Make No Bones

by Aaron Elkins

  “What about asking Don to take them for you? You could use some time to relax.”

  “Would you want me to do that? Slough off my responsibilities?”

  Julie was a supervising park ranger at Olympic National Park headquarters, there in Port Angeles. As Gideon well knew, she took her increasingly pressure-laden job seriously.

  “No. Yes.”

  “Thanks, that’s helpful.”

  “Ah, Julie, it’s just that—well, I hate being away from you if I can help it. Nine days…”

  She softened instantly, leaning forward to put her hand on the back of his. Her black eyes shone. “Well, why didn’t you put it like that in the first place, dopey? What was all that stuff about relaxation and sunshine?”

  He hunched his shoulders. “I was embarrassed. Mature people aren’t supposed to be so damn dependent on other people.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.” She tilted her head, smiled. “So do you want to make the flight reservations, or should I?” Gideon laughed. “I’ll do it.”

  He started spooning the basil mixture into the hot olive oil. “You know what I was thinking?” he said over his shoulder.

  “What? My God, that smells good.”

  “I was thinking of asking John if he’d like to do that session on crime-scene do’s and don’ts. It’d be fun to have him along, don’t you think?”

  “John Lau? Our John? You’re kidding.”

  “What’s wrong with the idea? He’s a bona fide FBI agent, isn’t he? He’s a first-rate cop, and he knows crime-scene procedure—he’s sure given me hell when I’ve messed things up. I think he’d love the chance to tell an audience of professors to watch where they put their feet.”

  “I think he’d hate it. He can’t stand giving lectures. Not that it wouldn’t be nice to have him there.”

  “Oh, I bet I can bring him around.”

  “What are you, kidding me? You think I’m gonna stand up and give a speech to a bunch of Ph.D. professors with long gray beards? You’re out of your mind.”

  Gideon smiled into the telephone. “What is it with beards? I’m a Ph.D. professor. Do I have a beard?”

  “I’m not doing it, Doc. Find somebody else.”

  “I’m doing you a favor, John. You’re always complaining that forensic types don’t understand police work. This is your big chance. You’ll have a captive audience.”

  “No way.”

  “You can have four hours if you want it.”

  “Thanks a heap.”

  “The meeting’s not far from Bend.”

  “Bend?”

  “Bend, Oregon.”

  “What’s in Bend, Oregon?”

  “Sunshine.”

  Silence. Gideon waited.

  “People ski in Bend, Oregon.”

  “Only in the winter, John. The climate’s high desert. Yesterday’s temperature was almost seventy, humidity eighteen percent. Sunny. I checked it in the paper.”

  What hadn’t worked for Julie, Gideon knew, was likely to do the trick for John, a native Hawaiian whose idea of good weather was a July day in Yuma, Arizona. Even Hawaii had been too cool to suit him, and too wet. The FBI, with bureaucratic caprice, had assigned him to Seattle, with its two months of sunshine (in a good year) and ten months of bone-penetrating drizzle.

  “We could probably justify two or three days there for you,” Gideon said. “You’d be welcome to sit in on the other sessions if you wanted…or you could just lie around the swimming pool.”

  “Three days?” John said, and Gideon knew it was settled. He could picture John on the other end of the line at his fifth-floor desk in the Federal Building, wistfully looking out on the rainy streets of downtown Seattle and the gloomy, fog-drenched Sound a few blocks away. In a way, Gideon had cheated, or at least stacked the deck; he’d waited a few days before calling, letting a brief spell of relatively tolerable weather pass, until another truly miserable day came along.

  “Might be nice,” John said. “Who pays?”

  “We do. And if you want, I can have a letter sent on WAFA letterhead requesting your services.”

  “That’d be good. Applewhite would probably let me do it on work time.”

  “Great, I’ll take care of it right now.” He started to hang up.

  “Wait, wait!”

  Gideon brought the receiver back to his ear. “What?” “Don’t you sign it, Doc.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you make Applewhite nervous,” John said with his usual candor. “Nothing personal. He just says every time we use you, things get weird.”

  “I report what I find,” Gideon said. “I’m sorry if it makes things difficult for you.”

  “Hey, don’t get mad at me. Applewhite just likes nice simple cases, no complications.”

  “Well, this isn’t a case; this is just a bunch of graybeards getting together to talk about bones, remember?” “Yeah. But all the same, do me a favor, okay?” Gideon sighed, then laughed. “All right, I’ll have Miranda Glass sign it, how’s that?”

  “Fine. Just keep your name out of it altogether, okay? No offense, Doc.”

  When it came time to book their airline tickets, they changed their minds and decided to drive. Eight or so hours in a car would be a sort of floating, between-two-places decompression period for Julie, whose job wasn’t being made any easier by the usual freezes, cutbacks, and other hysterics that traditionally went along with the federal government’s fourth fiscal quarter. They took their time, not that there was any choice in this part of the world. Port Angeles was situated at the very top of Highway 101, where it narrowed to two lanes and looped around the Olympic Peninsula, and you could go either east or west and still wind up in Los Angeles three days later, presuming of course that that was what you wanted to do.

  They drove east and then south, skirting the Olympics, down along the Hood Canal, dawdling through sleepy towns built around oyster beds, down past Duckabush and Liliwaup and Dosewallips, none of which looked as if they gave much of a damn about fourth-quarter reallocation problems. They stopped for lunch at Tumwater and did their duty as tourists, touring the brewery and enjoying it.

  Then it was out of the mistiness and ferns of the peninsula and onto Highway 5, a genuine freeway, where the country opened up and flattened out. South of Chehalis, Mount St. Helens reared into view, colossal and unmistakable, its scooped-out summit obligingly trailing a monumental, picture-postcard plume of white steam.

  They spent the night at a motel in Portland, relishing the quiet sense of adventure that went along with being in a place where no one in the world knew they were. In the morning they stopped in Salem for a late, unhurried breakfast and took the Santiam Pass road up into the Cascades, over the weird, black volcanic crest of the pass itself, and halfway down the wooded eastern slope, covering in three easy hours what had taken the wagon trains ten grueling, dangerous days not so very many years before.

  At two o’clock they pulled into the shaded parking area in front of Whitebark Lodge’s main building. Miranda’s letter had led them to expect a decrepit hulk of a place, and it was true that there were signs of neglect everywhere: forest-brown cottages unpainted for years or possibly decades; ample, once-lush lawns that now looked like goat-cropped meadows, hummocky and dandelion-infested; lavishly planted flower-borders half hidden by weeds; rust-colored algae thriving on the surface of the shallow pond that had been formed by diverting an arm of the creek that ran through the property. But the overall effect was of rustic comfort and rugged Western homeliness, of a relaxed and cordial matron (or better yet a madam), perhaps a little down on her luck right now, but with plenty still going for her.

  Their three-room cottage had dust balls in the corners and a curling, soiled flyswatter lying on a windowsill, but there was also a fresh country quilt on the pine bedstead, a reasonably clean kitchen that dated back no further than the fifties, and a massive river-rock fireplace in one corner of the living room. There was thickly shellacked, gleaming, kn
otty-pine paneling on the wails, the doors, the floors, the cabinets, even the ceilings. Underneath the surface dust, which was easily gotten rid of with a broom from the closet, everything seemed clean, and all in all they thought it was just fine.

  As far as Gideon was concerned, the sunshine slanting through the windows as if it were the most natural thing in the world didn’t hurt either.

  CHAPTER 3

  The conference began much like any other. The attendees reported to the conference registration desk, where they picked up their badges (Gideon’s said: “HELLO! My name is OLIVER GIDEON”), milled about with the other early arrivals, and renewed old acquaintances.

  Among these cronies, there were predictable exclamations of wonderment at the number of new faces to be seen this year, along with fond talk of the old days when forensic anthropology was new and all of its practitioners could have fit—indeed, had fit—around a single medium-sized table in a Shakey’s Pizza Parlor in Los Angeles. Now you had a hard time finding a familiar face in the mob. Who, went the refrain, were all these people?

  In Gideon’s case, as in many of the others’, it was more than talk. For Gideon, forensic anthropology—the application of knowledge of the human skeleton to situations, homicidal and other, in which bones were all there was to go on—was a sideline; interesting enough on its own merits, but definitely secondary to his interest in hominid evolution, which alone took him to five or six meetings a year. As a result, he’d managed to make only two of the biennial WAFA conferences: the second, with twelve participants, and the third, with twenty. There had been no graduate students attending, and no family members.

  This year, sixty-two had signed up, including twenty-one students, and at least a third had brought spouses/ lovers/friends/whatever. They had filled most of the aging lodge.

  When Gideon came back with his registration packet the cottage was empty. He found Julie outside, sitting peacefully under a couple of pine trees beside the pond. She was in a bulky wooden lawn chair, her feet up on a second chair and crossed at the ankles, with a paperback Anne Tyler novel on her lap. Swaying branches broke the light that fell on her into shifting, watery shards, as it, an artfully out-of-focus Victorian photograph—all glowing, indistinct highlights and soft outlines; a sweet, sad memory of something loved and lost. His throat suddenly constricted.

  She closed the book and looked lazily up at him. “Boy, do I feel relaxed.”

  He cleared his throat. “Boy, do you look pretty.” She smiled. “Kiss,” she said, “please.”

  He knelt and kissed her gently on the mouth. When he moved back, she tipped his head to her again, kissed him again, softly nibbled his lip. “I love you.”

  “You know,” he said huskily, “we have time to—”

  “No, we don’t. We have to be at a museum reception at five.”

  “We have time if we hurry.”

  “Who wants to hurry? I’m free this evening after the reception. How about you?”

  “Well, I’m pretty busy, but I’ll try and work you in.” He kissed her once more, stood up, and took the remaining chair. “Good book?”

  “Uh-huh.” She stretched, put the book on the table, and pointed at the registration packet. “Anything interesting in there?”

  “I doubt it.”

  But the topmost item proved him wrong: a letter from Nelson Hobert, anthropology chairman at Northern New Mexico and president of the National Society of Forensic Anthropology, WAFA’s parent organization. He scanned it silently.

  Dear Colleague:

  As many of you know, Albert Evan Jasper’s prodigious contributions to our field did not end with his death. Dr. Jasper’s will provided for the donation of his remains to NSFA, the organization over which he presided for so many years, with the provision that they be used “for the furtherance of knowledge and/or education in the science of human skeletal identification.”

  Ironically, the particulars of his tragic death made such application problematical, and for ten years his remains were stored while awaiting appropriate disposition. Recently, however, an opportunity to fulfill his wishes presented itself, viz, the installation of a major forensic anthropology exhibit by the Central Oregon Museum of Natural History in Bend.

  Contacts with Miranda Glass determined that the exhibit included no material on identification from burned skeletal remains, and that she would welcome those of Dr. Jasper for that purpose. While this would appear to have happily resolved the matter, you will understand that it raised issues of delicacy and taste, particularly in regard to Dr. Jasper’s family. Therefore, family approval was requested before taking the matter further.

  I am pleased to report that Dr. Jasper’s son and executor, Dr. Casper Jasper, has wholeheartedly approved the disposition of his father’s remains in this manner, and they were transferred to Bend some two weeks ago. Miranda assures me that they will be permanently installed in time for Sunday’s preview reception for WAFA members. As a longtime associate of Albert Evan Jasper, I can assure you that this final outcome of his bequest is fully in line with his wishes.

  On behalf of NSFA, welcome to the fifth biennial WAFA conference. I regret that personal business will prevent my arriving until Monday evening, but I look forward to greeting you all then.

  “Well, I guess you’d have to say this is pretty interesting,” Gideon said, handing it to her.

  She had hardly begun to read it when she looked up, frowning. “’Ironically, the particulars of his tragic death made such application problematical…’ What does that mean? Didn’t you tell me he was killed in a bus crash down here?”

  “It means there wasn’t much of him left, and what there was was in pretty bad shape. Burned to a crisp, in fact. Him and thirty or forty other people. The bus ran into some kind of fuel truck and pretty much exploded into flames. It was really horrible, I understand. There wasn’t much left of anybody.”

  “How do they know which one was Jasper, then?”

  “It wasn’t easy. Nellie and the others worked on the victims for days, and they never did positively identify everyone. In Jasper’s case, the jawbone and some of the teeth were still left, and they were able to match them up with his old dental charts.”

  The sounds of cars starting up drifted to them from the parking area in front of the main building. Gideon looked at his watch. “We probably ought to get going ourselves. Reception starts at five.” He smiled. “You’re right, we wouldn’t have had time.”

  Julie glanced at the letter again without getting up. “Nellie Hobert? The man who wrote this letter actually worked on the body?”

  “They all did. Nellie was one of Jasper’s ex-students too; the very first, I think. He was here at the lodge for the meeting. As I understand it, they had no idea Jasper was even on that bus. They didn’t know he’d left. In the morning they got a call from the state police saying there’d been this awful traffic accident, and could they possibly help identify the dead? Everybody pitched in, of course, and it was only after they got down to work that they realized he was probably one of the victims.” He stood up. “The dental records made it definite.”

  “Yuck.”

  Gideon shrugged. “It’s what forensic anthropologists do.”

  “I know, but the idea of his own students, people who were celebrating his retirement with him the day before—handling his teeth, poking at his bones…” She shivered. “I repeat: yuck.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. I’ve always thought there was something highly appropriate about a forensic anthropologist winding up as the subject of a forensic analysis.”

  “Maybe, but it’s highly creepy too. If you ask me, you should be glad you weren’t there.”

  Gideon couldn’t argue with that. Jasper’s remains aside, being up to his elbows in a morgue room full of the ghastly remnants of people who had been crushed and burned to death a little while before was an experience he was glad to have missed. He’d had his share of similar ones, but it wasn’t something you got used
to. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy working with bones—nothing fascinated him more—but the older they were the better he liked it, with ten thousand years being just about right.

  He held out his hand. “Come on, let’s get going. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to miss the unveiling. You can read the rest of the letter in the car.”

  “I don’t know…” she began doubtfully.

  “Believe me, with Miranda MC’ing things, there won’t be anything morbid about it.”

  He was turning their car out of the lodge in the wake of a bus hired for those who didn’t have cars, when Julie looked up from the letter with a spluttering laugh. “He named his son Casper Jasper?”

  “I told you, he was a bit of an oddball.”

  “Well, I guess he was. Dr. Casper Jasper. Is his son an anthropologist too?”

  “I think he’s an internist.”

  “Oh, a real doctor.”

  “Ha,” Gideon said, “most amusing. I met him once, you know.”

  “Casper?”

  “Uh-huh. He was still in medical school—I was just out of grad school myself—and his father brought him along to a conference. A big lanky guy, about six-seven; nice enough but a little, well, spacey. Some of us were walking along a street—I think it was in Tucson—and Casper, being as tall as he is, ran smack into one of those metal awning rods in front of a store. Caught him right across the forehead. Very disconcerting.”

  “I should think so.”

  “I mean for the rest of us. One second he was talking along with us, chattering away, and the next he was out cold and flat on his back. At first nobody could figure out what happened. The rod was way above everybody else’s head.”

  “What did you do?”

  “His father took over, and very efficiently too. Wouldn’t let anybody move him until we got an ambulance there to run him in for x-rays. And he was fine. They didn’t even keep him overnight.” He shook his head. “You should have seen that rod, though.”