Gideon had been prudently silent throughout. “Well, now, John,” he began as they walked back over the neatly trimmed lawns of the Civic Center toward the parking lot, “that was certainly an instructive example of—”
John cut him off, jabbing the air with a warning finger. “Don’t...say...anything.”
“ARE you planning to tell me where we’re going?” Gideon asked after they’d been driving a while. “At some point?”
“Where we should have gone in the first place,” John muttered, eyes fixed on the highway ahead. “The Kona CIS.” He set his jaw. “And they better be open.”
TEN
THE West Hawaii Criminal Investigation Section was on a side road off the coast highway, in the flat lowland country between Kona and the airport. Its neighborhood was, to put it mildly, unprepossessing. The idea, it seemed, had been to gather up most of the necessary but unlovely community services and deposit them in one out-of-the-way place, where they would be least likely to offend the eyes, ears, and noses of the sensitive: the garbage dump with its huge, surreal pile of wrecked cars waiting to be compacted, the Humane Society holding pens...and the West Hawaii CIS, which doubled as the Kona police station. A trailer and heavy-equipment repair yard and two huge, steaming piles of “organic waste” rounded out the complex, adding their own distinctive touches.
But the police building itself was reassuring: a modern, white, one-story structure, clean and well-maintained, on its own little island of concrete walkways and decorative
plantings.
And it was open.
Even better, the detective they were sent to when John said they wanted to talk about the Torkelsson case turned out to be an old acquaintance. Detective Sergeant Ted Fukida had been a new sergeant in the Honolulu Police Department when John was a young cop there, and he remembered him.
“How could I forget you, Lau?” Fukida said, extending his hand. He was a waspish man in his fifties who looked as if he was fighting a low-grade toothache. “You’re the guy who couldn’t fill out an expense form right if his life depended on it. So how’re you getting along with the Feebies?”
“Still can’t fill out the forms right,” John said. “Other than that, okay.”
“Good-good. So what can I do for you? Please, tell me this is not official Feeb business.”
He was a study in restlessness: flip, talky, and fidgety. At the moment, he was cracking gum between his teeth, bobbing back and forward in his swivel chair, and jiggling a toe against the plastic carpet protector underneath him.
“No, actually, it’s old CIS business,” John told him.
Fukida, they quickly learned, had not been the original case-handler. When the detective who had run the investigation had retired not long after the active phase was over, the case had been given to Fukida to oversee; more or less a pro forma gesture, inasmuch as unresolved homicide cases, while they might well go dormant, were never formally closed. There had been little to oversee, but the workmanlike Fukida had familiarized himself with the case file, which meant that it wasn’t necessary to spend a lot of time bringing him up to snuff. More important, from Gideon’s point of view, since it hadn’t been Fukida’s case during the investigative phase, he had nothing to be self-protective about.
Which didn’t mean that he was going to sit there and accept everything he was told; certainly not on the strength of Gideon’s supposed reputation. (When John had somewhat effusively introduced Gideon as the world- famous Skeleton Detective, his response had been a laconic, gum-cracking, “Yeah, I think I might have heard of him.”) Indeed, when Gideon began by stating—maybe a bit too baldly—that the skeleton in the Grumman was not that of Magnus Torkelsson but of his supposedly murdered brother Torkel, Fukida had interrupted before Gideon had gotten out his first complete sentence.
“What? You’re out of your mind. What is this supposed to be, a joke? We had an autopsy, we took depositions, we had a—how the hell did you come up with a royally screwed-up story like that?”
“There was a royal screw-up, all right,” John told him levelly, “but you guys made it.”
Fukida’s head rolled back and then round and round on his neck. Gideon caught a waft of spearmint.
“All I can say is, you two better have a good reason for wasting my time.”
“It’s all yours, Doc,” John said. “Just wait, Teddy, you’ll love this, this is great.”
Thanks a lot, John, Gideon thought.
“Mmf,” Fukida said, his eyes closed, continuing to stretch his neck muscles.
Gideon was generally good at telling when a cop was going to be open-minded about what forensic anthropology could do and when he was going to dig in his heels and resist, and Fukida didn’t strike him as a promising student. Happily, however, the sergeant proved him wrong, although he was anything but an easy sell. With the foot bones laid out in their anatomical relationship on his desk blotter, he had put Gideon through a detailed show-and-tell drill, interrupting with questions and argument, until he had more or less satisfied himself that the old talus fractures were really there and they meant what Gideon said they did. By the time they were through with it, he seemed a happier, more engaged man, his toothache perhaps gone.
“Okay, I’ll buy it,” he said, handing the talus back to Gideon, who wrapped it in a Kleenex from Fukida’s desk and put it in the box. “I like that. And I like the age stuff. It’s interesting. But you want to know what I don’t get? I don’t get why this has got to be Torkel. Why isn’t it Mag-nus? They both rode horses, right? They were both the same age, right? As far as I can see, it could be either one of them, or am I missing something?”
“Yeah, you’re missing something,” John said. “Maybe if you’d shut up for one minute, Doc here could get to it. You sure haven’t changed, Teddy.”
Gideon expected Fukida to flare up at that, but he laughed instead; a not-unfriendly noise somewhere between a snuffle and a one-note giggle. “Okay, ‘Doc,’ get to it. I’ll try and be quiet. But that’s not a promise.”
“It’s the toes,” Gideon said. “The toes are the clincher.” He pointed to the foot. “The two that go here are missing. The distal phalanges of the second and third toes. They were amputated decades ago, the result of an accident that Torkel had forty years ago. Magnus didn’t have any missing toes.”
