They had gotten their drinks in the bar-Scotch and soda for Gideon, beer for John, rum and Coke for Tilton-and taken them outside, to a shaded spot on the edge of the lawn, near a rust-mottled children’s play set that looked as if it hadn’t seen any use for a decade or two.
“I tell you,” Tilton said, “when I heard we had ourselves a deceased in some out-of-the-way cabin in this heat, I expected the worst. You know, everybody gets used to looking at decomposing bodies after a while-”
“Not this guy,” John said, directing a thumb at Gideon. “-but nobody ever gets used to the damned smell. God-o-mighty. So I came armed.”
He lifted a small plastic bag halfway out of the pocket of his damp plaid shirt. Oil of wintergreen, Gideon saw, and a couple of gauze plugs to saturate and insert into the nostrils. A lot of people in the field did that. Others preferred Noxzema, or Vicks Vapo-Rub, or strong cigars. Most, like Gideon, found that nothing really helped.
“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?”