Where There's a Will (12 page)

But recurring stress fractures of the calcaneus with no accompanying damage? Repeated forceful impact of the heel, but not the rest of the foot, against an unyielding surface? He had come upon the phenomenon in monographs before, but never in the flesh (so to speak). It was called “rider’s heel,” and it came from the way cowboys typically dismounted a horse, swinging their right leg-never the left-up and over the saddle and coming down hard on their foot, their right foot, smack on the narrow, raised heel of their boot. Again and again and again. Ouch. And the older the bone got, the thinner the cortex, the less dense the trabeculae, the more susceptible it would be to breaking.

Putting everything together, that seemed to mean “Lyle and Harvey-they need to know how long you’re gonna be.” Gideon, deep in his ruminations, hadn’t noticed John’s return.

“Not long.” He turned toward the plane and called: “If you can let me have a carton”-with his hands he indicated something shoe-box-sized-“and some paper for packing material, we can be on our way in ten minutes.”

“Roger, prof,” Harvey yelled back.

Gideon turned back to John, gesturing at the bones with a sweep of his hand. “It’s Magnus, all right, John.”

“Yeah?” John said, looking at the bones with renewed interest. “You know that?”

“Ninety percent sure,” Gideon said with a shrug. “Well, make it eighty-five.” He went over his reasoning, using the small, folding magnifying glass the brothers had provided, to show John the calluses, which John dutifully, respectfully, fingered.

“Of course,” Gideon said, “for all I know, there might be other things that would account for a repeatedly stress-fractured right calcaneus without signs of injury to the metatarsals or anything else-but I sure as hell can’t think of any likely ones.”

“Hold on a minute, Doc. If you don’t have his left, uh, calcaneus, how do you know that wasn’t broken, too? And if it was, then this dismounting theory wouldn’t work, would it?”

“No, it wouldn’t. And, of course it would have been nice to have the left foot, too, but there isn’t very much I can do about that, is there?”

“Hey, don’t go all defensive on me, Doc. I’m just asking a question.”

“Who’s getting defensive?” Gideon said.

But of course he was. He’d just completed what seemed to him a neat bit of reasoning, and he could have used a little amazement, or at least approbation, and not a string of skeptical questions. “Come on, John, you’re a cop. How often do you get every single piece of evidence you’d like to have? You play the hand you’re dealt, and this particular hand plays out to one conclusion: Magnus Torkelsson.”

It wasn’t just the foot, he pointed out. Everything added up, and there was nothing to lead off in any other direction. An airplane from the Hoaloha Ranch, lost since the very night Magnus flew off in it and disappeared; a woman that nicely fit the description of his pilot;-he ticked the items off on his fingers-and a male of advanced age who, as it happened, had spent a lot of time in the saddle. How many other people-missing people-would that combination fit?

John held up his hands. “Hey, if you say it’s him, that’s good enough for me. Magnus it is. What do I know?”

A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth, and then the skin around his eyes crinkled up, and then they both were laughing.

“I’m sorry I got defensive there, John.”

“No problem, Doc.”

There was only one thing that nagged at him a little, he admitted, and that was the fact that he’d known too much about the case to start with. Forensic anthropology was like anything else: You tended to find what you were looking for. It wasn’t supposed to work that way. When he consulted for the police or the FBI, he made a point, when possible, of not knowing anything about the suspected identity of the remains he was to examine: not the sex, not the age, not the race, nothing. But here he’d been aware of how old Magnus was, of his sex, of the fact that he rode a horse, of the age and sex of the pilot, even of her bulimia. And what do you know, his analysis of a very few bones had confirmed every single expectation. That was slightly worrisome: Had he over-reached for what he’d believed, a priori, to be the facts?

“Nah,” said John airily. “You’re never wrong about that kind of thing. Well, not that often.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence, if that’s what that was. Anyway, I have an ace up my sleeve. When I was checking the bones for fractures, I saw that a couple of toe bones were missing after all, and when I took a closer… well, take a look at the middle phalanges of the second and third toes.”

“The, uh, middle…?”

“These two,” Gideon said. “The distal phalanges-the outermost parts, the segments that had the toenails-are the missing ones, and these two are the ones that adjoined them.”

“They are?” John said, bending closer. “They don’t look like the others, do they? They’re barely half as long. And they’re thinner, and they, like, come to a point, almost…”

“The toes have been amputated, John. The distal phalanges and a segment of the middle phalanges have been removed. And when that happens the bone that’s left-the proximal portion of the middle phalanges, in this case-is likely to develop osteoporotic atrophy over time and become resorbed-absorbed back into itself-starting at the end where the amputation occurred. That’s why they look that way.”

“So this happened a long time ago?”

“Oh, yes. Years and years. Decades, probably.”

“And when you say ‘amputation,’ you mean by a doctor? An operation? Not some kind of accident?”

“No way to tell, not anymore. There’s been too much remodeling. The site of the original separation is long gone.”

John was looking a little confused. “So… why is this an ace up your sleeve? What does it tell you?”

“It doesn’t tell me anything, but it ought to tell the Torkelssons something. It’s a ‘factor of individuation,’ as we so grandly call it. If it turns out that Magnus Torkelsson had two toes missing-which it will, I think-that’ll settle it for good. Case closed, all doubts resolved.”

Harvey had brought the materials he asked for, and Gideon began wrapping the individual bones loosely in newspaper. “You wouldn’t happen to know, would you, John?”

“If he was missing any toes?” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t know. He didn’t have a limp; nothing I noticed, anyway.”

“Well, we’ll be seeing Felix tonight in Waikiki,” Gideon said, fitting the cover on the carton with the satisfying sense of having accomplished what he’d come for. “He’ll know.”

“Whoo,” said John, having completed his first long swallow of the frosted Mai Tai that had been placed before him. “I’m in heaven.”

So was Gideon. After the stagnant heat of Maravovo Atoll, the ocean breezes of Waikiki Beach, perfumed with gardenia and frangipani, flowed over them like balm. They had arrived at the Honolulu airport two hours earlier and had taken a taxi to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel-the posh, venerable “Pink Palace”-where the desk clerk had apologized for not having two ocean-view rooms available, but Gideon, if not John, was happy to be looking out over the green canopy of the giant banyan tree and the quiet, shaded gardens, rather than the jammed beach with its pungent smells of sunscreen and its multitudes of bare, glistening, not-so-beautiful bodies slow-cooking on their roll-up straw mats.

There had been a message from Felix waiting for them: He had been delayed at a meeting on Kauai and would not be back until five. And he had to be on a red-eye flight to San Francisco later in the evening, but with any luck he would meet them for a drink at six-thirty at the House Without a Key, the open-air restaurant-bar at the Halekulani Hotel. They had showered and changed, then walked the two blocks down Kalakaua Avenue from the Royal Hawaiian to the Halekulani, both of them slightly dazed by an enjoyable sense of disjunction, of disconnect. Only a little while ago they had been on a tiny speck of land in the Pacific, one of the most remote and isolated places in the world, with nothing but black flies and land crabs for company (but plenty of those). Now, later that same day, here they were on one of the most cosmopolitan boulevards to be found anywhere, fording streams of avid shoppers, tourists, and locals, seemingly of every race and sub-race on the planet. There were flip-flop-shod surfers toting boards on their heads or under their arms, perspiring, grim-faced joggers, dignified Japanese elders walking with their hands behind their backs and taking in the sights, tight clumps of nervous-looking Eastern Europeans, prim Asian ladies handing out brochures for shows and bus tours, and piratical, dissipated men with parrots and macaws on their shoulders (“What do you say, Jack, take a picture with one for ten bucks, with all four for twenty bucks?”).

The terrace at the House Without a Key, by contrast, was an oasis of taste and tranquility. When they arrived, the evening’s Hawaiian music was just getting underway. They had listened contentedly to the soft, agreeable melodies and the surf for a while, then ordered drinks-John’s Mai Tai and a Fire Rock Pale Ale from Kona for Gideon.

“Pretty romantic place,” Gideon said, taking in the scene. The musicians-a guitarist, a slack-key guitarist, a Hawaiian falsetto singer with an achingly sweet voice-and a smiling hula dancer performed on a low bandstand beneath an ancient kiawe tree, with the purple sea and the setting sun at their backs. The drinkers and diners sat at tables under a tropical sky of deepening blue-green tinged with rose. Off to the left, the unmistakable profile of Diamond Head loomed, slowly losing its folds and hollowed contours to shadow.

“It sure is,” John replied. “So what am I doing here with you?”

They settled back to watch the hula dancer, an elegant, fawnlike creature in a long flowered dress, perform a few more graceful numbers, but a part of Gideon’s mind kept turning back to Magnus Torkelsson.

“John, I’ve been thinking-”

“Uh-oh.”

“There are some things about this whole case that are starting to bother me.”

John’s arms flew out to either side. “What, now it’s not Magnus? Why do you always do this, Doc? You know what my boss says? Every time we call you in on something, no matter how simple it looks to be, by the time you get finished-”

“No, no, it’s Magnus, I’m not changing my mind on that.”

“What, then?”

“Well, something doesn’t quite compute. Something’s missing.”

“What’s missing?”

“How do they know for sure what happened to him?”

“They don’t, for sure. Isn’t that why we went out there?”

“No, I mean how do they know that he flew off in the first place? How do they know that’s what happened to him? Is it just that the plane was missing, and Magnus was missing, and the pilot was missing, so they assumed…”

“Oh, I see what you mean. I don’t know the answer to that, Doc. In fact I don’t know a whole lot about any of it; they don’t like to talk about it, for which you can’t exactly blame them. But I guess Magnus must have told someone before he left-I don’t know-Dagmar, probably. He probably called his sister.”

“No, if he’d done that they’d have known where he was going. But they didn’t. Remember? At dinner last night? They were trying to figure out where he was headed.”

“So? Maybe he felt safer if no one knew where he was going to be. Maybe he thought it was safer for them. ”

Gideon shook his head. “Could be, but something still seems off to me. Maybe it’s just that the whole thing-I mean the murder, the disappearance, the will, the finding of the plane-it all seems too tidy, too wrapped up. No loose ends. Don’t you get that feeling?”

John thought it over, had another long swallow, and shrugged. “Nope. No loose ends is good, Doc. What do you want loose ends for?”

“Well, you’re the expert,” Gideon said, leaning back, almost but not quite convinced. “Julie thinks I’m developing a suspicious turn of mind. Maybe she’s right.”

“She is right. You gotta stop hanging around dead people. I could use another Mai Tai. You want another beer?”

By the time Felix strode onto the terrace, the sun had dropped below the horizon, Diamond Head was a gray-black silhouette, and the lights were blinking on in the hillside houses. Jets coming into the airport a few miles away gleamed white, still lit by the vanished sun.

“Sorry I’m so late, boys! Sorry I have so little time!” His voice, marginally muted so as not to interfere with the music, was as hearty and honking as ever, but there was a hassled look around his eyes as he dropped his flight bag on the terrace, heaved a great sigh, and flopped into a chair. His linen sport coat was rumpled and limp, his trousers wrinkled. Closing his eyes, he took a moment to collect himself. “What a life,” he said under his breath-or as close to under his breath as he ever got-and then to John and Gideon: “Your rooms okay? No problems?”

They assured him, with thanks, that their rooms couldn’t have been nicer, and Gideon asked him what he wanted to drink. Also, they were thinking of getting something to eat. Did he want to order anything?

“I wish!” he said wearily. “But nothing for me, thanks, I don’t really have time to eat.” Wistfully, he eyed John’s Mai Tai. “And, unfortunately, I have a truckload of work to do on the flight, so I better keep a clear head. So,” he said, turning to Gideon. “How did it go? What’s the story?”

“Well-” Gideon began.

“Ah, what the hell, it’s been a long day.” Felix twisted in his chair and waved their waiter over. “Good evening, Sanford. May I trouble you for a martini, straight up? Gin, two olives. And while you’re at it, why don’t you bring us some pupus? One order of your coconut shrimp, an order of chips and guacamole, and, oh, um, an order of vegetable spring rolls, just to keep us healthy. Better make it snappy, I don’t have much time.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Torkelsson,” said Sanford. “I’ll be right back.”

“On second thought,” Felix shouted after him, “make the martini a double! Thank you, my friend!”