Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 02 - The Dark Place

by The Dark Place

  But he didn’t die. The astounded Oroville sheriff, finding him cowering in the dirt, covered him with an old shirt and put the exhausted, near-dead Indian in the jailhouse. Word quickly spread, and within a few days the great anthropologist Alfred Kroeber had come to him in the jail and sat patiently and kindly with him and learned a few Yahi words and even made Ishi laugh when he mispronounced them.

  The rest of the story was no less incredible. Kroeber took Ishi back to San Francisco and found a place for him to live—the University of California Anthropology Museum on Parnassus Heights. There Ishi maintained simple quarters and earned money for his needs—he wasted no time developing a taste for sugar and tea—by giving popular demonstrations of point-carving and arrow-making to an appreciative public.

  In the four years before he died of tuberculosis, Ishi developed a deep, genuinely reciprocated friendship with the brilliant Kroeber. During their long conversations and their trips back to the Yahi country, Kroeber learned as much about Ishi’s early life as one man can acquire from another. He learned how the little band of Yahi, certain they would be killed if the white man ever found them, had walked from stone to stone so they wouldn’t leave footprints and had walked under and not through the chaparral, traveling for miles on all fours. He learned how they had lain perfectly still when whites were nearby, sometimes from morning until dark, and how they had lived in tiny, camouflaged huts impossible to see at fifty paces, shielding their fires with tall rings of bark.

  And for forty years, no one had even vaguely suspected they were there.

  Ishi’s name was enough to end Abe’s resistance. "It’s possible, it’s possible," he said, his eyes glowing. "Why not? A little band of Indians in the rain forest. What better place to hide? Not luxurious, but they wouldn’t freeze either, and they’d have plenty to eat. Oy, Gideon, think what we could learn—a Stone Age people, maybe—what a thing it would be!"

  "What a thing, indeed," Gideon said. "But…they’re almost too primitive—bone spears, atlatls. Even the Yahi were more advanced, and certainly the Northwest Coast Indians were way ahead of that even a hundred years ago. So who are these people?"

  "Well, remember, they’ve got to be a small band, like the Yahi were—five, six, a dozen people. Even if they walk on rocks you can’t hide a hundred people."

  "True, and the cemetery is small. Not many people for a hundred-year occupation, assuming that’s their only burial ground."

  "Right. And when you get a group that small and that isolated," Abe said, "you get what I would call the cultural drift phenomenon."

  "And what would I call it?"

  "You wouldn’t call it nothing because I just named it, but it’s got to be true. Like genetic drift, where you got only one guy with blue-eyed genes. He gets killed, and good-bye blue eyes in that gene pool. Look, you got one guy, say he’s the bowmaker, the only one who knows how. One day he falls off a cliff, and poof"—he snapped his fingers inexpertly—"good-bye bow technology. You just lost five thousand years of cultural evolution."

  Gideon thought about it and nodded. "And you’re more isolated and scared than ever. You see the jets go over, you hear the automobiles, maybe see them sometimes, and you retreat farther and farther, where you’re safe, where those strange beings can’t kill you or eat you or whatever they think is going to happen."

  "And if someone gets too close, you kill him? Like Eckert?"

  Gideon had almost forgotten. "Yes. I think so."

  Abe finished the last of his milk and licked his lips. "And you’re going in the rain forest and find them."

  "When did I say that?"

  "You don’t got to say it. You think I don’t know you?"

  He was right, of course. "Abe, think what it’d be like to go in there and talk to them!"

  "Yes, sure, only they kill people who get close, remember?"

  "Well, yes, but I’m an anthropologist, not a casual drop-in. I’d research the language, I’d—"

  "Very nice, only what language? You don’t know who they are, you don’t know what they speak. Look, are we playing chess, or aren’t we?"

  Gideon picked up his queen, hesitated, and waved it vaguely about. "Well, I didn’t say I was going in tomorrow. I have the Dungeness dig to finish, for one thing. Then I have a lot of research to do before I try it. I was thinking of next summer." He put the queen down in front of Abe’s advanced pawn.

  "Already the queen?" Abe said. "On the third move?"

  Gideon pushed his chair back from the chess table. "I think I’d better get going, Abe. I have to be up early."

  Abe looked up from the board in surprise. "In the middle of the game?"

  Gideon grinned at him. "Checkmate."

  Abe stared at the board in rueful confirmation. "In three lousy moves," he said bitterly.

  "Child’s play," Gideon said, smiling. "I try that on you about once a year. It always works, and you always say you’ll remember to watch for it next time."

  "Next time I’ll remember." He laughed and patted Gideon on the back of the hand. "Gideon, you’re a physical anthropologist, not a cultural anthropologist. I don’t say you don’t know ten times as much as any of them, but why not leave it to the trained ethnologists? Report it to the university. Let them take it from there."

  "But the university says there can’t be any Indians in there. I’m not sure I could convince them otherwise."

  "You’re not sure you want to, you mean."

  "Maybe I’m not," Gideon said.

  Abe took a deep breath and let it out in a shuddering sigh. "Ah, in your shoes I wouldn’t be either. Boy oh boy, I wish I was ten years younger. I’d go with you. But this damned arthritis…"

  "I wish it too, Abe, with all my heart," Gideon said.

  The jingling of the telephone was fading to an echo as Gideon opened the door to Seagull Cottage, and the caller had hung up by the time he got to it. He stood there a little worried—it was 1:20 a.m.—waiting for it to ring again. It didn’t.

  "I know you’re going to ring again if I get into the shower," he said aloud, glaring at it. He brushed his teeth slowly and packed his bag for the weekend, waiting all the time for the ring. After fifteen minutes, he gave up, took off his clothes, and stepped under the shower.

  The telephone rang.

  "Doc, where the hell have you been?"

  "John? What’s up? Where are you calling from?"

  "Lake Quinault. I’m at the lodge. Julie told me you were coming down tomorrow, and I wanted to catch you before you started out. There’s—"

  "Wait, let me get a towel."

  He came back to the telephone, rubbing vigorously. It was cold in the cottage, and he’d forgotten to turn on the electric wall heater. "Okay, I’m back."

  "Doc, can you bring your tools down with you? We’ve kept on digging around that cemetery, and we’ve turned up another body—a partial skeleton, that is. It looks like Hartman."

  "Who the hell is Hartman?"

  "Hey, what are you getting mad about?"

  "I’m getting mad because, one, you got me out of the shower and I’m freezing, and two, because it’s going to be a beautiful day tomorrow and Julie and I were going to take off for Kalaloch Beach as soon as I got to Quinault, but you’re going to ask me to work all day in a dusty workshop on some dumb skeleton, and I’m going to rant and rave and say no, but eventually I’ll do it out of a ridiculous sense of friendship or service or something equally absurd." He gasped for breath. "That’s why I’m getting mad!"

  John laughed, the delighted, childlike burble that always broke down Gideon’s defenses. "I thought you liked working with bones."

  "I do like working with bones. I love working with bones. There are just some things I like even more." Gideon sighed. "All right, who’s Hartman?"

  "He’s the other guy who disappeared."

  "I thought that was a girl. Claire Hornick."

  "No, I mean six years ago, the same time as Eckert. Hornick disappeared last week. She’s still disappea
red."

  "What makes you think it’s not another Indian burial, an old one?"

  "Well, we’ve tentatively identified it through dental records, but I’d sure appreciate it if you’d have a look anyway."

  "Okay," Gideon said, "okay. I’ll see you about nine. Uh, John?…I’ve been talking the case over with an old professor of mine…"

  John listened quietly for ten minutes while Gideon told him about the discussion with Abe, interrupting only to ask for an explanation of atlatls. After Gideon had finished, the line remained silent.

  "John? Are you there?"

  "I’m here. I’m just in shock."

  "Well, after all," Gideon said magnanimously, "you were the one who first suggested Indians—"

  "I know. That’s what I’m in shock about. I never won an argument with you before. You’re actually telling me I was right and you were wrong? I can’t believe it!"

  "Come on, John," Gideon said, laughing, "I’m not that unreasonable. Sometimes even you make sense—to a certain degree, of course, and in your own way."

  "Thanks a lot. I wish I could say I deserved such fantastic compliments. But," he said, his voice dropping to a lower, grimmer register, "I’m afraid this new body doesn’t do much for your theory."

  "What theory?"

  "That wild Indians are running around bumping off people with Stone Age spears. Doc, this guy was shot."

  "Shot? With a gun?"

  There was a pause, and Gideon knew John was nodding soberly. "Yeah, with a gun. He’s got a neat little round hole drilled clean through the side of his skull."

  Chapter 8

  "Hmm," Gideon said, almost as soon as he had sat down and looked at the ivory-colored skull on the worktable. "Huh."

  John had his chair tipped back against the wall, and his hands were clasped lazily at his belt line. "I don’t like that ‘hmm, huh’ stuff," he said. "It always means you’re about to screw up my case. Not that I have a case."

  "He wasn’t shot, John," Gideon said quietly.

  The front legs of John’s chair came down on the linoleum tile. "Not shot…!" He gestured expressively at the circular hole in the left side of the skull.

  "Not shot. In the first place, look at the placement. High up on the coronal suture, almost at bregma. Isn’t it pretty unusual for someone to be shot so high up on the head?"

  "No, as a matter of fact."

  "Really?"

  "Sure," John said, obviously relishing the unaccustomed role of instructor. "It’s a fairly common placement in suicides."

  "And what would he have used to leave a hole that big? An elephant gun?"

  "Doc," John said easily, "no offense, but aren’t you a little out of your league with this forensic pathology stuff? Little bullets can make big holes."

  "Maybe," Gideon said, "but when they make big holes they make big sloppy holes, not neat round ones like that. And consider this: To drill a hole that cleanly, a bullet would have to be traveling at a heck of a velocity, wouldn’t it?"

  "So? That’s what bullets do. Say fifteen hundred feet a second—three thousand if you assume it was a rifle. Muzzle velocity, of course." John was still teaching and enjoying it.

  "Then where’s the exit hole?"

  John chewed the inside of his cheek. He was beginning to waver. "Lodged in the brain, probably, then fell out later."

  "A projectile that big, going that fast? It would have plowed through the brain like so much vanilla pudding and exploded the forward right side of the skull on the way out—here at the temporal or the sphenoid; both very fragile, thin bones."

  "Unless," John said, "it had a soft tip. Then it could have stayed inside."

  "But—"

  "I know. It wouldn’t have made such a neat hole." John leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, looking glum. "Okay, Doc, I give up. You’re right. Let’s hear your theory, but try to keep it to words I can understand, okay?"

  "This was a trephining, not a shooting."

  "Oh, one of those."

  "It’s also called trepanning. The cutting out of a disc of bone from the vault of the skull. A lot of primitive peoples have practiced it, including American Indians. For that matter, it’s still a common surgical technique."

  John took the skull carefully in both hands and peered at the hole. "And that’s what this is? Trephining?"

  Gideon nodded. "See those annular grooves encircling the aperture?"

  John shook his head in exasperation. "These scratches around the hole?"

  "Yes, they scraped round and round with something sharp until they got to the inner table and the disc of bone separated."

  "Ugh." He looked suddenly at Gideon. "Did they do it when he was alive or dead?"

  "Could be either. Sometimes it was done as a treatment for headaches or insanity, sometimes to get a piece of a dead enemy to wear as an amulet. There’s a twentieth-century group in New Ireland that did it just for fashion. They—"

  "For Christ’s sake, Doc, I mean this guy."

  "I don’t know." He took the skull from John and moved his fingertips slowly over the area surrounding the clean-rimmed hole. "Or maybe I do know. The differential healing of this fracture and the absence of septic osteitis suggest—"

  "Wait a minute," John said and sighed, rising and going to the coffeepot at the back of the room. "If you’re going to give a lecture, I’m going to need some fortification. You want some coffee?"

  "I’ll have some coffee," Gideon said, "but I’m not going to give a lecture. I’m simply going to demonstrate the art of scientific detection in a simple manner—simple enough," he said, looking loftily at John, "for even the most unformed of minds to comprehend."

  "Oh, brother," John said, "I better have two sugars." He returned to the table with two mugs cupped easily in one big hand, placed one of the mugs in front of Gideon, and sat down.

  "In the first place," Gideon said, "do you see this crack coming out of the upper part of the hole?"

  "This squiggly line?"

  "No, that’s the coronal suture, the division between the frontal and parietal bones. No…this thin crack here, that runs up to the top, just behind the suture."

  "Yeah," John said, fingering the almost-invisible fissure. "I noticed that before. I figured either it cracked when the hole was made, or after it was in the ground. Pressure from the earth or something. That happens, doesn’t it?"

  "All the time, but I don’t think it did in this case. In fact, I know it didn’t." He sipped his coffee, choosing his words. "Now: That barely visible fracture is more significant than this big round hole. There are three things to be learned from it. First, that it—and the blow that caused it—occurred not after he was dead, but while he was still alive. Second, that the blow didn’t kill him outright, and possibly not at all, but that he lived a week or so afterward. And third, that the fracture definitely preceded the trephining—and the trephining probably did cause his death."

  He paused, well launched in his best professorial style. In response, John’s mild truculence had evaporated, as it usually did, into a respectful, only slightly skeptical attentiveness.

  "Run your finger over the crack, from side to side, near the edge of the round hole," Gideon said.

  John did so and frowned. "The bone feels kind of concave—dented. How can you dent bone?"

  "Easily. Living bone is relatively soft. It bends, splits, dents. But dead bone quickly loses its elasticity and becomes brittle. Therefore—"

  "He probably got cracked on the head when he was alive."

  "Right." Gideon said. "By something heavy enough to cause the fracture and blunt enough to cause the concavity. The exact locus of the blow was undoubtedly a little lower down, at the site of the trephining."

  John took a notebook from the pocket of his denim shirt and jotted something down. "Okay, that’s point one," he said. "The fracture occurred while he was alive. Now, how can you tell he didn’t die on the spot?"

  "If you look at the crack closely—here, use th
e magnifying glass—you’ll see that the edges aren’t really sharp. They’re slightly rounded because there’s been some resorption of the bone. And at the very top of it there’s a thin, very slightly raised bead of bone that joins the two edges together. See it? It’s a little lighter than the rest of the skull."

  "I see it," said John with interest. "That shows it’s started to heal, right? Which wouldn’t have happened if he died right away."

  "Righto. That’s point two."

  "All right," John said approvingly, "but you said you could also tell that he didn’t live more than a week longer. How can you…? Ah," he said, tapping his forehead, "if he’d lived very long, it would be all healed, right?"

  "Right. Stick with me; I’ll make a detective out of you yet. All right, here comes the third conclusion—that the trephining came after the blow on the head and probably killed him immediately." Gideon slid the skull a little closer to John. "Now, this is going to take a small leap of faith, you understand."

  "No, it won’t. I’m ahead of you. The crack has started to close up, but the hole shows no sign of healing at all. So he must have died as soon as it was made." John beamed. "How’m I doing, Doc?"

  "’A’ on logic, ‘F’ on conclusions. A narrow fracture begins to show healing within a few days, but a larger perforation, like this hole, takes longer. In fact, it never actually heals in the sense of closing up; it just rounds the edges. But even that wouldn’t begin to show for a while. So even with the lack of visible healing, he could easily have lived another few weeks."

  "So how do you know he didn’t?"

  "I mentioned septic osteitis a few minutes ago." Gideon waved his hand as John began to write again. "Don’t worry, I’ll write it up for you. Septic osteitis is simply inflammation of the bone due to infection. If it had occurred, you’d see a roughening, a pitting of the bone all around the hole. But it’s smooth. So, no infection."