Dead Men's Hearts

Gideon leaned forward, palms on the table. “Last Sunday night, to be specific.”

“Last Sunday night?” Phil scowled at him. “But that’s when they found it!”

“That’s right. I think the numbers were put on after they found it, after they called the police. I think somebody came back in the middle of the night and did it.”

“You know, you’re starting to sound like—”

“I know who I sound like.”

Clifford Haddon, on the last evening of his life, the evening before someone murdered him. Babbling about people sneaking back into the enclosure in the dark of the moon, sneaking furtively back to make off with a yellow jasper Amarna head that he and only he had seen. Well, maybe he had seen something —despite there being no evidence of such a head in the collection—and maybe whoever had skulked off with the head had first skulked around inside the enclosure long enough to write those numbers on the bones. And then maybe he’d skulked back to the annex to get rid of the real 4360 by putting the bones in a bag and going out to the old dump site with them—

“Help, wait, you’re losing me,” Phil said. “Why would he bury the real one?”

“Why? So that the next morning in the enclosure, when everybody saw those surprising numbers on the bones and ran back to the annex to check, they’d find, what do you know, that the box that they belonged in was really empty. So in went the supposedly traveling remains of 4360, and that was that. Everything accounted for, no more embarrassing questions about the skeleton in the enclosure, no loose ends, case closed.”

“No, wait, that can’t be. There must be an inventory of the individual bones that are supposed to be in each storage box, so they’d know if they didn’t match… they wouldn’t?”

“They wouldn’t. No inventory. We’re talking about the late, unlamented golden age of Egyptology here. Flinders Petrie’s influence was yet to be felt at Horizon House.”

Phil, wandering contemplatively around the room, found an old, wheeled office chair, sank into it, and shoved himself up against the wall with his feet. “Whew. Is this the kind of thing you usually do for a living?”

“No,” Gideon said. “Thank God.”

“Gideon, you realize what you’re implying, don’t you? If it really happened last Sunday—”

“It pretty much had to, Phil. Everything about this says it was a rush job. Whoever did it was under heavy time pressure. And he couldn’t just come back during the night and get rid of those bones because they’d already been seen by Haddon and the others, right? It would raise all kinds of questions. So he came up with this wild scheme to thoroughly confuse the issue.”

“Which he has, with enormous success.”

“Whereas if he’d had some time at his disposal he wouldn’t have had to go through this complicated rigmarole, he could have come back and gotten rid of the skeleton in the enclosure anytime, long before it was found. He could have carted it off and dumped it in the Nile or buried it fifty miles from here, out in the desert somewhere.”

“Why didn’t he, then? If what you’re saying is so, they’d been lying there for years.”

It was a good question. “Beats me,” Gideon said. He sat on a corner of the table, arms folded. “But obviously he didn’t.”

Phil was tipped back in the pivoting chair, hands behind his head, leaning against the wall. “Well, if you’re right about it, it means it had to be one of the people who went out to look at them the night before: TJ, Jerry, or Arlo.”

“Or Haddon himself, if we want to cover all the bases, or Ragheb—”

“True, but let’s try to keep this reasonably realistic,” Phil said. “Arlo, Jerry, and TJ—no, not Jerry. If he buried those bones he’d hardly have gone ahead and had them dug back up.”

“But that digging was going on because Haddon ordered it,” Gideon said. “Conceivably, Jerry figured the best thing to do was to let it go on so he didn’t call attention to himself.”‘

“That could be,” Phil agreed. “So: Arlo, TJ, and Jerry.” He mulled this over.

“Yes, I guess so,” Gideon said. He gave the matter some thought too, staring abstractedly out the windows. The room faced the back of the compound, away from the shaded paths, away from the city. He looked out at desert and the shimmer of heat. In the far corner of the compound the backhoe was still at work, with Jerry supervising from under a table umbrella. Beyond the compound fence, a few miles farther off, mirages shimmered like pools of quicksilver in the hollows of the brown hills.

“But right now,” Gideon said at last, “what I’d love to know is who these bones belonged to. It has to be someone who disappeared in the time span we’re talking about—the last three, four, five years. There have to be missing-persons records at the police department. I wonder if—”

“Why is it so important to know who it is? What’s that going to tell you?”

“I was thinking it might provide a lead on who murdered him,” Gideon said. “Which might provide a lead on who murdered Haddon.”

Phil came away from the wall. “Hold on a minute. Now you’re telling me this guy was murdered too?”

“It’s starting to look like it.”

“I thought you said he died from a fall,” Phil said reproachfully. “Everybody seems to be under the impression that’s what you said last week.”

“That’s what I still say. He’s got exactly the kind of linear fracture you expect from a relatively low-velocity impact against pavement or tiles. Not a twenty-foot tumble like Haddon, just a simple, ground-level fall.”

“So what’s so sinister about a simple, ground-level fall? Why did someone have to kill him? People trip over things, you know.”