“Hi, there,” Julie said. “Gorgeous, isn’t he?”
Buried in thought, he hadn’t noticed her come into the cottage. She had found him in front of the bedroom mirror, stock-still, staring at himself.
He turned to smile at her. As always when she came in from the outdoors, she had a way of bringing some of it in with her; some indefinable freshness of skin and hair and fragrance. His spirits lifted.
“Did I ever tell you you’re extremely wholesome-looking?” he said.
She laughed. “Just when you get carried away on the wings of passion.” She came up behind him, hugged him gingerly, avoiding the scrapes, and stretched to kiss him on the back of the neck. “Do you feel okay?”
He reached around, drawing her head closer. “I love you.”
“Munn,” she said, nuzzled him a moment longer, gave him a final hug that made him grunt, then flopped into an armchair and kicked off her shoes.
“So,” she said, “how’d it go this afternoon? Anything interesting happen around here?”
CHAPTER 17
“And that’s about it,” Gideon said, summing up. They were standing on the footbridge over the pond, their elbows on the railing. After three blistering days, the layer of streaky clouds in the west had risen to veil the late-afternoon sun, and with it had come a moist breeze. The temperature had dropped a few degrees to marginally tolerable. They had walked slowly around the grounds while he told her what had been going on, finally stopping on the bridge while he concluded.
Julie had been quiet through the recital, asking few questions, making few exclamations; merely shaking her head occasionally. They began walking again. At the end of the footbridge was a weathered wooden sign that said, “Limit 3 Per Day.” Three what, Gideon wondered. The pond was all of four inches deep, and he had yet to see anything move in it.
“So the skull was Jasper’s,” Julie said. She was chewing on a grass blade she’d picked up somewhere. “That explains a few things, doesn’t it?”
He looked at her, surprised. All he seemed to have was questions, not explanations. “Not to me, it doesn’t.”
“Well, it explains why those remains were taken out of the case and destroyed. Someone was afraid one of you would somehow spot that they weren’t Jasper’s.”
“Yes, that’s probably true.” The fate of those burned shards of bone had plummeted to a lower priority this afternoon. He’d forgotten all about them.
“And it gives us a reason for Callie to knock you off your horse.”
“It does?”
Now it was Julie who stopped to look at him. “Of course, don’t you see? It’s what I said-or at least it could be. She was trying to keep you from finishing the reconstruction. She was afraid you’d find out it was Jasper. Which you did. Gideon, I’m telling you-”
“Julie, we’ve already been through this. If I didn’t finish it, somebody else would have, so-”
“But they wouldn’t have; that’s what I’m getting at. You explained yourself-very publicly-why there wasn’t any real point in doing a reconstruction on that skulclass="underline" If it was Salish, there were better ways of proving it; and if it wasn’t, then who was there to show it to? The only reason you were doing it was as a demonstration of the technique.”
“Well, yes-”
“So if you didn’t finish it, if she could put you out of commission just for this one afternoon, that would have been the end of it. It would have gone back to Nellie for analysis and wound up in a box somewhere, or wherever they keep unidentified skulls. There would have been no reason to reconstruct it, and certainly no reason to think it might be Jasper’s.”
They had circled the pond a second time and begun to head back toward their cottage. “Well, what do you think?” she said.
“Well-”
“In fact,” she went on excitedly, “she would have had the same reason for getting rid of Harlow to keep him from telling whose skeleton that was. Both of them could have been involved in Jasper’s murder, and she could have seen that he was starting to crack. After all, you did.”
“You know,” Gideon said, “you’re starting to make a certain amount of sense.”
“Why, thank you. It’s about time.”
“Except…”
She sighed. “I knew it.”
“Except that Callie couldn’t have had anything to do with Harlow’s murder. She was four hundred miles away.” “Oh.” The grass blade was nibbled and discarded. “Are you sure about that?”
“Pretty much, unless I’m way off on the time Harlow was killed.”
“Oh,” she said again. “You don’t suppose she only pretended to go away? Or that she snuck back, or-no, I guess not.”
“I sincerely doubt it. It’d be awfully easy to check.”
Julie shrugged and smiled. “Well, it was a pretty good theory anyway, don’t you think? I mean, except for that little detail?”
“It’s a great theory, Julie.”
At the porch of their cottage she stopped him. “Gideon, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“If that reconstruction you made was such a good one-”
“Which it was, but the skull gets all the credit. The bony landmarks were all in the right places, for a change.” He smiled. “Not that I’d expect anything else from the skull of Albert Evan Jasper.”
“And if all you people are trained professional anthropologists-”
“Which we are, certifiably.”
“Then how come none of you certified experts knew it was Jasper until Miranda revamped everything you did?”
He laughed. “You’ve put your finger on the problem with reconstruction. That’s what bothers people like Nellie so much. No matter how right you get the bony stuff, the rest of it involves a lot of guesswork, and that’s the most critical part.”
“I’m not following you. What’s the most critical part?”
“Look at it this way. Forget about reconstructions. Do you think you’d recognize me on the street if I changed just a few inconsequential, soft-tissue details on my face?”
“What kind of details?”
“Oh…different nose, different mouth, different hair, different eyebrows, different ears, different eyes-”
“But those aren’t inconsequential details. They’re what make you you.”
“Exactly. Well, I got most of them wrong, which is what usually happens-there’s no way to tell from the skull-but Miranda was sharp enough to pick up the similarity in the basic shape of the face. She just altered a few of those details and Albert Jasper jumped right out at us.”
“Hm. Impressive, but I think I’m starting to come over to Nellie’s side.”
Inside the cottage the telephone rang. “I’ll get it,” Julie said. “You’re being brave about it, but I can see you’re still stiff.” She took the three steps at a leap.
“What a hot dog,” Gideon called after her. But she was right. He was glad to let her make the run for the telephone.
The call was from John. The on-scene processing was done, the body was on its way to the morgue. Dr. Tilton, the deputy medical examiner, had come to his preliminary conclusions. Would Gideon like to join them for a drink in the bar to talk about them?
“Hot enough for you?” Dr. Tilton asked. He pulled the toothpick from the left corner of his mouth, put it in the right corner, twirled it as if to set it in more firmly, and with a noisy sigh rearranged himself more deeply in the wooden lawn chair. “Great God-o-mighty.”
Forensic pathologists, in Gideon’s experience, tended to be lively sorts, and Deschutes County Deputy Medical Examiner Floyd Tilton was no exception. A sweating, balding cabbage of a man with a hopelessly scroungy beard that failed to disguise the absence of discernible chin, he was a nonstop talker with the astonishing ability to gnaw on a toothpick, chew gum, and eat popcorn at the same time. All without missing a word.