Unnatural Selection Page 16

  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.”

  FIFTEEN

  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 is 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.”

  SIXTEEN

  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 B
each 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… 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.”

  “Yes.”

  “And is that also something you just happen to know? I mean I’m just curious, but doesn’t seem the sort of fact a person would just happen to—”

  “I don’t just happen to know it,” Gideon said, laughing. “Back in the eighties, an anthropologist named Curtis Wienker did a paper on the skeletal anomalies that go along with this kind of agricultural work. My prof in graduate school made it the core of his seminar on applied anthropology, so I remembered it, and Kyle let me use his laptop to look it up again on PubMed, and that’s where I saw the ninety pounds. That’s where I got most of the rest of what I’m telling you, too.”

  “I’m relieved to hear it,” Clapper said.

  “There’s one more thing,” Gideon said. “This rough, bulgy area on the left scapula is an old enthesopathy, an inflammation, at the point where the tendon of the trapezius inserts. That too is usually a result of stress, heavy stress, and when you consider the function of the trapezius and the—”

  “Tut-tut-tut-tut-tut, you’re losing me.”

  “In a nutshell, Mike, if you went around reaching up with your left arm to pick fruit—thereby rotating your scapula—while your left shoulder was already bearing the weight of that heavy bag, this is exactly what you’d expect that shoulder to look like.”

  Gideon put the bone down and leaned both hands on the table. “I rest my case.”

  Clapper nodded slowly and sat down in the other chair, thinking it over, patting his breast pocket in search of the cigarette pack that he’d left in his office, but not bothering to get up to get it. “But what of the squatting facets? Where do they come in?”

  “Well, I was wrong there too—”

  “They’re not squatting facets?”

  “No, they are squatting facets, but they probably didn’t come from squatting. Remember, what causes them isn’t necessarily squatting as we generally picture it. Specifically, you get them from repeated dorsiflexion of the foot.” Again, he illustrated as he had the day before, placing his hand palm-down on the table, then bending it sharply upward. “And—think about it for a moment—climbing up and down a ladder, especially with a heavy bag on your back, would involve a whole lot of highly stressful dorsiflexion.”

  He, too, sat down. “It all fits, Mike.”

  “Yes, it does. It’s also all circumstantial.”

  “Well, naturally. I can’t positively ID this guy—not so far, anyway—but what would you say the odds are of finding a dismembered fruit picker buried on a beach on St. Mary’s?”

  “Well, now, maybe not so poor as you think. There’s a lot of agriculture here. A lot of farms.”

  “Yes, but what are the crops?”

  “The crops? Ah, well, mm…”

  “Flowers, bulbs, and potatoes,” Robb called as he hung up the phone. “And then they harvest kelp, too.”

  “There you are,” Gideon said. “Unless they grow their potatoes on trees here, he’s not a local.”

  “I take your point,” Clapper said with a smile as the phone rang again and Robb picked it up. “All right, this deserves some looking into. I believe I’ll start by seeing what there is to be learned about Mr. Villarreal’s supposed demise in the wilds of Montana.”

  “Alaska,” Gideon said.

  Robb held out the telephone. “Sarge, it’s for you.”

  “Take it for me, lad.”

  “No, he wants you. Sounds serious. Something’s up.”

  “All right, all right, I’ll take it at my desk.” Clapper slapped his thick, corduroyed thighs and thoughtfully stood up. “Very interesting, Gideon. Back in a tick.”

  A minute later—Gideon hadn’t gotten around to getting out of the chair yet—Clapper came barging out of his office and into the corridor, but it was a different Clapper, far more akin to the coarse, rough character Gideon had met the other day. “I’ll need you, Kyle! Let’s get going!”

  Robb was on the telephone with another caller. He put
his hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s not quite ten, Sarge. The office is still open.”

  “You’ve done enough bloody nursemaiding for one day,” Clapper shot back. “The office is closed. Switch the telephones to the service, let Anna do something useful. Pack it in. Now!”

  “Straightaway, sir,” Robb said, practically jumping out of his chair. He uncovered the mouthpiece. “I’m sorry, miss, we’ll have to ring you back on that.”

  “What’s up, Mike?” Gideon asked.

  “Not your concern,” Clapper snapped without turning around to look at him.

  Robb paused at the table that held the two different kinds of headgear. “Which hat, sir?”

  “Screw the effing hats,” Clapper snarled, striding toward the front and roughly motioning for Robb to follow. At the door he turned back to Gideon with a parting growl. “If you go out, make sure you pull the effing door good and shut after you.”

  Gideon, deciding that further conversation with Clapper at this point was not in his best interest, silently watched them go.

  On a guess, he thought, I’d say that call was from Exeter.

  ** *

  BUT in fact the call had come from Star Castle, and the man who had made it stood waiting for them in the fog, at the base of the age-worn stone staircase, hands delicately folded in front of his discreet little paunch, as Robb pulled the van up in the grassy parking area at the entrance to the castle.

  “I am Mr. Kozlov’s majordomo,” the pasty, dark-suited man with the pencil mustache said. “My name is Mr. Moreton. You’ve come about the unfortunate deceased gentleman. You’ll want to see Mr. Kozlov. I’ll take you to him.” He turned to precede them up the stone steps. “If you’ll be so good as to follow me.”

  “No, we don’t want to see Mr. Kozlov, we want to see the unfortunate deceased gentleman,” Clapper said.

  A very slight lift of his eyebrows showed that Mr. Moreton considered this a contravention of etiquette, but he acceded without dissent. “Certainly.” He continued majestically up the steps before them.