Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 12 - Where There's A Will

by Where There's A Will

  The way she usually took care of annoying little problems like that was to let us solve them for ourselves. That is, if impacted, diseased wisdom teeth and unhealthy, crowded mouths got to be enough of a problem, people would die from them earlier than the general population did, and as a result their representation in the gene pool would diminish, and eventually, given enough time, the trait would die out and be no more. In other words, Mother Nature left it to us to work the bugs out of her program. (“Sort of like we do for Bill Gates,” a student had aptly remarked the previous quarter.)

  In the case of third molars, we were obviously still going through the process—they seemed to be becoming rarer with time—but modern dentistry, well-intentioned as it might be, had complicated things . . .

  He became aware that the Cessna’s engines had been chattering for a while, and, looking up, he saw that the plane was slowly motoring over the lagoon toward them again. Had he been dozing? Apparently so; John had returned from the lagoon without his noticing and was just finishing his second sandwich and crumpling up the plastic wrap.

  “Welcome back,” John said. “Have a good snooze?”

  “I was thinking,” Gideon said. “Turning things over in my mind.”

  “Yeah, right. I always snore when I turn things over in my mind, too. Listen, I got a question. This girl, this pilot, she had bulimia, right?”

  “Right, bulimia nervosa.”

  “Which is where you make yourself throw up after you eat.”

  “Mm-hm.” He yawned, scratched his back against the post, and straightened up.

  “But she was supposed to be this big, strapping kid. Aren’t bulimics underweight?”

  “Interestingly enough, no. They’re never very much underweight, and usually above average weight, actually. You see, they don’t do it all the time. They go on periodic binges where they overeat, then make themselves vomit. You’re thinking of anorexics, who starve themselves or make themselves throw up or take laxatives or whatever, but they do it day in, day out.”

  John cocked an eyebrow. “They’re never underweight?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “No.”

  “It’s impossible to have a bulimic who’s skinny?”

  “That’s right, because technically you can’t be a bulimic and an anorexic at the same time, so if a bulimic is morbidly underweight, she’s automatically classified as having anorexia, not bulimia.”

  John, who had thought he was closing in for a rare Socratic kill, was clearly disappointed. “That’s . . . but that’s . . .”

  “That is a salutary example of one of the tools of modern science,” Gideon said. “We experts use it all the time. It’s known as disposing of nonconforming data by means of semantic recategorization.”

  “Science,” John said, shaking his head. “It’s wunnerful.”

  “Hey, we’re done!” one of the brothers yelled from the plane as it neared the pier. “Got some good stuff for you.”

  Gideon got up, stretched, swished some water around his dry mouth, and went with John to meet them. This time they tied up and Lyle quickly climbed down holding a small mesh basket. “Possible personal effects,” he said.

  In the basket were the bent, lens-less frame of a pair of wire-rimmed glasses; a few coins—two quarters, a dime, a penny; a lidded coffee mug with a hula dancer on it; an enameled metal tourist souvenir, probably a trivet or a wall ornament, in the shape of the Big Island, complete with its two white-capped volcanic peaks in relief; a black plastic comb; and the rubber heel of a boot or shoe.

  The Big Island souvenir was snarled in a crumpled tangle of gray duct tape, which Gideon picked at and managed to unstick.

  “Amazing,” he said. “This stuff really does last forever.”

  “That and Twinkies,” said John.

  Some of the metal objects had a layer of green patina on them, but otherwise everything was in fairly good condition, and the ornament, the mug, and the glasses could well turn out to be helpful in identification. No bones, however, and Gideon had a hard time hiding his disappointment. “Well, this is good,” he said. “Somebody might remember some of this. See anything you recognize, John?”

  John fingered the glasses. “These, maybe,” he said doubtfully. “I don’t know.”

  “We can do better than that, prof,” Harvey said, jumping down onto the pier. “Lookee here, what we found jammed down under the right rudder pedal on the co-pilot’s side.” In his hand was a sodden, water-blackened cowboy boot, swollen and distorted, and missing its heel, but with the intricate stitching still in place. “You’ll love this.”

  “A boot?”

  “No, no, boot-shmoot, take a peek inside.” He tipped it so that Gideon could look into the top.

  And there, nestled deep within, was the skeleton of a right foot, or at least all that could be seen of it: the talus and the calcaneus, the two uppermost bones of the human ankle and foot. There was little doubt that the rest of the foot was there, too. The bulky talus and calcaneus, their anatomical relations to each other only minimally disturbed, blocked the opening, and with the leather whole and the sole of the boot still attached, there was no place for the other bones to go.

  “Hey, how about that?” he said, his enthusiasm reviving. The twenty-six bones of the foot and ankle were far from the most useful parts of the skeleton when it came to ageing, sexing, and so on (given his druthers he’d naturally have chosen a skull or pelvis or even a femur), but he had long ago found that there was always—always—something to be learned, whatever turned up. And a complete foot was not to be sneered at.

  The boot, oozing water, was placed, sole down, on the massage table. With a pair of metal shears from the plane, Gideon sliced it open from the top down, first at the back, then down the front, and then—very carefully—over the instep, while John held it upright for him. When he had finished, he peeled the halves of leather apart, snipping a little more at the sole where it was necessary to get the halves completely spread. The few falling-apart shreds of sock still present were picked off and put aside.

  “Wow,” breathed Lyle.

  “Whoa,” said Harvey. “Fantastic.”

  The skeletal foot, ossa pedis, lay upon the bed of clean, moist, white sand that covered the sole like an illustration in an anatomy text. Only a few of the phalanges—the toes—had been disarranged. The four men silently admired it for a few seconds, until Harvey abruptly sang out: “Lunch time, we got chicken fingers, we got barbecue chips, Twinkies, uh, we got Ding Dongs, uh, uh . . .”

  “You got Ho Hos?” John asked hopefully.

  “Of course, Ho Hos. Uh, Zingers, uh—”

  “You guys go ahead,” Gideon said. “I want to look this over a little more. I still have a sandwich left. I could use a Coke or something, if there is one.”

  The Shertz brothers, with chicken fingers on their minds and their interest in bones exhausted, retired to the Cessna for their meal.

  “John, give me a hand with the table, will you?” Gideon said. By now the sun had started down and the massage table was no longer fully shielded by the thatched roof. “I don’t want the bones baking in that hot sun. They’ve been in the water too long; they’ll split if they dry too fast.”

  “Thanks,” he said after they moved the heavy table a couple of feet. “Go get yourself something to eat if you want, John. I’m fine here.”

  “Nah, I’m fine, too, Doc.”

  Gideon stood looking down at the foot again. His sunglasses, smeared with perspiration and sunscreen, were laid on the table. He’d already made his first determination: The foot and the mandible were from two different people. You didn’t see feet like this in twenty-five-year-olds. The signs of arthritis in the joints, especially the metatarsals, the incipient osteoporosis, and the trivial and not-so-trivial deformities that sadly but predictably plague the ageing shoed (or booted) human foot suggested a minimum age in the fifties and probably older. The grainy look and feel of the bone went alon
g with this; nothing like the young, baby-bottom smoothness of the mandible. As to sex . . .

  “Well, you know,” John said brightly, “maybe I’ll just go see what the situation is with those Ho Hos, after all.”

  “Hm? Okay, sure,” Gideon mumbled abstractedly.

  “I’ll bring you that Coke when I come back.”

  “Uhm.”

  As to sex, he wouldn’t want to make a guess at this point; not with just a foot to go on. The bones were neither too big and robust to be female, nor too gracile to be male. There was a method, not a hundred percent reliable but better than guessing, for determining sex from combined measurements of the talus and calcaneus, but it took discriminant function analysis to do it, a statistical technique requiring a table of coefficients carried out to the fifth decimal place. And that he didn’t have. Besides which, the only measuring instruments the Shertzes had come up with were a metal tape measure and a yardstick, neither of which could come close to handling the tricky measurements involved on these asymmetrical, uniquely shaped bones.

  There was also a way to estimate height from the length of the metatarsals, the long bones of the foot, but that, too, would have to wait, and for the same reasons.

  For the moment, he was absorbed in looking closely at the calcaneus, which he now held in his left hand, turning it this way and that to examine the rough, curving, asymmetrical surfaces. Yes, this was a row of tiny exostoses—little spicules of bone—just forward of the calcaneal tuberosity, on the underside. And another little ridge that didn’t belong there, running longitudinally just in front of it, and a third bumpy, inch-long crest of bone on the upper side, where the bone was narrowest, behind the posterior articular surface. These irregularities were calluses, the strong, bony reinforcements the body laid down to heal fractures and strengthen repairs.

  So this heel bone had been broken at least three times, maybe more (bone calluses could disappear completely, given long enough). All appeared to have been “stress” or “fatigue” fractures: not the result of sudden compression or blunt-force trauma, but of the building-up of repeated, relatively low-grade stress over time. Gideon examined the rest of the bones, looking for similar injuries. Nothing. So here was a man that had fractured his heel bone three times, but had never, as far as he could tell, broken any of the other bones in his foot.

  Now that was interesting. The usual fatigue- or stress-related foot injuries—from walking, running, jogging—were found in the metatarsals and the toes; not in the calcaneus. Heel spurs, yes; you got those in spades, but not fractures, not usually. When you did see stress fractures of the calcaneus, however, they tended to be found in people who jumped or otherwise dropped from heights, with recreational parachutists and hang-gliding enthusiasts topping the list of orthopedic surgeons’ favorites. In those cases, however, associated injuries of the other bones of the foot could be expected; you didn’t just break your heel bone, you snapped a couple of metatarsals or crunched a cuneiform as well.

  But recurring stress fractures of the calcaneus with no accompanying damage? Repeated forceful impact of the heel, but not the rest of the foot, against an unyielding surface? He had come upon the phenomenon in monographs before, but never in the flesh (so to speak). It was called “rider’s heel,” and it came from the way cowboys typically dismounted a horse, swinging their right leg—never the left—up and over the saddle and coming down hard on their foot, their right foot, smack on the narrow, raised heel of their boot. Again and again and again. Ouch. And the older the bone got, the thinner the cortex, the less dense the trabeculae, the more susceptible it would be to breaking.

  Putting everything together, that seemed to mean—

  “Lyle and Harvey—they need to know how long you’re gonna be.” Gideon, deep in his ruminations, hadn’t noticed John’s return.

  “Not long.” He turned toward the plane and called: “If you can let me have a carton”—with his hands he indicated something shoe-box-sized—“and some paper for packing material, we can be on our way in ten minutes.”

  “Roger, prof,” Harvey yelled back.

  Gideon turned back to John, gesturing at the bones with a sweep of his hand. “It’s Magnus, all right, John.”

  “Yeah?” John said, looking at the bones with renewed interest. “You know that?”

  “Ninety percent sure,” Gideon said with a shrug. “Well, make it eighty-five.” He went over his reasoning, using the small, folding magnifying glass the brothers had provided, to show John the calluses, which John dutifully, respectfully, fingered.

  “Of course,” Gideon said, “for all I know, there might be other things that would account for a repeatedly stress-fractured right calcaneus without signs of injury to the metatarsals or anything else—but I sure as hell can’t think of any likely ones.”

  “Hold on a minute, Doc. If you don’t have his left, uh, calcaneus, how do you know that wasn’t broken, too? And if it was, then this dismounting theory wouldn’t work, would it?”

  “No, it wouldn’t. And, of course it would have been nice to have the left foot, too, but there isn’t very much I can do about that, is there?”

  “Hey, don’t go all defensive on me, Doc. I’m just asking a question.”

  “Who’s getting defensive?” Gideon said.

  But of course he was. He’d just completed what seemed to him a neat bit of reasoning, and he could have used a little amazement, or at least approbation, and not a string of skeptical questions. “Come on, John, you’re a cop. How often do you get every single piece of evidence you’d like to have? You play the hand you’re dealt, and this particular hand plays out to one conclusion: Magnus Torkelsson.”

  It wasn’t just the foot, he pointed out. Everything added up, and there was nothing to lead off in any other direction. An airplane from the Hoaloha Ranch, lost since the very night Magnus flew off in it and disappeared; a woman that nicely fit the description of his pilot;—he ticked the items off on his fingers—and a male of advanced age who, as it happened, had spent a lot of time in the saddle. How many other people—missing people—would that combination fit?

  John held up his hands. “Hey, if you say it’s him, that’s good enough for me. Magnus it is. What do I know?”

  A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth, and then the skin around his eyes crinkled up, and then they both were laughing.

  “I’m sorry I got defensive there, John.”

  “No problem, Doc.”

  There was only one thing that nagged at him a little, he admitted, and that was the fact that he’d known too much about the case to start with. Forensic anthropology was like anything else: You tended to find what you were looking for. It wasn’t supposed to work that way. When he consulted for the police or the FBI, he made a point, when possible, of not knowing anything about the suspected identity of the remains he was to examine: not the sex, not the age, not the race, nothing. But here he’d been aware of how old Magnus was, of his sex, of the fact that he rode a horse, of the age and sex of the pilot, even of her bulimia. And what do you know, his analysis of a very few bones had confirmed every single expectation. That was slightly worrisome: Had he over-reached for what he’d believed, a priori, to be the facts?

  “Nah,” said John airily. “You’re never wrong about that kind of thing. Well, not that often.”

  “I appreciate the vote of confidence, if that’s what that was. Anyway, I have an ace up my sleeve. When I was checking the bones for fractures, I saw that a couple of toe bones were missing after all, and when I took a closer . . . well, take a look at the middle phalanges of the second and third toes.”

  “The, uh, middle . . . ?”

  “These two,” Gideon said. “The distal phalanges—the outermost parts, the segments that had the toenails—are the missing ones, and these two are the ones that adjoined them.”

  “They are?” John said, bending closer. “They don’t look like the others, do they? They’re barely half as long. And they’re thinner, and they,
like, come to a point, almost . . .”

  “The toes have been amputated, John. The distal phalanges and a segment of the middle phalanges have been removed. And when that happens the bone that’s left—the proximal portion of the middle phalanges, in this case—is likely to develop osteoporotic atrophy over time and become resorbed—-absorbed back into itself—starting at the end where the amputation occurred. That’s why they look that way.”

  “So this happened a long time ago?”

  “Oh, yes. Years and years. Decades, probably.”

  “And when you say ‘amputation,’ you mean by a doctor? An operation? Not some kind of accident?”

  “No way to tell, not anymore. There’s been too much remodeling. The site of the original separation is long gone.”

  John was looking a little confused. “So . . . why is this an ace up your sleeve? What does it tell you?”

  “It doesn’t tell me anything, but it ought to tell the Torkelssons something. It’s a ‘factor of individuation,’ as we so grandly call it. If it turns out that Magnus Torkelsson had two toes missing—which it will, I think—that’ll settle it for good. Case closed, all doubts resolved.”

  Harvey had brought the materials he asked for, and Gideon began wrapping the individual bones loosely in newspaper. “You wouldn’t happen to know, would you, John?”

  “If he was missing any toes?” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t know. He didn’t have a limp; nothing I noticed, anyway.”

  “Well, we’ll be seeing Felix tonight in Waikiki,” Gideon said, fitting the cover on the carton with the satisfying sense of having accomplished what he’d come for. “He’ll know.”

  SEVEN

  “WHOO,” said John, having completed his first long swallow of the frosted Mai Tai that had been placed before him. “I’m in heaven.”

  So was Gideon. After the stagnant heat of Maravovo Atoll, the ocean breezes of Waikiki Beach, perfumed with gardenia and frangipani, flowed over them like balm. They had arrived at the Honolulu airport two hours earlier and had taken a taxi to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel—the posh, venerable “Pink Palace”—where the desk clerk had apologized for not having two ocean-view rooms available, but Gideon, if not John, was happy to be looking out over the green canopy of the giant banyan tree and the quiet, shaded gardens, rather than the jammed beach with its pungent smells of sunscreen and its multitudes of bare, glistening, not-so-beautiful bodies slow-cooking on their roll-up straw mats.