“So you’ve never had a chance to use any of the forensic material from the course?” he asked when the harried, sweating young waiter had taken their orders and run back to the kitchen.
“No. Well, just once. There was this case, oh, let me see, three, four years ago. There was this girl who’d been missing for a couple of days, and we finally found her, killed in a cave-in down at the south end. It wasn’t my case – I was just an inspector then, but I was helping the DCI who was running it, so I was out there when they dug her out. A mess; all mashed up, bones broken, internal organs exploded, maggots coming out of her – sorry, Julie, hell of a thing to be talking about at lunch.”
Julie laughed. “Are you kidding? Who do you think I’m married to? Go right ahead, don’t give it a thought. Maggots, exploding organs.. . everyday mealtime conversation at the Olivers.”
Fausto shrugged. “Yeah, used to be the same way at my house. Hey, could that be why I’m divorced? Anyway, she had plenty of ID on her, and enough face left so people could identify her, so no need for forensic anthro on that score. But you know what came in handy? Remember that Finnish guy who was there? The bug expert who you couldn’t understand anything he was saying?”
“Professor Wuoronin,” Gideon supplied. “A good entomologist. Knew what he was talking about.”
“Yeah, him. Gave out a ton of material on bugs that feed on corpses, you know, the sacro… the scaro…”
“Sarcosaprophagous insects.”
“Yeah, sarco… yeah, them. So I knew a blowfly maggot when I saw one, and I saw a zillion on her. All between two and three millimeters long, nothing longer, nothing shorter, which meant they were two to three days old, which meant I had myself a reliable time-of -death estimate.”
“A minimum time-of-death estimate,” Gideon reminded him. DCI or not, Fausto was still an old student and Gideon could get away with correcting him. Indeed, as Gideon saw it, he was morally obligated to do so. “The cave-in couldn’t have occurred any later than two to three days before… but it could have happened earlier. You can’t be sure of exactly when the flies laid their eggs.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, I know, but everything came together. Some passengers on the Morocco ferry, they saw the cave-in happen, so we knew exactly when it was. Two days before we dug her out.”
“But then you really didn’t need the estimate based on the maggots, ” Julie said. “Or am I missing something?”
“Okay, all right, you’re right,” a grudging Fausto admitted. “It was strictly corroborative. Jeez, what a purist.” He grinned. “But it was fun, you know?”
“Mmm, I bet,” Julie said. “Sure sounds like fun. Measuring maggots. ”
Their meals came. The waiter brushed away a few hovering black flies that had touched down on the food. The flies moved off but floated nearby in slow, hanging circles. They seemed to be a general nuisance on the patio. Other diners were brushing at their food and their faces.
Julie made a face. “Um… would those be blowflies?”
“Nope,” Gideon said. “Black flies.”
“They don’t feed on corpses?”
He shook his head and began on his ploughman’s lunch, tucking ham, relish, and cucumber into a partially sliced-through hunk of baguette to turn it into a sandwich. “They do not.”
“What do they feed on, then? No, wait, I don’t want to know.”
“A wise decision,” Gideon said, biting in. “Mmm, good.”
Fausto had tucked his napkin into the collar of his shirt – he was still a sharp dresser: mauve shirt, green tie, slick-looking olive brown suit – and was shoveling in chicken and rice, daintily but effectively. Julie was dabbing a spoon into her gazpacho, deciding whether or not she was really hungry at all.
“Fausto,” Gideon said, “this would be Sheila Chan we’ve been talking about, wouldn’t it? And the Europa Point cave.”
Fausto blinked. “Now how the hell would you know – oh, that’s right, she was one of you people. She was here for the meeting they had back then. Did you know her?”
“No, just by e-mail.” Gideon hesitated. “Was there anything suspicious about her death?”
Julie looked inquisitively at him over the rim of her glass. Fausto paused in lifting a forkful of rice to his mouth. “Why would you ask that?”
“Just some things that have been happening. Was there?”
“Anything suspicious?” He shook his head. “No. All cut and dried, everything kosher. Why?” he asked again.
“Fausto, did you ever hear of anyone getting pushed off the top of the Rock by one of the Barbary apes?”
“You mean on purpose?”
“On purpose or accidentally.”
“How could they push you off accidentally?”
“Come on, just answer-”
“No, I never heard of it. Why?” He was getting irritated. In that way he was like any cop. He preferred asking the questions.
“Gideon thinks he may have been the first,” Julie put in.
“The first to live to tell about it, anyway,” Fausto said with a snort. “That’s for sure.”
“Gideon,” Julie said, “I thought you agreed there wasn’t anything suspicious about that.”
“Well, I did, but then today at my lecture-”
“Oh, I forgot to ask,” Julie said. “How did it go?”
“Just fine, absolutely great, except for the part where I nearly got electrocuted.”
She started to laugh, but then saw he was serious. “What happened? ”
Gideon told them.
“And your conclusion?” Fausto said. He had eaten most of his dish, shoved it away, and pulled the napkin out of his collar. Gideon had eaten about half of his ploughman’s, Julie none of her gazpacho. Coffee had been ordered – tea for Fausto – and brought to the table.
“I don’t know,” Gideon said. “Everything might be explainable, taken one thing at a time – accident, carelessness – but to have been almost killed twice in less than twenty-four hours-”
“Brings to mind the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business,” Fausto said, dropping three cubes of sugar into his tea.
Gideon was surprised. “How do you know about the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business?”
“You talked about it in the seminar. Goldstein’s Theorem of Interconnected Monkey Business. Hell, it’s practically my mantra.”
Gideon’s too. It was a “law” posited only partly in jest by Gideon’s old professor and all-around mentor Abe Goldstein. When too many suspicious but seemingly unrelated things – too much monkey business – start cropping up in a short time, to the same people, in the same context, you can bet on there being some connection between them.
The three of them sat there looking somberly at each other until Julie said: “But why would anyone want to kill you?” The last time she had asked him that had been yesterday, after the incident on the Rock, when she had been trying to convince him that the idea was silly. This time, he was glad to see, it was meant as a serious question. It was her support, her backup, that he wanted, not her skepticism.
Fausto took it seriously too. “We’ll want that lamp,” he said, pulling a cell phone from his inside pocket. “I’ll have one of my-”
Gideon lifted the lumpy plastic shopping bag he’d set down beside his chair. “I figured you would. Here it is. The wires haven’t been cut, I could see that much. Not cleanly, not with a knife or a snipper. They look frayed, the same as the cord fabric, but whether they’ve been filed to look that way, or just worn through on their own, I don’t know.”
Fausto had opened the mouth of the bag, and without touching the lamp, was peering as well as he could at the torn area of the cord. “Can’t tell. Maybe filed, maybe just frayed. We’ll have to see.”
“How long will that take? Do you have a lab here?”