“And who’s Albert Evan Jasper? I know the name…”
“One of the pioneering physical anthropologists. A student of Hrdlicka’s. He was one of the first ones to really get into forensic work. The whole idea of WAFA came out of a sort of retirement party for him, put on by some of his own ex-students. They all got together at this Whitebark Lodge for a few days and talked forensic anthropology.”
“Yes, I’ve heard these retirement parties can get pretty wild.”
He smiled. “I guess some good discussion came out of it, and they decided to expand it and make it an every-other-year thing. I’ve been to a couple of them so far, and they’ve been useful. Fun too.”
“I gather Jasper himself is dead now?”
Gideon flicked the blender on and off a couple of times.
“Yes, he died right there in Oregon, as a matter of fact. Never got to enjoy his retirement.”
“He died at his own retirement party?”
“Well, not exactly at, but right after. He was killed in a bus crash on the way to the Portland Airport.”
“And now,” she said reflectively, “he has an annual weenie roast and chugalug contest named after him. I wonder how he’d feel about that.”
“Oh, he was an eccentric old bird. From what I know about him I think he’d have gotten a kick out of it.” He dipped a wooden spoon into the basil-garlic mixture, tasted it, and added a few more shavings of Parmesan. “What do you say, Julie? Will you come? It’d be something different for you.”
“Gideon, I’d like to, but that third week in June is a real stinker for me. I already have four meetings set up.”
“Couldn’t you put them off a week? Move them up a week?”
“Impossible, it’s quarterly review time.”
“What about asking Don to take them for you? You could use some time to relax.”
“Would you want me to do that? Slough off my responsibilities?”
Julie was a supervising park ranger at Olympic National Park headquarters, there in Port Angeles. As Gideon well knew, she took her increasingly pressure-laden job seriously.
“No. Yes.”
“Thanks, that’s helpful.”
“Ah, Julie, it’s just that-well, I hate being away from you if I can help it. Nine days…”
She softened instantly, leaning forward to put her hand on the back of his. Her black eyes shone. “Well, why didn’t you put it like that in the first place, dopey? What was all that stuff about relaxation and sunshine?”
He hunched his shoulders. “I was embarrassed. Mature people aren’t supposed to be so damn dependent on other people.”
“I couldn’t agree more.” She tilted her head, smiled. “So do you want to make the flight reservations, or should I?” Gideon laughed. “I’ll do it.”
He started spooning the basil mixture into the hot olive oil. “You know what I was thinking?” he said over his shoulder.
“What? My God, that smells good.”
“I was thinking of asking John if he’d like to do that session on crime-scene do’s and don’ts. It’d be fun to have him along, don’t you think?”
“John Lau? Our John? You’re kidding.”
“What’s wrong with the idea? He’s a bona fide FBI agent, isn’t he? He’s a first-rate cop, and he knows crime-scene procedure-he’s sure given me hell when I’ve messed things up. I think he’d love the chance to tell an audience of professors to watch where they put their feet.”
“I think he’d hate it. He can’t stand giving lectures. Not that it wouldn’t be nice to have him there.”
“Oh, I bet I can bring him around.”
“What are you, kidding me? You think I’m gonna stand up and give a speech to a bunch of Ph. D. professors with long gray beards? You’re out of your mind.”
Gideon smiled into the telephone. “What is it with beards? I’m a Ph. D. professor. Do I have a beard?”
“I’m not doing it, Doc. Find somebody else.”
“I’m doing you a favor, John. You’re always complaining that forensic types don’t understand police work. This is your big chance. You’ll have a captive audience.”
“No way.”
“You can have four hours if you want it.”
“Thanks a heap.”
“The meeting’s not far from Bend.”
“Bend?”
“Bend, Oregon.”
“What’s in Bend, Oregon?”
“Sunshine.”
Silence. Gideon waited.
“People ski in Bend, Oregon.”
“Only in the winter, John. The climate’s high desert. Yesterday’s temperature was almost seventy, humidity eighteen percent. Sunny. I checked it in the paper.”
What hadn’t worked for Julie, Gideon knew, was likely to do the trick for John, a native Hawaiian whose idea of good weather was a July day in Yuma, Arizona. Even Hawaii had been too cool to suit him, and too wet. The FBI, with bureaucratic caprice, had assigned him to Seattle, with its two months of sunshine (in a good year) and ten months of bone-penetrating drizzle.
“We could probably justify two or three days there for you,” Gideon said. “You’d be welcome to sit in on the other sessions if you wanted…or you could just lie around the swimming pool.”
“Three days?” John said, and Gideon knew it was settled. He could picture John on the other end of the line at his fifth-floor desk in the Federal Building, wistfully looking out on the rainy streets of downtown Seattle and the gloomy, fog-drenched Sound a few blocks away. In a way, Gideon had cheated, or at least stacked the deck; he’d waited a few days before calling, letting a brief spell of relatively tolerable weather pass, until another truly miserable day came along.
“Might be nice,” John said. “Who pays?”
“We do. And if you want, I can have a letter sent on WAFA letterhead requesting your services.”
“That’d be good. Applewhite would probably let me do it on work time.”
“Great, I’ll take care of it right now.” He started to hang up.
“Wait, wait!”
Gideon brought the receiver back to his ear. “What?” “Don’t you sign it, Doc.”
“Why not?”
“Because you make Applewhite nervous,” John said with his usual candor. “Nothing personal. He just says every time we use you, things get weird.”
“I report what I find,” Gideon said. “I’m sorry if it makes things difficult for you.”
“Hey, don’t get mad at me. Applewhite just likes nice simple cases, no complications.”
“Well, this isn’t a case; this is just a bunch of graybeards getting together to talk about bones, remember?” “Yeah. But all the same, do me a favor, okay?” Gideon sighed, then laughed. “All right, I’ll have Miranda Glass sign it, how’s that?”
“Fine. Just keep your name out of it altogether, okay? No offense, Doc.”
When it came time to book their airline tickets, they changed their minds and decided to drive. Eight or so hours in a car would be a sort of floating, between-two-places decompression period for Julie, whose job wasn’t being made any easier by the usual freezes, cutbacks, and other hysterics that traditionally went along with the federal government’s fourth fiscal quarter. They took their time, not that there was any choice in this part of the world. Port Angeles was situated at the very top of Highway 101, where it narrowed to two lanes and looped around the Olympic Peninsula, and you could go either east or west and still wind up in Los Angeles three days later, presuming of course that that was what you wanted to do.
They drove east and then south, skirting the Olympics, down along the Hood Canal, dawdling through sleepy towns built around oyster beds, down past Duckabush and Liliwaup and Dosewallips, none of which looked as if they gave much of a damn about fourth-quarter reallocation problems. They stopped for lunch at Tumwater and did their duty as tourists, touring the brewery and enjoying it.
Then it was out of the mistiness and ferns of the peninsula and onto Highway 5, a genuine freeway, where the country opened up and flattened out. South of Chehalis, Mount St. Helens reared into view, colossal and unmistakable, its scooped-out summit obligingly trailing a monumental, picture-postcard plume of white steam.