Make No Bones (22 page)

“As it was,” Tilton continued, reaching into the cardboard bucket of popcorn he’d carried from the bar—did he chew the popcorn and the gum on different sides of his mouth? Tuck one of them in a cheek while he worked on the other?—”the putrefaction process’d hardly gotten underway. Whoo. Thank the Lord for small favors. Well, what can I tell you gentlemen?” He raised his glass to Gideon. “Much obliged.”

“Cause of death?” John asked.

“Blunt-force trauma, it would appear, inflicted by the table leg. The blows were delivered from behind, the victim being seated at the time. Either three or four of them, any one of them sufficient to cause death.”

John nodded. “Can you give us a TOD estimate?”

“Ali, time of death; every policeman’s favorite question. Well, there’s lab work to be done, but I think you’d be on pretty safe ground assuming it happened sometime yesterday.”

“You couldn’t make it any more specific?”

Tilton closed one eye and squinted at John with the other. He fiddled with the toothpick, sliding it in and out between two teeth.

“Maximum, twenty-four hours; minimum, eighteen hours. That’s counting back from four o’clock today.”

“Between 4:00 P.M. and 10:00 P.M. yesterday,” John said.

It was what Gideon had guessed, but narrowed down to a degree that surprised him. Time-of-death estimation was tricky work, especially when it came to establishing the early part of the range, and most pathologists would have been leery of pinning themselves down to a six-hour span.

“That’s cutting it pretty close, isn’t it?” he asked.

He could see that Tilton was happy to get the question. “Most of the time it would be, yes,” he said spiritedly, “but we’ve got a few things going for us here, and what they add up to is eighteen to twenty-four hours.” He chuckled. “Between us, nineteen to twenty-four, but I hate to sound cocky.”

First of all, Tilton explained, there was the rigor mortis to be considered, or rather the passing of it. A notably unreliable indicator, but it was surely safe enough to conclude that Harlow had been dead a good twelve hours or more, putting the latest possible time of the murder at four that morning. The other extreme was established by the general lack of putrefaction; there had been no bloating yet, no overall discoloration of the abdomen; merely some blue-green marbling of the lower-left quarter. Under ordinary circumstances, that would mean that the death had occurred less than thirty-six hours ago. Given the heat, it was reasonable to make that thirty hours in this case. Would they agree with that?

They agreed.

“So,” Tilton said, “that puts it somewhere between twelve and thirty hours, are you with me? This is supported by the ocular changes—advanced corneal cloudiness, but nothing like opacity yet. Now, let’s see if we can narrow it some more. Let us consider…” He paused.

…carrion insect activity.”

That was another thing about forensic pathologists. To a one, they loved to lecture when they got a willing audience. Possibly that came from the infrequency with which they got hold of willing audiences. Julie, for example, although invited to this conversation, had known enough to beg off and have her predinner glass of wine with some of the others.

“You noticed the arthropodal deposits in the nostrils, the mouth, the wound?” Tilton asked.

Gideon nodded, fighting off a shudder. He was beginning to think he should have gone with Julie.

“Sure,” John said, “all over the place.” He helped himself to a fistful of Tilton’s popcorn.

“Well,” Tilton went on, “I’m sure you observed the stage of development of the deposits—”

“Eggs,” John said knowledgeably. “Not larval stage yet.”

“Right, yes, true. Bluebottle fly,
Calliphora vicina.
And I think we can take it for granted they were laid about the time he died, because in this kind of weather, with those kinds of nice, juicy wounds, the flies would have found him and started laying in about five minutes. Kapish?”

John and Gideon both nodded.

Tilton nodded back at them. “So what does that tell us, hm?” Bright-eyed, chipper, in his element, he looked at them, twirling the toothpick, his jaw muscles working vigorously. He chewed the gum in the front of his mouth, Gideon noticed, like a hamster, repositioning it with quick, twiddly movements of his lips. Was that his secret? Popcorn on the molars, chewing gum on the incisors?

“It tells us,” he continued, as Gideon had no doubt he would, “that those li’l suckers were laid sometime in the last twenty-four hours because that’s how long the egg stage lasts, and even that’s pushing it. Well, now; we can knock twelve hours off that straight out, because we already know your man was killed more than twelve hours ago, that is, before four this morning—”

“We do?” John said.

“Rigor, rigor,” Tilton said. “It’s already had time to loosen up.”

“Right, I forgot.”

“And, likewise, we can rule out any possibility of those eggs being laid
after,
oh, mm, nine o’clock last night—” “We can?” said Gideon.

“Sure, because the lights in the cottage were off, and that’s about the time it gets dark, and flies don’t lay eggs in the dark. They don’t do anything in the dark.”

“They don’t?” Gideon said.

Tilton laughed. “You ever hear a fly buzzing around in a dark room?”

“I guess not.”

“I
know
not,” Tilton said. “So there you have it, my friends. Death occurred no earlier than four yesterday afternoon, no later than nine yesterday evening. Nineteen to twenty-four hours.” He grinned happily at them and mopped his forehead with a wadded handkerchief. “Whoo. God-o-mighty. Ain’t science wonderful?”

“How positive are you about all this?” John asked. One of his more frequently employed questions.

“Let me put it this way. On a scale of one to ten, we’re up at about a forty, okay? I mean, maybe—
maybe
—I’m off by three or four hours at the far end, but that’s it. And I don’t think I am.”

John tilted the bottle for a thoughtful swig of beer. “Scratch Callie,” he said to Gideon.

“Unless she wasn’t really in Nevada,” Gideon said. He told them about his talk with Julie and raised the possibility of Callie’s trip being faked.

John was more receptive than he’d expected. “It’s possible,” he said reasonably. “She could have fudged it. Julian Minor’s going to give me a hand from up in Seattle. He loves to get into stuff like that. If there’s anything funny about it, he’ll dig it out.”

Gideon agreed. Julian Minor was another special agent who was often teamed with John. A reserved, methodical black man of fifty who spoke like a 1910 secretary’s handbook (“At the present time…” “At a later date…” “In regard to your request…”), he was a whiz at unearthing facts and pinpointing contradictions. And somehow, he did it best from his desk on the seventh floor of the Federal Building in downtown Seattle.

Tilton had followed the conversation restlessly. “Who’s Callie, one of your anthropologists?”

“That’s right,” Gideon said, “one of the few who was here for both murders.”

“Nape, uh-uh, forget it. If a forensic anthropologist did this, I’ll eat my hat. My fur-lined hat with earflaps, the one I wear when it snows.”

“What makes you say that?” Gideon asked.

“Well, the method,” he said, as if it were obvious. “I mean, really—simple blunt-force trauma?” His mouth curled contemptuously around the toothpick. “What kind of way is that for a forensic scientist to kill somebody?”

“Too unsubtle?” Gideon asked.

“Too physical, too risky, too much likelihood of getting caught. All that blood. Whoo.” He shook his head. “No, sir, these people are trained, just like you and me. They know things your everyday killer doesn’t.” He leaned forward, jiggling the gum between his front teeth. “Knowing what I know, I could come up with half-a-dozen ways to commit an absolutely perfect murder if I had to. Untraceable. Couldn’t you? And don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”

“I haven’t,” Gideon said truthfully, “but I see what you’re getting at. If I wanted to get away with murder, I certainly wouldn’t bludgeon somebody with an old table leg and then just leave him sitting in his chair, waiting to be found. Along with the table leg.”

“You’re darn tootin’ you wouldn’t. And neither would any of the rest of them.” Tilton twirled his toothpick, brushed popcorn from his paunch, and got to his feet. “Well, gentlemen, I leave you to it. John, I’ll have a report to you by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Okay, thanks, Dr. Tilton. I’ll be in touch.”

John watched him go. “Doc, you buy this expert-murderer bit?”

“I think he’s got a point.”

“Well, I don’t.” He stood up and yawned, stretching. “Let me tell you, smart people do the goddamn dumbest things all the time.”

“You said a mouthful there,” Gideon said with a smile. “Great God-o-mighty.”

   “No, the last time I saw Harlow would have been…oh…” Callie jutted her long chin out and up, and whooshed a sizable lungful of smoke at the ceiling. “…a little after noon. Probably about twelve-fifteen.”

“This was Tuesday?” John asked.

“Tuesday. In his cottage.”

“Would you mind telling me what you were talking about?”

“No, why should I mind? We were discussing his reason for not flying back with me for the curriculum meeting.” “Which was?”

She looked at her hands, running her thumb over the tips of her polished fingernails. “He said he wasn’t feeling well.”

“What was the matter with him?”

“What was always the matter with him. His stomach.” The guy’s just been murdered, John thought, and she’s mad because he didn’t make it to a meeting.

“Did he seem pretty sick to you?”

“Do you mean generally speaking, or Tuesday afternoon in particular?”

“Both.”

“No and no.”

John didn’t like it when interviewees got cute. It led to misunderstandings. “You want to explain, please?”

“Frankly, I think the main thing wrong with his stomach was all the worrying he did about it. He didn’t have anything worse than an intermittent generalized gastritis.”

That sounded bad enough to John. “Are you saying he could have made the meeting if he wanted to?”

“If he wanted to,” she said.

“Why wouldn’t he want to?”

Her upper lip bulged as she scoured the inside of her mouth with her tongue. “I don’t believe in speaking ill of the dead.”

“Uh-huh,” John said. He’d heard that a whole lot of times in his career. Nine times out of ten it was followed by a “but.”

“But I don’t think it’s any secret that Harlow was thoroughly burnt out. He was serving out his time; he didn’t give a damn. Frankly, his being on the curriculum committee was my idea. I hoped it might create some interest in the educative process—you know, as a synergistic function and as a source of personal renewal as well. But of course that kind of interest has to come from within.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” John said. “Were the tickets nonrefundable?”

“What?”

“The flight tickets to Nevada and back. Were they nonrefundable?”

“Well, I don’t—yes, I suppose they must have been.

Mine were, and the same secretary made the arrangements for both of us.”

“Who paid, the school?”

“Of course it did.” A glimmer of defensiveness. “It was university business, wasn’t it?”

“The reason I’m asking about them—”

“I understand the reason. And you’re right. Harlow wasn’t the kind of person who would throw away several hundred dollars—of his money
or
the school’s—because he wasn’t in the mood to attend a meeting.” She brushed her hair back with a tentative flick. “It’s conceivable I may have been wrong.”

“About what?”

“About his being ill. He may have been sicker than I thought.”

“But that wasn’t the impression you got?”

“To be perfectly candid, no,” she said, frowning, “but he did seem…”

John waited.

…worried…frightened…almost as if he sensed what was going to happen to him. But he didn’t say anything.” She drew thoughtfully on her cigarette, staring through the window over John’s shoulder at the soft gray rain that had broken the heat wave during the night and had been drifting down all day onto the Whitebark Lodge lawn. “My God, maybe if I’d been more receptive, more empathetic, instead of being tuned in to where
I
was coming from, I could have done something to prevent it.”

Her dark eyes, earnest and glowing, settled on John’s face. “I cared about him, you know, John. We had our professional differences, but I cared about him as a human being.”

Lady, you’re a phony, he said to himself. Right down to your socks. Harlow was a pain in the butt to you, and you couldn’t be happier about the guy’s being out of your hair.

He leaned back, studying her. Happy about it or not, she hadn’t killed him. That was one of the things Julian Minor had already established from his Seattle desk. The man at the Budget car-rental counter in the Bend-Redmond Airport had verified by telephone that Callie had turned in her Dodge Colt at 2:10 P.M. on Tuesday, sat around the airport lounge drinking coffee and working on her laptop for half an hour, and boarded the commuter plane to Portland. He’d reserved another car for her and had it waiting when she got off the first plane from Portland at 6:00 A.M. Thursday. And yes, he remembered seeing her actually get off. It wasn’t what you’d call a real big airport.

On top of that, her presence in Carson City as late as 5:00 P.M. on Wednesday had been confirmed. Unless she’d taken a private plane, there was no way she could have gotten back to Whitebark Lodge inside of Tilton’s 9:00 P.M. time-of-death deadline. And Julian had found no such flight.

Whatever Julie had seen or not seen on the trail ride—and John’s own brief interviews with several people who’d been on it had turned up nothing to support her—Callie was several hundred miles away when Harlow had been murdered.

So, once again: scratch Callie.

“Would you have any idea where he was between the time you saw him and late Wednesday?” he asked.

“No, I don’t. What’s so important about late Wednesday? Is that when he was killed?”