Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 07 - Make No Bones

by Make No Bones

  Les backed off. “Well, I wouldn’t swear to a supernumerary tooth. I’ve looked at a lot of skulls since then. But whatever there was, you didn’t have to be an odontologist to see there was a match.”

  “And you personally compared the charts to the remains yourself? You saw that they matched? You didn’t just take Harlow’s word for it?”

  “Of course I compared them. We all did.” He tilted his head, pulled on an earlobe. “Well, I think we did. Who remembers now? But, look, that mandible was right there in front of us the whole time. Anybody who felt like it could check it against the charts anytime he wanted. Harlow or anybody else would have been out of his mind to try to fudge anything.”

  Not if it had been done the way Gideon thought it had. It was becoming clearer, but there were still some fuzzy edges, some pieces that didn’t fit. “Let me ask you this, Les. How positive are you those records were really Jasper’s?”

  “What kind of question is that? About as positive as you can be. We found out who his dentist was, Harlow got in touch with him for the charts—you know the drill—and back they came, just like for anybody else. Well, except for the x-rays.”

  Ah. Gideon’s eyes narrowed. “What about the x-rays?”

  “There weren’t any. Jasper was scared of them.” He laughed. “Weird when you think about it. Here’s the number-one bone expert in the country—”

  “How do you know he was scared of them?”

  Les shrugged. He was beginning to tire of the conversation, or perhaps to wonder what they were talking about. “I don’t know. It wasn’t any secret.”

  “I never heard about it.”

  “So? What does it matter now?” Les yawned and shook himself, bearlike, the undulation seeming to roll slowly up his big torso under the skin. He took off the clay bracelet and dropped it on the table. “I guess head for—oh, hey I remember. Harlow told us. When he contacted the dentist. The guy told him Jasper was scared to death of x-rays. Okay? Satisfied?”

  With a gratifying clunk, the last piece dropped tidily into place. Gideon leaned back in the chair.

  “Satisfied,” he said.

  CHAPTER 15

  “Hello, welcome to McDonald’s; may I take your order, please?”

  John stuck his head out the car window to get closer to the microphone-speaker. “Hamburger, large fries, strawberry shake.” He turned back into the car. “Doc, you sure you don’t want something?”

  “No, thanks.” Gideon’s stomach still wasn’t quite settled, and the heat wasn’t helping. But he was thirsty. “Well, maybe a shake. Chocolate.”

  “And a chocolate shake,” John yelled into the mike.

  “Yo,” the speaker said metallically, and then a moment later: “That’ll be $3.54 at the first window, please.”

  John drove twenty feet to the first window and paid.

  “Thank you, drive to window number two and await your order,” he was told, this time by a living person.

  John drove to window number two and awaited. “And so that’s what the big secret is?” he said to Gideon. “They had a roast and Jasper took it the wrong way?”

  “According to Les.”

  “So what’s the big deal?”

  Gideon explained some of what Les had told him.

  John shook his head. “Hell, I don’t know what to make out of that. I asked Nellie about it twice and both times he told me he didn’t know what Leland was talking about.” He turned away to collect their order. “I just wish the guy would level with me,” he muttered.

  As John got the car moving north on Highway 20 toward Whitebark Lodge, Gideon continued going through Albert Jasper’s old file, which John had copied at the Medical Examiner’s office.

  After three or four miles, John glanced over at him. “What do you think?” He was getting restive. The hamburger had been consumed in a few bites; the french fries were being plucked one at a time from the bag beside him on the seat.

  “Tell you in a minute,” Gideon said.

  Side by side on his lap he had set two forms, slightly different in their layouts, but each diagramming the same thing: a set of all thirty-two human teeth, “folded out” to show the five surfaces of each. One of the forms bore the logo, “Victor MacFadden, D.D.S., 333 Montezuma Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87504.” Under it, alongside “Patient Name,” was “Jasper, Albert E.” The diagram had been crosshatched and shaded to show a variety of dental problems and treatments; to judge from them, Jasper had spent a lot of time in the dentist’s chair, as Les had implied.

  And crammed in between the lower-right canine and first bicuspid was an extra tooth that had no business being in anybody’s mouth: Les’s supernumerary.

  The other form, plainer and more cheaply printed, had Harlow Pollard’s finicky signature at the bottom, and a date of June 13, 1981. This was a standard odontological postmortem diagram, and it had apparently been filled out after the crash, directly from the remains. Naturally enough, only the part representing the eight teeth in the right half of the mandible had been marked up.

  And those markings, as Les had told him more than once, perfectly matched those on Dr. MacFadden’s chart: five fillings, all on the identical surfaces of the identical teeth, one gold inlay, one missing molar with its space closed…and one highly unusual supernumerary, between canine and bicuspid.

  “I can tell you what Nellie said,” John volunteered. “What’d Nellie say?” Gideon murmured, studying the charts.

  “He said you’re nuts,” John informed him cheerfully. “He took one look at MacFadden’s chart, that one you’ve got right there, let out a yelp, and said it proves once and for all that Jasper died on that bus.”

  “Mm?” Gideon said without looking up. “And how does he account for the reconstruction looking so much like Jasper?”

  “I can give you his exact words.” John took out the notepad he carried in his shirt pocket and glanced at it from the corner of his eye as he drove. “‘Occultism…humbuggery…subliminal suggestion…hocus—’”

  Gideon laughed and took his milkshake from the opened lid of the glove compartment. “Well, he’s wrong, John. Sharp as he is, Nellie’s got a blind spot when it comes to reconstructions. The fact is, Jasper never got on that bus. He was buried at Whitebark, and what’s left of him is now sitting on a shelf in the sheriff’s evidence room.”

  “What about these charts?” John asked. “They match, don’t they? And this one’s from Jasper’s dentist, right? How do you account for that?”

  “Faked,” Gideon said. “Or rather, one of them is. The postmortem one that Harlow filled out after the crash is accurate, all right. It shows exactly what was in the burned mandible that came from the bus. But this one—” he held up the form with Dr. MacFadden’s logo on it “—is a fake. It isn’t really Jasper’s chart, John.”

  “Now wait a minute, Doc. You know I don’t argue with you when it comes to bones and things—”

  “Oh, ho, ho,” Gideon said.

  “—but you need to know I already checked this out. While I was with Nellie. I put in a call to MacFadden’s office in Santa Fe. This guy is definitely a bona fide dentist, he’s still in practice, and Jasper was his patient. He remembers the accident, he remembers getting a call from Pollard—and he remembers sending out the chart. So—”

  “I’m sure he did send one out. But this isn’t it.”

  “This isn’t…?” John flicked a finger at Jasper’s name, at MacFadden’s logo. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The logo’s real,” Gideon said, “but the chart isn’t Jasper’s.”

  John was beginning to show signs of exasperation. “Is that MacFadden’s form or isn’t it?”

  “It’s a photocopy, not an original. To be more exact, it’s a photocopy of the photocopy that MacFadden sent. What Harlow did was the simplest thing in the world: a cut-and-paste job. Look, those ME files are full of forms from dentists, right? There were thirty-some-odd people on that bus and most of them were unrecogn
izable. But there were ways of coming up with almost all the names: bus reservations, unburnt pieces of ID, calls from people who were expecting to pick up other people, and so on.”

  “Right, so?”

  “Well, what the forensic team was trying to do was match these piles of bones and teeth to the names, so Harlow would have contacted every one of their dentists he could reach, right?”

  John made an impatient, rumbling noise. “Yeah, so?” “So one of the forms that came back was for the guy who they eventually identified as Jasper—call him Mr. X. What Harlow did was take off Mr. X’s name and the name of Mr. X’s dentist, stick on MacFadden’s logo, type in Jasper’s name on the Patient’ line, and run it through a copy machine. Presto-chango, Mr. X’s chart is now Albert E. Jasper’s chart—and naturally it matches Mr. X’s dentition, since that’s what it’s a picture of.”

  John chewed this skeptically over. “Assuming that it really happened that way.”

  “I’m pretty sure it did, John. And so Mr. X is duly identified as Jasper, and the question of what happened to the real Jasper never comes up. It doesn’t compute. And somebody gets away with murder; Harlow, it looks like.”

  John remained doubtful. “I don’t know, doc. If this Mr. X wasn’t Jasper, who was he, where’d he come from? Where’d Harlow find him?” He leveled a french fry at Gideon. “Everybody on the bus got identified, remember? Everybody’s accounted for.”

  “Not exactly. Take a guess.”

  “What do you mean, guess? How the hell am I supposed to know that?”

  “Come on, take a stab,” Gideon said, beginning to enjoy himself just a little.

  John folded the stick of potato into his mouth and shook his head. “How the hell am I—oh, shit. Salish?”

  “That’d be my guess. He had a bus reservation, right? And he had to be back at work in Albuquerque that afternoon, so there’s every reason to think he was on it.”

  “Only they never ID’d him,” John said thoughtfully. “Not for sure.”

  “That’s right. But they did identify Jasper—from eight teeth and a handful of burned debris. Let me tell you, John, with the shape those bones were in, Harlow wouldn’t have had any trouble convincing the others they were the remains of Genghis Khan—not if he had a perfectly matched dental chart to prove it.”

  John chewed mechanically, looking straight ahead through the windshield. “So it was Salish in that drawer all these years? Salish in the museum case?”

  “I think so.”

  John laughed unexpectedly, a brief splutter. “I know it’s not funny, but…Christ.”

  They let a few miles go by without talking. In the east, but still far away, bands of clouds were beginning to form in the Cascades; the first clouds in several days. Maybe, Gideon thought hopefully, relief from the hot spell was on the way.

  “Doc,” John said, “you’re not saying Harlow engineered that whole bus accident, are you? Because that’s just—”

  “My God, no. I’m assuming, that he must have killed Jasper some time the night before, after the roast. Probably buried him then too. The bus crash happening the next day was probably just a lucky break. He saw a great way of disposing of Jasper for good, with no awkward questions, and he took it.”

  Gideon sipped’ his shake, thinking. “Or, you know, it could be the other way around. Maybe the bus crash happened first, and when Harlow heard about it, he knew he had a chance to kill Jasper then and there—”

  “Why? I don’t suppose you’ve got a motive all cooked up too?”

  “—with nobody ever finding out about it, so he went to Jasper’s room—”

  “Wait a minute, hold it.”

  Gideon waited.

  “Listen,” John said, “are we talking facts here? Or are you making it up as you go along?”

  “About which came first, the crash or the murder? I’m making it up, what else?”

  “No, about the whole thing, the switch of the dental charts. You got anything at all to support it? Or is this all, you know, just—”

  “Unverified supposition?”

  “Yeah, exactly, unverified supposition.”

  “Uh,

  “I knew it.”

  “But there’s some circumstantial evidence to support it.” “Oh, great, now I feel better.”

  “For example, this would explain why Salish’s dental chart is missing from the file. Harlow removed it, probably back in 1981, to use as Jasper’s. And he didn’t have to bother about replacing it with still another fake, because nobody was interested in Salish’s teeth right up until yesterday.”

  “Why wasn’t anybody interested in Salish’s teeth?” “Because the remains that they tentatively ID’d as Salish back then didn’t have any teeth.”

  John chewed for a while. “Okay,” he said slowly, “I see what you’re saying. I think.”

  “Look, there’s a simple enough way to verify this. Just ask Dr. MacFadden to send Jasper’s chart again. We’ll see if it’s the same one we have here—which it won’t be—or if it matches what’s in the skull in the evidence room—which it will.” He laughed. “I think.”

  John grunted. “Okay, I will. We’ll see what happens.”

  “There’s something else. When a dentist sends in records, some x-rays usually come with them. But there aren’t any here. According to Les, that’s because Jasper was afraid of them. So said Harlow.”

  John glanced at him. “This is supposed to tell us something?”

  It told them, Gideon explained, that Harlow had been lying. Gideon recounted how the hapless Casper Jasper had been knocked cold by an awning rod, and how his solicitous father had immediately hustled him off to the hospital to be x-rayed. Did it stand to reason that a man leery of fluoroscopic radiation would unhesitatingly put his son through it?

  “Maybe not,” John admitted. “So why is that important?”

  “John, if you photocopy x-rays onto ordinary paper, they’re not much good because so much of the clarity is lost. So dentists use a special copying machine to reproduce them onto transparent film. Well, that’s what MacFadden would have done—and that would have been hell for Harlow to fake. You’re not talking about a simple cut-and-paste job to change the names anymore. And he would have had to get access to the right kind of machine himself. Not easy to do without anybody knowing.”

  John nodded, finally beginning to come around. “Easier just to say there weren’t any x-rays, and invent a reason for it.”

  “That’s right. I’m betting MacFadden actually did send a set and Harlow just tossed them. Any dental reports corning in would have gone straight to him, so who would know? And there wasn’t a chance in a million MacFadden would ever find out about it. He’d just read in the newspapers like anybody else that Jasper was identified from his teeth, period. And maybe he’d get a nice, polite thank-you call from Harlow.”

  “Yeah, but what about the rest of the file?” John said. “There’s a report from a doctor, something from a physical therapist. How could he fake all that stuff and hope to get away with it? He’d be bound to slip up somewhere,”

  “He didn’t have to fake anything else. The rest of the file is really Jasper’s, Look.”

  He thumbed through the folder until he found the physician’s report, a three-page form signed with a looping flourish by Willa Stover, M.D. —Post-traumatic osteoarthritis, right first and second metatarsophalangeal joints,” he read. “That’s the big toe and the one next to it. And here: ‘Fractured left ulna, childhood fall.’”

  John nodded slowly. “Just like on the skeleton Nellie dug up.”

  “Sure, because the skeleton’s really Jasper. But at the time, it was buried under the floor of the shack where nobody knew about it—and the remains Harlow said were Jasper’s were nothing but those teeth and a few splinters of bone that were just about unreadable. Every damn joint in the body could have been arthritic, and nobody would have known the difference. So there wasn’t any risk. All Harlow had to fake was the dental stuff
. And that’s what he did.”

  “You think.”

  “I think.”

  They pulled off the highway and into the graveled parking area at the entrance to the lodge. Even in the shade of the ponderosas, getting out of the car was like stepping into a smelter. Gideon glanced at the rusting metal Dr. Pepper thermometer nailed to the bulletin board. Ninety-four, it said, and it felt as if the relative humidity was about the same.

  “God, what weather.”

  “Yeah,” John said absently, “great, isn’t it?”

  They began walking toward the main building. John had a ruminative look on his face. “Harlow,” he said, as if he were testing the name on his tongue. “Seems like such a meek, harmless little guy. Kind of hard to see him as a killer.”

  Gideon nodded. “It’s a surprise. I was starting to wonder if Julie might not be right, if you want to know. About Callie.”

  “Let’s concentrate on Harlow. Any idea why he’d want to do in Jasper?” He looked up at Gideon’s laugh. “Did I say something funny?”

  “John, let me quote Les Zenkovich on Albert Jasper: ‘To know him was to want to punch him out.’ That would have applied to Harlow as much as any of them.”

  “Why? What’d they have against him?”

  “Well, he wasn’t the kindliest man in the world. From what I know about him, he was short-tempered, spiteful, contentious…inconsiderate…”

  John waved an impatient hand. “Doc, you don’t usually kill people because they’re inconsiderate. Or even inconsiderate and contentious.”

  “John, you asked me what they had against him, and I’m trying to tell you.”

  “Right, sorry.”

  “I’m doing the best I can.”

  “Right, go ahead.”

  “I mean, don’t expect me to solve your whole case for you.”

  John emitted a rolling growl. “Will you go ahead?” “With pleasure, if you’ll let me. The thing is, they were all his graduate students at one time or another—” “All of them? Even Nellie?”