Old Bones

by Aaron Elkins

"Oops, sorry," Gideon said quickly. "I meant this lipping around the rim, can you see? This sort of rampart."

  "Well, why didn’t you say it in English in the first place?" John grumbled, as he had many times before. He looked hard at the bone and brushed his fingers along the rim. "Okay, I feel it…Yeah, right there," he said with pleasure. Intolerant of scientific jargon he might be, and not at his best during long lectures, but he was an eager learner, always interested. "What is it, arthritis?"

  "That’s right; the kind of wear-and-tear arthritis that gets us all in time. Part of the normal ageing process. Most people show it pretty distinctly in the lower back by the time they hit forty, and it gets to be more noticeable—and more troublesome—as they get older."

  "Forty," said John solemnly, as one hand crept around to his lower spine. "Jesus." He was forty-one, six months older than Gideon.

  Gideon put the bone back down. "Since the lipping’s just started, I’d say he’s under forty and over thirty. Maybe thirty-two, thirty-three. That ought to please Joly." He grinned. "I’m not sure the inspector’s too happy with me either."

  John nodded. "Yeah, well, you’re pretty frivolous for a professor. He probably doesn’t like it when you sit up on the desk while you lecture. Hey, did you say‘he’?"

  "That’s right. It’s a male."

  "So how come you told Joly you didn’t know the sex? And—" His eyes narrowed, "—didn’t you say today you couldn’t be positive about the sex unless you had the pelvis, or the skull, or what was it, the head of the femur…?"

  "That’s right," Gideon said, surprised. "I’m impressed."

  John shrugged modestly. "Something must have woke me up for a minute. So why is it a male?"

  A reasonable question, but difficult to answer. The problem was that it was hard to explain, other than to say that after almost fifteen years of dealing with the human skeleton, his eyes and fingertips simply told him so; this sad litter of bones had supported the body of a man, not a woman. But he couldn’t quite face telling Joly—who had been so resolutely attentive at the conference, and who had asked such laboriously penetrating questions, and who had taken such regular notes in a no-doubt tidy and meticulous hand—that he just knew; it was a matter of intuitive, unquantifiable feel.

  John, yes, but not Joly.

  "I just know," he said.

  John nodded his acceptance. Once, a long time ago, he had been in the snake-oil camp, but he’d learned to trust Gideon’s judgment on skeletons almost as much as Gideon did.

  Most of the time.

  "Doc?" he said half an hour later, while Gideon was pondering the meaning of the beadlike nodules on the ends of the ribs. They rang a bell, but he wasn’t sure what kind of a bell. They were something he’d seen in textbooks. What was it they were called? Prayer beads, was it? That didn’t sound right.

  "Hm?"

  "You done with this part?" He pointed to an oblong, ridged plate at the front of the chest cavity.

  "Uh-huh. For the moment."

  "Well, I think you missed something."

  "What?" Gideon said abstractedly, still thinking about the bony lumps on the ribs.

  "This." John touched the plate-like bone. "This is the sternum, right? The breastbone?"

  "That’s right," Gideon said, puzzled. "So?"

  "Well, look at it!"

  Obediently Gideon looked. "What about it?"

  "This, for Christ’s sake!" John said. "Are you kidding me or something? The guy’s been shot. Even I can figure that out!"

  Gideon, who enjoyed John’s outbursts of forensic enthusiasm, examined the round, smooth hole in which the tip of the agent’s index finger rested. "No," he said quietly, "that’s just the sternal foramen. Perfectly natural."

  "Natural!" John shot Gideon one of his old snake-oil looks. "I’ve seen sternums before, you know; they don’t have‘perfectly natural’ holes drilled right through the middle of them. There aren’t any holes," he added accusingly, "in the ones you’re using in St. Malo."

  "No, but that’s because most people don’t have one. There are a lot of variable foramina in the skeleton— sternal, frontal, mastoid—Just minor defects in ossification that show up once in a while."

  John was silent for a few seconds, continuing to regard him doubtfully. "Yeah, maybe." He made an irritated sound. "How can you be so sure, anyway? I mean, you haven’t even looked at it under a magnifying glass or anything."

  Gideon pulled himself up to his full height and looked eye to eye at John. "Does the Skeleton Detective of America," he asked scornfully, "need a magnifying glass to tell a sternal foramen when he sees one? Look at how smooth the edges of the hole are. That shows it’s developmental. Bullets don’t leave nice, smooth holes. Round, maybe, but not smooth."

  "Sometimes they do," John said doggedly. "On the way in they do."

  "No, they don’t. They might leave an even, beveled perimeter, but not a soft, rounded one like this. Besides—" He flicked off the brown, onionskin-like shreds of cartilage by which some of the ribs still hung on to the sternum and turned it over. "—it’s equally smooth on the back. Have you ever seen an exit hole like that?"

  John’s perseverance finally flagged. He sighed. "No, I guess not…Hey, wait, couldn’t it be a healed bullet wound?"

  Gideon opened his mouth to speak, but was cut off.

  "And don’t tell me they don’t look like this, all smooth and round, because you’re the one who showed me they do. And what’s more—" He noticed Gideon’s smile. "What’s the joke?"

  "A healed bullet hole smack in the middle of the chest?"

  "Sure, why not? The heart’s on the left side, right? So a bullet exactly through the center might miss it. It might get the spinal cord and stuff, I guess, but a guy could still live, couldn’t he?" He didn’t seem to have convinced himself. "Or couldn’t he?"

  "John, the heart is in the center of the chest. Most of it’s on the left side, yes, but just how much varies. If you want to be a hundred percent sure of hitting somebody in the heart, the place to shoot him is in the middle of the chest. You can’t miss. And if you shoot him in the heart he dies. Always."

  "Yeah, all right," John muttered, "but still…"

  "Anyway, a healed perforation looks different because you get a bony scar tissue building up around it; the edges of the hole thicken. Now, this hole, as you see—"

  "All right, all right, forget it. Jesus Christ, do you know what a pain in the ass a guy is who has to be right all the time?"

  "I don’t have to be right, I am right," Gideon said with heat. "Maybe if you stayed awake during those lectures the FBI paid all that money to send you to, you might know some of these things."

  "Yeah, well, maybe if they didn’t put me to sleep I would."

  They glared momentarily at each other and then burst into laughter with the ease of old friends who’d been over similar ground more than once, and John stretched and said: "Hey, I’m starving. We forgot about lunch, and it’s already five o’clock."

  "Already?" That was depressing. In over an hour he had learned next to nothing. "Well, let me see what else I can find before Joly gets back…But I don’t think I’m going to come up with a hell of a lot."

  "Don’t worry about it. You always come up with something weird. Joly’s gonna just love it."

  BUT results, weird or otherwise, were few. It was almost as if a prudent murderer, anticipating the attentions of a physical anthropologist, had carefully removed everything that might be useful. Without the skull, the pelvis, or any of the limb bones, he couldn’t even make a guess as to height or weight.

  Well, maybe a guess. One could get a ballpark-type stature estimate from the length of the vertebral column, and he did have the vertebral column—except for the little matter of the top four and bottom three vertebrae. That left him with seventeen out of twenty-four, a little less than seventy percent of the total, to which he could apply Dwight’s old table of coefficients and extrapolate ("fudge," John said, and he wasn’t far wrong
) the body height.

  When he finished clicking buttons on his calculator, the result was 175.31 centimeters—about five feet, eight inches, give or take an inch or so either way. So that was something. He stood looking at the bones, thinking, his pencil eraser tapping his lips. True, the 175.31 centimeters really was little better than a guess; he needed all the vertebrae, or a femur, or a tibia to come up with a defensible estimation. But his practiced eye, not burdened with the requirement of scientific defensibility, told him 175 centimeters wasn’t far wrong. This was a small-boned man who had stood five-feet-nine at most. And he’d been slight; the near-feminine delicacy of the clavicles and scapulas— which in muscular men were ridged and roughened by the pull of tendinous muscle insertions—suggested gracility, perhaps even frailty. Assuming that he wasn’t obese (bones held no information about body fat), his weight would have been somewhere around 130 pounds; 145 at the outside.

  These conclusions were too tenuous to pass on to Inspector Joly, who made his appearance at the end of exactly two hours, which left embarrassingly little to tell: The remains were those of a male. (The proportions of the clavicles, scapulas, and sternum, while not completely reliable sex indicators on their own, were enough to provide credible support for Gideon’s intuition.) The probable age was thirty-two to thirty-four. Dismemberment had been performed with a knife at the shoulder, hip, wrist, and ankle joints, and at the fifth cervical and fourth lumbar vertebrae.

  Only one point seemed to rouse Joly’s interest. "A knife," he said. "Do you mean it literally? Not an axe? Or a cleaver?"

  "Maybe a cleaver, but he was cut up, not chopped up. If you chop a man’s foot off with an axe you naturally do it at the thinnest part of the lower leg, just above the ankle bulge." A slow, undulating shiver rolled up his spine. What a hell of a thing for a reasonably serious, moderately scholarly professor of hominid evolution to be chatting indifferently about.

  "Well," he went on, doing his best to ignore this unprofessional reaction, "that bulge isn’t made by the foot bones, it’s made by the leg bones—the lower ends of the tibia and

  fibula—so if you chopped through the narrow point, you’d get the last inch or two of those bones in with the foot bones. But all we have here are the foot bones. It’s the same with the other cuts. They were made between and around bones, not through them. You can’t do that swinging an axe."

  Joly stroked the skin behind his ear with a finger. "You know, one of the men upstairs is a butcher. He boasted about once having studied medicine. You don’t suppose…?"

  "One of the men upstairs? This happened forty, fifty years ago."

  "He was in the area forty or fifty years ago. He’s been gone since. Claude Fougeray." He said the name with slow, thoughtful emphasis, and repeated it. "Claude Fougeray. Not an endearing man."

  "This is done pretty crudely," Gideon said. "It doesn’t suggest any anatomical knowledge."

  "I believe he only studied for a year or two."

  "Even a first-year med student would do better than this. So would a butcher."

  Joly nodded. "All right. Is there anything else you can tell me?"

  "Not at this point, but I’d like to have another look at these and bring a few more tools. Something might turn up."

  "Of course," Joly said. He did not look overly hopeful. "By the way, our Mr. Fougeray expressed interest in coming down here to watch you at work. Would you object?"

  "Why would he want to?"

  "Morbid curiosity, I have no doubt, but he seemed to feel that his medical skills might make him helpful. Or perhaps his butchering skills. He pointed out rather smugly that he was the one who diagnosed the bones as human."

  Gideon didn’t think much of the idea, but he couldn’t come up with a valid objection. "Fine, as long as he stays out of the way."

  "Good, I’ll tell him. I want to be there when he comes."

  He rubbed his hands briskly together. "Now. The bones will remain here, with the room sealed, until Monday, when our forensics people will pick them up. Will that be time enough for you?"

  "Sure, I’ll come out tomorrow morning. I don’t have any lectures scheduled, and there isn’t anything particular I planned to do."

  A sudden, unexpected image of Julie jumped into his mind, and he almost allowed himself a rueful smile. To be in France with nothing particular to do! It would have been different a few years ago, but a few years ago he hadn’t met Julie. Now, the idea of grand sights and great meals depressed him if he couldn’t enjoy them with her.

  He chided himself, a man of forty so lovesick that being away from his bright, laughing, beautiful wife of a little more than a year turned everything gray and dull. He didn’t approve of it; being that dependent on anyone else was rotten psychology. But how terrific it was to have someone to miss so much. After Nora had died, he had thought for four long, black years that it could never happen to him again. But it had. In the person of a robustly pretty supervising park ranger at Olympic National Park.

  It had really come home to him on this trip. When he’d agreed to speak at the conference he’d been sorry, of course, that she’d already committed herself to a week-long seminar for National Park Service supervisors at the Grand Canyon training center, but it hadn’t dampened his anticipation of the pleasures of France. And yet here he was, glad for the diversion of some rat-gnawed, soiled old bones in a dank cellar …with Paris a few hours away.

  How absurdly adolescent, he thought proudly. And now he did permit himself a little smile, while John and Joly were preceding him up the cellar steps and couldn’t see.

  EIGHT

  AS the three of them walked down the hallway past the entrance to the salon, the stoop-shouldered, teacherish-looking man who’d smiled at Gideon before looked up from his chair and offered another diffident, tentative grin. With a start Gideon realized it wasn’t someone who looked like Ray Schaefer, it was Ray Schaefer. He returned the grin enthusiastically, and Ray came out into the hall to shake hands, watched curiously by the knot of people in the salon.

  "Ray, I didn’t recognize you before," Gideon told him unnecessarily. "You’ve taken off the beard."

  Ray blinked at him in what seemed to be happy astonishment. "You remember my beard?"

  "Sure I do. It was bright red; you looked terrific—like a pirate."

  "Well…!" Ray laughed, delighted, and blushed spottily. "A pirate! Well, now …What in the world brings you to Brittany, Gideon?"

  "There’s a forensic sciences meeting in St. Malo. Ray, I heard about Guillaume. I think you know how sorry I am."

  "Yes, well… these things happen, I suppose. He really enjoyed meeting you, you know. And he wasn’t the kind to take to many people."

  Gideon introduced John and Joly, and they all nodded and smiled, or perhaps Joly didn’t quite smile.

  "Yes," Ray said, "I’ve already met the inspector." The awkward smiles continued for a few moments.

  "How are things at Northern Cal?" Gideon asked.

  "Oh, fine, just fine. Yes, I’m doing a new seminar on Restoration comic dramatists next semester. You know, Etherege, Wycherly, the whole rollicking bunch. Who knows, maybe even Vanbrugh and Farquhar."

  "Ah," said Gideon.

  "Huh," said John.

  "Mm," said Joly, gazing down his long, thin nose. "Will you excuse me? I see that Fleury is finished with his report, and I want to go over it with him."

  The others watched him go. "He interviewed me for ten minutes," Ray said. "I’m afraid he didn’t like me very much."

  "He seems to do that to people," Gideon said. "My working hypothesis is that it has something to do with his upper lip."

  "It could well be," Ray said thoughtfully. "Do either of you read Henry James?"

  John shook his head. "Not on purpose."

  "Well," Ray said, unoffended, "there’s a passage in Portrait of a Lady in which he describes communicating with Caspar Goodwood as being like living under some tall, austere belfry that towers far above one, striking of
f the hours and‘making a queer vibration in the upper air.’ " He laughed. "Doesn’t it make you think a little of Inspector Joly?"

  "A lot," John said with feeling.

  Ray looked happily up at Gideon. "I don’t believe I’ve seen you since you left Northern Cal. Did I hear you and Julie are married now?"

  "Yes, we are. Look, I’ll be coming back tomorrow morning. Why don’t we have lunch together and get caught up on things?"

  "Oh, I’m sorry, I’m, er, busy for lunch." Ray blushed again. "What about coffee when you get here?"

  "Fine. Nine o’clock?"

  "Wonderful. Let’s just—"

  A wan, pale-haired woman with soft, hesitant eyes in a face too worn for her three decades had come unobtrusively down the stairs and stopped, startled to find strangers.

  "Oh! Pardon—" She saw Ray then, and her face came alive. "Raymond." She said it with a slight tremor, pronouncing it the French way, liquid and delicious. Suddenly she didn’t look so wan.

  "Why, Claire," Ray said. His rounded shoulders had squared the moment he saw her. He tugged cavalierly but without effect at the ends of his bowtie and shot a quick, proud glance at the two men before he went to her and took her hand.

  "Claire Fougeray," he announced awkwardly, "Gideon Oliver and John Lau. John and Gideon, Mademoiselle Claire Fougeray." He beamed and fidgeted.

  That, Gideon thought with interest, satisfactorily explained the business about lunch. He was frankly surprised; he’d long ago given up on his meek, unimposing, and—well, a little dry—colleague’s chances for romance, but it looked, happily, as if he’d been wrong. He smiled at the two of them. "I’m glad to meet you, mademoiselle," he said, meaning it sincerely.

  Ray stood back contentedly as she shook hands. "Oh," he said suddenly, with a new smile. "And this is my uncle, Ben Butts."

  "Cousin," said the blue-eyed man with the gray hair and the soft Texas accent who had come into the hallway from the salon. "That is, cousin’s husband. But the boy here just won’t accept that." He grinned and squeezed the back of Ray’s neck affectionately. "Look, everybody’s dying of curiosity in there, but nobody’s got the nerve to come out and say so. Why don’t you bring your friends inside and tell us what’s been going on in the cellar instead of whispering about it out here?"