A Rumor of Bones: A Lindsay Chamberlain Mystery (34 page)

"Yes," she answered. The heating system in the
old, small-town courthouse was on high, and Lindsay
could feel the prickly sensation of perspiration forming on her forehead. I must look guilty, she thought
ruefully. She saw Mrs. Kim and her son Albert out in
the spectator seats. Mrs. Kim understood little English, but she could read faces; her own was filled with
worry. Albert, who had dropped out of the university
to help his mother, looked angry. The defendant,
Denny Ferguson, sat staring down at his hands. Occasionally he would look up at Lindsay with a half
smile on his face.

Dalton's co-counsel sat tapping a pencil silently on
her pad of paper. She watched the jury for a moment,
then shifted her attention back to Lindsay.

"Well, then," Dalton continued with exaggerated
sarcasm, "forgive me if I don't quite understand. It seems to me that all you can say about my client-after
your brief look in the perpetrator's mouth-is that you
can't rule him out. This is a far cry from saying that
Denny Ferguson is positively the man you saw"

"The man who shot Mr. Kim was your client."
Lindsay realized she sounded more stubborn than
professional.

"Dr. Chamberlain, you require more supporting
evidence when you identify skeletal remains. Why are
you requiring so little for a man's life?"

"I have described your client's dentition in great
detail. I am sure of my identification."

The jury wasn't convinced. Lindsay could see that.
Too much rested on her testimony, and they didn't
believe she could identify Ferguson by having seen only
his teeth. They would not have noticed his teeth in that
detail, and they didn't really believe she would either.
Denny Ferguson would go free, even though Lindsay
knew he was the one who shot and killed Mr. Kim, the
neighborhood grocer-simply because Mr. Kim did not
have enough money in the cash drawer to satisfy him.

"You like the Kim family, don't you?" The defense
attorney's voice was quiet, almost gentle.

"Yes"

"You want to see the murderer caught. We understand your sadness and sympathy for the Kim family."
Again he gestured with a sweep of his arm, including
the jury as if they were on his side. He shook his head
and raised his voice, drawing out his words. "But just
how can you convince me, and these twelve very sensible people, that you can say for sure it was my client
who shot Mr. Kim and not someone else with bad
teeth?"

"Mr. Dalton," said Lindsay, raising her hands to
grip the top of the witness box and leaning forward
slightly. "You had orthodontic work as an adult. You
had four teeth pulled. Two upper second premolars
and two lower premolars. You wore your braces quite
a long time, and the constant soreness caused you to
develop the bad habit of grinding and clinching your
teeth at night."

Gerald Dalton gawked at Lindsay, surprise evident
on his face. His mouth dropped open, and he was
speechless for a moment. It was that moment of surprised hesitation that swayed the jury. Lindsay could
see them shift their gazes to one another the way
people do when they simultaneously see and understand a truth. In that moment she saw Albert nod his
head and turn to whisper something to his mother; she
saw the prosecutor smile and the defendant look
around as if someone had told a joke he did not
understand.

"Okay, how'd you do it?" Gilbert asked Lindsay, handing her a cup of coffee from the cappuccino machine in
the corner of his office. He grinned broadly. "Your
timing was perfect."

"My timing was from desperation."

Gilbert sat down and propped his feet on his dark
oak desk. "But tell me how you did it."

"It wasn't that hard. His theatrics made it possible.
The way he tried to intimidate me, leaning over me,
drawing out his words with that big voice of his, gave
me a good look into his mouth. I saw that he had premolars missing. When he looked down to clean his
glasses, I caught a glimpse of a permanent retainer behind his lower incisors. A retainer is used to prevent
shifting of teeth."

"And grinding his teeth?"

"His lower incisors were beveled where they
ground against his upper incisors."

Gilbert gave a satisfied laugh. "I'll bet there's going
to be a great gnashing of teeth in his office when the
verdict comes in. With circumstantial evidence and a
witness who only saw in the perp's mouth, of Dalton
thought this was going to be an easy one."

"You think they will find Ferguson guilty, then?"
asked Lindsay. She couldn't quite share in Gilbert's
confidence.

"I think so. Of course, I've been surprised and even
shocked by juries before, but I feel good about this.
You're a good witness."

Lindsay took a sip of her coffee. "I can't stay for
the verdict. I have to give an exam. Call me when you
know something." She set down her cup and rose,
offering Gilbert her hand.

He stood up quickly and shook her hand with a
firm grip. "Sure. Glad to work with you, Lindsay. We
don't usually have this kind of thing going on in our
little town. I hate to see this kind of crime come in."

"Me, too," said Lindsay. "I'm going to miss Mr.
Kim."

Sally, Lindsay's graduate assistant, was setting up the
classroom for the honors course final exam when
Lindsay returned to Baldwin Hall, home of the
Department of Anthropology and Archaeology.
Sally's dark blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail, one wayward strand falling into her face. She had on a pair of well-worn jeans and a black T-shirt showing a white skeleton of a rat on the front along with
the words: Rattus Rattus.

"I like your shirt," said Lindsay.

Sally looked down at the picture on her chest.
"Yeah, I do, too. We're selling them to raise money
for the anthropology club." She paused a moment
before she asked. "Is it over?"

"It's with the jury"

"I'm sorry about Mr. Kim, Lindsay."

"So am I" Lindsay tried to fight off the depressing
mood in which the trial had left her. "Did you get students from the advanced osteology class to help you
with the exam?"

"They'll be here in a few minutes." The graduate
students came in, followed by six honors students
from Lindsay's class. There were the usual moans,
groans, and the predictable question, "Is it hard?"

"I don't think so," said Lindsay, smiling. She gave
each of them a long strip of black fabric.

"What's this?" asked one of the students.

"A blindfold," she answered.

"I knew it," said another. "A firing squad. She's
going to shoot us if we fail."

"We have to get our bones somewhere," offered
Sally.

Lindsay smiled at the group of four male and two
female undergraduate students as they dropped their
backpacks on the floor and sat down. "Okay, everyone listen up. As you have probably guessed, your test
will be to identify some selected bones by touch
alone. After you've named each bone, the graduate
student assigned to you will write your answer down for you. You can get extra credit if you can identify
the correct side-left or right. Don't try to listen to
what the other students are saying because I've put
different bones in each of the boxes on the tables.
Now, pick a box and begin."

Each student picked a spot next to one of the covered boxes on the laboratory tables and tied their
blindfold across their eyes. Lindsay watched as they
removed the lids from their boxes, reached in, took a
bone, and felt for identifying characteristics. She
smiled when their faces lit up as they felt a trochanter
or a condyle or when they frowned as they searched
with the tips of their fingers for a fossa or muscle
attachment. Sometimes they would roll the shaft of a
bone in their hands to determine the shape of the
cross section. After a while she left the exam in
Sally's supervision and went to her office.

Lindsay's office had no windows. The walls beside
and behind her desk were lined with bookshelves
filled with books and journals. Her walnut desk had
belonged to her grandfather, the only other archaeologist in the family. The brown, straight-grained wood
surface was marred, and the left front leg still had her
father's initials carved into it where he had tried out a
new pocketknife on his ninth birthday. Her mother had
wanted to have the desk refinished before they gave it
to her, but her father had said no. Lindsay was glad
because the marks left on artifacts reveal their history
in a kind of code that she took pleasure in deciphering.
The coffee cup rings told of her grandfather's long
nights sipping coffee and working on articles. The cuts
and scratches were evidence of the stone tools he laid
out on the surface to examine and catalog.

The desk faced the door to the archaeology lab. An
oak filing cabinet inherited from the previous occupant
stood behind the door. On the other side sat a single
stuffed leather chair next to a brass floor lamp. Her
grandfather's trowel rested on a bookshelf, and an old
photograph hung on the wall behind the chair, showing her grandfather as a young man dressed in a tie
and rolled up shirtsleeves, holding a shovel and standing in front of an Indian mound in Macon, Georgia.

There were no artifacts or bones displayed in Lindsay's office. The only artifact she possessed was in an
old cigar box inside her desk. It was a treasured possession: the first Indian artifact she had ever found.
When Lindsay was five, her grandfather had taken her
on the first of their many trips to do surface collecting. She had earnestly examined the freshly plowed
ground as she walked beside her grandfather, getting
hot, tired, and restless. Then, there it was: the tip of a
point partially covered by the moist earth. She had
dug it out with her fingers and wiped off the dirt that
clung to it. The point was beautiful, and it was huge,
longer than her hand and almost as wide, made from
black flint.

"It's a Clovis point," her grandfather had told her.
"The oldest point there is. It could have killed a
woolly mammoth." Lindsay had held on to her find so
tightly the edges had cut her hand, but that didn't
matter because she had found something wonderful.
Since that day she had found many things, but no discovery had ever made her feel as she did that time she
found the Clovis with her grandfather. From that day
on, Lindsay knew she would be an archaeologist.

Lindsay was reaching for a term paper to grade when a figure appeared in her doorway. She thought it
was a student before she recognized Gerald Dalton's
co-counsel. Lindsay hadn't gotten a good look at her
in court. Now she saw that she was a small, fineboned woman, not over five feet, four inches tall.
Lindsay guessed she wore a size two. She looked as if
she had the hollow bones of a bird, she was so thin
and delicate looking. Her short, glossy-black hair was
cut in a pageboy, and her skin looked as though it
would be translucent if her makeup were washed off.
She stood stiffly in the doorway, still in the snugfitting dark blue suit she wore to the trial.

"Can I help you?" asked Lindsay.

"Have you heard the verdict?" Her voice belied her
small frame. It was low and husky.

"No, I had to give an exam ..."

"Yes, I saw your blindfolded students. I suppose
that fits ... teaching them that they can make a positive
identification without looking." The woman walked
into Lindsay's office and stood, putting her palms on
the desk and leaning forward.

"Is there a point to your visit?" asked Lindsay.

"I wanted to be the one to tell you that the jury
found Dennis Ferguson guilty. I hope that pleases
YOU."

Lindsay frowned. "Nothing about this event
pleases me."

"What really gets to me is that you don't have any
misgivings about convicting a man on the flimsiest of
evidence."

"I was sure"

"How can you possibly not have doubts? Are you
that arrogant?" She stopped and looked at Lindsay for a moment, her green eyes clearly showing her anger.
"God, you are, aren't you'? You've set yourself up
here as some great ... bone ... guru, haven't you? And
that performance really topped it."

"Performance?" asked Lindsay.

"The way you pulled the rabbit out of the hat on
the stand. It was the drama that convinced the jury,
not the facts ... It was the damn show you put on. You
are the most arrogant, manipulative woman I have
ever met."

Lindsay started to speak when the woman turned
on her heel and left.

Sally, who had been standing just outside the doorway, watched after the retreating figure before she
came into Lindsay's office. "Well, who peed in her
Wheaties?"

"I suppose I did," replied Lindsay....

The March winds lingered into April, and it was
unseasonably cold as Lindsay showed the students at
Barrow Elementary School how much you can learn
about people by examining their tombstones. Lindsay
and the class of sixteen young students were in the
old cemetery beside Baldwin Hall. Campus lore said
it was where the university buried deceased students
in centuries gone by when it was inconvenient to ship
the bodies back home. The story may have been true,
but the graveyard was actually the remnants of the old
City of Athens Cemetery, encroached on over the
years by the expanding university. Most of the residents had been exhumed long ago and moved elsewhere so that only a fraction of an acre of the
cemetery remained on the campus. Lindsay had just finished talking about identifying the different kinds
of rock the tombstones were carved from and asked if
there were any questions.

"Can we dig one up and look at the bones?" asked
a nine-year-old dressed in a red and black UGA
sweatshirt.

Lindsay was saved from answering by Sally, who
had come to tell her she had a phone call from Max
Gilbert, the prosecutor of Denny Ferguson. She left
the students and their teacher with Sally and hurried
to see what he wanted.