Where There's a Will

happened—that Magnus wasn’t Magnus and Torkel wasn’t Torkel—then why would they ask me to look at the autopsy report? Why did they ask me to go out to Maravovo Atoll and check the plane in the first place? They’d have to be crazy to take chances like that. There was no reason they had to do that. They could have just let the salvage company bring the bones back, buried them, and left me out of it. None of this would have come up.”

“Yeah, but ...well, maybe they...” John sagged against his seat. “My head hurts.”

“John, what do you say we forget about going up to see Axel? What do you say we turn the truck around and go back and talk to Fukida again? Tell him what we’ve been talking about, see what he thinks.”

“Dump it in his lap, you mean.”

“Absolutely. It’s his baby, not ours.”

Now John hedged. “All the way back to Kona? It’s not like we have anything definite here, Doc. There might be a simple explanation for everything. We might be stirring up a lot of trouble for everybody for no good reason. These are good people, basically.” He scowled down at his hands. “I think these are good people.”

“Well, you’re the cop. I’ll leave it up to you. If you just want to drop the whole thing—”

“Nah,” John said wearily, “you know better than that.

Okay, let’s go. Imagine how happy Teddy’ll be to see us again.”

SERGEANT Fukida looked anything but happy. From across his desk, he eyed them with the wary expression of the barnyard rooster looking at a couple of smiling foxes come calling. He was wearing two rubber bands on his wrist now, wide ones, and was snapping them both with a forceful little twist of the thumb. That’s got to hurt, Gideon thought. His baseball cap was still on, but no longer backward.

“I knew you guys would be back,” Fukida said. “I could feel it in my bones. I just didn’t think it would be today.”

“This is serious, Teddy,” John said. “There are some problems.”

Fukida heaved a colossal sigh. “Okay, let’s hear ’em.”

The possibility that Torkel himself had set the hay barn fire to obscure his escape left him unconcerned and impatient (“You came back to tell me this?”), but the question of why no one had brought up the ring after Gideon had identified the body in the plane as Torkel’s did catch his interest, and for few minutes they tossed possibilities back and forth. It didn’t take long to narrow the likely explanations down to one: When the Torkelssons had learned that Gideon knew the body in Maravovo Lagoon was Torkel’s, they realized that mention of the ring would make it clear that the confusion of identities had not been accidental, but purposeful; that Torkel had left his ring on Magnus’s body in a deliberate, premeditated attempt to mislead the police.

And if they were afraid of bringing that out, didn’t it mean that they’d been aware of the switch from the beginning? That they’d known all along that Torkel had actually outlived Magnus? That they had kept it to themselves because they much preferred their lives under the provisions of Magnus’s generous will? (And who wouldn’t?) If Torkel’s will had gone into effect instead, the great bulk of the estate would have gone to the Swedish Seamen’s Home.

Why they would have asked Gideon to look at the remains in the plane was still an unanswered question, but that didn’t change the rest of it.

“And if it’s all true,” a glum-looking John mused, “then they’re guilty of collusion to commit fraud for monetary gain.”

“Even your friend Axel?” Gideon asked after a moment.

John rubbed his forehead and ran his fingers through his hair. “Whew, that’s pretty hard to believe.” But the cop in him came through. “I’m not ruling it out, though.”

“They did more than that,” Fukida said. He held out a pack of spearmint gum. When they shook their heads, he folded over two sticks, inserted them into his mouth, chawed them down to a single manageable bolus, and continued. “If they knew all along that Torkel got away and they’ve been covering for him all this time, then they’ve participated in”—he began counting off on his fingers— “one, falsification of public records; two, providing false information to the police; three, identity theft. And if Torkel set the fire and they knew about it and didn’t say anything, then there’s insurance fraud, too. And if they knowingly accepted property that should have gone to the Seamen’s Home, that’s not just fraud, that’s theft.”

“This is really getting ugly,” John mumbled. “Are you going to reopen the case?”

There followed a period of gum-cracking, band-snapping, and general chair-jiggling while Fukida thought it through. “Wouldn’t you?” he asked.

John shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess so.”

“Well, so would I. I’ll have to talk to the lieutenant, but I don’t think there’s much doubt. At least it’s worth stirring things up. Maybe not a full-scale, official investigation at this point, no, but a look. Really sit down with the files, re-interview these characters...”

“What about the statutes of limitation?” Gideon asked. “With ten years gone by, are any of those things still prosecutable?”

“Who knows?” Fukida brushed the question aside and leaned forward in his chair. “I don’t give a damn about fraud or identity theft, not from ten years ago. But if those people helped Torkel switch identities—if they knowingly participated in that faked ID—thereby misleading the police, then they just might be criminally responsible, at least as accessories after the fact, to Magnus’s murder. That’s worth looking at—and no statute of limitation to worry about.”

“Murder?” John exploded. “Come on, Teddy, get real. You’re stretching the hell out of—”

Fukida out-yelled him—not an easy thing to do. “They are also criminally responsible for making the Kona CIS look like a bunch of incompetent assholes, and laughing aboutitallthewaytothebank!”Thedeclarationwasshouted into a vault of silence. The hum of conversation from other cubicles and desks had stopped entirely. Everyone was listening in. Everyone could hardly help it, Gideon thought.