Gideon, now down on his knees, had been peering at the end of the tube while they’d been talking. “Ted, it looks to me as if the end here has been cleanly cut, not torn apart by an explosion. Why would that be?”
“Yes, you’re quite right. Would you like to hear my scenario?”
“We’d love to hear your scenario,” Fausto said.
The three men stood up, to the accompaniment of a creaking of middle-aged knees. A gust of wind off the Strait brought an unexpected whiff of fragrance – a spice of some kind, coriander, caraway – perhaps from the freighter off in the distance, perhaps all the way from Morocco.
“I envision your bomber in a safe place – up there somewhere, or maybe a little off to the side,” said Orton a little dreamily, “setting off his bomb from his end of the shock tube. He assumes that after the explosion, it’ll be a simple matter for him to reel it in and take the evidence away with him. But ten or twenty feet at this end get caught in the huge mud slide he’s created and he’s unable to pull it out. So, in something of an understandable hurry, he cuts the tube at the point where it enters the mud, thinks no one will ever find the rest of it in any case, and makes good his escape. Two years go by, during which a certain amount of erosion takes place, revealing a foot or two of the tubing lying on the newly exposed surface, at which point I enter the picture and discover it. End of scenario. How does that strike you?”
“Pretty good,” Fausto allowed. “Not bad.”
“One thing bothers me,” Gideon said. “This ‘thinks no one will ever find the rest of it’ part. Ted, all of our suspects are pretty bright people. They’d take something like erosion into account. It’s hard to imagine they’d just assume nobody would ever find it, and let it go at that. You found it, after all.”
“That’s so, but only because suspicions had already been raised. I was searching for it, and I knew what I was looking for. But finding it is very different from merely seeing it. Let’s take you, for example. You’re an intelligent person, a famous paleontologist, as I understand it-”
Gideon was used to this and let it pass.
“-and let’s say you were prowling around the slide area hunting for some old bones or whatever, and you came upon this, sticking out of the ground. What would you make of it?”
Gideon looked at the dirty orange tube. “I’d think it was a piece of old plastic tubing, just some miscellaneous trash.”
“And there you have it,” Orton said.
“Wait a minute, Ted,” Fausto said, doubtful again. “Didn’t you say the powder inside it would have been consumed?”
“I did. Totally.”
“And the tubing itself wouldn’t have been affected?”
“Not a bit.”
“So how do you know it’s shock tube? How do you know it isn’t just a piece of miscellaneous trash?”
“I know because my experience of a dozen years tells me that it is not,” Orton said stiffly.
“Oh,” said Fausto.
Oh, thought Gideon.
“That,” Orton said with his first smile of the morning, “and a subtle but telling clue on the exterior of the tubing itself.”
He produced a folding, rectangular magnifying glass from somewhere and offered it to Fausto, who knelt and studied the tubing through it.
“Huh,” said Fausto, handing the lens to Gideon. “That’s subtle, all right.”
Gideon took his turn. “Let’s see… there’s some kind of tiny lettering…”
With the aid of the glass, it jumped into focus.
VOLOX LOW DENSITY POLYETHYLENE SHOCK TUBING.
TWENTY-TWO
At eleven thirty they got back to Fausto’s office. At 11:31 the phone buzzed. Fausto snatched up the receiver, and listened. “Okay, thanks.” He reached for another button, then paused. “It’s de la Garza. How well do you know this guy?”
“A little. We run into each other at meetings.”
He remembered Esteban de la Garza as a courtly, elderly archaeologist with a lean, pockmarked, deeply lined face. Like Ivan Gunderson, he struck Gideon as a throwback, but Gunderson had been late nineteenth century; de la Garza was more early eighteenth. He would have looked right at home in a wig and knee breeches, serving as royal schoolmaster to the court of Philip VI. His patrician manner put off some of the freer spirits who attended the anthropology conferences, but Gideon had always liked him. (But then, Gideon liked just about everybody, a personality flaw that he couldn’t seem to overcome, despite its having backfired on him many times more than once.)
“How’s his English?”
“Fine, perfect, better than mine. Prettier, anyway.” It was true. Esteban spoke English as if he were translating directly from the Spanish. He eschewed such rude English shortcuts as contractions and apostrophized possessives. For him there were no it’s, or wouldn’t s, or don’t s; and the fossil’s bones and Dr. X’s hypothesis came out as the bones of the fossil and the hypothesis of Dr. X. His ornate, measured speech was a pleasure to listen to, Gideon thought, always assuming one had the time to spare.
“Good, you talk to him, then.” He held out the telephone.
“Me? What do you want me to say?”
“You know, see if he knows what Sheila Chan was calling about. He’ll be more open with you. Besides, it might get too technical for me. I’ll listen in. Go ahead,” he said impatiently, shaking the phone in front of Gideon’s face when he hesitated. “Come on, come on.”
Gideon shrugged and took it. Fausto punched the button. He kept a second cordless receiver to his ear.
“Esteban?” Gideon said.
Esteban’s deep, sober voice sounded in his ear. “Si, senor, digame.” Cautious, wary. But then, he was returning a totally unexpected call from police headquarters; why wouldn’t he be?
“Esteban, this is Gideon Oliver. It’s nice to talk to you.”
This took a few seconds to sink in. More than a few seconds. De la Garza’s quickness of mind did not quite match his impressive gravitas. Then at last: “You are in Gibraltar?”
“Right, I’m here for the Paleo Society meetings.”
“Yes, but… is this not… I was under the impression that I was calling the police station.”
“You are. I’m sitting here with Detective Chief Inspector Sotomayor – he’s on the line too – and we’re trying to get some information on a woman named Sheila Chan.”
“Sheila Chan.” He considered. “This is the young woman who was working on a dissertation about bone disease in early modern Homo sapiens, is it not?
“Yes, you do know her, then?”
“I do. For some time I have not heard from her. Is she all right? Is there something wrong?”
“Well, yes. She’s dead. She’s been dead since 2005.”
“Aahh, that would explain why I have not heard from her.”
From anyone else it would have been a somewhat lame attempt at humor, but from de la Garza, who knew?
“On the other side of the table, Fausto rolled his eyes and mouthed a single syllable: Duh.
“Yes, she was killed in a landslide here in Gibraltar-”
“I regret extremely to hear it.”
“-but there are some questions about her death.”
“Questions? Do you mean in the sense that there are suspicious circumstances? This is why the police are involved?”
“That’s right. She may have been murdered.”
Esteban digested this. “How can that be? Did you not say she died in a landslide?”
