"Now wait a minute,” Julie said, having thought the matter through. “Who's to say the cave-in happened all at once? Maybe he was knocked down by a few falling pieces, and fractured his skull when his head hit the ground-and then the rest of it all fell on him. What's wrong with that?"
"Nothing, but he didn't just fracture it. It wasn't cracked, it was caved in-a depressed fracture. There was a hole in his skull, and some of the bone fragments were actually inside.” No doubt driven into the brain to provide the immediate cause of death, he might have added, but why spoil her appetite? Or his.
"And a fall couldn't do that?"
"Nope. It's an axiom of the trade: When a moving head hits a fixed object hard enough, you get a crack; when a moving object hits a fixed head you get a depressed fracture. No, first he was slugged, then he fell, and then the place came down on him."
He took a bite of his ham sandwich. “Marmolejo thinks the cave-in was an accident; that Howard came on somebody trying to take the codex and got himself killed for his trouble."
"No, how could that be? If Howard was the one with the gun and the crowbar, how come he's the one who wound up dead?"
Gideon shrugged. “I doubt if he would have shot a crew member or even pointed the gun at him. Not unless he found him right in the act of taking the codex. He would have assumed there was some other reason for him to be there. It was outsiders he was worried about."
Julie shook her head. “It's so hard to believe. How could a member of the crew bring himself-"
"For two million dollars? People can bring themselves to do a lot of things for that."
He took a long swallow of milk. “Anyway, Marmolejo figures that whoever was on the other end of the sledge hit one of the props without meaning to. Howard and the codex fell down the steps, and five tons of rubble landed on top of them. That's his theory."
"And what's yours?"
"I think he's right. An eight-pound sledge can get away from you when you're using it in a fight, and with the supports already weakened it wouldn't have taken much to bring the whole place down."
He tossed a sandwich end onto his plate. “You know what I keep wondering about? That ‘return to the scene of the crime’ in Stan Ard's notebook. What was he talking about? Whose return?"
"Howard's, obviously."
"You think whoever's behind this had Ard fooled too?"
"Sure.” She put down her sandwich and leaned forward. “To tell the truth, I never did put much faith in Inspector Marmolejo's idea about the killer just passing by and casually shooting him. Did Stan strike you as the kind of person who'd be outside working at seven in the morning? My guess is the killer made an appointment with him to lure him out there-” She smiled crookedly. “Gideon, is this what your cases sound like when you're working on them? As if you're reading lines, in a particularly dumb movie?"
"Yup. Go ahead. “To lure him out there…"
"…so that he could shoot Stan, but first get him to write something that would seem to incriminate Howard."
"Like what?"
"Like what he did write. It worked, didn't it? Maybe he out-and-out told Stan that Howard had been seen around, hoping he'd write that- which would really have confused us. But-"
"But Stan, who never passed up the opportunity for a cliche, came up with ‘return to the scene of the crime.’ And I suppose the killer thought he'd better settle for that, shot him, and got out of there.” Gideon nodded slowly. “You just might be right, Julie."
He put his feet up on the low table, crossed his legs at the ankles, and stared out at the twilit foliage. “Ah, that poor bastard Howard; he dies saving the codex, and the whole world winds up blaming him for stealing it. Thanks to someone who went to a lot of trouble to make us think just that."
"But why? That's what bugs me. I mean, I understand why somebody would do that in 1982: if everyone thought the codex was gone, nobody would bother to dig for it, and the killer could come back later on and get it. Fine. But why now?"
"Why what now?"
"Why bother to make it look as if Howard were still alive almost six years later? Especially in the middle of a dig that was bound to turn up his body sooner or later? And the codex too."
Gideon held up his hand. “Julie, Marmolejo and I went round and round for over an hour on this stuff, and we didn't get anywhere."
Julie brushed this aside. “Well, of course not. You didn't have the benefit of my brilliant insights. After all, who was the one who said all along that the codex was down there?"
"The same person,” Gideon pointed out, “who said all along that Howard Bennett was behind everything that was going on."
"That,” Julie said, “was unworthy of you.” She rubbed her hands together. “Come on, Skeleton Detective, let's order up some brandy and get this thing figured out. We're on a roll here."
Gideon smiled and got up to go to the telephone.
"Right, that's just what this case needs: a little cognac and a little cogitation."
From the outset Gideon knew that it wasn't going to be much of a day. There had been a little too much cognac the night before, and maybe a little too much cogitation too. Abe had joined them at about ten o'clock, and they had stayed up talking until one-thirty; then Gideon and Julie had overslept this morning. That was what had started him off in a grumpy frame of mind, eliminating as it did their usual slow, luxurious introduction to the day: fifteen or twenty dreamy, voluptuous minutes in each other's arms, drifting and dozing, nuzzling and stroking, slipping sweetly in and out of sleep until the warmth of the morning began to flow in their veins.
It was Julie who had to run off first, to the ceremonial staff breakfast with the people from the Institute. Gideon, with an hour before he was due to meet Marmolejo at the site, stayed in bed by himself for fifteen minutes (it wasn't the same) before snapping fully awake with the frustrating feeling of having dropped a stitch, of having been on the verge of figuring it all out if only he could have continued whatever train of thought had been going along almost independently in his mind. For a few moments more he lay still, trying to recapture it. Something about Howard, something Howard had said…but whatever it was, it melted into tantalizing wisps and evaporated before he could get hold of it.
He got up, yawning, ordered coffee and a couple of croissants from room service, and breakfasted while he shaved. His mind was still humming with the problems they had raised the night before. Once again it had been all questions, no answers.
Foremost, of course, was the question of who had killed Howard. The logical best guess, although it had been hard to take it seriously, was Worthy. He had been alone at the site with Howard that night. And it was only Worthy's word that Howard had taken the gun and crowbar and gone up to the temple. Maybe it had been Worthy who had taken the weapons and then tossed the crowbar on the ground near the path to make it look as if Howard had escaped that way. Worthy could easily enough have tried to steal the codex and wound up murdering Howard and accidentally triggering the cave-in when he was discovered.
But so could everyone else, and that was the problem. TlaIoc was less than a twenty-minute walk from the Mayaland. Any of them could have doubled back from the hotel after Howard had dismissed them. Certainly, Gideon was in no position to know; he had slept for an hour after dinner, getting ready for the night watch.
And what about the old question that had been nagging at them in one form or another since the first day, when they discovered the surreptitious digging in the stairwelclass="underline" Why had the killer waited until now to come back for the codex, when it would have been so much easier and safer last year, or the year before, or the year before that? Why-