Unnatural Selection

by Aaron Elkins

  “Are you saying you definitely agree that that’s what we’re dealing with? A dismembered corpse? You’re convinced?”

  Clapper stared at him. “Well, of course I am. What else would I think?”

  “I just wanted to be sure. You never said so in so many words, and you sure weren’t that convinced a couple of days ago.”

  “A couple of days ago, there was one measly piece of bone, species and context unverified, brought in unannounced by a man who claimed to be some sort of anthropologist. But now…” He gestured at the array on the table.

  “Does this mean you’ll be turning the case over to headquarters?”

  “Not bloody likely!” Clapper burst out, then collected himself. “That is to say,” he said serenely, “not at the present time. Let us first see what results ensue from the pursuit of our inquiries.”

  That suited Gideon, who was getting to enjoy working with Clapper. “Fine. Let us begin pursuing them.” He glanced over the thirty-odd hand and foot bones. “No obvious age or sex differences—and no duplication,” he said. “And everything matches the original tibia in condition and general appearance. No reason to think there’s more than one person here.”

  “I thought we’d just established that.”

  “Yes, but it’s the kind of thing you like to establish more than once.”

  With the goosenecked lamp that Clapper had brought now on the desk casting its light sidewise to accentuate textures, he turned the birdlike bones, one at a time, this way and that, for their first examination. “No obvious trauma or pathologies… well, except for a little osteoarthritis in some of the joints. That probably puts the age, oh, up in the thirties or forties, at any rate.”

  Clapper, in the act of lighting a cigarette, looked up from under his eyebrows. “Thirty or forty years old, and the poor bugger already has arthritis?”

  “Sure. So do I. So do you.”

  “Get away! My joints are perfectly fine.” He waved his arms in circles to prove it. “I’m in my prime, couldn’t be primer.”

  “Mike, I hate to tell you this, but you’re not in your prime. You never were. Your bones get stronger and healthier as they grow—say to twenty-five or so; thirty at the outside—and then, wham, it’s downhill from there right up to the end. The minute they reach maturity they turn around and start deteriorating. Osteoarthritis, atrophy, osteoporosis… there is no prime, as far as your skeleton goes, or if there is, it lasts about five minutes, and the chances are you were doing something else at the time and you missed it.”

  Clapper blew out his first lungful of smoke. “Now there’s a charming thought.”

  “And as for the rest of you, it doesn’t last all that much longer. You know those free radicals and antioxidants that start building up as you get older? Those are just your body’s way of trying to get rid of you. Nature doesn’t want you hanging around using up resources any longer than necessary—which means just long enough to get your DNA into the gene pool so the human race keeps going. So it does what it can to keep you healthy till then. After that, you’re on your own. If you’re not contributing any more DNA to the species, the hell with you. The sooner you’re out of the picture the better.” He laughed. “Hey, have another puff. Mother Nature will appreciate it.”

  Clapper scowled at him, but he was amused. “Oh, I can see I’m going to enjoy hanging about with you.” He looked for an ashtray but didn’t find one. “Try and carry on without me for a minute, will you?” He went to his office in search of an ashtray and came back with a metal one logoed The Goat and Compass, Norwich.

  “Well, now here’s something,” Gideon said as Clapper sat down, the ashtray in his lap. With his thumb, Gideon was stroking a smooth, dime-sized area on the lower margin of the right tibia, the part that connects to the ankle. “You don’t see these very often in modern skeletons, other than Asians.”

  Clapper peered at the spot but obviously saw nothing. Still, he was interested. “You’re saying this bloke is from Asia? You can tell from that little spot?”

  “No, I’m not saying that at all. Well, not necessarily. You see, I’m fairly sure it’s a squatting facet, though admittedly not a very distinct one. Asians have them more frequently than other people because—”

  “Because squatting is more common in the East,” Clapper supplied.

  “Right.” Gideon checked the other tibia. “Yes, this one has it, too. I’d feel more confident about their definitely being squatting facets if we had a talus—the ankle bone just below this one—because then we’d look for a matching facet on the medial portion of the trochlear surface, where the two bones abut. But as you see, we don’t have a talus.”

  “Pity, that,” said Clapper. “But assuming that you’re correct, and that these are indeed squatting facets, what is there to be made of them?”

  Gideon put the tibias down. “Well, that, at some point in his life, this guy did a lot of squatting. Squatting requires dorsiflexion of the foot—” He demonstrated with his hand, laying it flat on the table, palm-down, then raising it with a sharp bend of the wrist. “—and habitual dorsiflexion results in bone remodeling that produces squatting facets… like these.”

  “I see,” Clapper said dryly, emitting twin plumes of smoke from his nostrils. “You’re telling me that we’re dealing with a habitual squatter here. A serial squatter, as it were.”

  It was the kind of labored drollery that would have annoyed Gideon two days ago, coming from the newly met Sergeant Clapper, but now he knew Clapper better and he laughed. “All I can tell you is what I find. This guy had some kind of occupation, or hobby, or maybe a cultural upbringing, that involved a whole lot of squatting. If it helps identify him, great. If not, I can’t help that.”

  “Couldn’t just be someone who spent a lot of time in the loo, could it?”

  “Mm,” Gideon said abstractedly. He had gotten out of his chair and picked up the ulna now—the larger of the two forearm bones— and was slowly running his fingertips down it with his eyes closed. Like most anthropologists, he relied on his fingers almost as much as his eyes. It was touch, along with sight, that revealed the unobtrusive little ridges and facets and depressions that could tell the story of a lifetime—as well as the nicks and notches and cracks that might well throw light on the last few seconds of it.

  In this case, it was a ridge that had captured his interest, a small, sharp ridge near the top of the ulna—the larger of the two forearm bones—that ran diagonally, front to back, for not much more than an inch, a little below the elbow joint. First his middle finger and then his thumb slid lightly over it.

  “This is the supinator crest,” he said after a very long silence during which Clapper had sighed, and yawned, and finally gathered himself up in preparation to leave.

  “Oh, yes?” Clapper replied politely, partway out of his chair.

  “Yes,” murmured Gideon, who at this point wasn’t paying any more attention to Clapper than Clapper was paying to him. “Everyone has it. But this particular one is extremely well developed.” He was, in effect, talking to himself, something he was prone to doing when looking at bones. Julie accused him of talking to them, but it was himself he was addressing; he was firm about that.

  “Now, the supinator crest,” he continued, “naturally, is the origin of the supinator muscle, or at least of the deep layer of it…”

  “Naturally.”

  “… which is the primary muscle involved in supination…”

  “Well, I could have told you that.”

  “… of the hand, especially when the arm is in an extended position. Now that is interesting.”

  Clapper, who’d remained half-in, half-out of his chair, dropped down again. “Maybe you’d better run through that again. What’s interesting?”

  “Well, supination—” Aware that Clapper, like most people, might be a little hazy about the term, again used his own hand to illustrate, once more placing it palm down on the table, but this time flipping it over sideways with a twist
of his forearm so it rested on its back. “That’s supination of the hand.” Like turning a doorknob, he almost said, before remembering that doorknobs were few and far between in Europe, where handles were preferred. And turning a door handle—pressing it down, really—mostly involved the muscles of the upper arm and shoulder.

  Clapper shook his head, puzzled. “So?”

  “So whoever owned this bone did a great deal of just that movement, only with some stress associated with it. And it occurs to me— now this is just a shot in the dark, with nothing solid to go on, you understand. I’m not asserting anything, I’m not even hypothesizing, really…”

  “I imagine,” Clapper mused to the walls, “that if I sit here long enough, eventually he’ll come round to telling me what it is that’s occurred to him.”

  “Well, only that supination”—he turned his hand over again—“is the motion that’s involved in using a screwdriver, or to some extent in screwing on a radiator cap, or battery cap, or in—”

  “Or in,” Clapper said, catching on, “all manner of tasks having to do with maintaining motor cars.” Thoughtfully, he picked a shred of tobacco from his tongue. “You really believe, then, that this might be our automobile mechanic, Pete Williams? That Villarreal actually murdered him over some silly academic dispute?”

  “Well, I’m not about to go that far,” Gideon said. “For all we know he’s still happily walking around London and working on his book at night, so let’s find that out first, but right now”—he repeated what Liz had said to him at the Bishop and Wolf the previous night— “we sure don’t have any other hypotheses to go on.”

  Clapper pondered this, taking a last drag on his cigarette, grinding it out, and then nodding while smoke poured from mouth and nostrils. “But where would the squatting facets come in?”

  Gideon shrugged. “Auto mechanics spend a lot of time hunkering down to look at the undersides of cars, and at the wheels and things, don’t they?”

  “I really wouldn’t know.”

  “I wouldn’t either. Either way, though, they could come from something completely unrelated to what he did for a living.”

  “Mm,” said Clapper. “Well, it’s something to look into. I’ll see what can be found out about Mr. Williams’s current existence or lack thereof. And what about this Edgar Villarreal? Where would we be likely to find him?”

  “Not in this world, it seems,” Gideon said, and explained.

  “Eaten by a bear!” Clapper said with a grimace, but at that point they were interrupted by the laughing entrance of Kyle Robb, who burst in triumphantly cradling two large paper sacks in the crooks of his arms. “Mr. Hicks was much revived by lunch, as was Tess, and they decided to finish up that last quadrant today after all, and look what the good little doggie has turned up!”

  “Two more caches?” Gideon asked. “I wasn’t really expecting any—not from there.”

  “Only one,” Robb said, placing the bags on the desk, “but it’s a big one, couldn’t fit in one sack.” He stepped back. “Have a look, why don’t you?”

  Gideon tore the sacks down their sides and gently spread out their contents. “These are the bones of the thorax, the upper body. And a lot of it is here, Kyle. Scapulas, clavicles, vertebrae, ribs… the top parts of the humeri, too. There’s plenty to work with. This ought to tell us a lot.”

  “I thought you’d be pleased,” Robb said, as proud of himself as if he’d personally nosed them out. “I’ve cleaned them up a bit for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll pick up, lad,” Clapper said when the telephone rang, and went into Robb’s cubicle to do it.

  Presented with all these unexpected bones, Gideon felt like Silas Marner viewing his hoard; he practically wanted to rub his hands together. “First,” he told an observant Robb, “we’ll want to—”

  “It’s for you,” Clapper called, holding out the receiver.

  Mumbling something, Gideon wandered abstractedly into the other cubicle and took the phone.

  Julie was on the other end. “Hi, it’s me.”

  “Uram… hi, sweetheart.”

  She laughed. “I see the expedition was successful. You found some bones, didn’t you?”

  “What? Yes, how did you know?”

  “Well, partly because you’re there in the police station, and you said that’s where you’d be if you found something to work on, but mostly because you sound like your mind’s about a million miles away, and that’s the way you sound when you’re deep in bones.”

  “Yes, well, as a matter of fact—”

  “Gideon, you didn’t forget about the picnic, did you?”

  “Uh… picnic?”

  He heard a small sigh. “Madeleine Goodfellow invited us all to a picnic-reception and dinner on Holgate’s Green. You do remember that, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do,” said Gideon affrontedly. “Jeez, Julie, I’m not that absentminded.” Indeed, he did seem to have a vague memory to that effect.

  “Yes,” she said dryly, and he knew that she was smiling, “of course you do. Only it’s not on the green; it’s too foggy. It’s indoors, at the museum. That’s where I’m calling from. It started half an hour ago. You are coming, aren’t you?”

  “Well, sure, I am. The time just got a little away from me, that’s all.” He cast a last, long, lingering look at the bones in the cubicle opposite. “See you in fifteen minutes.”

  AS Clapper had predicted, the fog had continued to thicken, swirling in tendrils of graveyard gray, like mist on a stage set. Walking from the police station to the museum, he could actually see it part in front of him, like water before the prow of a ship, and then close again behind him. “Haven’t seen muck like this in donkey’s years,” he heard one dimly seen passerby complain to another. It was only a little after six, three hours until dark, but the store windows were already lit and the street lights were on, although they did little but contribute an occasional sickly, sulfurous, yellow nimbus to the all-enveloping gray goop. Even the footsteps of others and the occasional whispered snatches of conversation he heard were dulled and muffled by the atmosphere. “This is cool! It really creeps you out,” the distorted voice of an invisible child exulted.

  With only six feet or so of visibility, it was easy to imagine oneself back a hundred years, on some gloomy, fog-swirling London street, with cutpurses and body snatchers lurking in the alleys and street girls and fishmongers hawking their goods on the sidewalks. At the thought, he laughed aloud, no doubt startling anyone within range. The thing was, there was surely only one person you could reasonably call a body snatcher in Hugh Town at this moment, and his name was Gideon Oliver. As for fishmongers, there actually was one, or rather a fish-and-chips van, customerless and forlorn, parked near the town hall, barely visible in the blurry glow of its single lightbulb.

  As he left the town center, the lights grew fewer and the illusion of Victorian times more pervasive, so much so that when the van, now a block behind him, gave up for the day and banged its shutters closed, he took the noise at first for the clop of horses’ hooves. He pulled his jacket closer around him. Although his collar was turned up, his neck was wet with moisture that ran down from his hair. Absently, he touched the facade of one of the seventeenth-century buildings—he had the unconscious habit of grazing his fingers along ancient buildings as he went by them on old streets; for the anthropologist in him, it was a small, nurturing point of contact with the past—but this time he jerked his hand back. The rough-cut stone blocks were as slimy as eels. He shivered.

  I’m getting a little creeped out myself, he thought, looking forward to the dinner now. It was going to be good to talk about something other than homicide and body parts. He would listen without a peep of dissent even to Victor’s twaddle about Western thought-dominated non-relational ways of being.

  Alas, it was not to be.

  TWELVE

  HE was only halfway down the stairs to the museum’s lower floor, where the buffet was set up
, when he was spotted by the invitees, who were standing around the appetizer table, sipping their drinks, crunching potato chips—crisps, as the English called them—and raw veggies, and engaging in what appeared to be animated conversation. Madeleine, in particular, was nattering cheerfully about something; almost singing, her fluty voice jumped an octave at a time, her bracelets jangling in accompaniment.

  Liz was the first to see him. “Speak of the devil, there’s the man now!” she exclaimed, to be followed by an eager swiveling of heads in his direction and a blizzard of questions and comments, all flung at him at more or less the same time.

  “Hey Skeleton Detective, how the hell did you figure out it was Williams?” a more than usually outgoing Rudy Walker asked.

  “So did Edgar really murder him, then?” Joey Dillard wanted to know. No button tonight, but he was wearing a sweatshirt with PETA: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in big blue letters across the front. There was an easy slur to his speech that made Gideon think he’d been getting steadily into the liquid refreshment for the last half hour or so. By now he’d heard that Joey had a tendency to get a bit pickled when the opportunity arose.

  “And cut him up in little pieces?” Victor Waldo added with a happy little shudder.

  “How exactly did he do it?” Cheryl Pinckney asked with equal avidity. “Kill him, I mean? Could you tell? With a knife, with a gun, did he poison him, did he cut his throat—”

  “What are the police going to do about it?” her husband interrupted, his brow wrinkled. He was wearing a button in apparent reply to Joey’s sweatshirt: Support PETA: People for the Eating of Tasty Animals. “Don’t tell me they’re going to want to come and… and grill us?”

  “Of course they are,” Victor contributed. “They’ll have to investigate. They can’t just assume Edgar did it. I assume we’ll all be suspects.” He appeared to be thrilled with the idea. “Am I not right, Gideon?”

  In the expectant moment of silence that followed this barrage, Gideon wondered briefly if it was too late to get away with pretending not to have heard any of it, or better yet with snapping his fingers as if he’d forgotten something (like the absentminded professor he was after all), muttering something to himself, and turning around and heading abstractedly back up the stairs… never to return.