by Aaron Elkins
Not that he didn’t glow when surrounded by those fresh and adoring faces. Who wouldn’t?
Nellie had arrived the previous evening, accompanied as always by his wife, Frieda. Tired from a long day, he had nevertheless joined the poker party at about ten and stayed almost to the bitter end. An enthusiastic but hopeless card player, he had contributed handsomely and without complaint to Leland’s profits. And as Gideon had known he would, he’d taken the news of Jasper’s disappearance in his stride.
“The old boy just won’t stop making waves, will he?” had been his comment once he’d gotten over the initial shock. “Well, don’t worry about it,” he’d generously told Miranda, “we’ll get the old crock back. Who’d want to keep him?” Julie had taken to him at once.
“Good morning, Julie, Gideon!” he called now. “Guess what! Meredith here has spotted what she thinks are some cremains on the National Forest trail along the meadow. We’re going out to have a quick look before things get going. Care to come?
“Cremains?” Julie repeated.
“Cremated remains,” Nellie said.
“Human remains?”
“Yes, but don’t excite yourself. We’re talking about ordinary, legal funerary cremations. People scatter the ashes everywhere, you know. Want to see?”
She jumped up. “Sure! Gideon?”
He declined with a wave. “Go have fun. I’ll pass.”
For one thing, it felt too good to sit without moving in the warm high-country air. For another, as Nellie had said, the finding of cremated remains—Gideon still resisted calling them cremains, but it was a losing battle—had become an everyday occurrence. Regardless of laws to the contrary, people were always emptying urns filled with white ashes and chalky fragments in scenic areas—deserts, mountains, beaches, parks. He’d come across two in the past year himself: one in Mount Rainier National Park, the other near a dig on a beach along Washington’s wild Olympic Peninsula. No doubt, if he was in the habit of keeping his eyes on the ground when he walked, he’d have spotted more. Even the police shrugged them off these days.
Still, it was good for the students to know what they looked like—Julie too, being a park ranger—and Nellie, more power to him, never passed up a chance to teach anybody about anything, even after forty years as a professor.
As they left, Gideon mopped up the last of the egg with his biscuit and looked around him. Many of the resort’s outlying buildings had been razed, mostly in the last few years from the look of them, and in the fall the rest would come down. Not that the owners were hurting. The manager had explained that the lodge was being bulldozed out of existence, older, unused structures first, in preparation for its transformation by a developer. Somehow, what had once been an out-of-the-way tract of useless meadows and woods had become two hundred acres of prime country land in the booming resort district west of Sisters. By next year at this time, the rambling, aging lodge would have metamorphosed into “Witch’s Butte Estates, Forty Prestige Ranchettes in Central Oregon’s Newest and Most Exclusive Golfing Community.”
Well, things changed. The departed building whose foundations he was sitting on now, for example; it had been older than the lodge itself, dating back to the time when there had been a working ranch here. The rough old rock-and-mortar foundation suggested this, as well as some photographs that were in a scrapbook in the lounge. They had been taken in the sixties and they showed this structure as one of several ramshackle, tottery old sheds crammed with moldering, ancient ranch equipment, long disused. Black, split yokes and harnesses, and rusty, spiked implements of metal, sinister and inscrutable. All gone now.
He yawned, stretched, and got up, his eyes roving instinctively over the ground. The building had been almost a hundred years old, more than enough to spark his anthropologist’s curiosity. Not much to see, though. No intriguing bits of history poking up out of the soil. The floor of the shack, once probably hard-packed earth, had reverted to a softer soil, covered with pine needles and dotted with spindly tufts of rabbit brush, little different now from the surrounding countryside.
Still, as always, there were a few things. The scraping off of the topsoil by the bulldozer along one side had revealed the ghostly vestiges of a row of postholes running diagonally through the building. So there had been an even earlier structure here, perhaps from Indian or pioneer days. Well, that was mildly interesting, he thought lazily, squatting down to take a better look.
But there wasn’t much to see. The darker soil of the filled-in postholes disappeared into a nest of straggling brush growing out of the corner of the foundation. Without getting up, he turned on the balls of his feet to see if he could tell where they met the other corner of the foundation. Abruptly, the ground gave way beneath his left foot. He managed to keep from tumbling over by grabbing for the foundation, and as he did so he realized that he had been squatting on the very edge of a depression, the rim of which had crumbled under his weight.
More interested now, he pulled the trailing brush out of the way, tucking the branches into the irregular rocks of the foundation. And there, just inside what had once been the wall of the shack, was a…was a what? He got up and stood for almost a full minute, hands on his hips, staring intensely at the ground.
At his feet was a flat, shallow trench, roughly oval, about four feet long, three feet across at its widest, and two or three inches deep, scantily grown over with strawlike grasses. The sides had mostly collapsed, but here and there they could still be seen; vertical, now disintegrating walls with convex rims, like the top of an old-fashioned bathtub. Less apparent, but still noticeable—if one knew to look for it—was a smaller depression within the outlines of the first, a slight sinking of the soil, as if someone had scooped out a few more handfuls of dirt from the middle of the larger cavity.
A historical archaeologist must have guessed he was looking at the filled-in entrance to a root cellar. A casual visitor might have guessed, if at all, at hidden treasure.
A forensic anthropologist didn’t have to guess. Gideon hunkered down again, elbows on his knees to examine it more closely. In the profession, this was what was routinely referred to as a soil-compaction site, a nice bland term that might have had to do with something comfortable and homely, like composting techniques or solid-waste landfills. But it didn’t. A soil-compaction site was what you eventually got when you buried a body and tried to leave the ground looking the way it had before, with no mound to give it away. And that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, meant homicide.
The larger depression was the result of the dug-up, redeposited soil slowly settling; it happened when you dug a grave, it happened when you planted a rosebush. The convex rim resulted from excess soil on the edges of the hole. The smaller sunken area in the center, and this is what gave it inescapably away, was a “secondary depression”—another one of those nice neutral terms—which typically formed a few weeks after burial, when the abdominal cavity bloated, burst, and finally decomposed, allowing the soil above to sink down into it.
The body, he guessed, was about two feet below the surface. Any shallower than that, and the decomposing tissues would have provided a burst of organic fertilizer to the root zone, making the plant growth above it noticeably denser, which it wasn’t. And it wasn’t much deeper than two feet, because they never were. People disposing surreptitiously of unwanted corpses didn’t like to spend any more time digging than they had to. You didn’t find neat, rectangular six-foot-deep graves in places like this. Generally they were a foot or two deep—enough to cover them over with a few inches of soil—and no roomier than they absolutely had to be.
Gideon guessed that the body inside would be folded into the smallest possible bundle, which was on its side, arms and legs pulled up. Years ago, archaeology texts had offered various ingenious theories as to the religious reasons prehistoric people so often buried their dead in the fetal position. Now, forensic anthropology had provided a simpler, more likely explanation: It was the fastest, easiest way to get so
mebody into the ground and covered up.
He looked up, at the sound of Nelson Hobert’s rattling laugh. Nellie had dropped off Julie and the students somewhere and was on his way to the meeting room for the first session of the day, telling Harlow Pollard about the cremains and waving the last of a glazed donut for emphasis.
“There are two sets of cremains out there,” he announced, “probably more. It’s a pretty site, that’s why. The stream, the meadows. One’s a classic sling-and-fling job—are you familiar with Willey’s typology?—the other’s a pump-and-dump…”
He saw Gideon squatting by the side of the trench. “Gideon, Julie’s gone riding. She’ll see you at—ha, what do we have here?”
Gideon stood up and moved out of the way. “Have a look.”
Nellie clambered over the foundation. “Oh, dear,” he said with sharp interest. He poked the rest of the donut into his mouth and leaned over from the waist, hands on bare, hairy knees. “Well, well.” After a moment he slapped his thighs and straightened up, eyes bright. “By cracky, look what we have here.”
“What is it?” Harlow asked, hanging back. “Soil-compaction site.”
“Soil-compaction site?” Harlow was one of the more narrowly trained people at the meeting. Although a de-greed physical anthropologist, he had made odontology his specialty long ago, as a graduate student. Now he was one of the best when it came to teeth, but he had little familiarity with burial sites or crime scenes. His specimens came to him, he didn’t go to them.
“There’s a body under there,” Nellie said happily. “A body?”
“A homicide,” Gideon said. “You can bet on it.” Harlow looked from one of them to the other. “A homicide?”
“Yes, a homicide,” Nellie said through square brown teeth. “For Christ’s sakes, Harlow!”
“A homicide,” Harlow repeated dimly. “You mean a human body?”
Nellie let his breath out. Like many good teachers, he was endlessly patient with his students, but testy with others whose minds didn’t move quickly enough to meet his standards. “The last I heard,” he said dryly, “human bodies were the only kind you could commit homicide on.”
“But that’s—no, I don’t—why would—”
Gideon gently intervened, explaining about soil-compaction sites. Not that he expected it to do much good. Explaining something to Harlow could be like talking to a tree. He listened quietly but it was hard to say how much got through.
“All right then,” he said, “it very well might be a burial…”
But, thought Gideon.
“—but why in the world would you want to say it’s human? Anyone could have buried a dog here, or a goat…”
“A goat!” Nellie exclaimed, his cheeks reddening. “What kind of a damn fool—”
“True, Harlow, it could be anything,” Miranda Glass said kindly. With eight or nine others she had drifted over. “It’ll have to be dug up to know for sure. But I will bet you dollars to dumplings that by tonight there’s going to be a set of Homo sapiens choppers for you to do your stuff on.”
Harlow shook his head emphatically. “Not me. I have to catch a three o’clock plane; Callie and I both. We have to go back to Carson City. The biological sciences curriculum committee meets tomorrow morning.”
“You’re leaving early?” Miranda said with a groan. “What about your odontology round table Thursday? Christ, Harlow, if I have to revise the whole schedule I’ll kill myself.”
“No, no, we’ll be back early Thursday morning. I’ll do the session, all right.” Harlow seemed tense and distracted, the way he got when his stomach acted up. “Didn’t I say I would?”
Nellie cleared his throat, impatient with the diversion.
“Now then,” he said, very much in authority despite his T-shirt and lumpy knees, “the police have to be notified. Miranda—”
“The police—!” Harlow exclaimed.
“Miranda,” Nellie continued, “I assume they know you around here, so you’re probably the best one to call them.”
“Right,” Miranda said, starting for the main building. After a few steps she stopped and turned back with one of her rosy smiles. “This is going to be a switch. They usually call us about mysterious bodies in shallow graves.”
CHAPTER 6
Twenty minutes later, a white, brown-striped Chevrolet with a Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office emblem on the door pulled into the main parking area. By this time, there were fifty people milling about the burial site, the attendees having decided with the briefest consideration that being in on the start of an actual exhumation beat all hell out of the scheduled morning session on bilateral nonmetric cranial variation.
Deputy Debbie Chavez, skinny and weather-bitten, walked with a cop’s confident lope and seemed very much at home in her uniform of brown shirt, snug tan trousers, and boots.
“All right, folks,” she said after talking briefly to Miranda, “here’s the drill.” She swung around so the sun was behind her, took off her sunglasses, and stuck them under the flap of a shirt pocket. Gideon heard them click against her plastic chest-protector. An unexpected dusting of little-girl’s freckles flowed over the bridge of her nose and along the untanned skin under her eyes.
“First off, if Mrs. Glass here says we’ve got a body down there, that’s good enough for me.”
“It was the consensus,” Miranda said modestly.
“Whatever. So what I’m going to do is get on the horn and call the sergeant. Till he gets here, I’m going to seal the area, and I’d appreciate it if you people wouldn’t do any more tromping around here.”
“We’re not tromping, young woman,” Leland Roach said. “For your information, we happen to be forensic anthropologists—which means we are quite experienced in just this kind of thing—and we’re thoroughly familiar with crime-scene protocol.”
“Uh-huh,” the deputy said, looking down at the muddle of scuff marks and footprints—Gideon could see his own—around the oval depression. “You betcha.”
She was right, Gideon knew. They hadn’t been thinking. As soon as the soil-compaction site had been recognized for what it was, they should have kept everyone away. It was sheer luck that no one had stepped right in the thing. Well, at least John would have an attentive audience when he gave his session.
Nellie Hobert cleared his throat. “True, we may have been a little careless, deputy. On the other hand, this site’s obviously been out in the open for years. I can’t imagine we’ve ruined any evidence. Ahum.”
Nellie was embarrassed. He was one of the country’s two or three leading authorities on crime-scene exhumations. His Exhumation Techniques had been a police-science standby for over a decade, and it came down mercilessly on careless tromping.
“Well, all the same, I just think I’ll go ahead and secure the area,” Debbie Chavez said pleasantly. “Sergeant likes it that way. Why don’t y’all just go about your business and come back in an hour if you want to?” She smiled, a quick up-and-down jog of the corners of her mouth. “We could maybe use a few experts about then.”
By 9:00 A.M. the excavating operation was humming along like a demonstration out of Nellie’s manual. Ordinarily, forensic anthropologists take care not to intrude on each other’s territory, but in this case Miranda had readily deferred to Nellie’s status and experience, and the NSFA president, with a shapeless tan fishing hat on his bald head and a stubby, unlit pipe between his teeth, was atoning for his earlier sins of carelessness with a vengeance, directing Deputy Chavez, another deputy, and several anthropology students with equal vigor.
A thirty-by-thirty-foot square had been cordoned off with yellow plastic tape and gridded. The “artifactual material” on the surface—a couple of rusty bolts, a corroded paper clip, the worn rubber heel of an old shoe, none of which anybody really thought would amount to anything—had been staked with engineering pins, mapped, and photographed from every conceivable angle, then gathered up by Dan Bell, the sheriff’s evidence officer. A crime-sce
ne log had been established, and a line of entry had been delineated from the perimeter to the suspect depression. By means of this narrow path, those very few people permitted to enter made their way in—but not before having the patterns on the soles of their shoes recorded by Deputy Chavez.
Nellie himself had deftly exposed the edges of the pit with a whisk broom, and the digging itself was now under way, being carried out by two earnest graduate students under Nellie’s exacting supervision and the close attention of the forty or fifty people who now ringed the cordoned-off area.
John Lau had slept late, as he’d said he would, barely getting in on the dregs of the buffet. Then, seeing the crowd, he’d wandered over just as things had gotten started, looking mopey and preoccupied.
“That Leland’s like a shark,” he grumbled at Gideon. Gideon laughed. “How much did you wind up losing?” “Eighteen bucks.” He shook his head. “I still don’t think he had that flush. I should have stayed in.”
“Cheer up, John. Look at that sun. It’s supposed to be ninety today. Enjoy yourself.”
“How can I enjoy myself when I’ve got that session tomorrow?” He sighed. “I wish it was today, so I could get it over with.”
Sleepily, he looked around at the activity. “What’s this, a practice dig?” Then he saw the police uniforms and the POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape and his eyes opened all the way. “Hey, what’s going on, Doc?”
“It’s a burial. At least I think it is.” He’d begun to feel less sure of himself. The police activity, the excitement, had made him edgy. If there wasn’t a body there after all this fuss, he was going to look awfully silly. Leland was probably preparing one of his juicier little epigrams right now, just in case it was needed.
“How do they know?” John asked.
“Well, it just looked to me like a classic—”
John tilted his head toward him. “You’re the one who found it?”