Her eyes remained closed, but her brows drew together. “Mary Borba
… yes… weren’t we just talking about her? Oh, I remember, wasn’t she the girl eaten by the bear in Montana? She and her husband? You were the one who remembered their name.”
“That’s the one. But there was something else I thought I remembered about the name, so I got on the Web and looked up what I could find about the incident. And I was right. Her name was Mary Walker Borba.”
“Mary Walker Borba,” she repeated sleepily. Then her eyes popped open and she pushed herself onto her elbows. “Walker! Was she related to Rudy?”
“She-”
“Oh, my God!” Julie sat all the way up, her black eyes intent. “When you were asking him about his daughter… you said ‘Mary.’ Was she… was she…”
“Yes.”
“But are you sure? Mary Walker’s not exactly an unusual name. There must be-”
“No.” He sat up beside her, shaking his head. “First of all, the original article mentioned that her father was an ecologist, and then some of the later ones identified him by name, and by the school he was teaching at in Canada. No, that was her, the sweet little five-year-old I remembered from Wisconsin.”
“How terrible.”
“Obviously, it completely changed the way he thought about the world. Six months later was when that piece in the Atlantic came out, where he pretty much said the hell with the animals, the important thing is to make wilderness safe for human beings. And as for Villarreal, remember, he was the one who’d pushed them into bringing the grizzlies back in the first place. Rudy would have seen him as responsible for her death.”
“Well, he was, really. In a way.” She reached absently toward the Malteser bag, but changed her mind and brought her hand back. With her arms wrapped around her knees she stared out across St. Mary’s Sound, toward Tresco and Bryher, which were quickly turning golden as the evening came on. The windows of unseen houses, caught by the lowering sun, winked at them. “And then Edgar was so callous about the killings, even back then. What was it he said?”
“He said they were ‘unfortunate.’”
“‘Unfortunate,’” Julie echoed, shaking her head.
“And then, later, at the talk at Methodist Hall, according to what Liz and Joey told us, he said it was their own fault, that the Borbas were stupid people. He said-”
“He said the only thing he regretted was the killing of the bear. Oh, God, can you imagine the way Rudy felt? Gideon, do you think he came here planning to kill him?”
“I doubt it. I don’t think he would have made a public show of how much he disliked him if he was planning to do him in. No, I’m guessing that he’d been simmering for years, and those last remarks of Villarreal’s just sent him over the edge. It’s hard to blame him. For going over the edge, I mean.”
“But why would he have come back this year? Don’t you think he would have stayed as far away from St. Mary’s as he could?”
“Well, first of all, he thought he was completely safe. Even the police believed Villarreal had been eaten by a bear, months later. Second, there’s that $50,000.”
“Mm.” The glitter from the windows had died out now. The islands were wrapped in evening haze. The sun had sunk below the horizon, and the bright blue water now had dull streaks of mauve spreading across it. “And you think Joey actually knew about it? Why wouldn’t he have said something before?”
“I have no idea. But whatever he knew, it got him killed, too. By Rudy.”
She nodded. “The Theory of Interconnected Monkey Business does not lie.”
“That’s pretty much it,” he said, smiling. “Not exactly courtroom-ready, but maybe Mike knows more about that end of it. At this point, I have no idea what he knows or doesn’t know. I don’t even have a clue as to what made him decide it was Rudy.”
“Well, you can ask him in half an hour. Madeleine called just before you showed up. Mike expects to have things wrapped up for the day by nine, and we’re invited up to his apartment for a late supper.”
“Let’s head back then. I’d like to clean up first.”
Julie peeked into the Malteser bag. “One… two… there are five left. How do we split ’em?”
He smiled. “I’m sure we’ll work it out on the way.”
“I get to hold the bag,” she said.
TWENTY-FOUR
“As a matter of fact,” an animated Clapper said, gesturing with his fork as he talked around a mouthful of fried eggs, “what finally did the trick was something you said the other day.”
They were at the dining table in Clapper’s dowdy, comfortable, furnished apartment above the police station, enjoying bacon and eggs on thick, chipped, white china that had no doubt come with the furnishings. Earlier, Madeleine, showing a hitherto unsuspected domestic side, had bustled cheerfully about the minuscule kitchen humming Cherubino’s arias from The Marriage of Figaro in a surprisingly sweet little voice, and had produced four perfect little mushroom-and-cheese omelets, each with a halved grilled tomato and two strips of bacon alongside it. And toast and tea for good measure. All in under ten minutes.
Clapper had spent what must have been an exhausting five hours booking Rudy-a more thorough and extensive process than it was in the States-wading through the related paperwork, and communicating back and forth with headquarters. Now, with the day’s reports filed and the log filled out, and with Rudy locked up in one of the two holding cells downstairs (Robb and one of the volunteers were spending the night there), he was as fresh and talkative as Gideon had yet seen him, the words tumbling out of him like quarters out of a slot machine.
Gideon looked up from sawing through a strip of thick English bacon. “Something I said? And what was that?”
“Do you remember when we were on the beach at Halangy Point, and you were going on about the finer points of dismemberment? About how much blood you get cutting off the arms and legs, and carrying them about, and so on, and how it was usually done in a bathtub?”
“I remember.”
“Charming, the mealtime conversations one has in the company of this sort of person,” Madeleine Goodfellow said flutily.
“Better get used to it,” Julie said. “That’s my advice.”
“And you were saying how difficult it is to get rid of every trace of blood?” Clapper went on.
“Yes, sure, even ten years later, even if the surfaces are washed down. Luminol will pick up blood at one part per fifteen million.”
“Fascinating,” Madeleine said. “Do tell us more.” They had finished their meals and she was refilling their teacups.
Gideon thought for a moment. “With spectrophotometric analysis of the ammoniac residue, you can even tell how old a bloodstain is, how about that?”
“Fascinating,” Madeleine said.
“The trick is not to ask them questions,” Julie told her.
“The thing of it is,” said Clapper, “once we established that the remains were Villarreal’s, and then when Dillard’s subsequent death made it clear that everything was linked to the goings-on at the castle, I rang up headquarters and asked for a crime-scene examiner with bloodstain expertise. He arrived this afternoon.”
“And that’s what the room search was all about?” Julie asked. “He was checking our bathrooms, looking for blood? And he found it in Rudy’s-that is, in the room Rudy was staying in last time, the John Biddle Room?”
“Yes, in the grout above the tub, and between the tiles behind the wash basin, and in the crevices at the base of the walls. And not only in the bathroom, but in the bedroom as well, between the floorboards. I can’t say I was surprised. I had my suspicions, as we coppers are wont to say.”
“Really?” Gideon asked. “You suspected Rudy all along?”
“There wouldn’t be another couple of eggs lurking in the pantry somewhere, would there?” asked Clapper plaintively, knife and fork clasped upright in his hands, their bases resting on the table. Oliver Twist again. “And a rasher or two of bacon?”