“Oh, it’s been fascinating,” Julie said. “Fausto’s been telling me about the local crime scene. You wouldn’t like it here at all. No forensic work. They don’t have murders.”
“None?” Gideon asked, slipping into a chair. “Why, are they against the law or something?”
“It’s a fact, Gideon,” Fausto said. “Not a single homicide in the last two years. “Not one.”
Almost everything Fausto Sotomayor said came across as a declaration; sometimes a challenge. Although a native Gibraltarian, he carried the ghost of a Spanish accent, a Castilian lisp that his forbears had brought over from the mainland, but there was nothing lilting or musical about it. Besides, he spoke a brusque, slangy American English rather than British (he had lived in New York City with his UN-DIPLOMAT mother during his highly formative teenage years), and he spoke it in crackling, to-the-point sentences. On first meeting him, Gideon, whose ear for accent was usually sharp, had mistakenly taken him for a Puerto Rican New Yorker.
“Statistically, one killing every four, five years. I been here twelve years, only had three. Practically no violent crime at all. Not one case of rape in ten years, how about that? How many international cities you know can say that? There’s just, you know, the date rape thing once in a while.”
Julie wasn’t much of a feminist as feminists went, but this was too much for her. “Oh, just the date rape thing,” she said drily. “Nothing to be concerned about.”
“Come on, you know what I mean. Kids. Alcohol-related. But there aren’t any sleazeballs lurking in the alleys waiting for the sound of high heels. No stranger rape. Women can walk around anywhere, any time of night. Now admit it, that’s damn amazing, considering that thirty thousand people live here. All mixed races and cultures – jeez, we got Arabs, Jews, Catholics, we got Spanish, English, Indians, Italians.. . and we got maybe five thousand transients coming through a day. And still… no place safer.” He rapped his knuckles on the wooden table.
“Amazing. You must do a heck of a job of prevention,” Gideon said honestly.
Fausto jerked his chin in agreement. “You better believe it.”
Fausto Sotomayor had been a newly promoted detective sergeant when he had been sent to the eighth annual International Conference in Science and Detection some years earlier in St. Malo, France, at which Gideon had conducted the forensic anthropology sessions. One of twenty law enforcement people in the class, he had seemed to Gideon on first glance among the least likely to make it as a cop. Independently wealthy, no more than five feet five, quick-moving and quick-talking, rail-thin, with small (even for his size) hands (fingernails buffed and manicured) and feet (toenails buffed and pedicured?), he dressed in silk shirts and trim, expensive, perfectly tailored suits, and exuded a lithe, oddly graceful cockiness – Jimmy Cagney with a Latin accent – that clearly set the teeth of his bigger, slower, less fashion-conscious colleagues on edge.
After a few days, though, his more appealing side came through, at least to Gideon. He was intelligent and straight-talking – in-your-face might be closer to it – and on knowing him a bit better, the bantam rooster cockiness seemed less a reflection of a truly bellicose personality than a matter of comportment, of style, that he’d picked up somewhere along the way. It was, after all, hardly unusual in small men, particularly among those in the “manly” occupations. But underneath it, once you got to know him, Fausto was in fact fun to be around. The trouble was, not many of his fellow attendees had gone to the trouble (and really, why should they have?) of cracking through the flashy, gangsterish style and combative facade to see what was underneath. For that reason alone, Gideon had not predicted much of a future for him in the upper ranks of law enforcement.
And yet here he was, Detective Chief Inspector Sotomayor, a full-fledged DCI, so others had obviously seen something in him too.
They hadn’t ordered their lunches yet, so a couple of minutes were spent perusing the outsized, plastic- coated menus. Fausto ordered curried chicken and rice, Julie, whose appetite hadn’t fully recovered from their huge breakfast, ordered a bowl of gazpacho, and Gideon asked for a ploughman’s lunch and a half pint of ale to go along with the beers the other two already had in front of them.
“So you’ve never had a chance to use any of the forensic material from the course?” he asked when the harried, sweating young waiter had taken their orders and run back to the kitchen.
“No. Well, just once. There was this case, oh, let me see, three, four years ago. There was this girl who’d been missing for a couple of days, and we finally found her, killed in a cave-in down at the south end. It wasn’t my case – I was just an inspector then, but I was helping the DCI who was running it, so I was out there when they dug her out. A mess; all mashed up, bones broken, internal organs exploded, maggots coming out of her – sorry, Julie, hell of a thing to be talking about at lunch.”
Julie laughed. “Are you kidding? Who do you think I’m married to? Go right ahead, don’t give it a thought. Maggots, exploding organs.. . everyday mealtime conversation at the Olivers.”
Fausto shrugged. “Yeah, used to be the same way at my house. Hey, could that be why I’m divorced? Anyway, she had plenty of ID on her, and enough face left so people could identify her, so no need for forensic anthro on that score. But you know what came in handy? Remember that Finnish guy who was there? The bug expert who you couldn’t understand anything he was saying?”
“Professor Wuoronin,” Gideon supplied. “A good entomologist. Knew what he was talking about.”
“Yeah, him. Gave out a ton of material on bugs that feed on corpses, you know, the sacro… the scaro…”
“Sarcosaprophagous insects.”
“Yeah, sarco… yeah, them. So I knew a blowfly maggot when I saw one, and I saw a zillion on her. All between two and three millimeters long, nothing longer, nothing shorter, which meant they were two to three days old, which meant I had myself a reliable time-of -death estimate.”
“A minimum time-of-death estimate,” Gideon reminded him. DCI or not, Fausto was still an old student and Gideon could get away with correcting him. Indeed, as Gideon saw it, he was morally obligated to do so. “The cave-in couldn’t have occurred any later than two to three days before… but it could have happened earlier. You can’t be sure of exactly when the flies laid their eggs.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, I know, but everything came together. Some passengers on the Morocco ferry, they saw the cave-in happen, so we knew exactly when it was. Two days before we dug her out.”
“But then you really didn’t need the estimate based on the maggots, ” Julie said. “Or am I missing something?”
“Okay, all right, you’re right,” a grudging Fausto admitted. “It was strictly corroborative. Jeez, what a purist.” He grinned. “But it was fun, you know?”
“Mmm, I bet,” Julie said. “Sure sounds like fun. Measuring maggots. ”
Their meals came. The waiter brushed away a few hovering black flies that had touched down on the food. The flies moved off but floated nearby in slow, hanging circles. They seemed to be a general nuisance on the patio. Other diners were brushing at their food and their faces.
Julie made a face. “Um… would those be blowflies?”
“Nope,” Gideon said. “Black flies.”
“They don’t feed on corpses?”
He shook his head and began on his ploughman’s lunch, tucking ham, relish, and cucumber into a partially sliced-through hunk of baguette to turn it into a sandwich. “They do not.”
“What do they feed on, then? No, wait, I don’t want to know.”
“A wise decision,” Gideon said, biting in. “Mmm, good.”
Fausto had tucked his napkin into the collar of his shirt – he was still a sharp dresser: mauve shirt, green tie, slick-looking olive brown suit – and was shoveling in chicken and rice, daintily but effectively. Julie was dabbing a spoon into her gazpacho, deciding whether or not she was really hungry at all.
“Fausto,” Gideon said, “this would be Sheila Chan we’ve been talking about, wouldn’t it? And the Europa Point cave.”
Fausto blinked. “Now how the hell would you know – oh, that’s right, she was one of you people. She was here for the meeting they had back then. Did you know her?”
“No, just by e-mail.” Gideon hesitated. “Was there anything suspicious about her death?”
Julie looked inquisitively at him over the rim of her glass. Fausto paused in lifting a forkful of rice to his mouth. “Why would you ask that?”
“Just some things that have been happening. Was there?”
“Anything suspicious?” He shook his head. “No. All cut and dried, everything kosher. Why?” he asked again.
“Fausto, did you ever hear of anyone getting pushed off the top of the Rock by one of the Barbary apes?”
