Death Ray Butterfly

Chapter Eight

I'm not used to having all this time. It's bugging me. I was so busy for so long I never stopped to think about what I'd do when I retired, so when the time came it took me by surprise. I hate to be one of those reminiscers always going on about the old days, but I do miss the action. There weren't too many boring days back then. Now it's all I've got. The memories come flooding back sometimes, a bit scattered I have to admit but they do come in a rush all jumbled up. My assistant, Kelley, probably thought that talking it all out like this would help me sort them all out in my mind, but too many things run together, too many coincidences, too many loose threads. Just when I think I've put some pieces together, it all comes unraveled. I had cases that took years and years to come to some kind of conclusion.

I'd get called in on all sorts of things. I'd wonder why they were bothering with me at all, like the time they brought me in on the Reyn Tundra situation. Here was a job for a scholar, I thought, an archaeologist or an anthropologist at least. They'd found this body, frozen in a block of ice inside a glacier somewhere in Europe. He'd been dead, oh maybe twenty thousand years or so, they said. Said he'd been murdered. Now they wanted me to solve the crime! What could I tell about a frozen stiff that old? Some kind of Neanderthal at that. They flew me over there to see the body in person. I had to think that was the most ridiculous case I'd ever been dragged into.

All these skinny men and women with spectacles and white lab coats were gathered around this ancient body, now encased in a vacuum-sealed clear chamber in some chemical stenchy lab. The dead guy looked pretty pissed. Brutal. What eyes, and eyebrows, and thick long brown hair, and the body all wrapped up in some kind of wolfskin or bearskin or mastodon. What the hell did I know? Nasty looking fellow. So there I am, this fat old cop from the great southwest of the U.S. of A. - I was always kind of heavy, and I was already getting old by that time - anyway, there I am along with my assistant, Kelley, and we are like some kind of fish out of water to say the least. Kelley, smelling like tobacco as always, and me, smelling like burgers most likely, and looking like hell because I hate to fly, absolutely hate it. Makes me sicker than a dog most every time. And the time change wasn't doing me any favors. I was ready to puke already and then one of those scientists flicked some switch somewhere and the chamber started to revolve. The dead guy rolled over like a chicken on a spit and then the scientist who did that, he must have been the main guy, says in some kind of German-English, 'you see, Inspector, why we wanted you', and he pointed at the back of the dead guy's head, and sure enough, there was the entry wound.

Small caliber, close range, unmistakable. The caveman had been murdered with a gun.

The scientists had waited for me to witness the fact first hand, before proceeding with any further extraction of the bullet. I gave them the go ahead. For once, there were no crime lab "detectives" mucking up the scene. These scientists did a clean job of it. They had used some imaging machines and knew precisely where the bullet was - what the bullet was - and had some very fancy medical techniques for getting it out of there. Wasn't long before the thing was on a table in front of me, clean as a whistle.

Of course it would have its own unique markings. Anyone who ever watched a cop show would know about that. What they never tell you is the chances of finding a match were a billion to one, let alone the gun it came out of. This thing could have come out of any yard sale, any gun show, any time from the second half of the twentieth century on. I ventured to say it was American. They agreed. It was why they hadn't brought in Maigret, I suppose. The working theory was, the guy had somehow got himself forward in time at least long enough to get shot, and then was somehow shipped back to his own time as a corpse. Or else somebody went back to his time and did it.

Yeah, I said, why not? If only it was so easy. Turned out there were some further complications.