Skeleton Dance (28 page)

"I don't like autopsies. I'm not too keen on dead bodies, in general."

"You're sure in a funny line of work, then."

"I sure am. You think maybe Uncle Bert was right? That I'd have been better off in cost-accounting?"

"No, I don't. Look, why don't you put back the seat and take a nap for a while? Just relax, it'll do you good. You think you're all recovered from the other day, but you're not, trust me. Give those neuroaxons a rest. I'll wake you up when we get to Les Eyzies."

"You know, I just might do that." He adjusted the back of the seat to as close to horizontal as it would go and settled back. The clouds had closed in again and with them had come the rain, a cooler, thinner rain, pattering on the car's roof and running down the windshield in irregular rivulets. He watched them for a while, then closed his eyes to the steady, lulling
whish-whish
of the wipers.

"Doesn't that mean what?" he said, putting up the seat half-an hour later and finding that they were on the outskirts of Les Eyzies, just crossing the little bridge over the Vézère.

"Feeling better?"

"A lot better," he said truthfully, the sights, smells, and sounds of the autopsy having receded. "You started to ask me something before: 'Doesn't that mean… ?'"

It took her a moment to remember. "Oh, yes, I was thinking that if the suicide was a set-up, then how do we know that the business with the ring wasn't a set-up too?"

"That's exactly what I believe it was. I don't think it came off during a struggle, I think it was planted there. I don't think Bousquet killed Jacques at all. I don't think he killed anyone."

"But how would they have gotten hold of his ring?"

"Easy. They just took it off his cold, dead finger. You see, I think Bousquet was probably killed before Jacques was—which, may I point out, would have made it particularly hard for him to murder him. "

"Come again? I thought you said Bousquet had only been dead a couple of days. And Jacques was killed Thursday—one, two,
three
days ago."

"No, I said
Roussillot
finally came to the conclusion that he's been dead a couple of days. I came to a different one. I think it's been a good three days—more likely four or five."

"But Roussillot's a professional pathologist."

"That's true enough. And I'm just a lousy skeleton detective."

"No, you know what I mean. I'm not surprised that you'd know more about bullet trajectories and so on, but wouldn't he know more about the time-of-death aspect—decomposition, bodily changes—than you do?" She glanced at him. "Or don't you think he's competent?"

"No, he's competent enough."

"So how can you be that far apart? A two-or-three-day difference of opinion wouldn't be a lot if you were talking about a corpse that'd been out there for a month, but this is a fresh one. The indicators should still be pretty definitive."

She clapped her hand over her mouth. "Oh, my God, listen to me, I'm actually learning this stuff."

"And you're absolutely right," Gideon said. "The indicators ought to be more definitive. They usually are. But this is just one of those cases where they're all over the map. He's looking at one set, I'm looking at another one."

"I don't understand."

"Well, what we found… are you sure you want to hear this?"

"Yes, I do," she said staunchly. "I want to know what's going on too, and if you can stand watching an autopsy, I guess I can stand hearing about one. And better before dinner than during." She pulled the car to the curb near the center of the village, shut off the ignition, and turned attentively toward him, her elbow on the steering wheel. "Proceed. Only no gratuitous repulsiveness, please."

Gideon was no more in favor of gratuitous repulsiveness than Julie was and explained, as non-graphically as he could, that the timetables of the various processes of decay and putrefaction, by which the time of death was usually estimated, were seriously out of whack in Bousquet's case. The withered, puttylike skin and the advanced decomposition of the brain (when the skull had been sawn open there had been little more than gray-brown slush inside, he didn't bother to tell her) went along with his estimate of four or five days. On the other hand, the relative freshness of the abdominal organs—minimal bloating, color change, or odor—supported Roussillot's estimate of only two days. And that was it, in a nutshell. Roussillot was inclined to go with the insides, Gideon with the outside and with the brain.

"You know, there's something familiar about all that," Julie said. She'd relaxed; apparently she'd been expecting something worse. "Weren't you involved in something similar once?"

"No, I'd remember it if I had."

"Hm. But it's pretty unusual, isn't it? To have differences like that?"

"Unusual yes, but it happens. Maybe one part of the body was mostly in the shade and another part in the sun, or some parts, being in contact with the ground, stayed cooler, or maybe the funny weather, hot in the daytime and chilly at night, had something to do with it. Or it could have had something to do with what he'd been eating—all kinds of things come into play. I could easily be wrong; Roussillot could easily be right. We'll just have to wait and see what the lab comes up with."

"Right, good thinking, I'm for that." She plucked the key out of the ignition. "Okay, have we finished talking about people's insides?"

Gideon laughed. "Is it safe to go get something to eat, you mean? I think so, yes."

The rain had slackened off again and the filtered late-afternoon sunshine had brought some life back into the village streets in the form of strollers and shoppers. A few feet from their car, waiters on the sidewalk terrace of the Café de la Mairie were drying chairs and tables, and it was there that they went, neither of them being in the mood for a full-fledged French dinner.

They were halfway through the
spécialité de la maison
—
soupe Périgordine,
a rich, garlicky broth swimming with beans, potatoes, and lettuce, with an egg whipped into it and two round slices of bread floating on top—before the subject of Jean Bousquet came up again.

"Why?" Julie said, thinking out loud. "What would have been the advantage of making it look as if Bousquet killed himself? Wouldn't it have been easier and safer to just leave his body in the woods—maybe bury him—where he'd never be found? Or at least not for years."

"Ah, but then there'd be some of those loose ends left. Or as Lucien might put it, the snake wouldn't have swallowed itself. The police would still be poking into things, trying to find him."

"All right, I can see that, but why in the world use that funny air rifle to do it? Was that supposed to mean something?"

"Good question. Possibly it was to 'help' us make the connection between Bousquet and Ely's death. Maybe to imply that Bousquet was consumed with guilt and self-recrimination over it."

Julie tipped her head to the side. "I don't know, it sounds pretty far-fetched to me."

"Yeah, me too."

She spooned up soup for a few moments, thinking. "We
are
assuming whoever killed Ely also killed Bousquet, right? And Jacques too?

"Sure, Occam's Razor
and
the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business tell us that. Whatever's going on, it's all connected."

"I agree. All right, now tell me this: why would the murderer have kept that rifle all this time? He couldn't have known he'd want it again three years later to kill Bousquet."

"That's a
real
good question. And who is 'he'? Who are we talking about? Montfort? Audrey? Émile? Pru?" And as an afterthought: "Madame Lacouture?"

"And
why
?" Julie asked. "Above all, why? Okay, let's say Carpenter was killed over the hoax, one way or another. I can think of several possibilities for that. But why was Jacques killed? And Bousquet?

"And what was Bousquet doing back here anyway? If he's really been dead four or five days, that means he was here before anybody even knew I'd identified the bones as Ely's. So what brought him? What did he want?"

"Whew, we don't have very many answers, do we?"

"No," Gideon said, "but are we ever doing great on questions."

   The "new" home of the Périgord Institute of Prehistory, was actually five centuries old, a large, rectangular stone house that had originally been an outbuilding of the medieval cliffside chateau—a granary, perhaps, or a winery, or even a dovecote—but owned for most of the last century by a family with tobacco holdings in the nearby Lot valley. When the last male scion had died the previous year at the age of 101 and the house had come on the market, it had been bought by the Université du Périgord and sparklingly refurbished for the use of the institute, which would have its own quarters at last, after thirty years of renting space from the
foie-gras
cooperative.

Like the chateau itself, the structure had been erected on a long, level terrace about a third of the way up the cliff, its back wall built into a recess in the cliff face, its front coming out to the very edge of the terrace, so that from the big windows of the main room, mullioned in the Baroque style, there was a straight drop of 100 feet down to the main street and an unobstructed view over the village and across the green valley of the Vézère.

The light-filled windows, some of which had been swung open to dissipate the remaining fumes from the recent painting, made a splendid backdrop for the speakers, of whom there were an alarming number. Everybody who was anybody in Les Eyzies was there: the mayor, the deputy mayor, the nine-member municipal council, the administrative magistrate, and, of course, the prefect of police. Unfortunately, most felt the need to utter a few words of civic benediction and of eulogy for Jacques, which made for a long, long morning.

Conspicuously absent from the table of honored guests at the front was Jacques' wife, who had responded to her invitation with a curt reference to other commitments.

"One would think she holds us personally responsible for his death," said Émile Grize, sitting next to Pru McGinnis in the row of folding chairs immediately behind Julie and Gideon.

"Like maybe," Pru said out of the corner of her mouth, "it might just have something to do with the choice of weapon? Duh."

It was meant to relieve the general tedium and sobriety, and Gideon smiled, but a glance at Julie showed that they were both thinking the same thing: Madame Beaupierre was right: one of them
was
responsible. The possible
why's
behind Jacques' death, and the other murders as well, might still be murky, but the possible
who's
were crystal-clear. When you took everything into consideration, starting back with the hoax itself, you couldn't get away from the conclusion that it had to be somebody from the institute: Audrey, Montfort, Émile, Pru. And as a long shot, Madame Lacouture. That was it; the total list of suspects, all of them right there in the room with them, listening to the obsequies for Jacques, gravely smiling or soberly nodding as the situation required.

The speeches ground on, made more formal and stilted by the fact that the main speaker, the director of the Horizon Foundation, Bob Cram—an administrator better known for his scratch golf than his linguistic skills—felt obliged to deliver his address in French, in keeping with the institute's bilingual tradition. But at last they were over and the fifty or so people in the room rose, to the creaking of many aged and not-so-aged knees, and shuffled gratefully toward the bar that had been set up in front of the windows, where coffee, soft drinks, bottled water, and cordials were available. Audrey's presentation as the new director was yet to come, after which everyone could go home for lunch.

Julie and Gideon got their bottles of Évian and spent most of the break chatting somewhat awkwardly with Audrey, whose eyeglasses were still patched with Scotch tape, but who was otherwise more her old self, although stiff and formal in her unaccustomed black skirt-suit; and with a remote, brusque Michel Montfort, no hand at social amenities even at the best of times.

As they took their seats again, Julie put her hand on Gideon's arm. "Tom Cabell!"

"Pardon?"

"Tom Cabell, your friend from Calgary, the medical examiner, the one with the squinchy little mustache—"

"Julie, I know who Tom Cabell is. What about him?"

"It was when the AAFS convention was in Seattle, remember? And we all went out to dinner in the Space Needle.
That's
when I heard about it."

"I suppose," Gideon said mildly, "that if I wait patiently, you'll eventually let me in on this."

"Gideon, I'm trying to tell you that I remember the case I was trying to think of—the one like Bousquet, where the different indicators didn't match and they had all that trouble coming up with the time of death? I thought it was one of yours, but it was one of his. Don't you remember? He was going on and on about it over the veal scallopine and I was doing my best not listen, but I couldn't help hearing."

"Julie, I honestly don't—"

It hit him like an electric shock. "I remember!" he said, sitting bolt upright. "You're right! I wasn't thinking of it because it wasn't a murder at all, or even a forensic case, it was just a hiker who got—who got…" He stared at her as the full impact hit him. "Julie, do you realize—"

"S-s-s-t," Émile hissed from behind them. Audrey had begun her address.

Gideon didn't hear two words of it. He was scowling out the windows and into space, not thinking as much as simply sitting there, barely breathing, letting things fall into place as if by gravity. They'd been wrong about everything—everything. It was as they'd been trying to play some gigantic, frustrating pinball game, only without their being aware of it the game board had been upside down from the beginning. Now, in a single instant it had been turned right side up, and the little steel balls were rolling merrily about, bumping into flippers, setting off lights and buzzers, and plunking neatly and satisfyingly, one after another, into their cups.