Gideon was used to this and let it pass.
“-and let’s say you were prowling around the slide area hunting for some old bones or whatever, and you came upon this, sticking out of the ground. What would you make of it?”
Gideon looked at the dirty orange tube. “I’d think it was a piece of old plastic tubing, just some miscellaneous trash.”
“And there you have it,” Orton said.
“Wait a minute, Ted,” Fausto said, doubtful again. “Didn’t you say the powder inside it would have been consumed?”
“I did. Totally.”
“And the tubing itself wouldn’t have been affected?”
“Not a bit.”
“So how do you know it’s shock tube? How do you know it isn’t just a piece of miscellaneous trash?”
“I know because my experience of a dozen years tells me that it is not,” Orton said stiffly.
“Oh,” said Fausto.
Oh, thought Gideon.
“That,” Orton said with his first smile of the morning, “and a subtle but telling clue on the exterior of the tubing itself.”
He produced a folding, rectangular magnifying glass from somewhere and offered it to Fausto, who knelt and studied the tubing through it.
“Huh,” said Fausto, handing the lens to Gideon. “That’s subtle, all right.”
Gideon took his turn. “Let’s see… there’s some kind of tiny lettering…”
With the aid of the glass, it jumped into focus.
VOLOX LOW DENSITY POLYETHYLENE SHOCK TUBING.
TWENTY-TWO
At eleven thirty they got back to Fausto’s office. At 11:31 the phone buzzed. Fausto snatched up the receiver, and listened. “Okay, thanks.” He reached for another button, then paused. “It’s de la Garza. How well do you know this guy?”
“A little. We run into each other at meetings.”
He remembered Esteban de la Garza as a courtly, elderly archaeologist with a lean, pockmarked, deeply lined face. Like Ivan Gunderson, he struck Gideon as a throwback, but Gunderson had been late nineteenth century; de la Garza was more early eighteenth. He would have looked right at home in a wig and knee breeches, serving as royal schoolmaster to the court of Philip VI. His patrician manner put off some of the freer spirits who attended the anthropology conferences, but Gideon had always liked him. (But then, Gideon liked just about everybody, a personality flaw that he couldn’t seem to overcome, despite its having backfired on him many times more than once.)
“How’s his English?”
“Fine, perfect, better than mine. Prettier, anyway.” It was true. Esteban spoke English as if he were translating directly from the Spanish. He eschewed such rude English shortcuts as contractions and apostrophized possessives. For him there were no it’s, or wouldn’t s, or don’t s; and the fossil’s bones and Dr. X’s hypothesis came out as the bones of the fossil and the hypothesis of Dr. X. His ornate, measured speech was a pleasure to listen to, Gideon thought, always assuming one had the time to spare.
“Good, you talk to him, then.” He held out the telephone.
“Me? What do you want me to say?”
“You know, see if he knows what Sheila Chan was calling about. He’ll be more open with you. Besides, it might get too technical for me. I’ll listen in. Go ahead,” he said impatiently, shaking the phone in front of Gideon’s face when he hesitated. “Come on, come on.”
Gideon shrugged and took it. Fausto punched the button. He kept a second cordless receiver to his ear.
“Esteban?” Gideon said.
Esteban’s deep, sober voice sounded in his ear. “Si, senor, digame.” Cautious, wary. But then, he was returning a totally unexpected call from police headquarters; why wouldn’t he be?
“Esteban, this is Gideon Oliver. It’s nice to talk to you.”
This took a few seconds to sink in. More than a few seconds. De la Garza’s quickness of mind did not quite match his impressive gravitas. Then at last: “You are in Gibraltar?”
“Right, I’m here for the Paleo Society meetings.”
“Yes, but… is this not… I was under the impression that I was calling the police station.”
“You are. I’m sitting here with Detective Chief Inspector Sotomayor – he’s on the line too – and we’re trying to get some information on a woman named Sheila Chan.”
“Sheila Chan.” He considered. “This is the young woman who was working on a dissertation about bone disease in early modern Homo sapiens, is it not?
“Yes, you do know her, then?”
“I do. For some time I have not heard from her. Is she all right? Is there something wrong?”
“Well, yes. She’s dead. She’s been dead since 2005.”
“Aahh, that would explain why I have not heard from her.”
From anyone else it would have been a somewhat lame attempt at humor, but from de la Garza, who knew?
“On the other side of the table, Fausto rolled his eyes and mouthed a single syllable: Duh.
“Yes, she was killed in a landslide here in Gibraltar-”
“I regret extremely to hear it.”
“-but there are some questions about her death.”
“Questions? Do you mean in the sense that there are suspicious circumstances? This is why the police are involved?”
“That’s right. She may have been murdered.”
Esteban digested this. “How can that be? Did you not say she died in a landslide?”
“Well, that’s what we’re trying to figure out. One of the questions has to do with a couple of phone calls she placed from her hotel the day she died. Apparently they were to you.”
“To me? Two calls? Are you certain of this?”
“Well, to your office. She called twice, an hour or so apart. This would have been in 2005.”
“Ah, wait, yes, I remember that, but it was only once that we spoke. I was not in the office when first she called. Thus, she left a message with my secretary.”
Fausto nodded at Gideon across the table. That sounded right. The first call had lasted only one minute. The second was eleven minutes long.
“Those were probably the last two calls she ever made, Esteban, so you can see why they’d be of interest.”
“Oh, yes, certainly, I do see. And the police inspector would like to know the nature of her call.”
“Exactly.”
De la Garza meditated for a while. “Well, my friend, the fact is that I cannot tell you in honesty that I recollect the content, but I would have to assume it had to do with some assistance I was providing on her dissertation. I can think of no other reason. We had no other, er, relationship.”
So de la Garza had been helping her too. That seemed strange. Sheila had been researching skeletal disease among late Pleistocene humans. It had made sense that she would turn to Gideon, a physical anthropologist, for help, but why would she have gone to an archaeologist?
“How exactly were you helping her, Esteban?” He held his breath. He had an inkling of what the answer was going to be.
“In only the most minor way. I had earlier let her borrow a late Pleistocene bone that exhibited one of the diseases that were the subject of her investigations.”
Ah, he was right! In one of Sheila’s e-mails to Gideon, she had mentioned coming across such a find in Spain. This, the mysterious T10, had to be it! His fingers found the vertebra, which he’d brought to Fausto’s office and now lay on the desk. “And did you ever get it back?”
“Back? Why, I believe not, now that you mention it.”
“Was it a vertebra by any chance?”
“Why, yes, it was. Why do you ask? How do you know this?”
“Because I’m pretty sure I have it in my hand right now. Esteban, this vertebra – where was it from?”
“It was part of our teaching collection here in Algeciras. We retain a small collection of bones and artifacts for didactic purposes. They come from some of the sites – the ones of little significance – that our department has excavated over the years. This particular vertebra… Gideon, may I be permitted to know why this is of concern to the police? I do not understand the connection to Sheila’s death.”