Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 07 - Make No Bones

by Make No Bones

  For most of the short trip to Bend they followed the bus in silence, content to take in the immense views. They were in what Oregonians called the High Country, but dominating the sky to their right was the even higher country of the eastern Cascades: Mount Faith, Mount Hope, and Mount Charity—the wind-scoured, volcanic peaks better known as the Three Sisters, from which the town of Sisters to the north had taken its name. Below and on their left, at the base of the shoulder along which the road traveled, was a totally different landscape: the wheat-gray desert country of central Oregon, seeming to spread out forever, flat and featureless except for dusty, cinder-cone volcanoes and the strange, black, fan-shaped forms that Julie told him were ancient lava flows.

  The highway itself traveled through a kind of buffer zone, a pleasing countryside of gnarled junipers, gently rolling rangeland, healthy-looking cows, and occasional ranch houses. Bend itself arrived with a bang. One moment they were in open, unspoiled country, and the next moment Mountain View Mall, an honest-to-God suburban shopping mall, popped up in front of them, right out of the sagebrush, and they were in the city. Highway 20 became Third Street, an undistinguished, trafficky thoroughfare of malls, motels, and all-you-can-eat buffets, varied by an occasional body shop or auto-parts store.

  They had lost the bus by now, but Julie had the directions. “Right on Greenwood,” she told him. “Follow the signs to the college. Tell me some more about Dr. Jasper—the father, I mean.”

  “Let’s see…I guess the first time I ever saw Albert Evan Jasper was at the AAA meeting in Boston. This was maybe sixteen or seventeen years ago. There was a banquet in one of the hotels, and Jasper was sitting up at the head table with the bigwigs. I was way in the back with the other graduate students. Well, a waiter asked us what kind of a conference it was, and one of the guys at our table said we were phrenologists—we told people’s personalities by the bumps on their heads.”

  “Not that far from the truth,” Julie observed.

  Gideon lifted an eyebrow in her direction but otherwise ignored this. “Well, the waiter said how about a reading, and my friend told him we were mere students, but if he wanted one from the world’s greatest living practitioner, just go up and ask Jasper. So up he marches to the head table. We couldn’t hear anything of course, but we could see the waiter talking and Jasper listening with a funny look on his face, just blinking slowly back at him.”

  Once off Third Street they were back in rural Oregon. They passed the Elks Lodge, complete with a bronze elk on the roof, crossed over the Deschutes River, and went by a little white church that would have been right at home in Vermont. At College Way they turned right to head uphill toward Central Oregon College, where the museum was located.

  “And?” Julie prompted.

  “And,” Gideon said, laughing as he remembered the long-ago scene, “Jasper motions him to bend down, feels his head all over, and gives him a reading, a five-minute one. The waiter was absolutely delighted.”

  Julie laughed too. “He sounds nice.”

  “Well…”

  “But definitely a character.”

  “That for sure.”

  Julie folded the letter, meditatively brushing it against her lips. “I suppose I’m not looking at this the right way, but doesn’t this thing tonight strike you as rather…well, macabre? I mean, there’s Jasper, identified after his death by his own friends and colleagues—”

  “Colleagues,” Gideon said. “I don’t know about friends. From all I’ve heard, he really was a hard guy to like.”

  “All the same, it’s pretty grisly. And then ten years later, what’s left of him ends up in a glass case right back where he got killed, with the—the exhibit being unveiled right in front of those same colleagues. Brr. That doesn’t seem downright gruesome to you?”

  Gideon thought it over while he turned into the parking lot beside the low, modern, stained-wood museum building.

  “No,” he said. “Creepy, yes. Gruesome, no.”

  For almost an hour the fifty-odd people had attentively followed a cheerful and outgoing Miranda Glass through the Lucie Kirman Burke wing of the Central Oregon Museum of Natural History, beneath murals of bears and cougars. They had trooped slowly by glass cases illustrating the principles, problems, and oddities of forensic anthropology: skulls punctured with bullet holes, or with axes or arrows still embedded in them; skeletons twisted by rickets or achondroplasia; trephinations, scalpings, beheadings; fractured bones, split bones, crushed bones, cannibalized bones; murder victims from two thousand years ago and from two years ago; pelves, mandibles, vertebrae, and long bones that demonstrated the criteria of aging, sexing, and racing skeletal material.

  It was all very well done; eye-catching and grisly enough to grab anyone’s attention, but thorough enough to teach something to those who had the patience to look and to read.

  But it was in front of one of the least spectacular cases that the group gathered for the longest time: a sparse, gray-black assemblage consisting of half a mandible, the base of a cranium, a few vertebral fragments, and three or four cracked, misshapen long-bone segments, all of them embedded in an irregular mud-colored mass, like a set of fossil relics from the La Brea tar pits. In this case, however, the mass was known to be the melted-down plastic cushioning material from Seat Number 34 of Bus Number 103 of Cascade Transport Lines.

  On the wall beside it was a placard coolly detailing the effects of heat on bone and explaining how anthropologists analyzed burnt skeletal material. In small upper-case letters at the bottom were the words, “Bequest of A. E. Jasper.”

  Gideon had wondered how he would react to the display. He hadn’t known Jasper very well, and their limited acquaintance hadn’t done much to make him like the older man. A top-notch scientist, certainly, and a legendary wit and iconoclast; but to Gideon the jokes had seemed contrived, the personality beneath them mean and self-centered. Gideon had seen him publicly cut a hapless student to shreds—wittily, to be sure, but the student hadn’t looked any happier for that.

  Still, how often did you look into a glass case in a museum and see someone you’d shared a pepperoni pizza with? To his great surprise, sudden laughter bubbled up in his throat. He covered his mouth and converted it—unconvincingly, he was sure—to a cough. At the sound, there was a sudden splatter of similarly unpersuasive snuffles and throat clearings. Was it tension relief, the same nervous reaction one saw at funerals? Or simply the freakishness of the situation? Some of these people had known Jasper a lot better than he had. Some of them, as Julie had said, had actually handled and pored over these remains immediately after the bus crash.

  Miranda Glass was one of them. He looked up and accidentally caught her eye. She stared fixedly back at him, eyes very wide and on the edge of fluttering, mouth pursed, soft chin tucked in, while her hand went to the nape of her neck to wrap a strand of hair around her index finger. You bastard, don’t make me laugh. She couldn’t have said it more clearly if she’d spoken.

  An entertainingly freewheeling woman about fifteen years older than Gideon, with a round, deceptively cherubic face, she’d been a student of Jasper’s once, but had never finished her doctorate and never gone on to teach. Instead, she’d drifted into museum work, where she’d established a solid and well-deserved reputation. Although she still served the local police as a forensic consultant, her paramount interest was the museum, and all but the simplest and most unambiguous cases were forwarded to the state medical examiner in Portland for analysis.

  An unsettling tendency to say whatever came into her head made some people uncomfortable in her presence. Others, Gideon among them, found Miranda a bracing change of pace; something like being slapped in the face with a paImful of Aqua Velva.

  She had successfully fought down her own urge to laugh and was now soberly finishing her reading of the official letter of transmittal from Nellie Hobert. “‘…given his very bones to continue in the service of education, to which he so selflessly devoted his life. Surely Albert Evan
Jasper would be pleased.’”

  There was a spatter of polite applause, after which Miranda added some comments of her own.

  “As most of us know. Dr. Jasper was also quite a showman; some might say an exhibitionist.” She paused, pushing oversized octagonal glasses up on her nose and managing to look droll doing it. “If you ask me, the man would have died for an opportunity like this.”

  Those who didn’t know Miranda glanced around them for cues on how to respond. Those who knew her laughed, or groaned, or shook their heads.

  “In conclusion, folks, you have to admit that this is a pretty appropriate windup for a teacher of anthropology. So, when you get back home, remember us in your wills. There’ll always be a place for you in the Central Oregon Museum of Natural History.”

  The laughter now was more general. “Don’t get any ideas,” Julie said to Gideon. “I’m not about to be the widow of a museum case, no matter how beautifully laid out.”

  “Ali, but there are advantages,” said the spare, fiftyish man on Julie’s other side. “I had a woman once—I speak figuratively, you understand—who donated her husband’s skeleton—he’d died under somewhat ambiguous circumstances—to our lab on the condition that she be allowed to visit him monthly. She did, too. We’d pull out the drawer for her and she’d sit down and look at him for a while. We always made sure he was quite attractively displayed. After half an hour she’d leave, always with a sad, thoughtful smile.”

  Julie’s mouth curled downward just a little.

  “Personally,” the man went on, “I’ve always been convinced she poisoned him. I suppose she needed the periodic reassurance that he was really dead.”

  “That’s really touching, Leland,” Gideon said. “That’s a wonderful story.”

  “But seriously now,” the man said, wide-eyed behind heavy, plastic-rimmed glasses. “Surely you wouldn’t deny the world the bones of America’s Skeleton Detective, the ‘Quincy’ of the bone labs, the darling of the media?”

  Gideon laughed. Leland was Leland. It was the way he was made, and you couldn’t take what he said personally.

  The pale-eyed, amber-mustached Leland Vernon Roach was another of Jasper’s students. Unlike Miranda he’d managed to complete his doctorate, but like her his main interests had strayed from the forensic. In Leland’s case they were in the direction of the relatively new science of coprolite analysis—the study of fossilized excrement to determine food content and eating habits.

  Once, when Gideon had asked him how it was that he’d gotten into so arcane a subfield, Leland had shrugged. “You happen to like bones,” he’d said with his prissy, exquisite diction. “I happen to like shit.” Gideon still didn’t know if he’d meant it to be funny.

  Now he clapped the smaller man lightly on the shoulder. “I’ll give it some serious thought, Leland,” he said. “Assuming I can talk Julie into it.”

  Julie muttered something as they moved on to the next exhibit with the others.

  “What?”

  She arranged her mouth to speak with Lelandlike precision.

  “Fat,” she said, “chance.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Gideon was shaving the next morning, listening to Julie tell him from the shower about her plans for the day—she was driving to the Lava Butte Geological Area south of Bend to talk shop with the head ranger—when the telephone rang.

  “Gideon, this is Miranda. Something peculiar’s come up. Would you mind skipping the first session today?”

  He had glanced at the schedule a few minutes before. The first session was Recent Developments in Quantitative Microradiography and Histomorphometric Analysis.

  “Urn, I think I could manage that,” he said. “What’s come up?”

  “Albert Evan Jasper’s disappeared.”

  It took a second to make any sense at all of this. “I don’t—what did you say?”

  “His skeleton—it’s missing.”

  “Missing?”

  “It’s been stolen.”

  “Stolen?”

  Miranda’s sigh crackled in his ear. “As wildly enchanting as this conversation is, I need to break it off and make some more calls. I want to get the FMs together. Meet in the lounge in half an hour? I’ll have coffee and stuff sent in.”

  “Yes, sure, be there.” He hung up, replaying the brief conversation. Now how the hell could…

  “Who was that, Gideon?” Julie called.

  “Miranda,” he said, walking abstractedly back to the bathroom. He used a towel to dab shaving cream from under his ear. “Jasper’s skeleton is missing.”

  The shower door opened. Julie stuck her head out, looking puzzled.

  “Missing?”

  “FMs” was shorthand for Founding Members, also sometimes called the Board of Directors, although this last was something of an exaggeration. As scientific organizations went, the Western Association of Forensic Anthropologists was more laid back than most. There were no officers, no formal chair, no standing committees. The people Miranda had gathered were, except for Gideon, simply those ex-students of Albert Evan Jasper who had come together ten years earlier to pay homage to their teacher and talk about their profession. After WAFA had sprouted from this nucleus, what little direction was necessary continued to be handled by this group, largely by default.

  There were seven Founding Members. One of the original ones, Ned Ortiz of USC, had died a year earlier and Gideon had accepted an invitation to replace him, but 110 one had bothered to change the FM appellation to something else. Of the six others, only Nellie Hobert, who wouldn’t arrive until that evening, wasn’t there. The rest were all present in the lounge (the Tack Room, according to a tiny brass plate on the door), a roomy, comfortable, seedy place with well-worn chairs and sofas, roughly finished bookshelves stuffed with glittering rows of Reader’s Digest condensed books, and a generally rustic atmosphere (more acres of knotty-pine paneling).

  Miranda was in front of the empty fieldstone fireplace, explaining and gesturing. Gideon was in a scarred, cane-backed chair near an open window that let in the piney fragrance that still smelled like perfume to him. Another day, and he wouldn’t smell it anymore. Next to him sat Leland Roach, looking like an undernourished turtle with his thin shoulders hunched up and his head pulled in, and giving off his usual aura of complacent disapproval.

  Sitting earnestly—and not many people could sit earnestly—on a table in a corner near the television set was Callie Duffer, smoking furiously. A toothy, big-boned woman in her early forties, with wire-coat hanger shoulders and long, restless hands, she was a full professor at Nevada State University and department chair besides. Fidgeting at Miranda’s eccentric and rambling recitation, she was clicking one lacquered fingernail against another, making fitful, insectlike snapping sounds. These brought pointed little mustache twitches of annoyance from Leland, to which she appeared oblivious.

  More relaxed, if not overly attentive, was the youngest member of the board, Les Zenkovich, who had stationed himself on a decaying leather couch within easy reach of the sweet rolls. With a neck like a tree trunk, a stubbly blond beard, and kinky, receding hair tied into a short ponytail, Les looked more like an amiable, over-the-hill linebacker than a scientist, an effect heightened by the loose tank top and flimsy shorts he wore. His arm muscles bulged, his thickening midsection bulged, everything bulged.

  When Gideon had left Northern California State for the University of Washington a few years earlier, it had been Les who was hired to fill in behind him, but the appointment had failed to work out. Academic considerations aside, this was no surprise to Gideon. He couldn’t imagine Amanda Righter, the decorous and genteel head of the department, being much taken with Les’s view on academic ceremony (“meaningless bullshit”), or the gold stud he wore in his right ear, or his weekend gigs as bass player with a country-western group in Oakland. Even Les’s bulginess had probably been an affront to Amanda’s well-cultivated sense of proportion. To the relief of all concerned, he had resigned after
a year, opening his own consulting business—Golden State Forensic Services—and settling happily into life as an anthropological private eye. He had arrived at the meeting in a red Porsche with a DR BONES license plate.

  On the couch next to Les was Harlow Pollard, a fiftyish associate professor from Nevada State. Once he had been Callie’s doctoral committee chairman. Now he was her subordinate. Not a comfortable situation for either of them, Gideon imagined.

  A gray-faced man who had stomach problems and looked it, Harlow sat perfectly erect, perfectly still, feet flat on the floor and close to each other, knees pressed together, hands on his knees. His anxious, somewhat vague gaze was fixed on Miranda with his familiar blend of misgiving and incomprehension. The total effect was something like that of a worried squirrel trying to make sense of an unfamiliar sound.

  It wasn’t dimness of mind that was Harlow’s problem, or so Gideon had always believed, as much as an almost desperate need to have his facts ordered and classified, with every last ambiguity resolved. When they weren’t, he fretted until he got everything straight, which could take a long time.

  And what Miranda was telling them was particularly hard going. Sometime between five o’clock and ten o’clock the previous evening, while the museum was closed to the public for the WAFA dinner and reception, the charred partial skeleton of Albert Evan Jasper had disappeared from its case. On his seven-thirty round, the morning guard had discovered that someone had taken out the eight screws holding on the front of the case and removed the bones; an easy task inasmuch as they were wired to their backing, a breadboard-sized rectangle of white Styrofoam that was not itself firmly attached to anything. The case front had then been replaced and loosely attached with two of the screws.

  A quick search of the museum this morning had not turned up anything. A more thorough search was now under way, but without much hope. The bones with their Styrofoam base weighed only a pound or so. Break the plastic in half, and they could have fit into an attaché case or a bag and been carted off anywhere.