John looked up from his hamburger. “Eight?'
'Two of them are dead. Jasper, of course, and Ned Ortiz from USC.'
John went back to the hamburger. “Yeah, well, I think I better concentrate on the live ones. Dead guys are tough to get anything out of.'
'But Jasper's the only one with any kind of a real connection to Salish. The others didn't even know him before the meeting. And Jasper left suddenly, without telling anybody. Doesn't that make him worth checking out? If —'
He stopped abruptly. If he'd heard himself right, he had as much as suggested that the late, great Albert Evan Jasper was a murderer. And that really was overdoing it. “I mean,” he finished lamely, “I thought that was the way the police mind worked.'
'That's the way the police mind works, all right,” John said. “All I have to figure out is how you check out a cigar box worth of burned bones.'
'If you can find them,” Julie said. “Nobody seems to know where they are at the moment.'
She had said it casually, but her expression suddenly changed. She put down her sandwich and spoke quietly. “There's got to he a connection there.'
John was studying her. “Well, now, that's something to think about.'
Gideon considered the idea. “No, how could there be a connection? We're getting our causal sequence backwards. Jasper's bones disappeared Sunday night. The skeleton didn't even turn up until this morning—two days later. And Chuck Salish's name didn't come into the picture until just a few hours ago.'
'Yeah, I know,” John said slowly. “Far be it from me to argue with causal sequence, Doc, but I think Julie's got something there.'
She smiled at him. “Why, thank you, John.'
And maybe she did. Julie had a way of spotting connections that other people missed. it had happened enough times before.
'There might be something else worth thinking about, John,” Gideon said heavily. He might as well get it out. “I know Nellie fairly well by now, and I get the impression he's holding something back.'
'Huh? Twenty minutes ago you were vouching for him.'
'I'm still vouching for him. I don't think he's killed anybody, I just think he's—look, Honeyman asked him if everybody got along at the 1981 meeting, and he said yes, but I got the feeling that he was—well, holding something back.'
'What makes you think so?'
Gideon shrugged. “It was just in the air. A feeling. You'd have to know him.'
John looked understandably doubtful.
Gideon banged his mug down, suddenly nettled. “Look, John, I'm just telling you the impression I got. If you want to follow it up, fine. If you don't want to follow it up, fine. All right?'
John glanced at Julie. “What's with him?'
'Nothing's with me. Come on, let's get out of here.” He swiped irritably at the check and turned it over. “Twenty-six dollars.'
John looked at Julie. “Did I say something to make him mad, or did you say something to make him mad?'
'Oh, he's not mad at us,” Julie said, and then looked at Gideon with a smile. “He's feeling like a rat, that's all. These people are his friends, and he feels like a traitor to his own kind. We're just getting the brunt of it.” She touched the back of Gideon's hand. “Not that I'd want you any other way.'
Gideon reacted with silence and mixed feelings. It was damned irritating to have someone who knew what you were feeling before you did. On the other hand, if you were going to feel like a rat anyway, it was nice to have Julie there to understand.
'That's about it,” he said gruffly, and squeezed her hand in return.
On the short drive back to the lodge, John chuckled to himself in the back seat. “Hey, guess what Applewhite said when I talked to him about this on the telephone.'
Gideon thought for a second. “He said: ‘I bet that sonofabitch Gideon Oliver is mixed up in this somewhere.—
John grinned. “You got it. Or words to that effect.'
* * * *
The evening session was held in Whitebark Lodge's meeting room, where the folding tables had been stowed along the walls and the seats arranged auditorium-style. Once at the lectern and into his subject, Nellie recovered all of his customary verve. His description of the skeleton was precise and dramatic, his account of the cause-of- death analysis—for which he gave Gideon generous credit—was detailed and suspenseful, if not altogether accurate in its minor points. ('Gideon looked at me. I looked at Gideon. What, we wondered, could have caused these bewildering little fractures? Our eyes met above that small, puzzling vertebra. ‘Garrote,’ we both whispered at the same time, as the grim implications...')
His audience, so engrossed that they forgot to fidget on the uncomfortable folding chairs, consisted of the forty-some-odd anthropologists and students. The spouses, et al., had long ago had their fill of the new skeleton and had found other things to do, as was attested by the clacking of Ping-Pong balls and bleeping of video games from the recreation room next door. The only “outsiders” at the session were Julie and John, sitting with Gideon in a row of seats placed along one of the walls, and Frieda Hobert, occupying pride of place on the aisle in the first row.
The news about Chuck Salish created the expected stir, and when it was noticed that John was in the room, there was a flurry of questions: “Did the police think it was Salish?” “Was there any idea as to the motive for the
