Make No Bones (23 page)

John nodded. “Between four and nine o’clock.”

Callie shuddered suddenly. “Is it true that his skull was crushed?”

It was true, all right, John said. Did she have any idea what might be behind the murder?

She dragged hard on her cigarette. “It has to have something to do with this bizarre thing with Jasper—with Jasper’s murder.”

That was true too. “Tell me a little about Jasper.” “Jasper?” Her mouth thinned and set. “Jasper was a son of a bitch.”

Not just your everyday sonofabitch either, John noted, but a son of a bitch; three fat, separate words dripping with venom.

Well, CaIlie had good reason for hating him. According to Gideon, Jasper had made her life as a graduate student miserable. He had chipped away and chipped away at her doctoral dissertation, making her process big chunks of her data over and over, until she had quit in frustration after four years and transferred to Nevada State. Thereunder the less-demanding Harlow—she had her degree in a year and a half.

“Enough of a sonofabitch for one of his ex-students to want to kill him?” he asked Callie.

“Albert Jasper was awful,” she said. “Cynical, condescending, ruthless, uptight, paternalistic in the worst sense of the term…” John thought she had run out of words, but she was only pausing for breath. “Arrogant, inauthentic, self-centered…all in all, a horrible person. You don’t have to take my word for it either; the others will tell you exactly the same thing.”

So they had, so far. “And yet you put on a big party for him when he retired.”

“Nellie put it on. He did the organizing, and I think most of us came to please him, not Jasper. And, well, to tell the truth, in my case I was flattered to be invited. I wasn’t a very big fish at the time. And I was excited about the idea of a forensic anthropology conference. But the whole retirement-party bit was Nellie’s concoction; no one else’s.”

“And yet you all came.”

Callie laughed shortly. “A big mistake.”

Especially for Jasper, John thought.

Callie drew herself up. “Are we done? There’s a session I’d like to attend.”

“Just one more thing,” John said. “I’d like you to take a look at this.” He removed a sheet of paper from the folder at his elbow and passed it to her. On it was a copy of Albert Jasper’s telephone bill for June 1981—more of Julian Minor’s work, obtained by Telefax a couple of hours earlier.

“Look at the circled number, the call to Nevada.” She looked. “Yes?”

“Do you know that number?”

“Well, it’s the university’s prefix—”

“I know that, but the extension isn’t in use anymore, and so far no one’s been able to tell us what it was. You don’t recognize it?”

“No. Wait, yes. It’s the old anthropology department extension. We haven’t used it since 1989.”

“So it would have been a call to the department switchboard?”

“The department secretary. There were only six or seven faculty offices back then, and a secretary could handle it.”

“The call was made just two weeks before the meeting—two weeks before Jasper was killed. You wouldn’t happen to know what he was calling about?”

“No.”

“He wasn’t calling you?”

She laughed. “Jasper wouldn’t call me.”

“All right, who would he call?”

“Well, Harlow, probably. I mean, I don’t think he knew any of the others. They were all cultural, or linguistics, or archaeology. But I’m just guessing.”

“What would he be calling Harlow about?”

“I have no idea. They weren’t exactly in close contact, so it’s a bit of a surprise, actually.”

John looked up as a head poked through the open doorway of the lounge.

“Manager said you wanted to see me.” It was one of the lodge staff, a sleepy-looking teenager with a bad complexion and long, stringy blond hair under a turned-around baseball cap. He took an unwilling step into the room.

“Thanks, be with you in a second.”

“I can come back later.”

“No, I’m just leaving,” Callie called to him. She ground out her cigarette and stood up. “I really think I would have heard about that phone call if it were anything significant,” she said to John. “I can’t imagine it was anything important.”

Maybe not, John thought, but it was the only call listed on Jasper’s bill to any of the people John was now concerned with. And they had talked for thirty-nine minutes. That was a long time for a long-distance call. Especially for people who weren’t exactly in close contact.

John pulled out his small notebook as the kid eased warily into Callie’s chair. “What’s your name?”

“Vinnie.”

John looked up.

“Stoller.”

John wrote it down. “And you’re the one who changed the sheets and towels Wednesday?”

“Not all of ‘em. I did Cottage 18.”

Harlow’s cottage. “Do you remember what time that was?”

“About 4:57.”

John put down the pad.
“About
4:57?”

“I remember because it was the last one in the row, and I was like back for my dinner break at 5:00.”

John wrote down
4:57p.
“Tell me exactly what you saw at the cottage, exactly what you did.”

The boy shrugged. “I didn’t do nothing. There was a do-not-disturb sign on the door, so I left everything on the wood box, under the eaves.” His hands were circling one another. They were already the hands of a man; square, work-scarred, thick-jointed.

“You didn’t have a passkey?”

“Sure I did, but we’re not supposed to go in if there’s a sign. So I left it, that’s all.”

“You didn’t knock?”

“Well, yeah, I think I did.”

“And?”

“I told you. Nothing.”

“You didn’t look through the window?”

“There wasn’t no point. I’m telling you, you couldn’t see nothing. Can I go now? I gotta get back to work.”

“Sure. Thanks for your help, Vinnie.”

Vinnie ran his tongue over his lips as he got up. “Was the, uh, guy already, like, dead when I was there?” “Looks like it,” John said.

And that was about the only concrete thing he’d learned in over four hours of interviews: The do-not-disturb sign had been put out by 4:57 P.M. Wednesday. Assuming that the killer had hung it there to put off the discovery of the murder, that had to mean Harlow was already dead by then. And with 4:00 being the earliest possible time of death—Tilton was awfully damn sure of that—the murder had to have happened after 4:00 and before 5:00.

He picked up a molded-glass paperweight that sat on the table as a decoration. Inside was a miniature desert scene with cactuses, a tiny bleached steer skull, and a rail fence. He shook it, and instead of the usual snowstorm effect, there was a swirl of brown particles; a sandstorm. Very Western.

He held the weight in his palm and watched the particles settle. One thing he had no shortage of was motives for wanting to see Jasper dead. Callie wasn’t the only one. As Gideon had told him, they all had similar stories. Jasper had told Les Zenkovich flat out—after three years of graduate work—that he didn’t have the brains to make it as an anthropologist and he’d do better looking for a field that made less stringent intellectual demands on its practitioners. Like Callie, Les had transferred too, and wound up getting his Ph.D. at Indiana with little difficulty.

Miranda Glass had been told much the same thing, also after three or four years under his thumb, but she had lost heart and thrown in the towel on her doctorate. She’d become a big name in museum work, but in this crowd, with only an M.A. to her credit, she was one of the undereducated.

Leland Roach had a different kind of grievance. Although he’d suffered the usual hard time under Jasper, he’d stuck it out and managed to get his degree without having to go elsewhere, and to do it relatively quickly. All the same, he had been unable to get a satisfactory academic appointment for five years. Then he had learned that it was because Jasper had been blackballing him behind his back, smilingly agreeing to serve as a reference whenever Leland had asked, then denouncing his competence, his resourcefulness, his personality, and, at least in one case, his sense of humor. When Leland had dropped Jasper from his list of references, he had quickly landed an assistant professorship at San Diego State, then moved on to the prestigious Colorado Institute of Technology.

All these accounts, Gideon had reminded John, had to be taken with a grain of salt. The sources, after all, were the aggrieved parties themselves, and the tales had been told during various late-night rounds of war stories at one conference or another through the years. But whether accurate in their specifics or not, they left no doubt that there hadn’t been much love lost on Albert Evan Jasper in this group.

Only Nellie Hobert, Jasper’s first student, had gotten through his apprenticeship with his admiration for the old anthropologist intact. Maybe it was because Jasper had been kinder in those days, or maybe it was because Nellie had been the best as well as the first. Either way, Nellie had never, in Gideon’s hearing at least, expressed the hard feelings the others had.

But seen from another angle, it was Nellie who’d had the best reason for wanting him dead. Not out of revenge or bitterness, which had never been high on John’s list of homicidal motives anyway, but from personal ambition, a much more likely incentive. For it had been on the older man’s death that Nellie’s own career had bloomed. He had, as everyone had expected him to, succeeded his mentor as Distinguished Services Professor of Human Biology at Northern New Mexico, as president of the National Society of Forensic Anthropology, and, in effect, as top gun in his field.

So none of them could be ruled out. Not on grounds of motive. Not by a long shot.

He upended the paperweight one more time and set it swirling back on the table. The one bright spot in all this was that nice, tight little time range; one hour, from four to five o’clock Wednesday afternoon. A little checking on who was where at that time was going to narrow things down, speed things up.

And speeding up was in order. Applewhite had given him until Monday, three more days, to do what he could to help Honeywell. After that, the case would be handed back to the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office. John wasn’t going to solve it for them in three days, but it’d be nice to tie things up a little more for Farrell, who would still have another week to go before his sergeant of detectives got back.

He stood up, yawning, and slid his papers into his folder. Jasper’s telephone bill caught his eye again. That unexplained call to Harlow was interesting too, a link between two men murdered a decade apart. He needed to call Julian Minor and pass on what little Callie had told him about it, then let Julian run with it. The guy was amazing. You never knew what he’d turn up.

Mrs. Gelbert, the resort manager, tapped on the doorjamb. “Mr. Lau, telephone. Gideon Oliver. You can take it up front.”

   “Hi, Doc, whatchagot?”

Gideon took the receiver from the crook of his shoulder, where he’d wedged it while pouring himself a cup of coffee and waiting for John to come on the line.

“It checks out, John. It’s Jasper, all right. No surprises this time.”

He had spent the last two hours in the Justice Building’s small conference room, scraping the clay from Jasper’s skull, comparing the dentition against the newly received chart (and x-rays) from Dr. MacFadden, and going over the skeleton as a whole.

“Good,” John said. “I’ve had enough surprises for a while.” “And Nellie’s report is fine, as expected. I agree with everything in it.”

“Glad to hear it. All the same, I’d appreciate it if you’d do one up yourself.”

“Why? It’d say just what his says.”

“Yeah, but we better have it anyway. I mean, what if Honeyman winds up charging him? Is he supposed to use the guy’s own report as evidence? Does he call him as an expert witness to describe those broken neck bones? It wouldn’t work.”

“Okay,” Gideon said resignedly. It would mean getting the bones back out of the evidence room, out of the labeled paper sacks in which he’d put them, laying them out on the table again, and going over them one more time. “I’ll take care of it. I just wish you’d told me before.”

“I wish I’d thought of it before. Thanks, Doc. See you later.”

When Gideon brought the first armful of sacks back to the conference room, he found Nellie sitting at the table dressed relatively conservatively—in full-length trousers and a red T-shirt with nothing written on it but “Go, Broncos!”—and looking subdued.

“I was driving around in the rain, thinking about things,” he said, “and decided to stop in. I thought you might be working on the bones.”

Gideon felt himself flushing. He understood perfectly well why John had wanted him and not Nellie to complete the skeletal analysis, but it didn’t stop him from feeling rotten about it. He had planned to use the drive back to the lodge to think up some way of broaching it tactfully with the older man, but Nellie had beaten him to the punch.

“Uh, Nellie, actually, the reason I’m doing this is—well, I’m sure you know it’s not a question of trust, or of—of competence. I mean, there’s certainly no question, no question at all—”

With a wave of his hand, Nellie put a merciful end to his babbling. “Don’t worry about it. Of course I understand. I’m a potential suspect; how can I have anything to do with the investigation? I approve completely.”

Gideon was happy to see that he gave every sign of meaning it. “Thanks, Nellie.”

“My boy, don’t give it another thought.” He sobered when he looked at the sacks in Gideon’s arms. “Is that Albert?”

“Yes.” Gideon laid them on the table, then looked up sharply. “You mean you agree it’s him now?”

A rare sheepish look dragged Nellie’s features down. “Yes, yes, you were right about it, of course. You all were. It just took a while for me to admit it. I can, on occasion,” he said dryly, “be a wee bit stubborn. Or maybe we’d better make that ‘pigheaded.’ I simply wouldn’t accept having made so colossal an error.”

Gideon was more relieved than he showed. Nellie had seemed more than pigheaded to him; he’d seemed fixated, almost fanatical.