“But…?”
“But when a farmer with his bulldozer has been there before you, doing his damndest to turn the place into a mushroom farm, all bets are off.”
“Okay, I see that,” she said, nodding, “but I would have thought there were some kind of geological tests that could confirm it, one way or the other.”
“There are: soil tests, skeletal tests, tests on associated flora and fauna. And I have no doubt they are now going to be performed. But they’re expensive and they take time. You don’t do them unless you have some specific reason.”
“And the possibility of a hoax wasn’t a good enough reason?”
“Julie, the possibility never arose! Gunderson wasn’t the greatest excavator in the world, but he was – we thought he was – a reputable archaeologist. Of long standing. The possibility of, of-” He could hardly bring himself to say it. “-of fraud would never have crossed anybody’s mind.”
“Uh-huh. Because the science of archaeology relies on the integrity of its practitioners.”
He sighed. “That’s about it,” he said miserably. “Let’s get a bite. I forgot all about lunch.”
They walked the few blocks to Main Street more or less mentally chewing their cuds and found a palm-shaded patio table at Latino’s Classic American Diner, which, despite its name, featured an eclectic menu of European, Chinese, Tex-Mex, and Moroccan foods. Another cruise ship was in port and the streets were again mobbed, but, at four o’clock in the afternoon, the restaurant was relatively uncrowded. Julie, who wasn’t hungry, asked for an iced tea. Gideon ordered a chicken BLT on ciabatta bread and a Coke.
“So,” Julie said, “why was Ivan killed? Why was anybody killed? Why were you attacked?”
“Well, there, all we’ve got is surmise, but the most probable scenario is-”
“-That someone else besides Ivan knew the find was faked, and was desperate to keep anyone else from finding out.”
“Yes, that’s the way I see it. If you start with the first person killed, Sheila, the fact that she had those two matching vertebrae from the two different sites makes it clear that she’d found out about it. And she was going to expose it at the conference. I mean, why would she have brought them with her to Gibraltar except to use them as Exhibit A?”
“But if that’s the case, why wouldn’t the killer have gotten rid of them? Apparently he got rid of the paper she was going to present and any notes she might have had. Why leave the vertebrae? They were her proof positive. Wouldn’t he have taken them too?”
Gideon spread his hands. “My guess is that he didn’t know about them. Remember, Sheila played things pretty close to the vest, according to everyone. She was probably saving them to make a big splash at her talk. Which they would have; a huge splash.”
“But obviously she told someone, or she’d still be alive.”
“Well, yes; told, or implied, or insinuated – anyway, enough to scare him into killing her.”
“Or her,” Julie amended. “So the question is, who would Sheila have told?”
“For which I don’t have an answer, do you?”
“No, it could have been any of them.” She paused while the waiter set down their orders. “And what about what happened to you? Was that on account of that newspaper article? Someone was afraid you’d found out too? That you really had something that was going to leave Piltdown in the dust?”
“Looks like it.”
“Which it would have, I gather.”
“And still will, when it gets out.”
“And poor Ivan himself was murdered because he was going to give a speech the next day.”
“Uh-huh,” Gideon managed around a heavenly mouthful of bread, chicken, bacon, tomato, and mayonnaise.
She paused to sugar her iced tea and have a first sip. “But wait a minute,” she said thoughtfully, “we talked about this before. Ivan must have given plenty of other speeches over the years. Why would someone think he would choose to reveal it now?”
“I doubt if anyone thought he would choose to reveal it, but now-”
She finished the sentence for him. “Now someone was afraid he was might reveal it inadvertently – because of that Guadalcanal slip.”
“I think so.” He put down the sandwich. “If only I’d realized what it was about at the time, I might have been able to prevent-”
“No, you couldn’t have. There was no conceivable way you could have known what that ‘Guadalcanal’ meant. How could anyone?”
“You’re right, I know,” he said with a sigh. “Still, I can’t help thinking that if I’d been a little quicker on the uptake-”
“Now you stop that right now,” she said firmly. “Eat your sandwich. Don’t be so hard on yourself. If somebody had told you then – what was it, four days ago? – what you’ve just finished telling me, would you have believed it?”
“Not in a million years.”
“You know,” she said, while he returned to chewing away, “this pretty much settles it. It has to be one of our people, someone who was right there in the dining room that night – someone who heard Ivan get confused over Gibraltar and Guadalcanal.”
“That’s right. Rowley, Audrey, Buck, Adrian, Corbin, Pru – the very same people, by the way, who were around last night, when George brought those two vertebrae to the table. One of them obviously recognized what they were, what they represented, and rifled our room hunting for it. Which,” he added with a smile, “we still wouldn’t know about if old eagle-eye here hadn’t spotted a jacket hung backward.”
“Rowley, Audrey, Buck, Adrian, Corbin, Pru,” she recited. “So who had the motive? Which of them would benefit most from keeping the fake a secret?”
“Hey, you’re thinking like a cop now – that’s exactly what Fausto asked me.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said it was a pretty good motive for all of them, every last one.” He dabbed mayonnaise from the corner of his mouth and explained.
For each of them, the fact that there was no Gibraltar Woman, no First Family, would be a hideous blow to their reputations and even to their livelihoods. Adrian and Corbin probably had the most to lose. They had written the standard academic books on the First Family, and they had supervised the dig itself; there was no way they could come out of this without looking like bunglers and – worse than bunglers in the minds of fellow scientists – dupes. Or maybe it was Rowley that had the most to lose; he hadn’t been involved in the dig per se, but his precious museum was founded on its supposed findings, and his new book, the book he’d been working on for three years, was now worse than meaningless. Audrey “That does look good,” she said, indicating his sandwich. “How about cutting me off some?”
“It is good. Want one of your own?”
“No, I’d rather have a piece of yours.”
He sliced off a quarter for her and went back to his rundown.
Audrey, heretofore esteemed for her expertise and acumen, would be ridiculed as another dupe, and, considering her long record of caustic remarks about others, there were plenty of colleagues just waiting for the chance to do it. Buck had had nothing whatever to do with Gibraltar Point, but his devotion to Audrey couldn’t be missed, and who knew what lengths he might go to in order to protect her? Pru probably had the least to worry about. True, she was the person who had actually dug up the remains, but in her case there were extenuating factors; namely, the depredations of a rampant bulldozer before she ever got there. On the other hand, extenuating factors were probably not going to entirely get her off the hook. There was no getting around the fact that she had personally excavated the sham “First Family” and had never had a clue that there was anything wrong. She would go down as one more dupe. Maybe not a world-class dupe like the others, but a dupe all the same.
Between them, they had finished the sandwich. Gideon ordered coffee and Julie got a refill on her iced tea. She pulled slowly at the straw with a contemplative scowl.