Make No Bones

by Aaron Elkins

  “Specific bones on the brain?” Gideon said lazily, still beguiled by the water. He tossed in another pebble.

  Julie got up, walked two steps to the edge of the bank, and crouched, using a twig to probe gently at the root area of a young willow that overhung the stream. She turned to look at him over her shoulder. “Gideon, I think these are cremains.”

  “I wish people wouldn’t call…”

  “Excuse me, cremated remains. Come look.”

  Gideon got reluctantly to his feet and went to her side, leaning over with his hands on his knees. “Yup.”

  “But aren’t the chunks kind of big? The ones Nellie showed us were almost like powder.”

  “Well, it depends on the funeral home. Sometimes they pretty much pulverize what’s left, and other times they more or less break it up with a hammer, and you get pieces like these.” He picked up one of the two fragments; a bit of humerus. “But I grant you, these are bigger than usual.

  There seem to be only these two pieces. I imagine someone was throwing the ashes into the stream, and these accidentally fell onto the bank. They don’t look as if they’ve been here very—”

  “Gideon!”

  Julie had continued scanning the nearby ground, and now she was staring at a small tangle of exposed roots that jutted out from the side of the bank, two or three inches above the water and a couple of feet from the bone fragments.

  Gideon saw instantly what had seized her attention. He put down the burned piece and kneeled to look more closely at the bright, granular fleck of white caught among the roots. After a few seconds he sat back on his haunches and looked thoughtfully up at her.

  “Jasper?” she said.

  “Looks like it.”

  There wasn’t much room for doubt. The fleck was a broken, half-inch-wide particle of white styrofoam; the same kind of plastic that Jasper’s remains had been wired to. And, as if the matter needed cinching, there was still a loop of white, plastic-coated wire piercing it, twisted together at one end. It was the loop that had snagged in the roots.

  “They must have done it in the dark,” Gideon said, thinking aloud. “After the walk-through at the museum. They wanted to get rid of it in a hurry. They came out here, broke up the display, and tossed everything in the stream.”

  “Or thought they did,” Julie said. “It would have been easy for them not to notice they’d dropped a few pieces.” “Yes. But…”

  “What?”

  “Doesn’t this strike you as an odd place to dump these? Right on the nature trail? I mean, if I’d wanted to get rid of them quickly, I would have maybe tossed them out of the car window on the way back from Bend, a piece at a time. No one ever would have found them.”

  “Most people didn’t go to Bend in their own cars. They went in groups, or took the bus. You couldn’t have done it without other people seeing.”

  “Well, then, I’d have crushed them after I got back—a couple of blows with a hammer or a rock would have done it—and flushed them down the toilet. Crush-and-flush.”

  “You’d have flushed the Styrofoam?”

  “All right, that I’d have broken up and tossed in the garbage. Without the bones or one of these wire loops, who would connect it to Jasper? Or maybe I’d have buried it, to be on the safe side. But somewhere out in the woods. I sure wouldn’t have left any of it right along the trail like this.”

  “I agree, it’s strange.”

  He nodded and straightened up. “Julie, I’d better get going. I have to be in Bend at seven. Will you let John know about this when we get back to the lodge?”

  “Of course.” They began walking back. “What do you make of it, Gideon?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Still think it’s just a prank?”

  He looked at her. “No,” he said, “I don’t think it’s a prank.”

  Miranda was as good as her word. When Gideon arrived at the Justice Building in Bend at 7:00 A.M., the county commissioners’ meeting room, which had surely never before been used for such a purpose, was set up and ready with everything he needed.

  At the head table the materials he would use were neatly laid out: a somewhat unsettling pair of dark-gray prosthetic eyes; a box of terra-cotta-colored Jolly King modeling clay; a seven-inch length of eraser rubber; a box of round toothpicks; a box of cotton; a tube of Duco cement; an X-Acto knife; a few small rulers; a couple of simple modeling tools (fingers would be the most important tools); some 80-grade sandpaper; and a folder put out by the University of New Mexico called “Tables of Facial Tissue Thickness of American Caucasoids.”

  And a carton of donuts and a metal urn of hot coffee just perking its last on a long table against the wall. This was especially appreciated by the arriving students. With ninety-degree heat coming, the air conditioning had been turned up to keep the clay from slumping on the skull.

  “Need anything else?” Miranda asked.

  “No, this is great. You must have gotten here at five.” Miranda placed her hand on her heart. “We are here to serve.”

  She had brought the skull and mandible from the room Nellie was working in and placed it on the table. Gideon quickly filled in the medical examiner’s evidence tag: Released to: Gideon Oliver. How: In person. Date: 6-19-91. Time: 7:00 A.M.

  “Okay, have a ball,” Miranda said. “Yell if you need anything. I’ll be right down the hall.”

  “You’re going to be working on the postcranial skeleton with Nellie?”

  “Uh-huh. Me, Nellie, and Dr. Tilton from the medical examiner’s office. Since I’m the one the ME officially released it to, it makes sense for me to be there.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And of course you always learn something from Nellie.”

  “That’s true too.”

  “And it was either that or coprolite analysis. Hands on.” “I hear,” he said, “what you’re saying.”

  After Miranda had left and they had stoked up on coffee and donuts, Gideon got started, explaining as he went. First, the skull was firmly locked onto a plastic mount. Then he packed the fragile bones in the eye sockets and nasal aperture with cotton, and covered them with a protective layer of clay. The Duco was used to glue lengths of toothpick to the surfaces of the lower molars to prop the mouth slightly open. Without them, there would be an unnatural, clenched-teeth appearance. After that the mandible was attached to the skull with daubs of clay, an easy-enough process because mandibles fitted into place only one way. Inserting the eyes took more time; eyeballs do not fill their sockets, and getting them placed just right—not too protruding, not too sunken, not too high or too low—was something that took patience.

  But by eight o’clock these preliminaries were out of the way. Gideon now had a skull that stared alarmingly back at him with great, goggling, lidless eyes. He explained the rest of the process.

  “First of all, despite what you may have read in popular fiction, we don’t make a facial likeness by building up the musculature a layer at a time. The Russians may still do it that way, but we’ve had more success using average skin thickness as a guide.

  “The folders in front of you show the average soft-tissue thicknesses of Caucasian males measured at thirty-two points on the face. What I’m going to do is cut the eraser rubber into thirty-two sections to match those thicknesses and glue them to the right places on this particular skull. That’s our guide for how thick the flesh is at those points, and we just use clay to fill in between them.” He smiled. “Nothing to it.”

  “Sort of like connect-the-dots,” someone said.

  “Sort of,” Gideon agreed.

  What he didn’t tell them was that this was the easy part. The basic form of the face, which is what connecting the dots gave you, was relatively simple and reasonably accurate. The trouble was that nobody ever recognized anybody else from his basic facial form. What made you distinguishable from a hundred million other people was not your facial form but your ears and eyes, your lips and nose, the “ca
st of your eye and your own singular and indefinable mien,” as his seminar instructor had put it.

  And, as of yet, no one had figured out a way to determine the curve of a lip or the droop of an eyelid from the bone beneath. To say nothing of an indefinable mien.

  But that could wait until later, after they understood how the early part was done. First, he would measure and cut the rubber, glue the cut lengths to the skull, then cut the clay into strips and roll them into “worms,” which would be laid down from rubber marker to rubber marker, crisscrossing the face until those disturbing gray eyes goggled from behind a tightly fitted grid, like the eyes of the Man in the Iron Mask. And getting it that far was going to take most of the morning.

  The eight students showed a lively interest, which naturally pleased Gideon, but their frequent questions slowed things up. It was almost 1:00 P.M. before the open spaces in the wafflelike facial grid had been filled in and smoothed out. The results, as always at that point, were bland and disappointing, featureless in the literal sense of the word. Without nose, lips, eyelids, eyebrows, and ears, the “face” didn’t look like much of anything.

  Over take-out pizzas, Gideon explained that, to make it look like something, you had to stop being an anthropologist and start being an artist. Except for providing a few clues on the shape and size of the nose, the skull had nothing further to tell them; there was no way of gauging from the bone beneath how wide the mouth was, or how thick the lips were, or what the form of the eyelids was, or anything at all about the ears. There were lots of artists’ rules of thumb, however—the eyebrows were three to five millimeters above the orbital rim; the ears were tipped back fifteen percent and about as long as the nose; the mouth was as wide as the distance between the canine teeth, and so on. They would spend the rest of the day applying them.

  In the tiny sheriff’s snack room, twenty yards from where the clay face was slowly developing into something humanlike under Gideon’s hands, John Lau was looking at his watch. Nellie Hobert was late for their appointment, not that that was much of a surprise. If Hobert was anything like Gideon Oliver, he went into a trance when you put a skeleton in front of him. You had to nudge him every now and then to make sure he kept breathing.

  Idly he contemplated the display behind the glass front of the candy machine, trying to decide if he really wanted anything. Probably so; there were still almost three hours until dinner. Behind him, the door to the room opened.

  “Don’t do it, John,” Nellie called. “Resist all temptation.” He came up to the machine beside him and silently scanned the rows. “You’d think they’d have Paydays,” he grumbled after a few seconds.

  John pointed. “G-4.”

  Nellie brightened, digging in the pocket of his shorts while John made his selection. A moment after John’s Three Musketeers bar clunked into the tray, a Payday followed.

  “Peanuts are good for you,” Nellie explained. “Loaded with thiamine and riboflavin. Good-quality protein source.”

  “Yeah, but it’s incomplete protein,” John said. What that meant he wouldn’t have wanted to explain, but he had heard his wife Marti say it, and it always paid to establish your expertise when you were dealing with scientific types.

  Not that Nellie seemed so hard to deal with. In a lot of ways he reminded John of an older Gideon: a little stuffy, a little touchy, but with a sense of humor that was never very far below the surface. And under all the technical bullshit there was a likable, unaffected guy who didn’t take himself too seriously.

  “In that case I’ll make sure and have some milk with dinner.” Nellie pulled a chair away from the single chipped table, sat down, and unwrapped the candy bar, blissfully twisting off a chunk with his teeth. He looked like a five-year-old with a beard. His T-shirt showed a raised fist, with lettering that said: “Stop Continental Drift!”

  John laughed. “So how’s it going in there?”

  “Just fine, but I’m sorry to say I don’t have anything definitive to tell you.” Hopefully he eyed the large envelope under John’s arm. “I don’t suppose that’d be Chuck’s file, would it now?”

  John handed it to him. “Copy just for you, straight from the ME,”

  “Aah!” Nellie laid the Payday on the table, brushed crumbs from his fingers, and began riffling through the ten-year-old file. He stopped at what John recognized as the report from Salish’s physician. The anthropologist scanned down the sheets with his finger, making a humming noise through his nose. “Mmmmmm…well, hell.”

  “Problem?” John said.

  “No, not a problem, but not much help either. I think you know the skeleton in there’s got an old broken arm and some arthritis in one foot. Well, there’s no mention of either one here.”

  John frowned at him. “Are you saying maybe that isn’t Salish’s skeleton now?”

  “Good heavens, no,” Nellie said, “not at all. That broken arm was probably fifty years old. Salish probably never even told his doctor about it—assuming he remembered it himself. As for the lack of mention of any arthritis, well, it wasn’t very severe, and it’s quite possible Salish never complained to his physician about that either. Just one more nagging little ache among the many we all have to start getting used to eventually.”

  He shrugged. “All I’m saying is that it’s not going to be quite as simple as I thought, coming up with a definite identification. It would have been nice to have laid any remaining doubts completely to rest.”

  He leafed through the rest of the material. “I don’t see much else of use here.” At a sheet of Salish’s photographs he paused, slowly shaking his head.

  John had a moment’s uneasiness. “That is him in those pictures, isn’t it?”

  Nellie glanced up. “Yes, certainly.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course. They’re good likenesses, actually.”

  “Well, what about using them? Can’t you do—what was it, video imposition?”

  “Video superimposition. You use a computer program to impose the face from a photograph onto an image of the skull and see if it seems to fit.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, there’s some as swears by it and some as don’t.” He twisted off another hunk of the Payday. “Me, I don’t. They’re a long way from proof positive, John. Look, have you had any luck turning up those missing dental records? Something tells me we’re going to need them.”

  Let’s hope not, John thought. So far, the Albuquerque office hadn’t even found out who Salish’s dentist was. “We’re working on it. Nellie, you have any idea at all who took them out of the file?”

  Nellie stopped chewing. “Oh, I can’t believe anybody took them. They probably got put back in the wrong file, that’s all. It happens every day. I expect a search through the adjacent files would turn them up soon enough.”

  Not so far, it hadn’t. John had spent half an hour in the morning doing just that, and now a clerk was going through the entire file cabinet. Other misfiled items had indeed shown up, but not Chuck Salish’s dental records.

  “They were there, though?” John asked. “You remember seeing them?”

  “You mean ten years ago? Oh, yes, we got his dental records, all right. We didn’t get much use out of them, of course, since the remains we thought were his didn’t have any…John, your question—why would anyone take those dental records?—implies that you think someone did take them.”

  “That’s right, I do.” After a second he added: “Don’t you?”

  Nellie didn’t respond to the query. “And that implies in turn that you think it’s one of us, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s a pretty logical place to start.”

  “And one of us who is here again now.”

  “I guess,” John said carefully. “Nellie, anything you could tell me about that first meeting that might throw some light—”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, anything that—”

  Nellie suddenly thrust himself up from his seat, took the couple
of steps that the small room allowed, and stood with his back turned and his arms crossed, facing the Pepsi machine. “You actually think one of us killed poor Salish, don’t you?”

  This time John wanted to wait him out if he could, but Nellie wouldn’t go along. “So? Do you? Say what you think, dammit!”

  “At this point I wouldn’t even want to guess about that, sir.” At the word sir, Nellie emitted a peculiar growl. John was uneasily aware that he was being cagey with a man the director of the FBI had called the dean of American forensic scientists, a man of spotless reputation who’d already assisted the Bureau on more homicides than John would handle in his entire career.

  But, yes, there was something in the air, as Gideon had said last night. He could feel it too. Holding something back, those were the words for it, all right. He took a deep breath. “Dr. Hobert, I think you’re keeping something to yourself and—”

  Nellie spun around, stubby and contentious in his baggy shorts. “I am, am I?”

  “—and I think the best thing would be for you to just tell me about it.”

  “You do, do you?”

  Dean of forensic scientists or not, it wasn’t the best way to get on John’s good side. “Yeah, I do,” he said angrily. “And you goddamn well ought to know it too.”

  Nellie bristled. For a moment it looked as if he were going to stalk out and leave him there. John had unhappy visions of indignant telephone calls to Charlie Applewhite. But then the blue eyes closed. Nellie squeezed the bridge of his nose, rubbing hard. When he opened his eyes the heat had gone. He came back and sat down next to John.

  “I seem to be barking at people these days,” he said mildly. “Really, I’m very sorry. This miserable business with Salish…”

  “That’s okay, I understand.”

  “There’s no reason at all why you shouldn’t ask me whatever you like. May as well come straight to the horse’s mouth. The horse’s something, anyway.” His smile was tired. “But I assure you I’m keeping nothing under my hat.”

  John nodded at him. “Okay.” He was a long way from convinced. “Let me ask you about something else, then.