“Oh, well, yes of course I do, I’d love to, but I only have a limited time, unfortunately. I do need to get back, so I’d better get on with looking over these fractures. And, really, I’m afraid I’ll be underfoot here. You don’t have that much room. And it would be better if I could examine it someplace quiet, maybe sitting down somewhere.”
It was overkill for a simple request, and Gideon feared that Merrill might read it for what it was-a lame attempt to get the hell out of the autopsy room-but all he could make out on the pathologist’s face were disappointment and surprise, both of which were manfully overcome.
“Certainly,” he said. “Rajiv, take Dr. Oliver to the specimen room. He can use the table there.”
Placing the calvarium on a towel, Rajiv led Gideon a couple of doors down the hall to a tiny room that stank even more of formaldehyde, and with good reason. The shelves that ran around three of the walls were loaded with specimen jars filled with various organs in cloudy formalin, some floating, some sunk to the bottom, some hanging on strings. But specimens in jars, well-separated as they were from their owners’ bodies, didn’t bother Gideon, and he had no trouble concentrating on the cracked, ivory-colored dome in front of him.
Without a word, Rajiv smilingly handed him a set of gloves, and Gideon smiled his gratitude in return.
“Well, Joey,” he said softly, as Rajiv pulled the door shut behind him, “let’s see what you have to tell me.”
At that, he smiled. Maybe Julie was right. Maybe he did talk to bones.
In a way, it was worse than that, because this particular one was talking back to him.
TWENTY
Clapper yawned and stretched. It had been a long afternoon and little had come of it. He was feeling grungy and depleted. Grumpy, too; not wanting to violate Kozlov’s no-smoking policy, he’d had but one fag since noon, when he’d run outside for a quick break; half a fag, actually. He reassured himself by touching his breast pocket to make certain they were still there. He was on his last interview of the day; in twenty minutes he’d be leaving and lighting up in the fresh air.
“Mrs. Bewley,” he called into the kitchen, “if we could have a fresh pot of tea, love, that would be grand.”
This being the third pot he’d requested, she was ready for him, and in she bustled with the pot, several cups, and the associated paraphernalia. She set them down on the table as quickly as she could, cleared the earlier service away, and hurried back to the kitchen as if worried that the sergeant might clap the cuffs on her if she stood still long enough to give him the chance.
Clapper poured himself a cup, added milk, sipped the fortifying liquid gratefully, and closed his eyes. With the consortium proceeding upstairs in the Victorian lounge, he was conducting his second day of interviews in the Star Castle dining room, a big, irregularly shaped (everything in this old place was irregularly shaped) space walled with the unplastered, unpainted, rough-cut granite blocks that made up the castle’s exterior. He was sitting at a linen-covered table before an ancient, soot-blackened stone fireplace, with a cavalier sword and a musket leaning against it on either side, and a rusty old saber hanging from the mantel. Above the table was a medieval-style chandelier made from a hammered ring of black metal and fitted with candle-shaped bulbs, and on the walls were metal sconces, also with bulbs shaped like candles. He had been told that the room had been the original sixteenth-century officers’ mess, and he had no trouble believing it. If not for the electric bulbs, he thought, he might have been back in the fifteen hundreds right now.
Not his cup of tea, Clapper thought-he had little interest in the past-but certainly highly atmospheric. A good place for deeds sinister and foul.
At the sound of footsteps he opened his eyes to see Vasily Kozlov, who had left the table a few minutes ago, come bouncing back in, fresh and sprightly in his sandals, shorts, and crisp, bright T-shirt, and brandishing a sheet of paper.
“Got it right here!” he declared, sitting back down. “Ah, tea!” He dropped four sugar cubes into a cup, poured hot tea over them, stirred, and swallowed half a cupful.
“You found the fax, then,” Clapper observed.
“Sure, right in file.” Kozlov slid it over to him.
Clapper aligned the sheet and read:
To: Vasily Kozlov
Fax: 1720 422343
Sender: Edgar Villarreal
Vasily:
It will come as no surprise to you that my stay in St. Mary’s was not the most pleasant or enlightening time I have ever had. I have no intention of wasting another week of my life two years from now, so I hereby withdraw from the seminar (or consortium, or Three Stooges convention, or whatever the hell you call it).
Obviously, this means I will not receive the $50,000 stipend, and frankly, my dear, I don’t give a shit. Edgar Villarreal
“I’m beginning to see why he wasn’t the best-loved man in the world,” Clapper mused aloud, placing the fax on the table.
“He not such good fellow,” Kozlov agreed.
The body of the message was computer-printed, and the logo above it said “The Mail Cache, 3705 Arctic Boulevard, Anchorage, AK.” The time stamp at the top said “06/08/03, 14:47” and gave the shop’s fax number. That was everything. Clapper hadn’t expected much to come of it, and he’d been right. If Kozlov had come back saying that he was unable to find it, that it was inexplicably lost, well, that might have been something to think about; but here it was. And it proved nothing, disproved nothing. Gideon was perfectly right: anyone could have sent it.
“May I keep this?” Clapper asked.
“Of course.”
“Did you reply?”
Kozlov shrugged. “For why?”
“I understand. And you never heard from him again?”
A shake of the white, wild-haired head. “Never.”
Clapper sipped at his tea but found the cup empty. He removed the cozy from the pot, offered to serve Kozlov, who declined, and poured himself a fresh cup with milk.
“Well, then, Mr. Kozlov, let’s go on to something else. Another question or two and we’ll be done.” He pulled his notepad around to write on it. On the open page he’d already drawn a diagram of the guest room layout on the second floor. “I’d like to know who was staying in which room.”
“Sure.” He raised his eyes to the beamed ceiling and began to count off on his fingers. “In Sir Henry Vane Room is Lizzie. In John Biddle Room is Victor. In Duke of Hamilton Room is Julene and husband. In-”
Clapper crossed out the names he’d already written and put down his mechanical pencil. “No, those are the rooms they’re staying in this year. I meant two years ago. Where did they all stay then?”
“Oh, where they was staying then, ” Kozlov said. “Let me think.” He thought. He shrugged. “Who knows?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Nope.”
“What about you? Were you living on the floor above then, too?”
“Sure, this where I live.”
“But as for the attendees, you have no record of where they were?”
“For why I shall keep such records as this?”
“Mr. Moreton, would he know?”
“No. He was working for me since this year only.”
Clapper slipped the notepad and pencil into his pocket, already tasting the Gold Bond he’d be lighting up inside of two minutes, already feeling the cool, corky filter-end against his tongue.
“Well, not to worry,” he said, “we’ll ferret it out.”
“Ah, back, are you?” Merrill said brightly, glancing up from what had once been Joey Dillard but now looked like a gutted deer carcass. His scrubs bore the unappetizing effects of his work. (Gideon’s were as spotless as when he’d put them on.)
“Well, it’s pretty much as we thought,” the pathologist said, cheerfully wiping his hands on a towel provided by Rajiv. “Let me show you exactly what we found.”
Which he did. First, the shattered orbital roofs, now visible from above with the skullcap gone and the dura stripped from the base of Joey’s emptied cranium. “The result of contrecoup forces, no possible doubt about it.”