Skeleton Dance

Joly picked up the metacarpal and studied it again, silently shaking his head.

'I hope you'll put that someplace safer than Marielle's back room,” Gideon said. “Safer than the St.-Cyprien morgue too.'

Joly nodded. “These will go to Perigueux with me this afternoon.” He wrapped the metacarpal in a paper napkin, put it carefully in the folder with the rest of the fragments, and rewound the string around the grommets, then continued to sit there, motionless and contemplative. “So then, what happened to the plane?” he murmured at last.

'What do you mean, what happened to it?'

'Where is it?'

'Well—what you said. The pilot probably landed it in some farmer's field in the dark.'

'And then what? Where is it now?'

'Who knows? Gotten rid of some way or another. Maybe it really was ditched in the ocean to get rid of it.'

'A $150,000 airplane? I think not.'

'All right, the black market, then. What difference does it make?'

'Perhaps none. Still . . .” He sank into another long, heavy silence, emerging to mutter: “Did we have it backwards then? Was it Bousquet who killed Carpenter, and not the other way around?'

'Maybe, but I don't see why you want to limit it to Bousquet.'

'Yes, you're right about that,” Joly agreed. “All right, whom would you suggest?'

'Well, remember, this thing happened while feelings about the Tayac hoax were still running pretty high. There was a lot of tension in the air, a lot of anger and recrimination.'

With his eyebrows lifted, Joly studied him. “You think he was killed over the hoax, then.'

'No, not necessarily over it. I'm just suggesting that there's a link between the two.'

'And your basis?'

'Look, murders and hoaxes aren't exactly everyday occurrences, and here they are happening at the same time, in the same little town, involving the same people. The probability of their being two completely separate, completely unrelated incidents seems pretty remote to me. There has to be a connection.'

The unlit cigarette that Joly had been playing with finally came apart in his fingers. He made an annoyed clicking sound, tongue against teeth, and scooped the tobacco into an ashtray, automatically taking another Gitane from the pack, but not lighting that one either.

'Non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem,” he intoned in bishoplike cadence.

Gideon couldn't help laughing. Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. In other words, always choose the simplest explanation that fits the facts. Occam's Razor, the law of parsimony. What made it funny was that he knew exactly where Joly had gotten it—from Gideon himself at the forensic seminar he'd conducted in St. Malo.

'Well, what do I know, Lucien,” he said good-naturedly, “I'm just the guy who looks at the bones.'

'The bones,” Joly repeated, shaking his head slowly back and forth. “Cowboy thumb,” he muttered, his tone somewhere between wonder and reproach. “The things you tell me.'

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Chapter 17

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Situated in a pleasant, wooded valley lined by low cliffs, Prehistoparc wasn't nearly as bad as Gideon had feared; neither seedy nor phony-baloney, although there was a definite Disney World feel to it. One paid an admission fee and then walked along a footpath that meandered through the natural forest, where two dozen life- sized, extensively labeled groupings of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon men and women going about their lives were artfully placed. The Neanderthals were perhaps a little exaggeratedly brutish-looking and the Cro-Magnons were maybe a tad over-clean and refined for people who lived in muddy rockshelters and wore animal skins, but on the whole the displays were interesting and within the bounds of scientific knowledge.

'So what's your opinion, Gideon?” Julie asked after he had filled her in on the day's bizarre developments while they strolled between the exhibits. “Did we all have it backwards? Was it Bousquet who killed Carpenter and not the other way around?'

'Maybe, but there are other possibilities.” He stepped aside to let a couple of French kids waving rubber “Neanderthal” axes bought in the gift shop romp by hooting Plains Indian war whoops out of North Dakota by way of Warner Brothers.

'All we know for certain,” he said, getting back on the path, “is that it's Ely Carpenter, not Bousquet, who's dead. But who killed him—that's anybody's guess. Just because he had problems with Bousquet doesn't mean he didn't have them with somebody else.'

'Somebody else at the institute, you mean.'

'Well . . . yes. I didn't want to think so at first, but there's sure something funny going on. It's not just that everybody's playing it so cagey and close to the vest—well, everyone except Emile, who may just have his own axe to grind. There's also the theft of the bones from the morgue in St.-Cyprien, what about that? We assumed it was to keep me from identifying the skeleton as Bousquet's—which might conceivably have implicated Ely—but now we