Uneasy Relations (17 page)

“Because I’m a professor. This is what I do. Come on, look at the crack. What happens to it?”

Fausto sighed. “Nothing happens to it. The damn thing goes down into the, what do you call it, the ear-hole thing.”

“The auditory meatus.”

“Whatever. And it disappears in there.”

“Very good. Now compare it to the other fracture, where
it
runs into the unburned bone that was under the muscle.”

Kaz’s brows knit. “I don’t—”

“There’s nothing to compare, dammit,” Fausto said through clenched teeth. “The other crack doesn’t run down that far.”

Gideon straightened, stripped off his gloves, and tossed them on the tray. “Bingo,” he said.

FOR
almost two hundred years the Alameda Botanical Gardens have been a peaceful, restorative haven where the people of Gibraltar could go to get away from the congestion, dust, and bustle of the city. Lovers — moony teenagers and shuffling old married folk — still stroll hand in hand among its lush plantings, stately civic memorials, and nineteenth-century cannons, planning their futures and recalling their pasts.

Strolling there hand in hand, Gideon told Julie about the burned body in the morgue.

“So he
was
murdered,” she said thoughtfully.

“I’m pretty sure.”

“And does Fausto go along with you?”

“Oh, yes. He was setting up some interviews when I left him. Rowley’s at the top of the list.”

“He suspects
Rowley
?”

“No, but Rowley drove Ivan home that night. He’s probably the last one who saw him alive before the killer. He probably knows Ivan better than anyone else too.”

“Does Fausto have anybody he suspects? Do you?”

“No. Do you?”

She shook her head. “No, I’m trying to imagine a reason any of these people would want to kill him, and I can’t come up with one.”

“I know. I would have thought he didn’t have an enemy in the world. I’m sorry you didn’t know him before; he was impossible to dislike. But then, we know next to nothing about his outside life. There’s more to him than archaeology. Family, acquaintances, old enemies, maybe . . .”

“I know. But if you add in the attacks on you, and Sheila Chan’s ‘accident,’ it just has to have something to do with Gibraltar Boy and all that — which means something to do with these people — your friends.”

“Julie, we have no compelling reason to think what happened to Sheila
wasn’t
an accident, and as for the supposed attacks on me, the jury’s still out, right? There’s no hard evidence anyone really attacked me.”

“Yeah, right,” Julie said, which, in reality, pretty much summed up Gideon’s sentiments too.

They walked a few more steps. “You could really tell he was murdered by comparing the cracks in his skull?” Julie asked.

“More or less.”

“That’s remarkable. Every time I think I know all your tricks you come up with another one.”

“But unlike most magicians, I always tell how I did it.”

“Whether I want to know or not.” She dug him in the ribs with her elbow. “You know I’m kidding. Tell me.”

“What do you say we sit down?”

They chose a lichened stone bench in a grove of small but ancient oaks, poplars, and spiky palms, with the clean, white façade of the Rock Hotel, and the immense Rock itself, looming above them through the foliage.

“There were two keys,” he said. The first had been the form of the fractures. One was narrow, with sharp, clean-cut margins. As Fausto had said, if there hadn’t been any warping of the surrounding temporal bone, the edges would have fit together perfectly. That was fairly typical of thermally induced fracturing.

“The skull just splits open from the heat?” Julie said.

“No, not exactly. It happens primarily because the organic content of the bone is destroyed, which delaminates it — the external table separates from the diploe and shrinks and cracks. Continue the heat, and the same thing happens to the internal table, so then you get a fracture all the way through.”

She frowned. “Isn’t that what I just said?”

He laughed. “I suppose so, yes. In any case, there’s nothing suspicious about that one. But the second crack, the anterior one, ah, that one was wide open, with margins so worn and eroded — so burned — that they no longer came close to matching each other.”

Long used to this kind of conversation, Julie was characteristically quick on the uptake. “Meaning that the second crack was exposed to the heat for a longer time, so it must have come first,” she said.

“Right. Presumably it was there before the fire started.”

“But how do you know it wasn’t just a question of the way he was lying?”

“The way he was lying?”

“Sure. He was lying on the bed, right? Which was where the fire started. Maybe that part of his head — the part that had the eroded crack — was against the mattress, so it took more of the heat for a longer time. Couldn’t that be the reason for the difference?”

“Well, it could, yes — although the two cracks were awfully close together for a differential rate of burning. But, yeah, you could be right, it’s possible. Fortunately, there was another key. And this one was the clincher.”

It was the simple fact that the fracture in question ran all the way down the temporal bone to its very bottom and disappeared into the auditory meatus, he explained.

“I don’t understand,” Julie said.

“No, of course not. Neither did Kaz, neither did Fausto. This is more new research, something we didn’t know until a few years ago. The thing is, when a skull cracks from the heat of a fire, it’s only the burned part that fractures. The crack won’t extend into undamaged bone. That’s the way it was with the second crack; it ended at the point where the sternocleidomastoideus had covered the bone and prevented it from burning. Just stopped short.”

“But the other one didn’t stop short,” Julie said, nodding. “When the doctor stripped off the muscle, there it was underneath . . . meaning it had to have been there before the fire started. A traumatic injury of some kind.”

“Bingo,” Gideon said for the second time in an hour. “Blunt force, from the look of it, although the actual site of the blow was gone.”

“That’s interesting, but didn’t you say that the doctor said he died of smoke inhalation? Was he wrong, then?”

“No, I don’t think he was wrong, but neither am I. I’m assuming Ivan was whacked over the head with something — probably lost consciousness; I hope so, anyway — and then the fire was set to cover it up, and Ivan, just about dead already, took in a few whiffs of smoke and that was the end of it. If whoever did it knew the place was full of glues and solvents, which he probably did, he also knew it would go up like a haystack. He figured Ivan’s body would be beyond any useful forensic analysis. And he was damn near right. I was lucky to find anything at all.”

Julie suddenly shivered. “Ivan’s body,” she echoed. “It’s funny, I forgot for a while there that we were talking about a real person, a nice old man we were chatting with just a couple of nights ago.”

“I know,” Gideon said with a sigh. “I forget too.”

They were quiet for a few seconds, watching a gecko skitter across the path and into the bushes, taking in the bird calls — warblers, wrens, blackbirds — breathing in the flowery air. The sights, sounds, and smells of life.

Gideon looked at his watch. “The groundbreaking for the Europa Point visitor center thing is at two o’clock. Want to come?”

“You mean they’re still planning to have it? Weren’t they going to present Ivan with another award?”

“Yes, they’ll do it posthumously. But you know, aside from that, this will be my first chance to see the actual cave site. They haven’t been letting anybody down there since the path to it collapsed when they had that cave-in a few years ago.”

“When Sheila Chan got killed.”

“Right. But Pru says it’s not really that hard to get to, and nobody really stops you. She’s going to show me around it. So I’m going. What about you?”

“Sure, I’d like to come.”

“Did you pick up the rental car, or will we need to get a taxi? I promised Pru a lift.”

“No, I have the car. It’s back at the hotel. A bright red Honda. But I could use some sustenance before then,” Julie said. “How about lunch?”

“Sure.”

“Any preference?”

Gideon thought for a moment. “Anything but steak,” he said.

THE
farther one goes from the center of Gibraltar town, the less English the landscape becomes. Driving south toward Europa Point in their rented red Honda, Gideon and Julie watched as the buildings — modest, single-story homes mostly — became more and more Spanish, with red tile roofs predominating, and pastel-colored stucco walls replacing stone ones. Even the Rock itself, along the diminishing flank of which Europa Road took them, became rockier, drier, more austere; putting one more in mind of the stony windmill country of
Man of La Mancha
than of William Blake’s “green and pleasant” England. After a mile and a half or so, the Rock petered out altogether, plunging into the sea at Europa Point, the very tip of the peninsula.

This was not quite the southernmost point of Europe (Punta de Tarifa, a few miles to the east in Spain, had that honor, being one-tenth of a degree of latitude lower), but it was supposedly the closest point in Europe to the coast of Africa (also by one-tenth of a degree), and it was, as Adrian had volunteered on the plane, the historic point at which General Tarik and his invading Moors had first set foot on the continent thirteen hundred years before.

This information was provided by one of the line of informational posters set up on easels at the cleared, windswept cliffside site that was to become the Ivan S. Gunderson Visitor Center. Pru, on reading it, tilted her head to gesture behind her and said, “Looks to me like they’ve returned.”

She was referring to the blindingly white Ibrahim-al-Ibrahim Mosque, the gleaming new dome and slender minaret of which dominated the area, dwarfing the red-and-white lighthouse that had stood for almost two hundred years, serving as a sentinel over the narrow neck of water that separated the tranquil Mediterranean from the roiling Atlantic.

Other than the lighthouse and the mosque, there wasn’t much on this craggy, blustery plateau that swaddled the tail of the Rock. Down near the water, of course, was the famous rock shelter itself, the Europa Point Cave — still mostly buried under the landslide that had killed Sheila Chan — but up here there was little to see. A parking area, some low, winding stone walls, a few trails, a historical marker, a few nondescript outbuildings, and a lot of desolate, rocky land swathed here and there with scraggly ground cover. A bus had come with a load of Asian tourists who wandered disconsolately around, obviously wondering why this desolate spot was on their tour, and politely trying to look interested as their guide pointed out Africa across the water and chattered away.

The group of archaeologists and anthropologists that stood at the cliff-top site of the dedication wasn’t much larger — perhaps thirty in all — and certainly no more animated. They had dutifully wandered the line of posters, looking at historical notes, architect’s renderings, and photos and paintings of Gibraltar Boy and his Neanderthal mother. They had solemnly watched as the governor-general turned over a gold-plated shovelful of earth, as the Freedom of the City Award, Gibraltar’s highest honor, was posthumously bestowed on Ivan (accepted in his place by Rowley), and as a bronze plaque with Ivan’s profile in bas-relief was unveiled by the deputy minister of culture, to be installed later in the entrance rotunda of the center.

And they had stood, shifting from foot to foot, listening to the inevitable speeches. The governor-general made one, the minister of culture made one, Rowley made one, and the president of the historical association made one, all extolling the manifold virtues of Ivan Samuel Gunderson. Adrian made one too, of course, and of course it was the longest of them all. Once he’d delivered the obligatory eulogy, he lapsed into one of his mellifluous, erudite lectures, going on — and on, and on — about ecological conditions at Europa Point in the Pleistocene’s waning years, forgetting, or more likely ignoring, the fact that almost everybody in his audience knew as much about it as he did.

“Inasmuch as the northern ice sheets had not yet melted, the sea levels would have been far lower at that time. Thus, our cave dwellers would have looked out, not on the water we see today, but on a marshy seaside plain harboring a rich array of game — rabbits, birds, foxes. Fish, shellfish, tortoises, all would have been there within easy reach for the taking. Up here on the coastal plateau there would have been horses and deer, and higher up on the Rock they would have found ibex. Taken all together, our First Family and their clan surely lived what would have passed for a life of ease in—”

Gideon’s attention wandered. He peered down the face of the cliff trying to pinpoint the location of the rock shelter but couldn’t find it. The particular part of the cliff face they overlooked was not a clean, vertical wall of rock plunging straight down to the sea, in which a cave would have been easy to spot, but a wide, deeply eroded gorge that had been more or less dammed up with mounded earthen detritus that ran all the way down to the water in a sloping incline. Clearly, the cave-in of four years ago had been only the latest, and probably not the last, of the Europa Point land disturbances.

“Pru, what do you say?” he murmured. “Could you show me around the site a little?”

“You mean right now, this minute?” she asked. “Please” — she inclined her head toward Adrian, who showed no sign of approaching this close, and cathedraled her fingers in front of her chest — “say yes.”

“Yes,” Gideon said, smiling. “Adrian’s not going to notice.”

“That’s for sure. Julie, you want to come too?”

“What? No, I think I’ll give it a skip. Actually, I find what he’s saying pretty interesting.”

“That’s because you’re the only one here who hasn’t heard it before. ”

Corbin, protected from the sun by a floppy, broad-brimmed hat that was tied under his chin, was standing nearby. She tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, Corb, I’m going to show Gideon around the site down there. Wanna come?”