While Julie went off to make a prearranged courtesy call on the head naturalist of the Upper Rock Nature Preserve, Gideon walked down to police headquarters at New Mole House. He found the DCI waiting for him, seated behind his desk in his usual office uniform – an immaculate silk dress shirt (plum colored this time) with the cuffs neatly folded over his forearms, and a tie (blue-gray) that must have been carefully chosen to match. A few forms were spread out before him.
“You know an archaeologist named de la Garza?” he asked without looking up.
“Good morning to you too,” Gideon said, sitting down across the desk. “Esteban de la Garza? Yes, I do. A prof at the University of Cadiz.”
“Correct. Well, he’s not up there at the Cadiz campus, though. They’ve got a branch down here at Algeciras, right across the bay – la Escuela Politecnica Superior – which is where their archaeology department is.”
“Is that so? That’s very interesting. And why are you telling me all this?”
Fausto slid one of the forms across the desk to him. “Check out the last two lines.”
The form was from the Eliott Hotel, a list of Sheila Chan’s outgoing phone calls. Gideon scanned down to the bottom of the page.
21/08/05 08:37 AM 34 95 663 05 72 Algcrs Sp 01 minutes 21/08/05 09:50 AM 34 95 663 05 72 Algcrs Sp 11 minutes
“Uh-huh. And this tells me…?”
“This tells you that what we believe were the last two phone calls Chan ever made were to your pal de la Garza. I was hoping you might have some idea why.”
“Nope, not a clue.”
“Do you know what his connection to Chan was? Was she ever a student of his or something?”
“Not that I know of. She was at Cal. But maybe she was, I don’t know. Look, why ask me about it? Why don’t you just give him a call?”
“Ooh, hey, what a great idea. Duh. I did call him, but it’s his office number, and the school wouldn’t give us his home number, and he doesn’t get in today till eleven thirty. He’s supposed to call then. I just thought it’d be helpful if there was something you knew about it.”
“Sorry, there isn’t. Well, I do know her dissertation was on Iberian Paleolithic skeletal anomalies. I was helping her. Maybe he was working on it with her too.”
“Yeah, maybe.” He took the sheet back and stared at it for a moment, receding into his own thoughts, then yawned and looked back up at Gideon. “So what are you doing here, anyway?”
“We had a meeting at ten. One of your people called.”
“A meeting about what?”
“Good question. He said be here, and here I am. I always do what the police tell me.”
“Yeah, right,” Fausto said. “Well, it beats me.” He clasped his hands behind his neck and leaned back with another yawn, his swivel chair creaking. “What the hell, what’s new?”
“Actually, there’s been another development you probably ought to know about. Somebody broke into my room last night.”
Fausto’s hands unclasped. The chair snapped forward. “I probably ought to know about?” He raised his eyes heavenward. “Jesus Christ, I don’t believe this. Somebody breaks into your room and you don’t run for the phone and call the cops first thing? After all that’s been happening?”
“Well, it was almost two in the morning by the time we found out, and nothing was taken, and everybody’s fingerprints were already in the room, and their DNA for that matter, so-”
“Okay.” He sighed. “Save it, tell me later. What were they after, do you know?”
“Oh, yes, this.” He placed the bag on Fausto’s desk. “The little vase that Rosie made out of those ‘plaster’ vertebrae. She dropped it off at the hotel last night.”
“Why would anyone be interested enough in a couple of plaster-”
“Turns out they weren’t plaster, Fausto. The top one was, but the bottom one was real.”
Fausto stared at him. “The bottom one was…?”
Fifteen minutes later, as Gideon was winding up his explanation, the phone buzzed. Fausto picked it up and listened. “Okay, tell him I’m on my way. Now I remember why I wanted you to be here,” he said to Gideon as he hung up. “It’s Orton, the dynamite guy. He said he’d have something for us by ten, and I figured you’d want to hear it from the horse’s mouth. He was supposed to come here, but now he says he wants us out at the Point. He wants to show us something.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, what are we talking about here? What dynamite guy?”
“Didn’t I mention it?” Fausto was inserting his cuff links. “Ted Orton is from FSS – the Forensic Service Lab in London. He’s checking over the Europa Point site for signs of dynamiting.”
“And he’s already here? He already has a report to make?”
“Yeah, sure, I called him yesterday, right after you told me about the maggots.”
“Did you, really? I wasn’t sure how seriously you took me. I wasn’t sure if you believed me.”
“Hey, man, you wound me. I always believe what you say. Anyway, he was here by four o’clock; it’s less than a three-hour flight. He spent maybe two hours at the Point yesterday, till it started getting dark, and eight o’clock this morning he calls to say he got some interesting results.” He shrugged into his jacket and shot his cuffs. “So? You coming or not?”
“I’m coming,” Gideon said.
Ted Orton was a gangling, horse-faced man in his late forties, wearing crisply ironed jeans, blindingly white tennis shoes, and a new “Rock of Gibraltar” sweatshirt with a picture of a Barbary ape mother and infant on it. Having led them down to a sunlit, windy spot atop the ridge of earth that had buried the Europa Point cave – in fact, no more than a dozen feet directly above the hole from which Sheila’s body had been dug out – he knelt down and yanked on a foot-long length of thin, orange tubing, made of plastic or rubber, that disappeared into the earth at his feet. “Anybody have any idea what it is?”
Fausto and Gideon, hunkered down beside him, shook their heads. “Nope,” Fausto said. “What is it?”
“It’s just what I’ve been hunting for,” Orton told them. “If it’s proof of an explosion you’re looking for, you couldn’t ask for anything better than this.” He was practically bursting with pride at having discovered something important, a feeling Gideon understood very well.
“So you’re saying somebody did trigger the landslide?” Gideon asked. “You’re positive?”
“Completely.”
Fausto fingered the tubing doubtfully. “What’s it supposed to be, some kind of fuse? No, wait, it can’t be a fuse. If it was a fuse, it’d be burned away. It wouldn’t be there anymore.”
“Correct, Chief Inspector, it would not. But the fact of the matter is, fuses are not much in use nowadays. Too unpredictable, too inconsistent. This-” He gave it another tug. “-is a piece of what is called a ‘shock tube.’ Made of plastic. It serves the same function as a fuse, but is far more reliable and infinitely faster. The inside of it, you see, is generally coated with a thin layer of HMX explosive mixed with something along the order of ten percent powdered aluminum. This makes a highly sensitive but low-power detonating medium. It would likely have been set off with some small, handheld device – a percussion primer, an electric match – by a person standing somewhere nearby, but well out of danger – unless of course, he was somewhat lacking in intellect. Once it was set off, the detonation would have raced along this tubing for a hundred, two hundred feet, perhaps even more, at the end of which it would have detonated a blasting cap, which would in turn have set off the terminal high-explosive charge – oh, dynamite, gelignite, ammonium nitrate, something along those lines – the result being-”
“So if it acted like a fuse, how come it didn’t burn up?” Fausto interrupted. “Like a fuse.”
“Oh, the layer of powder on the inside is extremely thin, and the detonation, as I said, literally races along the inside of the tube – at over a mile a second – so the powder is consumed, while the tube is unharmed.”
“Uh-huh. So where’s the rest of it supposed to be?”
“Down there,” Ted said, gesturing at the dirt, “however much was left of it after the explosion. I hope you didn’t expect me to dig it out. That’s not part of my contract. I just do the brain work, not the muscle work.”
“No, I mean where’s the rest of it up here?” What, the bomber took it with him? That’s what you’re assuming?”
“That would be my assumption, yes,” Orton said. If his feelings were hurt because he’d expected congratulations from Fausto, not skepticism, he wasn’t showing it. But then, maybe he already knew Fausto.
