by Aaron Elkins
“So I said—you want to know what I said?”
“Do I have a choice?” Gideon answered, but he was already smiling. Here it came.
“I said: ‘Well, hell, man, I was UNDER OATH!”
Nellie banged his hand on the nearest table, rolled back his head, and shouted laughter at the acoustic-tile ceiling. He stuck his pipe back in his mouth. “Did I have you going there, or didn’t I?”
“Not for a second,” Gideon said, laughing along with him. “Now: What was it you wanted my help on?”
The older man sobered. He turned back toward the skeleton. “Tell me what you see.”
“Well, as you said, it’s male, Caucasian—”
“Yes, yes, of course. We’ve done all that. Caucasian male, average build, estimated stature of 69.3 inches, plus or minus 1.18—”
“You used the Trotter and Gleser equations?”
“For femur plus tibia—And Suchey-Brooks for aging from the pubic symphysis: It’s a textbook Phase 5, completely rimmed, which gives us a range of say, thirty to seventy, and most likely forty-five to sixty-five. Throw in the vertebral lipping, the atrophic spots on the scapula—”
Gideon picked up the right scapula and held it up against the light from the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. There were milky patches of translucence where the bone had thinned in its normal, unstoppable progression toward disintegration.
“—the sternal rib changes,” Nellie continued, “the general bone density and so on and so forth, and you get an age of around—”
“Fifty-five or so,” Gideon said, putting down the scapula. Say fifty to sixty.”
“On the money, my boy. As for possible features of individuation, we have a healed fracture of the left ulna, probably from childhood, and an extracted first molar, also old. A few fillings. And some arthritis in the metatarsophalangeal joints, but nothing worse than any other old geezer. And that’s it. Nothing much to go on. For that matter, nothing very interesting. But…” He paused weightily. “…in cause of death I think we have something else entirely.”
“Cause of death?” Scanning the bones, Gideon had seen nothing to suggest what it was.
“Yes. How was the dastardly deed done? That’s what I want your opinion on. I think that we have something unusual here; a—well, I better not give you any hints. Wouldn’t want to bias you. Go ahead, tell me what you think.” He bestowed a split-faced grin on Gideon and used the stubby pipe to make a gesture at the skeleton: It’s all yours.
Intrigued, Gideon picked up the skull, most likely of all bony elements to tell a story of death by violence. Until now, he had seen only the front and the left side, which showed no fractures, no entrance or exit wounds. He turned it over and there on the rear, just to the right of center, was an inch-and-a-half-long horizontal crack just above the lambdoidal suture. Gideon ran his finger along it.
“Oho,” Nellie said quietly, chewing on his unlit pipe.
Gideon looked at him, puzzled. The crack was an uncomplicated linear fracture of the right parietal. No depression of the bone, no radiating fracture lines. Textbooks described this kind of injury as the probable result of an “accelerated head impacting on a fixed surface”—and not the other way around, which would have had more sinister implications. In other words, a simple fall; hardly proof of dastardly deeds.
“Nellie,” Gideon said cautiously, “I’ll grant you that this could have caused death—maybe a contre-coup brain contusion, subdural hemorrhage—”
“Yes, yes.” Nellie gestured impatiently. “Could. But didn’t.”
“Well, then—”
“Keep looking. You haven’t found it yet.”
Gideon turned the skull, millimeter by millimeter. He shook his head. “I don’t see anything else on the skull.” “Not on the skull.”
“Below the skull?”
Nellie cocked his head. “Is there another way to go from the skull?”
Gideon smiled. “Okay, below the skull.” He lifted the sternum.
Nellie shook his head. “Higher.”
Gideon put down the sternum and picked up the first cervical vertebra, the atlas, so named because the globe of the skull rested on it.
“Lower,” Nellie said.
Gideon put it down. “I’m sure glad you’re not giving me any hints.” He moved to the second cervical vertebra.
Nellie shook his head. “Nope, but you’re getting warmer.”
Gideon sighed. “Nellie, how about just—all!”
Inconspicuous as it was, it seemed to leap out and catch his eye. On the sixth cervical vertebra, located just below the level of the Adam’s apple—a minuscule break zigzagging its way across the front of the right transverse process, one of two small, winglike spurs jutting out from the body of the vertebra.
Gideon leaned closer, nudged the bone with a forefinger. The crack was perhaps a quarter of an inch long. “Hinge fracture,” he said, using the conventional term for a break that went only partway through the bone, something like what happened when you snapped a fresh twig.
“Exactly,” Nellie said with enthusiasm. “Precisely. And you’ll also notice, on the posterior root—”
“Another fracture,” Gideon said. “Hairline. And as for the adjacent vertebrae…” One by one he lifted them and carefully examined the convoluted surfaces.
Nellie nodded vigorously, urging him along.
“…nothing,” Gideon said. “No sign of trauma.” Another crisp nod from Nellie. He paused in lighting his pipe. “So? What’s your conclusion, doctor?”
Gideon leaned against a lab stool. There wasn’t much room for doubt. Injuries like these, in these particular places, meant that enormous squeezing force had been applied to the neck. One saw them in hangings, or even in manual strangulations if the killer happened to be built along the lines of King Kong. But in such cases, the wholesale wrenching of the neck muscles generally produced injuries to more than one vertebra, often to four or five. To have only a single vertebra cracked, and that one in two places, meant that the constriction had been extraordinarily localized.
It wasn’t something one came across often; in Gideon’s experience only twice. And each time it had been caused by the same thing.
“Garrote,” he said.
“Aye, mate,” Nellie said with satisfaction as he got his pipe going. “The old Spanish windlass.”
The technique dated back at least to the time of Christ. In its basic version a cord—in ancient times it had been made of animal sinew—was looped twice around the neck, and a stick or other firm object inserted between the loops. Rotating the stick would then twist the cord, much like a tourniquet, and create terrific pressure, first closing the windpipe and then, with a few more twists, snapping the spinal column; thus combining the virtues, so to speak, of strangling and hanging. When applied at the level of the sixth cervical vertebra, it would also compress the carotid sheath, thereby shutting off blood flow to and from the brain. Just for good measure.
The Spanish Inquisitors, who used the method as a merciful alternative to the stake, claimed that it was painless, but there was a lack of definitive data on this point. What it demonstrably was, however, was simple, efficient, and silent. And, if the cord was knotted at close intervals, bloodless.
Gideon touched the crack in the skull. “You think he was knocked out by a fall, then garroted?”
“Let’s hope so,” Nellie said, “for his sake.”
Gideon hoped so too. He stood looking down at the table in an odd reverie. What an enormous difference there was between the livid, flagrant corpses a pathologist had to work with and this, the anthropologist’s quiet and unassuming skeleton. This man’s life had ended horrifically, yet the bones gave no signs of upset or fright. Or even of pain. Just two clean, inconsequential-looking little cracks in one tiny, inessential-looking bone. The skull grinned like any other skull, no different from that of a man who had died peacefully in his bed. There were no bulging eyeballs, no purple and protruding tongue, no cruelly bruised and swollen
flesh.
A good thing too, or he’d have been out of this business a long time ago.
Nellie smacked his hands together. “Well, then, if that’s settled, let’s lock up and get out of here. If you’ve got time, let’s stop by Honeyman’s office and give him the good news.”
He took off the lab apron he’d been wearing and tossed it onto a coat hook. Today’s T-shirt was a bright and cheerful blue. “Our day begins when yours ends,” it said. “Dallas PD, Homicide Unit.”
“So,” a sweating, shirt-sleeved Honeyman said bleakly, turning the stub of a pencil end-over-end on the big old desk that took up a full third of his tiny office. “It’s definitely homicide. There’s no doubt about it anymore.”
“Was there ever?” Nellie asked. “Or did you seriously consider that he might have buried himself?”
Honeyman glared at him, then permitted himself a baggy smile. “I could always hope.”
“What about you?” Gideon asked. “Making any progress?” “Progress!” Honeyman said with a snort. “The budget meeting was a total disaster! They actually expect us—” “I meant on the burial,” Gideon said.
“Oh, the burial. Well, there are these.” From an ink-stained shirt pocket bulging with half a dozen pens he pried out a small yellow envelope, which he opened and upended on the desk. A quarter and two nickels rolled out. “These came out of the grave after you finished. Right under the body, about an inch below.”
“Must have rotted out of his pocket,” Nellie said.
“Yes, or somebody dropped them while they were burying him. Same difference.”
Gideon turned the coins over to read the dates: “1981, 1972, 1978.” He looked up. “So at least you know something you didn’t know before. He couldn’t have been buried before 1981.”
“No, or after, either. Not that I know what that does for us.
“Or after?” Nellie repeated. “Why the devil not? Just because a 1981 coin—”
“Well, it’s not the coin,” Honeyman said, “it’s the shed.” “The shed,” Nellie said.
“Yes, the shed.”
Gideon tried helping things along. “The shed that used to stand where we found the grave?”
“Sure, what else are we talking about? I talked with the management, and they said part of it blew down in a huge windstorm we had in October 1981, and they bulldozed away what was left of it a few days later. So there you are. That body was buried in 1981. Before October.”
“Where are we?” Nellie demanded. “So the shed blew down in October. Who’s to say the body wasn’t buried later?”
Surprisingly, Honeyman was ready for him. “It’s always possible, but what would be the point? It would have been right out in the open, only a few feet from some of the guest cottages. And you can see it from the road. You’d have to be crazy to try to bury a body there.”
“Well, yes…”
“But…” Honeyman said, and Gideon began to think he might actually be enjoying himself. Not many people got a chance to lecture Nelson Hobert. “But while the shed was still standing, it was perfect. Easy to get into, a nice dirt floor to dig in, plenty of junk in it to hide the grave—and with the open side facing away from the cottages and the road. What more could you ask? The chances of that grave ever being found were just about zero.”
Gideon nodded his agreement. If Honeyman ever decided to get out of administration and into detective work, he just might do all right.
“Not quite zero,” Nellie pointed out. “It did get found.”
“Oh, certainly,” Honeyman said with another of his sad-eyed smiles, “but only because our poor, dumb perp never bothered to calculate the probability of a convention full of forensic anthropologists showing up and crawling all over the place ten years later. Just goes to show the limitations of the criminal mind.”
“Nineteen eighty-one,” Gideon said slowly. “Wasn’t that the year of the first WAFA meeting?”
“WAFA?” Honeyman said.
“Western Association of Forensic Anthropologists. Their first meeting was at Whitebark Lodge. In 1981.” Honeyman laid down his pencil. For the first time a flicker of real interest showed in his eyes. “Is that so? All these same people?”
“Well, just a few of us,” Nellie said. “We’ve grown quite a bit since then, you know. Back in 1981 there were only…”
He stopped in mid-sentence, forgetting to close his mouth, his head tilted as if he were listening for something.
“What?” Honeyman said nervously. “What is it?”
“By gum,” Nellie said softly, incredulously. Jammed between the side of Honeyman’s desk and the wall, he leaned as far back as he could in the straight-backed chair, locked his hands behind his neck, and stared, seemingly at the marked-up boxes of a big “Executive Plan-Your-Month” calendar over Honeyman’s head. But his eyes were unfocused and Gideon could see that his mind was racing. He sat like that for a long time, then lowered his gaze and faced them, still not altogether back from wherever he’d been.
“By gum,” he said again. “I believe I know who that skeleton is.”
CHAPTER 8
“Well…who?” Honeyman asked.
“Chuck Salish,” Nellie said, and looked dreamily at Gideon. “Has to be. Think about it.”
Gideon frowned back at him. “Nellie, I don’t know who Chuck Salish is. Was.”
It took a moment for this to register. “You don’t—
No, of course you don’t. You weren’t there. Forgive me, I forgot. Chuck and Albert were going to go into business together when Albert retired, you know. Albert—”
“Albert, Albert, who’s Albert?” Honeyman was growing increasingly edgy.
The interruption seemed to wake Nellie up. His eyes drifted back into focus. “Albert Evan Jasper, of course. They were going to open a forensic consulting outfit. It would have been one of the first.”
“Chuck Salish,” Gideon repeated. The name was completely unfamiliar. “An anthropologist? I’ve never heard of him.”
“Anthropologist? No, what gave you that idea? He was an FBI agent, out of the Albuquerque office. He was—”
“FBI agent?” Honeyman stood up, opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. Still, it was a few seconds before anything came out. “You’re telling me I’ve got a—a dead FBI agent, a murdered FBI agent, lying on a table in the museum?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Nellie said calmly. “He was retiring, too, at about the same time Albert was. They’d worked together on a case or two, you see, and they’d gotten along, and they’d decided to go into business together, so—”
“Dear God, why me?” With a pitiful groan Honeyman flung himself back into his chair. “Well, what was he doing around here?” he demanded accusingly.
Nellie looked mildly back at him. “Do you suppose we could get out of this room? I could stand a little fresh air. And, my word, I’d give my soul for a hot cup of coffee. Farrell, you look as if you could use something yourself, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“What I could use is unhearing what you just told me,” Honeyman muttered.
A few minutes later they were settled around one of the awning-shaded tables outside Goody’s Soda Fountain on Wall Street, a block north of the Justice Building. Gideon was as glad as Nellie to be out of Honeyman’s stuffy office. It was a relief, almost a surprise, to see that the air was still clean and fresh, and to be among people who weren’t talking about buried skeletons and murdered FBI agents. Despite the temperature, which had now climbed into the promised nineties, Nellie had his hot coffee, a double espresso. Gideon had iced tea in front of him. Honeyman had bought a bottle of fruit-tinged mineral water.
Nellie tossed down half the coffee in two swallows and heaved a great sigh. He searched in the roomy pockets of his Bermudas, hauling out his pipe and two tobacco pouches, one a soft red leather, the other a cheap plastic one, cracked and dingy. He chose the plastic one, as Gideon knew he would. It contained the expensive, evil-smelling Latakia
he loved. The red one held an aggressively perfumy blend that he smoked only when Frieda was around.
“Well, then,” he said, completing his drawn-out lighting ritual, “the two of them had worked together and gotten to be friends, and Albert invited Chuck along to our get-together to meet some of the people in the field. But the unfortunate upshot of it was that he was killed in the bus crash too.” His eyebrows came up as he glanced keenly at them. “Or so I thought until today.”
“This is the ‘81 Santiam Pass crash you’re talking about?” Honeyman asked.
“That’s right. Gideon, you know what we’re referring to?”
“I think so. The bus accident you and the others all worked on. The one Jasper was killed on.”
Nellie nodded. “Albert and thirty-seven others. Maybe more—we had some odds and ends of people we never attributed for sure.”
Odds and ends of people, Gideon thought. Was there any other profession where this would pass for everyday conversation?
“It was on an early-morning run between Bend and the Portland Airport,” Nellie went on, “a service for people in the resorts around here.” His coffee was black and sugarless, but he stirred it anyway. “Well, what I assumed at the time—what we all assumed—was that some of those odds and ends were Chuck Salish. We had every reason to believe he was on that bus, and no reason, none at all, to think he wasn’t.”
That sounded a little indefinite to Gideon. “Are you saying you actually identified some of those fragments as Salish?” he asked.
“Gideon, when I say odds and ends I mean odds and ends. I’m not talking about dentition, facial skeletons, nice big chunks of long bone and innominate—I’m talking about burnt, crumbling scraps so mutilated and tiny that they couldn’t be positively attributed to anybody. Maybe they belonged with some of the people we’d identified for sure, maybe they didn’t. The whole thing was a horrific jumble, just terrible. We examined what we had, we talked it out; and, where we had to, we made the best guesses we could, that’s all.”
Honeyman lifted both hands pleadingly. “Wait, wait, wait. Hold it, hold it, hold it. Did I just hear you say that you just guessed he was on that bus, and that was that? An FBI agent? Tell me that’s not what you told me.”