Make No Bones

by Aaron Elkins

  “Yes, why?”

  “No reason,” John said. “Just asking.”

  “Look, John,” Gideon said a little tartly. “I didn’t go looking for the damn thing. I practically fell into it, over there—”

  “While minding your own business…”

  “Well…yes, damn it—” He laughed. “Sorry, I guess I’m starting to get nervous. Maybe I was wrong about it.” “We’ll find out pretty soon,” John said sagely.

  A few minutes later Nellie took a break and walked over to chat. “How are we doing here, John?”

  “You’re doing great,” John said. “I don’t know why you guys want a lecture from me.”

  Nellie beamed. “Well, it always has more weight coming from someone outside the fold. Besides, you should have seen us an hour ago.”

  “Nellie,” Gideon said, “does it still look to you like there’s a body in there?”

  “Oh, sure, no doubt about it, none at all.”

  Gideon was reassured.

  At a little after ten o’clock Julie returned from her ride. “What in the world is this all about?” she asked. She looked wonderful, tousled and healthy, and she smelled of horses.

  Briefly, Gideon explained.

  “How did anybody even think to look for a burial here?” she wanted to know. “Who found it in the first place?” “Guess,” John said.

  Julie laughed. “That’s what I thought. Well, I better go get cleaned up.”

  But she stayed where she was, engrossed by the scene. “Uh, if they do find a body, it’ll just be dry bones, won’t it? Not some kind of awful, messy…you know.”

  “Let us fervently hope so,” Gideon said sincerely. “It’s been there a while, so I think decomposition is long past. If not, you’ll smell it before you see it.”

  But the only smells were clean ones: pine needles and pine bark, sweet and spicy, and the coarse, dry soil. It hadn’t rained for weeks, so with each scoop of the trowel a puff of red-brown dust rose and floated off. Gideon could feel it in his nostrils and at the back of his throat. Above, through the branches, the sky was enormous and beautiful, a clean, washed-out blue, marred only by the occasional silent, bright speck of a jet plane floating by. As predicted, the temperature had risen rapidly, and the humidity with it, but they were still in dappled shade. Even the diggers had hardly worked up a sweat. It was all very pleasant and unhurried, more like an archaeological dig than a forensic exhumation.

  And Gideon had stopped worrying about whether they’d find anything. What if they didn’t? He’d been wrong before, and he’d be wrong again. So had all of them, and everyone was accustomed to it. That, in fact, was one of the healthiest things about forensic anthropology; its practitioners were willing to be proven wrong. They had to be. It was an applied science, and your hypotheses and guesses were always being put to practical tests. And since nobody could be right all the time, people either learned to live with being wrong or they got out of the field.

  Nothing like theoretical anthropology, where scholars could barricade themselves behind unverifiable pet theories for decades, ready to fight off dissenters with an old broom handle if need be. Who, after all, could prove one way or the other whether Neanderthal Man walked fully erect, or if Oreopithecus was a hominid ancestor or just another Miocene ape?

  But in forensic work, either a particular bone you examined was female or it wasn’t, was Caucasian or it wasn’t. And if you said a distinctive conformation of the soil meant that a body was buried under it, either a body would be there or it wouldn’t.

  It was. At eleven o’clock one of the students, using the trowel in the Hobert-sanctioned manner, horizontally scraping off about a few inches of soil at a time, caught the tip in a bit of tattered gray clothing. The rotted cloth tore, but not before dragging a bit of bone to the surface.

  “Ha!” Nellie said, and Gideon was relieved in spite of himself.

  Nellie dropped to his knees and leaned over to peer at the fragment through his bifocals, his stiff gray beard fixed on it like a pointer’s snout. There was a surge against the tape as anthropologists and student anthropologists jostled forward. Everyone seemed to be in a jolly mood. From the point of view of the attendees this was turning into quite a conference; one that would surely take its place in WAFA legend.

  “This must be a new experience for you,” Julie said. “Bones coming up out of the ground, and you can’t do anything but watch from behind a barrier, just like the rest of us.”

  “It’s awful,” Gideon agreed. They were about fifteen feet from the digging. “I can’t even make out what the hell it is. A bit of fibula? No, ulna.”

  Nellie was sympathetic to his colleagues’ plight. Still on his knees, he straightened up, took the unlit pipe from his mouth, and made a terse announcement. “Proximal left ulna. And…” He leaned down again to blow away some soil. “…medial epicondyle of the humerus. Disarticulated but in anatomical apposition. Quite dessicated. Good condition.” He stretched out his hand without looking up. “Chopsticks.”

  Julie turned to Gideon. “What?”

  “A left elbow joint, without any soft tissue—”

  “Come on, Gideon, I can understand that. But didn’t he say—”

  “Chopsticks. He was talking to one of the students. When you get near the bones, you don’t want to dig with anything metal, even a trowel. Nellie favors slightly sharpened chopsticks. He sent someone out for a few a little while ago. Also some small paintbrushes to use for whisks.”

  “Chopsticks,” Julie repeated. “Do you use them too?”

  “Yes, I do. Sometimes a piece of bamboo. A dental pick, if nothing else works.”

  “How odd,” she murmured. “All those times you’ve gone running off to dig up some murder victim in the woods the last thing I pictured was you poking around with chopsticks, like a man in pursuit of an egg roll.”

  He grimaced. “Well, not quite.”

  Nellie’s probing, assisted by follow-up whisking by the students, was producing quick results in the loosely packed soil. Every few minutes his head would come up again. “Coracoid process,” he announced. “Acromion…Left iliac crest…Male, on his right side, legs sharply flexed…Fine condition, just beautiful…”

  He was, of course, going about it right, not just digging away at it, but first clearing the surrounding dirt a few vertical inches at a time. This the students would do with trowels, so that the skeleton, embedded in its matrix of soil, slowly emerged, mummylike, on its own pedestal of earth. As it did, Nellie would carefully go to work with his chopsticks, in effect dissecting out the skeleton.

  By this time, many of the nonanthropologists had drifted away, Julie among them. “I smell like a horse,” she said. “I want to take a shower before lunch.”

  Gideon nodded, absorbed in the digging. Nellie had made a preliminary determination as the bones came into view: Caucasian male of middle size, over forty, under seventy. No sign of cause of death. Finer distinctions would have to await removal and cleaning.

  A little before noon, a rumpled, bearlike man with a pouchy, anxious face made his way toward Gideon and John.

  “Dr. Hobert there tells me you’re FBI,” he said to John.

  This, they knew, was Sheriff’s Lieutenant Farrell Honeyman, who had arrived several hours earlier to supervise the investigation. “Oh, boy, this is all I need,” had been his very first words, murmured despairingly at Deputy Chavez as he climbed out of his car.

  They had not made a favorable initial impression on John, who had been standing nearby with Gideon. “That’s Homicide?” he’d said under his breath. “Good luck.”

  Gideon shared his reservations. The crestfallen Honeyman, with his baggy suit and his face like a plate of runny scrambled eggs, had stood off to the side of the grave for most of the morning, uncommunicative and abstracted. In addition to repeated forlorn sighs, there were frequent glances at his watch and various other signs that he was a man of many worries. He had briefly questioned Gideon about the findin
g of the site, but even then his mind had seemed to be elsewhere.

  But now, having found a colleague, he had perked up, at least to the extent of becoming more talkative. “God, I’m up to my earlobes,” he told John. “I have a multi-team interagency task-force meeting coming up this afternoon. This is the last thing I need.”

  “What’s up, lieutenant?” John said, ready with sympathy for a fellow cop’s caseload problems. “Drug bust going down?”

  “Drug bust?” Honeyman answered, his droopy eyes widening. “No, I’m talking budget restructuring, personnel reallocation, the whole schmeer.”

  “Oh,” John said after a fractional pause.

  “I’m the administrative lieutenant,” Honeyman explained. “Our detective sergeant’s on vacation. He’s really screwed me. I’m telling you, John, I’m really glad you’re here. If you’ve got any ideas, I wish you’d just pitch right in.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you can handle it without any help from me,” John said gracefully.

  “No, I mean it. I’ll take all the help I can get.”

  “Hey, I’m here to get away from this stuff,” John said. “This is your show all the way.” But Gideon could see that he was grateful to be asked, something FBI agents learned not to expect from the locals.

  “Not a bad guy,” John said when Honeyman moved off. “I just hope he knows what he’s doing.”

  “Why don’t you take him up?” Gideon asked. “He could probably use some friendly advice.”

  John shook his head. “Doc, the guy was just being nice. He doesn’t want my help, believe me. I know these people.”

  After that, John spent a few more minutes restlessly shifting from one foot to the other while the exhumation inched along, punctuated by Nellie’s osteological bulletins. Finally, he gave up. “I’m gonna go sit by the swimming pool,” he grumbled. “I gotta work on my lecture notes.”

  “John, you’ll do fine. They’ll love you. I’ll be there. I’ll shill for you from the audience.”

  But John, not persuaded, went away talking to himself.

  The exhumation proceeded. Even with frequent pauses for photographs and careful piling of the dislodged earth for later sifting by the evidence unit, much of the skeleton was exposed by twelve-thirty, its arms and legs folded up like a sleeping child’s. The small bones of the hand had been slightly scattered. Shirt, trousers, and underwear were almost completely rotted away, no more than some stiff, gray-brown scraps, but the one foot that was visible was still encased in a sturdy, well-preserved lace-up shoe.

  As things wound down, Gideon found himself standing next to the solitary, woebegone Honeyman again. “Do you have any open cases that might fit this?” he asked, as much out of sympathy as anything else.

  “What? Well, we haven’t even established how long that body’s been there yet.”

  “Oh, I think five to ten years would be a pretty reasonable guess. The body’s completely skeletonized, so that tells us it’s a few years old anyway. And it’s not too old, or there wouldn’t have been any signs of the burial left to see in the first place.”

  “Oh. Well, I suppose that makes sense. No, we don’t.” “I beg your pardon?”

  “We don’t have any open cases from five to ten years ago that could fit this. Some of that was before my time, but I’ve had the files checked, and there’s nothing. No missing white males, not that age, not from around here. Hell, I don’t know what they expect me to do with this.” He nodded and moved despondently off.

  Les Zenkovich, who had come up and listened in on the last few sentences, watched him go. Like most of the others, he had left for a few minutes to get something to eat from the lunch buffet, and he was now using a toothpick with an air of well-fed serenity. He looked expressively toward the burial, and then at Gideon.

  “Well, somebody’s sure as shit missing from somewhere,” he said, sucking a bit of food from between his teeth. “You can bet on that.”

  CHAPTER 7

  For someone who knew as much as he did about the joints and what could go wrong with them, Nellie Hobert cracked his knuckles often and with relish, extending thick-wristed, fuzzy forearms with his fingers interlocked, bending them backwards, and snapping the lot with a long, rolling crackle. It generally meant he was feeling good.

  As usual, Gideon flinched. “Damn, I wish you wouldn’t do that, Nellie.”

  “Ah, nothing like feeling those synovial bursae pop,” Nellie said happily. “No harm to it, you should know that. Now then. You are probably wondering why I asked you here, yes?”

  “Well, yes.”

  It was late in the afternoon, and the two men were in the basement of the Central Oregon Museum of Natural History, in a workroom crowded with partially constructed museum “boulders” made of chicken wire, papier-mâché, and wallpaper glue. In one corner a library table had been draped with heavy polyethylene plastic, and on it was the skeleton, laid out on its back.

  Not literally on its back, of course, inasmuch as it didn’t have a back to lie on, but in a supine position, skull tipped gently to the side, as in sleep, its disarticulated bones arranged in anatomical order. Except for a few of the smallest bones—the hyoid, a few phalanges, and some carpals and tarsals—they were all there and all in good condition, with no damage worse than some abrading and a few gnaw marks here and there. Cleaned now, they were tinged a reddish-brown, like the soil they’d come from, and they smelled faintly of earth and decay.

  It wasn’t a putrid odor—active decomposition was long past—or even unpleasant, really, but simply the way bones smelled after they’d been in the ground a long time, after even the tallowy odor of the fat had disappeared: musty, foresty, a little mildewy. A peaceful, undisturbed smell, the way old, dead bones ought to smell.

  The skeleton had been removed from its grave and put in marked paper sacks at about 1:00 P.M. that afternoon. From there, according to Nellie, it had gone to the mortuary at the Saint Charles Medical Center for a pro forma autopsy by the medical examiner’s pathologist.

  “The ME just looked at it and laughed,” Nellie said. “He told me: ‘With forty goddamn forensic anthropologists hanging around looking over my shoulder, you think I’m crazy enough to stick my neck out on some bags of bones?’ It was the shortest autopsy on record, let rue tell you.”

  “So he turned them over to you for analysis?”

  “Yes, this morning. To Miranda, officially, but she asked me if I wouldn’t take charge.” He smiled. The unlit, metal-stemmed pipe between his teeth bobbed up and down. Nellie’s sudden, wide smile was one of his most disarming features; his lips seemed to disappear, his face to split into two equal parts, like a Muppet’s.

  “And you know me,” he said, “taking charge is what I love to do. Anyhow, we bagged it up again, brought it over here, and Miranda and I worked the thing over. She’s good, Miranda. Just doesn’t get enough cases to give her any confidence. She needs to get her hands dirty a little more.”

  “Uh-huh. So what am I doing here, Nellie?”

  Nellie had telephoned him at the lodge half an hour earlier, at three-thirty, and asked if he could drop by the workroom. Gideon had left the conference session on forensic data nets and driven to Bend. He still didn’t know what for.

  “Well, I asked you to come over because I need your help, Gideon. I’m pretty sure I found something, and I want you to tell me if I’m right.”

  Gideon was honestly surprised. “You want me to tell you?”

  “That’s right. Between us girls, you’re the only one of ’em that’s worth a damn, whippersnapper though you are.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say—”

  “Yes, you would. Who’s better? Harlow knows everything there is to know about teeth but damn-all about bones. Callie’s off in never-never land—and anyway, they’re both back in Nevada right now. And as for—”

  “All right, but what—”

  “—Leland, he doesn’t have time anymore for anything but his precious turds; Les wouldn’t know a�
��a—well, who else am I going to ask?”

  “Ask what? Nellie, you’re the president of the association. You’re the dean of American forensic anthropologists. If you’re sure you found something, then that’s good enough for me. It’s there.”

  “Think so?” He leaned his rump against the table, crossed his arms, took the pipe from his mouth, used the stem to scratch the side of his short, gray beard, and peered at Gideon from under disorderly eyebrows. “Well, now.”

  Here comes a shaggy-dog story, Gideon thought.

  “That reminds me of some testimony I gave in a case in Gallup,” he said, “and the defense attorney was trying to make me look bad, the way they do. Punching holes in my credibility, you know?”

  “All too well.” Gideon had put in some uncomfortable hours on the expert-witness stand himself.

  “Well, sir, this attorney, he says to me, ‘Now, then, Dr. Hobert,’ he says…”

  Shaggy-dog story, all right, Gideon said to himself. He settled down to wait it out.

  “‘Dr. Hobert, who would you say is the most expert forensic anthropologist in the state of New Mexico?’

  “Well, I didn’t quite know where he was going with that, so I just told him, nice and humble, that it was me. ‘I am,’ I said.

  “’I see,’ he says. ‘All right, then, Dr. Hobert, who would you say is the most highly regarded forensic anthropologist in the United States?’

  “’I am,’ I said, but I was starting to get nervous. I didn’t like this guy.

  “’I see,’ he says. ‘Now then, could you tell the court, who in your opinion is the most expert forensic anthropologist in the world?’

  “I look him in the eye, take a deep breath, and say: ‘I am.’

  “He leans over at me with that smirk they get. ‘No one in the entire world is as good as you are?’

  Not…even…close,’ I tell him, “Well, the prosecuting attorney asks for a recess and gets me aside. ‘Nellie,’ he says, ‘how could you say those things? You know that kind of thing puts the jury’s back up.’