“All right, Constable, that’ll do. What do you think about all this, Gideon?”
“I think it doesn’t prove anything at all. Anyone could have taken that flight in Villarreal’s name, or picked up his SUV and dumped it somewhere. Why wasn’t it found at the camp? Did the bear eat that, too?”
“A good question,” Clapper said, nodding.
“But the one place where he’d had to have been who he said he was, would have been the flight from England to the States, where he’d need to show a passport. And apparently there’s no record of his having done that.”
“There isn’t,” Robb said. “I was able to computer-search the manifests of every flight from the UK to the United States from 5:00 P.M. on the seventh of June to noon on the eighth. The name of every person who was at the consortium shows up-except Villarreal’s”
Gideon spread his hands. “Well, there you go. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to build a paper trail that ‘proved’ he was alive. But the one thing he couldn’t do was to get Villarreal’s name on an international flight.” He gestured at the scatter of bones on the table in the cubicle across the hall. “So I’m still betting that’s him right there.”
Clapper finished his sandwich and stood up. “And I’m agreeing with you,” he said. “That’s the way I see it, too.”
“I’d like to do some more work on the bones this afternoon. Maybe I can come up with something else for you.”
“Very good. Kyle and I are off to the castle to irritate the residents a bit more. You can have the station to yourself if you want it.”
He did; he had plenty to do. There was a formal inventory and description of the bones to be prepared, and then a careful, bone-by-bone analysis (the tables he’d been waiting for had arrived), with the results written up into a report that Clapper could use later on. And he needed to prepare something for Merrill as well, setting out on paper his autopsy-room conclusions and a rationale to accompany them. Accepting Clapper’s invitation to use his office and computer, he first wrote and printed up his findings for Merrill, then took some coffee, prepared earlier by Robb, into the cubicle where the bones were and prepared to get to work on them.
He did so with an unaccustomed sense of guilt, one that had been nagging at him for a couple of days, but which he’d managed to keep more or less at bay. The fact was, in almost every way, his handling of the skeletal analysis so far had been far short of the professionalism he demanded of his students. He’d acted like a raw grad student himself, running off in whatever new direction grabbed his interest. First he’d rushed to find evidence of dismembering; then he’d tried to see if the bones could have been Pete Williams’s. Then he’d gotten all caught up in the fruit-picker syndrome and the admittedly thrilling identification of the remains as Villarreal’s. And then… then he’d lost interest and dropped it; the exciting part was over, and what remained was a lot of measuring, counting, and describing.
Understandable enough in a first-year student, but that just wasn’t the way it was done. This was a science, not some magic act in which you went around pulling one rabbit after another out of the hat to the amazement and stupefaction of all concerned. There was a methodology, an order to be followed, and the very first, most elementary steps-laying out all the bones, not just the interesting ones, in their anatomical position and inventorying them-had yet to be taken. He had made no record of the number of fragments he had or exactly what they were, because he didn’t yet know himself-after three days with them right there in front of him on the table. I’m getting careless, he thought gloomily. No, not careless, cavalier. Rules were for lesser people, students and such, and not for him.
Well, he’d put an end to that line of thinking right now.
Some of the bones were still in their sacks. He got them all out onto the table, and then by way of penance, started with the ones that gave him the most trouble when it came to distinguishing between them and determining right from left: the thirty-five hand and foot bones. Without a text or a comparative skeleton it wasn’t easy. There was a public library just down the street, and chances were they had an atlas of anatomy he could have used, but what kind of penance would that have been? Sorting the maddening little bones was frustrating, but because it didn’t require anything like coherent thought-it was basically a matter of comparing bone to bone, nodule to nodule, foramen to foramen-it untethered and relaxed his mind, allowing it to float off on its own.
And it was while he was in this drifting, hovering state that the repugnant thought that had been niggling away at the borders of his mind broke through his defenses and entered. Julie had suggested that Joey could have been killed because he knew who had murdered Villarreal, and the killer had silenced him before he could tell anyone. And Gideon had rejected it because Joey’s death had come when everyone still thought the remains were Pete Williams’s, and how could anyone predict that he, Gideon, would identify them as Villarreal’s the next day? But now… now he realized that there was indeed someone who might have foreseen just that.
A crime of passion, Clapper had called it, and most assuredly it was. But crimes of passion were hardly limited to sexual jealousies, let alone resentments over academic disputes or prima donna status. There were other possible causes. And while the specific cause he was thinking about now was as improbable as it was repugnant, it had to be looked into. If nothing else, it was the only thing-the only thing he’d thought of so far-that might conceivably explain Joey’s murder.
The skeletal inventorying had waited this long; it could wait a little longer. He put down the left cuneiform bone he’d been holding in one hand and the ballpoint he’d had in the other, and went to Robb’s computer but didn’t have the password to access the Internet. Instead, he locked up the station and walked a block down Garrison Lane to the little public library-the Scillies’ one and only-where he plunked down five pounds for an hour’s Internet access at one of the two computers. He brought up the ProQuest search engine, typed in “Selway-Bitterroot AND Villarreal AND grizzly OR grizzlies,” clicked to sort the results by date, and waited while seventy-five references scrolled down the page. The last one, the oldest, was the one he wanted, and he brought it up.
CANADIAN COUPLE KILLED, PARTIALLY EATEN BY GRIZZLY Bill Giles
The Associated Press
Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, MT-In a horrific incident at Lost Horse Creek campground, on the Idaho-Montana border about forty miles southwest of Missoula…
WHEN the Fellows of the Consortium of the Scillies reconvened after a late lunch, they were surprised to find Sergeant Clapper awaiting them in the Victorian lounge, seated on the piano bench, his back to the upright piano.
“I’ll take but a minute of your valuable time,” he said convivially, as they placed themselves on the red, overstuffed chairs. “I wanted to inform you that the premises of Star Castle will be examined again this afternoon. Is that all right with you, Mr. Kozlov?”
“Me? Sure. What I got to hide? Just don’t break nothing.”
“Very well, then-”
Donald Pinckney’s forefinger went up. “Do you mean you’ll be searching our rooms again, Sergeant?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Again?” Rudy Walker said. “You’ve already gone through all our things once.”
“Yes. It’s not that pleasant to have someone pawing through your personal things, you know,” Donald said. “I mean, well, my wife doesn’t appreciate having some stranger…”
Clapper’s eyebrows drew together. “I don’t expect anyone will be interfering with your wife’s personal things at this time. Or yours, either.”