They could have just let the salvage company bring the bones back, buried them, and left me out of it. None of this would have come up.”

“Yeah, but… well, maybe they…” John sagged against his seat. “My head hurts.”

“John, what do you say we forget about going up to see Axel? What do you say we turn the truck around and go back and talk to Fukida again? Tell him what we’ve been talking about, see what he thinks.”

“Dump it in his lap, you mean.”

“Absolutely. It’s his baby, not ours.”

Now John hedged. “All the way back to Kona? It’s not like we have anything definite here, Doc. There might be a simple explanation for everything. We might be stirring up a lot of trouble for everybody for no good reason. These are good people, basically.” He scowled down at his hands. “I think these are good people.”

“Well, you’re the cop. I’ll leave it up to you. If you just want to drop the whole thing-”

“Nah,” John said wearily, “you know better than that. Okay, let’s go. Imagine how happy Teddy’ll be to see us again.”

Sergeant Fukida looked anything but happy. From across his desk, he eyed them with the wary expression of the barnyard rooster looking at a couple of smiling foxes come calling. He was wearing two rubber bands on his wrist now, wide ones, and was snapping them both with a forceful little twist of the thumb. That’s got to hurt, Gideon thought. His baseball cap was still on, but no longer backward.

“I knew you guys would be back,” Fukida said. “I could feel it in my bones. I just didn’t think it would be today.”

“This is serious, Teddy,” John said. “There are some problems.”

Fukida heaved a colossal sigh. “Okay, let’s hear’em.”

The possibility that Torkel himself had set the hay barn fire to obscure his escape left him unconcerned and impatient (“You came back to tell me this? ”), but the question of why no one had brought up the ring after Gideon had identified the body in the plane as Torkel’s did catch his interest, and for few minutes they tossed possibilities back and forth. It didn’t take long to narrow the likely explanations down to one: When the Torkelssons had learned that Gideon knew the body in Maravovo Lagoon was Torkel’s, they realized that mention of the ring would make it clear that the confusion of identities had not been accidental, but purposeful; that Torkel had left his ring on Magnus’s body in a deliberate, premeditated attempt to mislead the police.

And if they were afraid of bringing that out, didn’t it mean that they’d been aware of the switch from the beginning? That they’d known all along that Torkel had actually outlived Magnus? That they had kept it to themselves because they much preferred their lives under the provisions of Magnus’s generous will? (And who wouldn’t?) If Torkel’s will had gone into effect instead, the great bulk of the estate would have gone to the Swedish Seamen’s Home.

Why they would have asked Gideon to look at the remains in the plane was still an unanswered question, but that didn’t change the rest of it.

“And if it’s all true,” a glum-looking John mused, “then they’re guilty of collusion to commit fraud for monetary gain.”

“Even your friend Axel?” Gideon asked after a moment.

John rubbed his forehead and ran his fingers through his hair. “Whew, that’s pretty hard to believe.” But the cop in him came through. “I’m not ruling it out, though.”

“They did more than that,” Fukida said. He held out a pack of spearmint gum. When they shook their heads, he folded over two sticks, inserted them into his mouth, chawed them down to a single manageable bolus, and continued. “If they knew all along that Torkel got away and they’ve been covering for him all this time, then they’ve participated in”-he began counting off on his fingers-“one, falsification of public records; two, providing false information to the police; three, identity theft. And if Torkel set the fire and they knew about it and didn’t say anything, then there’s insurance fraud, too. And if they knowingly accepted property that should have gone to the Seamen’s Home, that’s not just fraud, that’s theft.”

“This is really getting ugly,” John mumbled. “Are you going to reopen the case?”

There followed a period of gum-cracking, band-snapping, and general chair-jiggling while Fukida thought it through. “Wouldn’t you?” he asked.

John shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess so.”

“Well, so would I. I’ll have to talk to the lieut enant, but I don’t think there’s much doubt. At least it’s worth stirring things up. Maybe not a full-scale, official investigation at this point, no, but a look. Really sit down with the files, re-interview these characters…”

“What about the statutes of limitation?” Gideon asked. “With ten years gone by, are any of those things still prosecutable?”

“Who knows?” Fukida brushed the question aside and leaned forward in his chair. “I don’t give a damn about fraud or identity theft, not from ten years ago. But if those people helped Torkel switch identities-if they knowingly participated in that faked ID-thereby misleading the police, then they just might be criminally responsible, at least as accessories after the fact, to Magnus’s murder. That’s worth looking at-and no statute of limitation to worry about.”

“ Murder? ” John exploded. “Come on, Teddy, get real. You’re stretching the hell out of-”

Fukida out-yelled him-not an easy thing to do. “They are also criminally responsible for making the Kona CIS look like a bunch of incompetent assholes, and laughing about it all the way to the bank!” The declaration was shouted into a vault of silence. The hum of conversation from other cubicles and desks had stopped entirely. Everyone was listening in. Everyone could hardly help it, Gideon thought.

John lowered his voice to a hiss. “That’s what this is really about, isn’t it, Teddy? They made you look like idiots, and now you want to get back at them.”

Fukida glared at him, opened his mouth to shout some more, changed his mind, and settled back, shaking his head. After a second he sat up straight again, snorted, and angrily flung his cap into a corner. “I don’t understand you, Lau. You walk in here uninvited, you rake up all kinds of dirty laundry, you tell me we got this wrong and that wrong, you raise a million questions… and then when I tell you, well, maybe there’s something to it and we ought to reopen, you climb all over me. What do you want? Do you want us to investigate? Or do you want us to drop it?”

John had calmed down while Fukida spoke. He looked about as miserable as his open, cheerful face would permit. “Yes,” he said. “And yes.”

A beat passed before Fukida spoke. “What is that, zen? I don’t get it.”

Gideon did. It was what had been bothering John all day; the conflict between human being and lawman. By coming to Fukida, he felt, understandably enough, as if he were betraying his friends. But as a cop himself, he couldn’t bring himself to pretend that all the equivocations, misrepresentations, omissions, and generally dubious behavior on the part of this family he’d known so long had never occurred.

“I have an idea,” Gideon said. “For all we know, we’re blowing things up way out of proportion. Basically, we’re operating without facts. Maybe they didn’t do anything illegal. Maybe we’re seeing things all wrong. I know it looks bad, but maybe there’s a simple explanation for everything that we haven’t thought of.”

John’s and Fukida’s faces showed that they believed this about as much as he did, but that they were willing to listen.

“So what I suggest, before you go barreling in in any kind of official way, Sergeant, is that you let us poke around a little more. Discreetly, of course.”

“Like how?”

“Well, like the two of us-John and I-going back and having a chat with Axel. Informally. We were going to do that anyway, before we decided to come back here. Bring up some of these same questions and see what he has to say.”

Fukida was shaking his head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for civilians-”

“Who you calling a civilian?” John demanded. “And who dug up this stuff for you in the first place? Where would you be if not for us? Exactly where you were ten years ago-fat and happy and way out on a limb you didn’t even know you were on.”

“That’s the truth,” Fukida grumbled. “Happy, that’s for sure. Okay, I won’t do anything for a couple days. Go talk to Axel. Don’t shake things up, though. Be discreet, you know?”

John put a hand to his heart. “Discretion is my middle name.”

“This is good,” John said as they headed to the truck. “I trust Axel. He’ll level with us.”

“I hope so.”

John climbed in and buckled the seat belt. “Especially if we nudge him a little,” he said under his breath.