"WHAT DO YOU THINK?" Moira said, pointing to what I suppose would be a little hummingbird when the red welts calmed down, on her upper arm right at her shoulder.
"Very cute," I said.
"I think this may be the bravest thing I've ever done," she said.
"Probably," I said.
"I kind of lost my nerve on the belly button idea," she said. "For one thing, I felt a little squeamish, and also I wasn't sure how Clive would feel about a hummingbird around my navel."
"Good idea," I said. "This looks nice, and it's discreet."
"Exactly. You, too, could have one," she said. "This is on my shoulder and is therefore called a… just a minute, I'll remember, he pare. If it were on my thigh, it would he kona. Just so you know. Remind me I have to put antibacterial cream on it from time to time. Guess where I got it? You'll never guess. Daniel Striker's wife, Eroria did it. You know, the cameraman. His wife is a real artist, and she does tattoos both here and in Australia where they live part of the year." She stopped for a moment and looked at me. "You're looking a bit green about the gills, Lara. Are you getting another migraine? Is there a problem?"
So I told her. "Jasper is dead!?" she gasped. "Murdered?"
"I'm afraid so," I replied.
"And Dave? Are they saying the same thing about Dave?"
"Not yet, but I think they might once the pathologist gets here."
"When is that supposed to be?"
"Tomorrow," I said. "He's flying out from Santiago tomorrow."
"I didn't believe you, you know, about Dave. I am a jerk. That must have been something, finding Jasper like that," she said.
It was. Finding a dead guy leaning against an ahu may have made for much better television, but it also made Pablo Fuentes' life a living hell. Jasper, when we'd found him, was stone cold dead and had been for several hours. No matter how much Fuentes wanted to rule this another accident, two corpses with their heads bashed in made at least one too many. But we'd got the horse business out of the way, or so I thought at the time. There were no hoof prints to be seen. No horse poop in the immediate vicinity, either.
Still, Fuentes wanted to make it an accident, even if it was pretty obvious that you couldn't just accidentally hit your head like that, all by yourself, unless you threw yourself off the third floor of a building, maybe, which he hadn't done, partly because I had yet to see a three-story building on Rapa Nui, and because even if there was one, it wasn't anywhere near Ahu Akivi.
The good news was that finding Jasper had cleared up my mental discomfort with tattoos, and that came as something of a relief, although given the circumstances it was hard to see why. Jasper's chest, as Dave Maddox's had been, was red and puffy from the effects of a very recently acquired tattoo. I'd just focused on Dave's face when I'd found him, I suppose, and blotted the rest of it out. No wonder the thought of tattoos made me nauseous.
The bad news was that Fuentes seemed to hold me personally responsible for the rather abrupt change in his job responsibilities which heretofore, as far as I could tell, consisted of riding around the island with three of his compadres in one of the distinctive cream and green Carabineros de Chile vehicles. I say this because the whole time I was on Rapa Nui—and it was days longer than I intended to be there—I never saw one of these vehicles with fewer than three or four men in it. I also heard very little evidence of crime, and, as Fuentes himself had told me, people didn't go around murdering others much on Rapa Nui. Perhaps being Chilean, assigned for a few months to an island at the end of the world, with people they could not entirely understand even if they spoke Spanish as a common language, the carabineros sought safety in numbers.
Called upon to act, Fuentes did two things. First he confiscated all the footage Kent Clarke Films had taken since their arrival several days earlier. His second act was to do what I'd told him to in the first place, that is to say, make all of us stay on the island whether we wanted to or not. He rather peremptorily summoned me to come with him to see the congress delegates, now all assembled in the meeting room.
"You will come with me," he said in a tone that brooked no disobedience.
"Where are we going?" was the best I could manage in reply, even though I wanted to tell him to stuff it, given he had been so patronizing when I'd told him Dave Maddox had been murdered.
"I am not comfortable speaking English to a crowd," Fuentes replied. "You will translate."
I felt I had no choice but to do so, thus earning myself the distinction of being the one person at the conference that they could all agree on. In other words, every single one of them hated me.
"You will stay here until the investigation into the murder of Jasper Robinson is completed," I said, at Fuentes' bidding. A groan surged from the audience in my general direction.
"While Corporal Fuentes has not yet taken the step of confiscating your passports, he wants you to know that your names have been given to the authorities at the airport, and also to customs and immigration officials in Santiago. There are no flights to Tahiti today, given that last night's flight has finally taken off. In other words," I said, ad-libbing for a moment, "he's telling us there is nowhere to go."
Another groan, louder than the first. "I'm a U.S. citizen," Edwina Rasmussen said. "I demand to meet with a consular official."
"That would be in Santiago, Madame," I said, after listening to his reply. "You may do so when you get there." Actually, I toned down what he said a little. I didn't want Edwina to hit me with her umbrella.
"When will we be allowed to leave?" Susie Scace asked.
"When I say so," I translated. "By which I mean Corporal Fuentes."
"Do we have to stay in the hotel?" Brian asked.
"No," Fuentes replied. Everybody thought that was a bonus, but maybe they hadn't really thought it through.
"I believe I may be of assistance," Cassandra de Santiago said. "I am in touch with the spirit world."
"No, thank you," I said. That was not even close to what Fuentes said, but I'd have been embarrassed to translate what he did say out loud.
"So where is the San Pedro rongorongo tablet?" I asked Fuentes when everybody had filed angrily out of the room, most of them glaring at me as they did so.
"What are you talking about?" Fuentes asked me after a second or two. I told him that Jasper Robinson had unveiled a tablet covered in rongorongo script that he had found in the Atacama Desert.
"What is rongorongo?" he asked irritably, when I'd finished my reasonably lengthy description. This amazed me at first, but then I reminded myself that he was Chilean, not Rapa Nui. It seemed a dumb idea, particularly right now, during the investigation into two suspicious deaths, to have a police presence that knew nothing about the culture in which they found themselves. I was sure my opinion would not be appreciated by Fuentes, however, so I told him about rongorongo, and how, given he'd taken all the Kent Clarke footage, he could see for himself what the tablet looked like. He stomped out of the room.
It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what Fuentes would do when he'd looked at Daniel's tapes. Once the policeman got around to acknowledging that murder was a distinct possibility, Gordon Fairweather was going to be number one suspect the moment the Rano Raraku footage appeared before his eyes.
I wanted to run to Hanga Roa to try to find Gordon or Victoria and warn them, but when it came right down to it, what difference would it make? Gordon could run, and he could probably hide for a day or two, but this was one small island to try and evade authorities on, and frankly there was nowhere else he could go. After a couple of hours of persuading myself to think this way, I gave up and went into town. I had no trouble finding out where Victoria Pakarati lived. Half the town was called Pakarati as near as I could tell, and a very tall white archaeologist with braids wasn't that hard to locate either.