Unnatural Selection (20 page)

“Out of how many ribs altogether?”

“Tw-”

But Robb was quicker on the draw. “Twenty-four,” he announced promptly. “Twelve on a side. And men and women do have the same number.”

Clapper rolled his eyes. “What a joy it is to work with such a fount of knowledge.” He groped for the box of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, flipped open the lid with his thumb, and lit up. “Truly, I am blessed.”

“Sorry, Sarge,” Robb said, laughing, “It just popped out. I can’t help myself sometimes.”

“You should try harder,” Clapper said. “Twenty-four altogether,” he mused, letting out a lungful of smoke. “So if the ratio holds, we probably have something on the order of a dozen stab wounds, would that be a reasonable guess?”

“No, I wouldn’t want to guess at the number,” Gideon said, “but I think it’s pretty safe to assume, given what we have, that he was stabbed a whole lot of times. A very violent death.”

Clapper nodded soberly. “A crime of passion. Someone was very upset with our Mr. Williams. Assuming that this turns out to be Pete Williams.”

“Oh, as to that, I don’t think it will. Williams was supposed to be around thirty-although that may turn out not to be correct. But in any case, this guy was a good twenty years older than that.”

Predictably, Robb’s interest quickened. “Can you tell us how… ?”

“Sure, some bones age predictably enough to give you a pretty reliable range.” He was going to demonstrate with the sternal rib ends, but that got a little abstruse, so he picked up the scapulas instead and held them up to the ceiling lights. “See, bone demineralizes and thins out as you get older, and whereas in a twenty- or thirty-year-old, you wouldn’t see any light through… any light through…”

His voice faded out. This was the first time he’d held the two scapulas up side by side, and as he did his mind shot off on a tangent of its own. There were some significant differences between the two shoulder blades. “Looks like he was left-handed…” he murmured, and then, after a few moments: “No, it’s almost as if these are from two different people. No, it isn’t that. It’s more like…”

Again, continuing to peer at the scapulas, he fell silent. Thirty seconds passed.

“Hello?” Clapper said. “Is anybody home?”

“Mm,” said Gideon. Another thirty seconds went by.

Clapper sighed and ground out his cigarette. “Shall we go?” he said to Robb. “It appears that Elvis has left the building.”

The only room in Star Castle that was large enough to comfortably hold seven people, other than the dining room and the dungeon bar, was the cozy second-floor lounge, and it was there that the consortium held its meetings, seated not at a conference table but informally, in a rough circle, on what were probably the very same overstuffed Victorian armchairs on which Queen Victoria and her retinue had taken tea there that hallowed afternoon in 1847.

It was 9:45 A.M. The second urn of post-breakfast coffee, prepared by Mrs. Bewley, was on the seventeenth-century sideboard, and the light had gone on indicating that it was ready. Various items of administrivia had been disposed of, and it was time to get down to the serious business of the day: the reading and discussion of Donald’s paper on the many social and ecological benefits of properly regulated sport-hunting. But one member had yet to arrive.

“So where’s Joey?” Liz asked.

“Well, you know, big night last night,” Kozlov said, tipping an imaginary glass to his lips with an amiable wink. “Maybe not so good feeling. We start anyway, okay?”

“If you like,” said Donald, who was just as happy not to have Joey there to carp at his presentation anyway. “Julie,” he said coyly, “may I have your promise not to report on my paper to your famous husband? I wouldn’t want to upset him again.”

“My lips are sealed,” said Julie, amid general laughter. I wouldn’t want to upset him, either, she thought.

From his attache case Donald removed a sheaf of papers of alarming thickness, placed them on the butler’s table in front of him, lovingly patted them into a neat stack, cleared his throat, cleared his throat again, and began.

“Man’s hunting heritage predates the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic era by millions of years. Without the prehistoric hunter’s contribution to early hominoid society, human social mores and family structure could hardly have developed…”

The room was filled with a faint, sad, sighing sound, partly from human lungs, and partly from slowly compressing seat cushions, as his colleagues resignedly settled themselves in for what looked like a very long haul.

Alone again, Gideon sank into a chair beside the table, angling the scapulas in front of his face to look diagonally down their dorsal surfaces.

“Now what do we have here?” he said, happily and aloud, almost as if he expected them to answer him.

Which, in a way, they would.

Mrs. Bewley rinsed the last of the breakfast things that were too big for the dishwasher, put them on the drying rack, and dried her hands with a dish towel. She was troubled. Generally, she couldn’t remember her dreams five minutes after she woke up, but the one last night, if it was a dream, was still with her. She hadn’t been able to get the idea that something had happened out there, just beyond the kitchen window, out of her mind, although she hadn’t worked up the nerve to mention it to Mr. Kozlov or Mr. Moreton.

“This is silly,” she told herself firmly, stroking dry-skin lotion into her reddened hands. “You’re a capable, grown woman. If there’s something out there, which there probably isn’t, you can go and see for yourself. Besides”-and this was a thought she’d successfully fought to keep from the surface of her mind, although she now recognized it as the source of the nagging guilt that had been with her since she’d awakened-“someone might be hurt.”

She took a final drag from the cigarette she had burning in an ashtray on the windowsill, got her sweater on, squared her shoulders, and went out to look.

Gideon was sitting at the table, hunched over the two scapulas, when Clapper appeared at the opening to the glassed-in cubicle.

“Well, Gideon, you were right. Whoever it is that you’re communing with, it’s not Pete Williams. I just got word. The gentleman is alive and well in London.”

“Mm,” said Gideon, not looking up. His elbows were on the table, his chin supported in his hands, his eyes on the scapulas.

“Amusingly enough, by the by, he does work for a garage, or rather a franchise of them, but your informant got it slightly wrong. He’s an accountant, not a mechanic.” A rumble of laughter came from his chest.

“Yes, I know.”

The laugh was cut short. “You know? How do you know?”

“How do I know what?”

“How do you know he’s an accountant?”

Gideon finally looked up. “How do I know who’s an accountant?”

Clapper stared silently down at him, his big hands on his hips. “I think I’ll go out and come in again,” he said mildly. “We can start all over.”

Gideon leaned back in the chair. “I’m sorry, Mike. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention.”

“You weren’t paying any attention,” Clapper grumbled. “Pete Williams,” he said, enunciating with great clarity, “still walks among us. And he is not an automobile mechanic, he’s an accountant. Accountants, to my knowledge, do not spend a great deal of time twisting screwdrivers or anything else. Ergo, no supinator crest. Ergo, the chap we have before us on the table is not Pete Williams.”

“Yes, I know it’s not Williams. That’s what I meant before. When I said I knew.”

Clapper sighed. “I’m not getting any less confused. You know it’s not Williams? How do you know it’s not Williams?”

Gideon was as subject as any other forensic anthropologist to engaging in the secret vice and great pleasure of the field; namely, boggling the minds of policemen large and small. He let a deeply satisfying beat go by before replying.

“I know,” he said with a sweet and childlike smile, “because I know who this is.”

Clapper’s reaction was all that he’d hoped for. “Get out!” he shouted so violently that Robb, who was hanging up the telephone in the office across the corridor, nearly toppled his chair. “You’re out of your bloomin’ mind!”

“I don’t think so, Mike,” Gideon told him. “I think we’re looking at what’s left of Edgar Villarreal.”

“Edgar… Edgar…” Clapper turned around and stomped back to his office.

“Did I offend the man in some way?” Gideon called pleasantly across to Robb.

“No, no, he’s just gone back to get his cigarettes. Is it really that Villarreal chap?”

“I think so. Come on over, if you want. I’ll tell you about it.”

But the telephone rang again, and Robb dropped back into his seat just as Clapper, true to Robb’s word, came back out of his office shaking out a match, and talking around the freshly lit cigarette in his mouth. “Now, did I misunderstand, poor, dumb copper that I am, or did you not tell me, in this very room, only yesterday, that Edgar Villarreal was et up by a grizzly bear in the wilds of Canada some two years ago? Consumed, digested, and excreted in minute pieces?”

“Alaska,” Gideon said. “Yes, I did. I’m pretty certain now I was wrong. He’s in fairly minute pieces, all right, but it was a saw that did it, not a bear. The people in Alaska were wrong.”

“How could they be wrong about a thing like that?”

“I’m not sure,” Gideon said. “But if I’m right, they were wrong about more than that. After he left here, Villarreal was supposed to have faxed Kozlov a letter from the States, resigning from the consortium. That’s why-that was ostensibly why-he wasn’t here this year. And as soon as he got back to the States, he was supposed have gone right off to his summer base camp to study bears. Which is where one of them supposedly got him.”

“And you don’t think it happened that way?”

Gideon gently touched a scapula. “I don’t think he ever went home,” he said soberly. “I think he’s been right here at Halangy Point Beach all along.”

“But how do you explain the fax?” Robb called.

“What does it prove?” asked Gideon. “Anybody could have sent it. And what else is there to show that he was really alive after he left here?”

Clapper sucked furiously on his Gold Bond and expelled a haze of smoke from his mouth and nostrils. He was thinking hard, Gideon could see. “If you’re right… if you’re right, then someone went to some pretty elaborate lengths to mislead everyone.”

“It looks that way, yes.”

Clapper thought some more. “All right, then, go ahead. What makes you so sure about this?”

“All right. First of all, you have to know that Edgar Villarreal had once been an agricultural worker, a fruit picker.”

Clapper began to say something, but then clamped his mouth shut.

“His parents were Cuban immigrants who worked in the citrus groves in Florida, and Edgar worked right with them for a long time-from the time he was five until he was seventeen, if I remember right.”

Clapper nodded. “Continue.”

Gideon cleared a small area around the scapulas. “If you look here, on both these bones, immediately medial to the supraglenoid tubercles, which are these-”

“Let’s keep it simple,” Clapper muttered.

“Okay, right. This general area”-using the right scapula, he fingered the ovoid, concave surface of the glenoid fossa-“is the place where the head-the ball-of the humerus fits.”

“The shoulder socket, you might say.”

“Exactly, and this small, flattened area at the top of it-”

“That? You’d better not tell me that’s another squatting facet.”

Gideon laughed. “Well, but that’s what it is, in a way. It’s been worn, or polished, into the bone as a result of another bone moving against it during a certain kind of activity. Only in this case it’s not squatting, of course. This is what you’d get in a person who spent a whole lot of time with his arms raised and moving above shoulder-level, okay? And look, here on the head of the humerus, exactly where it would come into contact with that facet, you can see a slight flattening. You can feel it better than you can see it.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Fine. Well, that goes along with the arms-above-the-shoulder idea. With me so far?”

“Yes, of course I see what you’re getting at. But Gideon, agricultural workers are hardly the only people who hold their arms up. So do barbers, or orchestra conductors, or, or-”

“Sure, but I’m only getting started. Give me a chance. Now, these are a couple of the cervical vertebrae-C6 and C7. They’d be right at the base of the neck. The lipping on the bodies of these vertebrae strongly suggest that this person regularly extended his neck and head dorsally-” He tipped his own head sharply back to demonstrate. “And I don’t think a barber or an orchestra conductor would be doing that too much. But a fruit picker on a ladder would, when he leaned his head back to see the fruit.”

Clapper smoked silently and frowned. He was coming around.

“Now here’s the clincher,” Gideon said. “Most right and left scapulas look pretty much alike, but these are really different. The right one is pretty standard; your basic, everyday shoulder blade. But the left one is anything but. Look at how much bigger the acromial end of the scapular spine is, and-”

A hollow, rumbling growl from Clapper made him change course. “Let’s just say there are several indications of a lot more stress being placed on the left shoulder girdle than the right. Well, migrant citrus workers typically carry those long heavy ladders they work with over their left shoulders. Not only that, but that’s where they hang the bag of fruit as they pick, and a full bag of oranges weighs ninety pounds. That’s a lot of stress, Mike.” He waited for Clapper’s reaction.

Clapper had finished his cigarette. He stubbed it out in the Goat and Compass ashtray. “Can I ask a question?”

“Of course.”

“A full bag of oranges weighs ninety pounds.”