“Sounds pretty far-fetched to me,” said MacPherson. I felt the wind go out of my sails and cursed myself that I could feel like giving up because of something some stranger with nothing at stake had just said to me.
“Did you have the larvae on you at the time?” he asked.
“That’s the funny part,” I said, desperate to recapture my momentum. It scared me that I could lose it so easily. “I’ve gone over it a dozen times in my head. All my collection was strapped under the seats of the canoe, and normally I carry my day’s collection with me in a container in my backpack. However, that day I took out the full container and left it at the end of the portage, replacing it with an empty one in case I came across something of interest.”
“So, if someone had been waiting at the beginning of the portage they wouldn’t have seen you switch the containers?”
I nodded. “They must have seen me collecting the larvae from Diamond’s body and were waiting for the chance to destroy them. When they saw me getting into the canoe to bail it they seized their chance. I was still wearing the backpack when we got caught by the current.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Duncan. “Your lab was broken into about two weeks after you got back?”
“That’s right.”
“How did they know? And if they knew why wouldn’t they have broken in sooner to destroy the insects? Why wait two weeks, especially after they had shown no qualms about killing you?”
“Because that’s when it was reported in the papers that I still had some larvae from the body. When I called the cops they weren’t interested. The case was closed. Whoever it was obviously thought the larvae were lost in the canoe. Most of them were.”
“So. You think you might be able to find something in the autopsy results that would help you?”
I nodded.
“You know I can’t let you look at them.”
We looked at each other across his black metal desk. Duncan rose, and my heart sank, but as I got up he raised his hand.
“Perhaps, my girl, you should take a look around my office while I go and help my students.” His hand absently tapped a brown folder on his desktop as he winked and left the room.
I watched him go, and manually thrust my jaw back up from where it had fallen. I eagerly reached for the folder. The autopsy results were filed neatly and marked “Diamond” with the date of the autopsy and a large red stamp saying “confidential.” I was going to owe MacPherson more than the ID of one lousy butterfly.
Everything was included in the file: a copy of the police report and a list of all the items found at the campsite, including those found in the backpack.
I ran through them. One empty film canister had been found, but the camera had been empty. A deck of cards, a couple of pencils, one sleeping bag, bright orange. One chocolate bar. No mention of the diary anywhere. Interesting. The food pack had contained dried staples and fresh vegetables, carrots, potatoes, dried meats, sugar, flour, nuts, raisins, cook pots, even Diamond’s toothpaste and brush. Curious, that. I wondered again why an experienced camper like Diamond would be careful enough to haul his toothpaste out of a bear’s reach and then leave a chocolate bar in the tent and opened tin cans of beans and sardines lying about the site.
I flipped through the file to the coroner’s report. The page was a sea of tight red ink, but the writing was totally illegible and highly technical. I could make out the odd word but nothing providing any continuity. Why hadn’t he typed it on a computer?
“Solved it yet?” Duncan’s big voice crashed into the little office.
I looked up and gave him my best hangdog look. “I can’t read your writing. Would you mind translating for me in a nutshell what you found?”
“My dear girl, if you think that dew-eyed hound dog look is going to persuade me to help, you already know me better than you think,” he guffawed. “My writing’s not that bad, but those are just my original notes. The computer copy is with my secretary.” He picked up his notes and flipped through them. “Diamond died from loss of blood. He was severely mauled, but none of the wounds alone would have killed him. He bled to death.”
“Was there anything else?”
“Let’s see. Hmmm. He had taken some kind of sleeping pill, nothing really unusual …”
His finger moved down through the jumble of words. “Ah, right. Here. This was a bit of a puzzler. We couldn’t explain it, but it wasn’t sufficient to keep the case open. We also found evidence of a strong tranquilizer in his blood.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Apparently he used tranquilizer guns in his work to put down his study subjects so he could radio-collar them. Looks as though, in his panic, he managed to get the tranquilizer gun but either it wasn’t soon enough or he was unable to jab the bear. The theory goes that he finally used it on himself to ease the pain. He certainly would have been in monstrous pain before the loss of blood mercifully let him lose consciousness. Awkward position, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“The puncture mark was in his right shoulder, with the needle partly broken off in his arm. Strange. It’s a difficult place to jab yourself, especially if you are right-handed, but not impossible, I guess, with a bear pinning you down. The police concluded that the bear must have jerked Diamond at the wrong moment and the gun went off, hitting Diamond instead of the bear. They never found the tranquilizer gun, though, when they searched his campsite.”
That’s not surprising if he wasn’t killed where he was found, I thought. “How did he get the gun, load it, and use it in the short time it takes a bear to charge?”
“He must have already had it loaded up for its real purpose and grabbed it when the bear charged. He could even have been after the bear, following it to put it down for his research. Apparently he has done that before. Radio-collared bears, although his main line of research is cats.”
I grunted and pointed at the report. “Were there any other marks on him?”
Duncan laughed. “He was mauled by a bear, girl. Of course there were.”
“I mean not made by a bear,” I said.
Duncan looked at me shrewdly, nodded his head.
“You’re sharp, my girl, very sharp, but no. Just the usual cuts and scrapes and bug bites that you’d find on a man in the bush.”
I mulled this over in my mind while Duncan continued to talk.
“None of this offers any insight into why any one would move the body, assuming you are correct, of course. If the body were discovered why not raise the alarm right there, let the police know? Why move it downriver and let some strangers trip over the remains?”
“My guess is that somebody’s hiding something and it looks as though Diamond got mixed up in it somehow.”
“Why not just hide the evidence and leave the body then?”
“Because somehow the evidence is linked to the place of death itself?”
Duncan poked some eraser droppings around on his memo pad, corralling them into a neat pile.
“I’m afraid it’s all speculation. None of this merits reopening the case, so if you intend to go gallivanting around asking questions, getting people’s backs up by insinuating murder where murder may not exist, I’d be very careful. The cops would not take kindly to it.”
“I have to get my disks back,” I said in quiet desperation. I hated how wobbly my resolve was. I had to keep reminding myself that going forward was better than going backward. I had everything to lose by doing nothing, but there was no guarantee that finding out the circumstances surrounding Diamond’s