Make No Bones (13 page)

Among professional anthropologists, the practice had as many scoffers as true believers, with Gideon somewhere in the middle. It was, as far as he was concerned, a helpful tool if used discriminatingly, by people who knew what they were doing, with full appreciation of its limitations. His own three-for-four batting average he put down to some extremely lucky breaks. One of the cases had been a woman with an easily recognizable bony hump on the bridge of her nose, another had had eyes set extraordinarily far apart, and a third had been a man with a jaw like Benito Mussolini’s (that one, for better or worse, had gotten national media coverage). But the fourth had been just an everyday sort of skull, with no particularly distinctive features. And of course that was the one that was still sitting in a box in the King County Medical Examiner’s Office in Seattle, unidentified.

He’d always been frank in his reservations about the process and about his own skills. All the same, when the WAFA schedule was being prepared, Miranda had asked him if he’d put on a demonstration, mainly for the students in attendance. She had offered to provide all the materials he’d need and he’d agreed. The half-day session was on the schedule for the following afternoon—and that, he supposed, made him the closest thing to an expert they were going to get.

“I think—” he began.

“Stand up so people can hear you,” Nellie said, waving him up.

Gideon stood. He didn’t have much to say. “My opinion is that there wouldn’t be much point. When you already have a pretty good idea whose skull you’ve got, there are quicker, better ways to confirm it.”

“Right you are,” Les said from the audience. “What do we need to mess around with clay for? There are some good pictures of Salish in the file, and we can use video superimposition and computer-generated imaging to see if they match the skull.” Since he’d become a consultant, Les had developed an appreciation for high-tech anthropology.

Nellie vigorously nodded his agreement. “I’ll take it a step further than that. There’s no need for any of this mumbo-jumbo here. Not only do we have virtually the man’s entire skeleton, we have his complete dentition, which can be compared directly to Mr. Salish’s dental records, once Mr. Lau locates them. What more do we need?”

In the matter of facial reconstruction, Nellie was firmly on record as a scoffer. He had written several articles on the subject. The kindest of them was an article in the
Journal of Forensic Science
entitled, “Facial Reconstruction: Harmless Fun but Not to Be Believed.”

“We’ll know if it’s Salish, all right,” he said, “and we won’t have to resort to facial reconstruction to do it.”

“But what if it isn’t?” one of the students asked; a mustached thirty-year-old in khakis and a scuffed slouch hat; one of several who seemed to have studied anthropological dress with Indiana Jones. “Maybe it’ll turn out to be someone else. At least a reconstruction would give us a place to start.”

“Not necessarily,” Gideon said. “You have to understand, a facial reconstruction is a long way from an exact likeness. Nobody’s going to look at it and say: ‘My God, that’s
him!’
All you can do is show it around and hope; see if it looks even a little familiar to anybody.”

“But what’s wrong with that?” asked another student. “Couldn’t we do that?”

“Show it around? To whom? Who’s missing that we know about?”

The student shook her head. “I don’t follow.”

“Well, reconstructions are like fingerprints. They’re not any good unless you have something to compare them to—
somebody
to compare them to, and we don’t have anybody we’re looking for. Nobody but Salish, and as Les and Nellie said, there are better ways of proving it’s Salish.”

“But—”

“And if it turns out to be someone else, some other missing person, we don’t have any idea of where he’s missing from—according to the lieutenant, it’s not from around here—so
where
do we show it around? And to whom?”

“Oh,” the young woman said, and sank disappointedly back. “I see.”

“Thank you, Gideon,” Nellie said, pulling together his notes from the lectern. “And now I think—”

Gideon was still standing. “But on the other hand…”

He still didn’t see any forensic point in it, but by now his teacherly instincts were engaged. Throwing cold water on any glimmer of student interest went against his grain. Besides, seeing how close the reconstruction came to Chuck Salish’s face would make it interesting for him as well as them.

“On the other hand, I’m supposed to do a demonstration tomorrow afternoon anyway. I was going to use a skull from the museum collection, but I don’t see why I couldn’t demonstrate just as well on an actual murder victim.”

“Yes, it does add that certain je ne sais quoi,” Leland said, sotto voce.

“But if I’m going to go through the whole process for real,” Gideon went on, “even if we just skim through it, it’ll take more than an afternoon. I’d better get started in the morning.”

“But how can you do that?” It was Miranda. “Nellie, aren’t you still working on it?”

Nellie considered. “I’ll tell you what. You go ahead and work with the skull tomorrow, Gideon. I still have plenty to do on the postcranial skeleton. Let’s see, isn’t tomorrow afternoon’s general session going to be at the museum?”

It was, someone volunteered. The topic was blunt-force skull fractures, and they would be using Miranda’s collection.

“Well, then, why don’t we give you until…oh, four o’clock, Gideon? Since everyone will be in Bend anyway, we can all drop by and see how your work stacks up against the photos—and against the memories of those of us who remember Mr. Salish. An impartial evaluation of the art of facial reconstruction, done in the spirit of scientific inquiry.”

The smile he directed at Gideon was somewhere between that of a friend for a friend, and of a frog for a fly.

“Not fair and you know it, Nellie,” Gideon said. “A day isn’t enough for a thorough job, especially if I’m supposed to be teaching while I’m doing it. Three or four days, maybe—”

There were a few good-natured boos.

“Come on, Doc, put your money where your mouth is,” John murmured. “Give it a shot.”

Gideon sighed. “All right, fine,” he announced. “For what it’s worth. But it’s
not
a test of the method. And it means we’ll have to get started early tomorrow. We’d better get the reconstruction going at seven.”

The looks exchanged among some of the students suggested a slight diminution of enthusiasm.

“Miranda,” Gideon said, “is there a problem getting the materials to me that early?”

“No, I’m usually at the museum by six. Quiet time, you know. I’ll go on over to the sheriff, get a room set up for you, and see that there’s coffee and donuts.”

“Can you do that?”

“Sure, they owe me. And I can sign the skull over to you then.”

Leland, looking dissatisfied, waved a finger at Gideon. “This means you won’t be able to attend the regular morning session.”

“No, I suppose not. What’s on?”

“I am. I’m presenting an overview of recent developments in coprolite analysis and their applications to forensic archaeology. With slides and hands-on material.”

There was a near-imperceptible pause. “Damn, Leland,” Gideon said, “it looks like I’ll have to miss it.”

   “I think I’m getting bones on the brain,” Julie said.

Yawning, Gideon flipped another pebble into the creek. “Who wouldn’t?”
Ploop.

They had gotten up early to spend some time together. With Gideon committed to the all-day reconstruction and Julie planning to pay a working visit to Lavalands National Monument, they wouldn’t be seeing each other until late afternoon. They’d had a quick cup of coffee and then walked along the nature trail, a wooded path following the smaller of the two streams that ran through the heart of the old resort and into the woodlands to the north.

It had been a good idea. With the heat wave predicted to continue (John was delighted), the growing but still tolerable early-morning warmth had intensified the sweet, spicy fragrances of the pine forest, so that every breath was thick with cinnamon and vanilla-like scents; markedly different from the cool, cedary aromas of coastal Washington. They had walked hand in hand, quietly, glad to be enjoying the freshness together before the rest of the world had gotten moving. Underfoot, the path lay three inches deep in pine needles as long and golden and pungent as hay. Walking through them made dry, swishing, silky sounds that soothed their ears. And when there was the unexpected, rasping crunch of a hidden pine cone being stepped on, they laughed.

After a quarter of a mile they had stopped and sat down at this pleasant, open spot where the branches filtered the sunlight and the stream lapped at the low bank. They had watched the sparkling water, and sat with their arms around their knees, and chewed wild grass stems, and talked aimlessly about nothing much. It had been too long a time since they’d had a morning like it.

“No,” Julie said, “I don’t mean generally speaking, I mean right now; specifically.”

“Specific bones on the brain?” Gideon said lazily, still beguiled by the water. He tossed in another pebble.

Julie got up, walked two steps to the edge of the bank, and crouched, using a twig to probe gently at the root area of a young willow that overhung the stream. She turned to look at him over her shoulder. “Gideon, I think these are cremains.”

“I wish people wouldn’t call…”

“Excuse me, cremated remains. Come look.”

Gideon got reluctantly to his feet and went to her side, leaning over with his hands on his knees. “Yup.”

“But aren’t the chunks kind of big? The ones Nellie showed us were almost like powder.”

“Well, it depends on the funeral home. Sometimes they pretty much pulverize what’s left, and other times they more or less break it up with a hammer, and you get pieces like these.” He picked up one of the two fragments; a bit of humerus. “But I grant you, these are bigger than usual.

There seem to be only these two pieces. I imagine someone was throwing the ashes into the stream, and these accidentally fell onto the bank. They don’t look as if they’ve been here very—”

“Gideon!”

Julie had continued scanning the nearby ground, and now she was staring at a small tangle of exposed roots that jutted out from the side of the bank, two or three inches above the water and a couple of feet from the bone fragments.

Gideon saw instantly what had seized her attention. He put down the burned piece and kneeled to look more closely at the bright, granular fleck of white caught among the roots. After a few seconds he sat back on his haunches and looked thoughtfully up at her.

“Jasper?” she said.

“Looks like it.”

There wasn’t much room for doubt. The fleck was a broken, half-inch-wide particle of white styrofoam; the same kind of plastic that Jasper’s remains had been wired to. And, as if the matter needed cinching, there was still a loop of white, plastic-coated wire piercing it, twisted together at one end. It was the loop that had snagged in the roots.

“They must have done it in the dark,” Gideon said, thinking aloud. “After the walk-through at the museum. They wanted to get rid of it in a hurry. They came out here, broke up the display, and tossed everything in the stream.”

“Or thought they did,” Julie said. “It would have been easy for them not to notice they’d dropped a few pieces.” “Yes. But…”

“What?”

“Doesn’t this strike you as an odd place to dump these? Right on the nature trail? I mean, if I’d wanted to get rid of them quickly, I would have maybe tossed them out of the car window on the way back from Bend, a piece at a time. No one ever would have found them.”

“Most people didn’t go to Bend in their own cars. They went in groups, or took the bus. You couldn’t have done it without other people seeing.”

“Well, then, I’d have crushed them after I got back—a couple of blows with a hammer or a rock would have done it—and flushed them down the toilet. Crush-and-flush.”

“You’d have flushed the Styrofoam?”

“All right,
that
I’d have broken up and tossed in the garbage. Without the bones or one of these wire loops, who would connect it to Jasper? Or maybe I’d have buried it, to be on the safe side. But somewhere out in the woods. I sure wouldn’t have left any of it right along the trail like this.”

“I agree, it’s strange.”

He nodded and straightened up. “Julie, I’d better get going. I have to be in Bend at seven. Will you let John know about this when we get back to the lodge?”

“Of course.” They began walking back. “What do you make of it, Gideon?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Still think it’s just a prank?”

He looked at her. “No,” he said, “I don’t think it’s a prank.”

Miranda was as good as her word. When Gideon arrived at the Justice Building in Bend at 7:00 A.M., the county commissioners’ meeting room, which had surely never before been used for such a purpose, was set up and ready with everything he needed.

At the head table the materials he would use were neatly laid out: a somewhat unsettling pair of dark-gray prosthetic eyes; a box of terra-cotta-colored Jolly King modeling clay; a seven-inch length of eraser rubber; a box of round toothpicks; a box of cotton; a tube of Duco cement; an X-Acto knife; a few small rulers; a couple of simple modeling tools (fingers would be the most important tools); some 80-grade sandpaper; and a folder put out by the University of New Mexico called “Tables of Facial Tissue Thickness of American Caucasoids.”

And a carton of donuts and a metal urn of hot coffee just perking its last on a long table against the wall. This was especially appreciated by the arriving students. With ninety-degree heat coming, the air conditioning had been turned up to keep the clay from slumping on the skull.

“Need anything else?” Miranda asked.

“No, this is great. You must have gotten here at five.” Miranda placed her hand on her heart. “We are here to serve.”

She had brought the skull and mandible from the room Nellie was working in and placed it on the table. Gideon quickly filled in the medical examiner’s evidence tag:
Released to
: Gideon Oliver.
How:
In person.
Date:
6-19-91.
Time:
7:00 A.M.