Fausto had returned to Ivan. “Boyd was able to give us a bunch of contacts that might turn up something. Gunderson’s solicitor, his housekeeper…”
Whatever was nagging at him necessarily had to be in the context of either what Fausto had told him during lunch at the Angry Friar the day before, or what he’d heard from Pru and Corbin at the testimonial dinner the night before that – because that was all he’d ever heard about the cave-in and Sheila; that was his entire context, but it had been enough to set his antennae quivering when he saw the actual site, the actual dirt of the landslide. Both conversations together couldn’t have totaled more than fifteen minutes. How hard could fifteen minutes be to reconstruct? Start with Fausto. Fausto had told them – Julie and Gideon – that he had been on the scene when she’d been dug out, that she’d been much crushed in the slide, that the maggots found on her indicated a time of death two to three days earlier, that some passengers on the Morocco ferry had seen “The maggots!” he cried, practically jumping out of his chair.
Fausto, caught in mid-sentence, blinked. “The what?”
“The maggots, the maggots!” Gideon repeated, and this time he did jump out of his chair, waving his arms and striding excitedly around the room. “The maggots!” he exclaimed yet again. “How could I miss it? Where was my mind?” He whacked himself in the forehead, much as Kazimir Figlewski had that morning, but harder than he’d meant to. “Ow!”
Fausto calmly watched this extraordinary performance from his chair. “So are you planning to let me in on this brainstorm anytime soon?”
Gideon returned to the desk and leaned over it, supporting himself with both hands. “Fausto, she was murdered,” he said intently. “She-”
Fausto threw up his hands. “Oh, hey, give me a break, will you? Give it a rest already. We got this great record of one murder every five years, and you show up, and in one day you’re telling me about two murders that we never noticed? What, I don’t have enough on my plate? I’m telling you, if you’d been around these last five years I’d have had a homicide every other day. I mean, what is it with you? Every time you look at somebody dead, you-”
“Fausto, shut up and listen. She was not killed in the landslide. She was already dead when it happened. The cave-in was a cover. Like the fire was a cover for Ivan.”
“You see? Right there – that’s what I mean,” Fausto said with a pained expression. “For you, any time there’s a-” He sighed. “Okay, all right, I know you’re gonna turn out to be right. Just give me a minute to get used to it. I’m just, what do you call it, venting.” He sat there shaking his head, then laughed, a mixture of incredulity and amusement, and followed it with one more sigh. “All right, I think I can stand it now. Let’s hear it. Tell me, why was she not killed in the cave-in?”
EIGHTEEN
She wasn’t killed in the cave-in, Gideon explained, because if she’d been killed in the cave-in there wouldn’t have been any maggots.
“No maggots,” Fausto said dully. “Uh-huh.”
“No maggots,” Gideon repeated. “Look, maggots are the larvae of flies-”
“I know that.”
“-which hatch from the eggs that the flies lay on dead things-”
“I know, I know. Jesus, Gideon, tell me something I don’t know.”
“Well, what you obviously don’t know is that flies do not lay eggs on dead things when they’re covered by three, or four, or five feet of earth. You don’t find maggots on people buried by landslides. How would the flies reach them?” He waited for that to sink in.
“Oh. I never thought of that,” Fausto said quietly.
“Well, why should you? But I should have thought of it the minute
… damn, how could I miss that?” He raised his hand for another crack at his own forehead, but thought better of it.
Fausto scowled up at him. “So this means…?”
“This means that Sheila Chan spent some time aboveground between the time she died and the time the cave-in buried her.”
“You mean she laid around dead for two days? Those maggots were two days old.”
“No, no, no. Just long enough for the flies to get to her and lay their eggs. Once they did that in the open air, where they could get to her, the maggots would be able to survive underground.”
“How long would that take? For the flies to get to her and lay their eggs?”
“No way to tell, but not very long. Maybe five minutes. In a climate like this, almost certainly inside of a couple of hours.”
“So you’re saying she was killed somewhere else,” Fausto mused, “then brought out to the cave, and buried under the cave-in?”
“Not necessarily.” Gideon dropped into his chair again, quieter and more reflective now. “Corbin and Pru told me she’d been hanging around the site even though she wasn’t supposed to.”
“That’s true.”
“Okay. I think we can assume everybody knew it, so my guess would be that someone got to her right there, that she was killed right where she was found, and then they triggered the cave-in to cover her. That’d be a lot simpler and lot safer than carting a dead body around in a car.”
Fausto nodded. “Yeah, I guess.”
“This cave-in business, though… I’m out of my element here. Is it really that simple to trigger something like that? How would you do it, dynamite?”
“Dynamite, gelignite, something like that. And the cliff was unstable to begin with, from all the rain we had. So I’d say it wouldn’t have been that hard, no.”
“Can you just buy explosives in Gibraltar, or do you need to get a license or something? What I’m wondering is, could there be a record of who bought any around that time?”
“Well, yeah, you need a license, but you have to be a construction or demolition company to get one. If I remember right, there are only two companies that have them. I can check that angle out. Problem is, if the guy had any brains, he’d have skipped the license thing and sneaked the stuff in from Spain, or even better, Africa. If I were him, that’s what I would have done. I love my country, but I have to say we’re about the easiest place in the world to smuggle anything into. Or out of. But don’t get me started on that.”
Gideon leaned back in his chair. “Fill me in on the case, will you, Fausto? When did you know she was missing? What made you check out the cave? Do you know if she had any-”
“Whoa. I told you, I was just helping out. It wasn’t my case, so I don’t have all the details in my head.”
“Well, can we talk to the guy whose case it was?”
“Sure, if you want to go to the Falklands. But we ought to be able to get what information there is right here.” He picked up the telephone. “Conrad, I need the file on Sheila Chan. It’ll be in the dead files. Thanks.”
He hung up and rotated his chair to face Gideon. “I can give you the general picture while we’re waiting, though.”
The call to the police had come from Corbin. Sheila had been scheduled to present a major paper at the conference, but she had failed to show up for it. Moreover, no one seemed to have seen her since the morning of the day before. Concerned, Corbin had already checked with the desk at the Eliott Hotel, where she’d been staying, and had learned that her room hadn’t been slept in the previous night and no meals had been charged to her account since breakfast on the morning of the day before.
The police had taken it seriously, and in conducting their interviews, it hadn’t taken them long to put together two highly pertinent facts: (a) the cave-in at Europa Point had occurred exactly two days earlier, only a few hours after anyone had last seen Sheila, and (b) despite the clearly posted warnings, she had been spending a lot of time at the risky site. Guessing that she might have been caught in the slide, and hoping that she might be alive under the rubble, they had quickly mobilized an emergency rescue squad to dig for her. And after four hours of burrowing holes in the dirt, they had uncovered those shrunken, reaching fingertips.
