Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 01 - Fellowship Of Fear

by Fellowship Of Fear

  John was smiling his crinkly-eyed smile.

  "What’s so funny?" Gideon asked.

  "You are. You just look like a professor all of a sudden. You really look like you’re in your element. All you need is a magnifying glass and a Sherlock Holmes pipe and a white coat."

  "Great idea. A magnifying glass would be very helpful, thanks." He grinned. "Skip the pipe and the coat."

  When he had gone, Gideon realized how correct John had been. He was in his element. Sitting in front of a pile of bones to play detective, patiently unlocking their secrets one by one; there was nothing more absorbing, nothing more satisfying, nothing he’d rather be doing. At least there hadn’t been for two years now. A shiver worked slowly down his spine. How much he used to delight in sharing with Nora the little osteological deductions he’d made. She’d pick him up at the lab, and he’d go over them with her, step by step. ("I was really puzzled until I noticed that the crack in the left parietal had partially healed. That established two things beyond doubt: that the blow to the head had been delivered while he was still alive, and that he had lived no more than three or four weeks more. Therefore….")

  And she would ooh and aah.

  When she had died, he had come near to killing himself, the only time in his life he’d ever thought about it. He hadn’t known how he could possibly live without her. He did, somehow, but even now he wouldn’t let himself think of her, except when he awakened sometimes in the night and dreamed, drifting back…

  So what was he doing now, chin cupped in his hands, elbows on the table, staring glassily at nothing? There were things to be done. He reached for the mandible and blew off its coating of powdery ash. It was the left rear corner of the jaw, where the ascending ramus joins the basilar segment. He ran his index finger lightly over it. No, it wasn’t Marco. The face that had covered this jaw had been more heavily muscled. You could tell from the rough ridges where the powerful masseter muscle had been attached. It was a male for sure; too rough for a female.

  He touched the fragment of occiput; yes, a thick, raised superior nuchal crest, evidence of a massive trapezius muscle. The man had been heavy-jawed, thick necked, and broad-shouldered. It wasn’t Marco, and it wasn’t the one with the Etonian accent either; he had been too slender. It must be the other, then, the one who had been about to shoot him. He had been muscular and big-boned… No, that wasn’t right either. These bones were strong and bulky, but not large. The jawbone was definitely on the small side, in fact.

  What was more…he looked at it again to make sure…yes, he was right! It wasn’t Caucasian; it was Mongoloid. Even though much of the corner had crumbled away in the fire, you could see where it showed signs of flaring widely at the mandibular angle. That was typical of Mongoloid skulls; it was one of the things that gave an Oriental face its broad, flat appearance. The signs of powerful musculature supported a Mongoloid hypothesis too. The flaring wasn’t pronounced enough to be an American Indian, but more than you’d expect in a Chinese. Japanese, most probably.

  So far so good. The teeth, now. There were two of them still in place: second and third molars. The third molar was perfectly and fully erupted, not always the case with a wisdom tooth, and further evidence that the person had been an adult. There seemed to be some evidence of differential wear on them, which might help him to pinpoint the age, but the fire had cracked them both and made it hard to tell… Damn, where was John with that magnifying glass?

  Impatiently, he looked over his shoulder toward the doorway and started violently when he saw John standing only two or three feet behind him.

  "Whew, John! Don’t do that! How long have you been standing there?"

  "You were so deep in thought, I didn’t want to interrupt." John set down two paper coffee cups. His own was already emptied; he must have drunk it while watching. "With the great Italian coffee they brew here, I don’t know why anybody drinks this lousy instant, but that’s all there is. Here’s a magnifying glass. Do you still want calipers? So far I haven’t been able to figure out sign language for them."

  "No, a ruler would be fine."

  "Okay, back in a minute."

  Gideon took a swig of the coffee without tasting it, and put the mandible under the glass. Yes, he had been right. The cusps of the second molar were definitely worn down.

  The third molar showed less attrition—just a little abrading of the cusp tips and the tooth edges. It was impossible, of course, to make a reliable age estimate based on tooth wear unless you knew what sort of food had been habitually consumed. Diet could make all the difference in the world. The relative wear of different teeth did provide some useful information, however.

  His educated eye studied the two teeth. The second molar was roughly twice as worn as the third. Now, assuming that the second had erupted at twelve and the third at, say, twenty (here plain guesswork took over, third molar eruption time being notoriously variable), then—assumig that the teeth had been wearing down at the same rate ever since they had come up—what age would the person have been when the second molar had been chewing away for twice as long as the first and was therefore twice as worn?

  It was like a Sunday paper riddle. He took another sip of the coffee, tasted this one, and grimaced. Then he made a simple matrix on one of the sheets of paper that John had carefully torn from his notebook, and filled it in.

  Twenty-eight. At twenty-eight the second molar would have been masticating for sixteen years, the third for eight. But twenty-eight seemed young for these bones. What if the third molar had erupted late, at twenty-five? Then he would have been… thirty-eight, at which time the second molar would have been grinding away for twenty-six years, and the third molar for thirteen years. Thirty-eight looked about right for these remains. He wasn’t sure just how he knew that, but he had long ago learned to trust his instincts when it came to bones. Anyway, they weren’t instincts; they were intuitive responses to subliminal but well-learned cues. Yes, he’d bet on thirty-eight, plus or minus a couple of years.

  What had he learned so far, then? He knew the envelope held what was left of a male, about thirty-eight, short and muscular, Oriental, and definitely not one of his attackers—at least not one that he’d seen. Who was it then? What had he been doing in the car?

  Suddenly realizing that he’d been leaning stiffly forward in absolute concentration for fifteen minutes, he slumped back in his chair and finished the last of the coffee, satisfied and aware that he was enjoying himself very much. He picked up the mandible again. There was something else about the tooth-wear pattern, something that rang a bell…

  John returned with a metal ruler. "Hey—" Gideon held up his hand and John stopped obediently, nailed to the floor.

  It was the second molar that was bothering him—the oddly eroded, concave depression on the anterobuccal edge. He had seen something like that before; where was it?

  With startling clarity, it came back to him. It had been one of the great triumphs of his graduate years at Wisconsin. He and the great, the studiedly eccentric, Professor Campbell had been in the laboratory studying a cranium and mandible that had been plowed up by a farmer and then turned over to the university’s physical anthropology laboratory by the Madison police, for help with identification. It was a routine occurrence. Usually such bones turned out to be remnants of centuries-old Indian burials, but this one hadn’t.

  They had already identified the cranium as that of a Caucasian in his fifties, buried between ten and thirty years before. Professor Campbell had puffed away at his pipe, chewing audibly on the stem, his thick, carefully combed eyebrows arched high. He had muttered to himself about the remarkable, saucer-shaped depressions in the first and second molars. "Hmm," he said (puff ), "hmm. What do you think, Oliver? What could it be (puff-puff ), what could have done it? Hm?"

  Gideon, a second-year doctoral student, had sat, shy and deferential, waiting for the great man to answer his own question.

  "Just don’t know," Professor Campbell said, through a vei
l of fragrant smoke. "What could do that? Never seen it before." The celebrated eyebrows frowned in defeat.

  Gideon cleared his throat. "Sir," he said, "could it be from a pipe? Would smoking a pipe for maybe decades do it?"

  The professor had been delighted. He whooped, pushed his massive body from his chair, and shambled to his desk, rummaging in drawers until he came up with a dental mirror. Together they had explored his own right lower molars. Gideon was embarrassed and delighted by the intimacy, and they had quickly found it: the same depression in the same place.

  "Oliver," the professor said, "that’s splendid, splendid!"

  After nearly twenty years, Gideon could still bask in the glow. There was even a little more. "Professor," he had said, made bolder by success, "do you think we could hypothesize that he was right-handed? Don’t most pipe smokers hold their pipes in their dominant hands? And don’t—"

  "Of course! Excellent! People who hold their pipes in their right hands generally put them into the right sides of their mouths. Wonderful! The police will never understand it. To determine handedness from a mandible! They’ll be talking about it for years!"

  Gideon had checked that same afternoon on a sample of fifty pipe smokers in Sterling Hall (smoking pipes had been de rigueur for serious graduate students in 1963) and had found that forty-four of them habitually put their pipes into their mouths on the same side on which they held them in their hands, and that forty habitually held them in their dominant hands. Months later, when the police had definitely established the identity of the remains—the victim of a mass murder in the 1940s—his pipe-smoking and right-handedness had been confirmed.

  And now here it was again, the same depression in the second molar. The man had smoked a pipe, and in all probability he’d been left-handed. Now—

  "Uh, Doc," John said, "do you mind if I watch?"

  "Of course not," said Gideon.

  "Could you explain to me as you go along? That is, if I could understand it?" He was a little shy; Gideon was touched.

  "Sure," he said. "It’s not complicated, really. What I’m going to do is estimate the height."

  "You can tell how tall the guy was from these?"

  "I can make a rough guess."

  "So can I, but that doesn’t make it right." John said it aggressively, provocatively, but Gideon was beginning to understand his style. In a second he would burst into laughter.

  He did, and Gideon laughed too. "Well, that’s the difference between a professor and a cop," Gideon said. Look, it is pretty iffy, but it’s a place to start. This is the tibia, the proximal part of it, anyway. That’s your leg bone, from the knee down. It’s the only one of all these pieces we can use to estimate height. You can only do it from the long bones. The idea’s simple enough; people with long tibias usually have long femurs—thigh bones—and if they have long thigh bones they probably have long vertebral columns, and so on. The same relationships hold true for short people. So if you can get a measurement on one of the long bones, you can project the others, and total height too.

  "But not all tall people have long legs." John was sounding genuinely interested, like one of Gideon’s own anthropology students.

  "Right, only most do. If I had a hundred tibias here, I’d feel confident in estimating the average total height. The few tall ones with short legs would balance out the few short ones with long legs. But with only one, how do I know I don’t have one of the oddballs? I don’t, but the odds are on my side."

  "Fair enough."

  "Okay. We can shortcut the calculations a little. If I remember correctly, we can get the approximate total height from the tibia by multiplying tibial length by ten, dividing in half, and subtracting about five percent. The taller a person is, the less reliable that becomes, but I think this guy’s short. Anyway, let’s measure it."

  John sat, childlike in his concentration on the fragment in Gideon’s hand. When Gideon didn’t do anything for a long time, he finally asked, "What’s the matter?"

  "You’ve got the ruler."

  John chuckled delightedly and handed it over. Gideon realized he was beginning to like John Lau very much.

  The tibial fragment was 113 millimeters long. "All right," Gideon said, "time for a major leap of faith. I’ll guess that we’ve got about a third of the total bone here— you can tell from the popliteal line, this ridge on the back. That would make the total length… 339 millimeters, say 340."

  He jotted a few numbers on a piece of paper. "Total height, 1615 millimeters," he said. More jotting. "About five-four."

  "All you have to do is know the formula? That’s all there is to it?"

  "That’s what Watson was always saying to Holmes… after the fact."

  "Except that Sherlock Holmes was always right." The enthralled student was giving way to the skeptical cop. "No offense, Doc, but you sure made a lot of unverifiable assumptions there. Maybe they’re okay when you’re measuring ten-thousand-year-old Neanderthals. Who could prove you were right or wrong? But this stuff would never hold up in court."

  John was quite right, Gideon knew. He’d often had similar thoughts about prehistoric finds. But he also knew somehow that his estimate was accurate. "I may be an inch or two off, but no more. You can count on it." Pettishly he added, "And the Neanderthalers are a lot closer to fifty thousand years old than to ten."

  "Okay, Doc, you’re the expert. Only I’m still not convinced. But what are you suggesting? That it’s the little one, Marco?"

  "Marco?" Gideon had forgotten that John wasn’t aware of the rest of his findings. "No, it’s not Marco. Marco was about twenty. This one was nearly forty. And Japanese. And built like a wrestler, say 145 pounds."

  All this was put rather more confidently than the data warranted, but a strong front seemed appropriate. Then the coup de grace:

  "And, if it’s of any interest, he was left-handed and he smoked a pipe."

  The effect was more than Gideon had hoped for. John’s mouth dropped open and he actually stammered. "You’re telling me you know all that from… some… some skull bones and a…a piece of leg bone? You don’t have any hand bones—any, any arm bones! How can you know he’s left-handed?" John was chopping at the air with both hands, his quirky temper on the rise.

  "Gently, John. I’m not pulling your leg."

  Slowly, simply, Gideon began explaining his conclusions. John was testy, however, and querulous, arguing every point. Gideon didn’t have the energy for it. After a few minutes his enthusiasm had drained away. "The hell with it, John; I don’t give a damn if you buy it or not. Solve it all yourself. Look, could we go back? I’m really bushed." He could feel the torn muscles in his cheek sagging, blurring his speech. His ankle had begun to throb again, and it felt grossly swollen.

  "Fine," John said, sounding as if he didn’t give a damn either. "If it’s all right with you, we’ll stop at the Security Office on the way in to see if anything new has come in."

  Gideon didn’t answer. It wasn’t a question.

  IN the car, he sulked most of the way. John was silent and fidgety. As they neared the base, John suddenly said, "Look, Doc, I know you know a lot of things about bones. If this was some old fossil skeleton, I wouldn’t argue with you. What do I know? But I can’t just blindly accept what you’re telling me. What am I supposed to put in my report? ‘Professor looked at burned piece of jawbone and identified victim as five-foot-four-inch male Japanese with a birthmark on his left ear and a pimple on his ass’?"

  Gideon’s eyes were closed. He opened them. "Five-four was wrong," he said slowly. "That formula was for male Caucasians. This guy was Mongoloid—he’d have a shorter leg length relative to total body size. That means I underestimated. He’s probably about five-five. And change his weight to one-fifty."

  "Come on, Doc—!"

  "John, don’t worry about it, will you? I’m just talking to myself. Believe whatever you want."

  He was quiet again for a while, dozing a little in the late afternoon sun. Then, after t
he brightly smiling Italian guards had waved them through the base gate, he said, "John, I have a favor to ask. Nobody else calls me Doc. Nobody ever called me Doc. Nobody calls anybody Doc. My name’s Gideon."

  John lit up. "Okay, you’re on, Gid."

  "Gid? Oh God, please. If we have to choose between Gid and Doc, I’ll take Doc." He shook his head. "Gid! Jesus Christ!"

  "What a prima donna," John said. They both laughed, glad to be friends again.

  "If I have to choose between Doc and Gideon, I’ll stick with Doc. Takes less time to say."

  "So be it," Gideon said. "I’m resigned."

  At the Security Office, John left Gideon in the car while he went into the white frame building. A moment later he returned and leaned into Gideon’s window.

  "Nothing new. There’s a telephone call for you from Heidelberg. Do you want to go in and call back?"

  "Heidelberg? Gosh, I forgot!" Dr. Rufus had called him two days before, full of avuncular concern and reassurance. Gideon was not to worry about the Heidelberg lectures that week; when news of Gideon’s "accident" had reached them, they had contracted with a German professor from Heidelberg University to deliver them through an interpreter. "Not quite the Oliver eclat," Dr. Rufus had said, "but adequate."

  As for the following week’s lectures in Madrid, they would take care of those, too, if necessary. Gideon was to concentrate only on getting well at his own pace.

  Gideon, however, did not intend to spend the next couple of weeks in a hospital bed. Putting what little verve he had into his voice, he had told Dr. Rufus he’d be ready to fly to Madrid by the next weekend, but that he’d call in a day or two to confirm. Then he’d forgotten all about it.

  John handed the message to Gideon. A routing slip stapled to it showed that the call had come in to the Education Center yesterday. The message had been forwarded to the hospital and then to Security. It was from Eric Bozzini, not Dr. Rufus, and it said "Pls call back. Impt." For a moment he couldn’t place Eric Bozzini. When he did, he wondered why the laid-back Californian should be telephoning him—with an Impt. Call, no less.