Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 10 - Skeleton Dance

by Skeleton Dance

  "Now wait a minute, Lucien. I don't know anything about flying airplanes, but even I know that if they're within range of air traffic control, they're on somebody's radar screen. There's a gizmo on the plane that sends out some kind of identifying signal—"

  "A transponder, yes," said Joly, grinding out his cigarette while he arranged his thoughts. "Imagine this. Carpenter leaves the Bassilac airfield fully in accordance with a previously filed flight plan. Then, once out over the sea he begins to descend and, in apparent distress, informs the air traffic control center at Lorient that he is inexplicably losing altitude. Their radar confirms that this is so. Carpenter continues his descent, utters his heart-rending 'last' words: "Dites-leur—"

  "—que je suis desolé," said Gideon.

  Joly looked at him. Gideon shrugged. "Pru McGinnis told me. This morning."

  "Utters his last words," Joly continued, "drops to thirty or forty meters above the water, and turns off his transponder. The radar signal disappears, contact is lost. To all appearances, the worst has occurred, the airplane and its pilot are no more."

  "But in reality he just keeps going?" said Gideon, who was beginning to think Joly was making a pretty good case.

  "Precisely. He continues flying at this low altitude and lands his craft at some prearranged site he has chosen. Even if he were to be detected in flight again, his Cessna would be so low and so small that it would appear as no more than a fleeting image for one or two sweeps of the radar antenna—and in any case, with the transponder deactivated it could not be identified. You understand?"

  Gideon turned back from the window, impressed. "You've really been looking into this, haven't you?"

  "Is it so preposterous to wonder," Joly continued, "whether this was his way of escaping from his difficulties, his way of leaving his troubles behind and starting a new life?"

  "Well—"

  "And remember this: Carpenter's 'tragic' communication with the air traffic control tower was recorded on the night of September 25. Less than seventy-two hours later, on September 28, Madame Renouard made her report to the police asserting that Bousquet had not been seen for several days. Doesn't this bring us back to the possibility—"

  "No, it doesn't. You keep harping on that, but on that score you're off-base, Lucien. Ely didn't kill him. It's impossible. He—"

  Joly held up a finger. "Do you recall telling me that when Carpenter was working in these boondocks of yours—these remote, isolated boondocks, with the rifle so very close at hand—that he sometimes had an assistant, a single assistant, working with him?"

  "Sure."

  "Do you know who that assistant was?"

  "I have no—you're not going to tell me it was Bousquet?"

  "But I am. Bousquet was frequently with him, serving as a manual laborer and paid from Carpenter's own pocket."

  Gideon, surprised, slowly shook his head. "But they hated each other. Why would Ely hire him?"

  "Apparently he had little choice. Jean Bousquet was the only worker available with some experience of archaeological sites."

  "Well, all right, so they were working together. That doesn't mean anything. Remember, he was still alive two months after Carpenter left. He called."

  "Yes, so say the fellows of the institute. But it has yet to be independently confirmed."

  "It's been confirmed, all right. Madame Lacouture, Beaupierre's secretary, remembered it too. She had it in her logbook. I saw it. Sorry to spoil your theory, Lucien."

  Joly digested this. "Secretaries say whatever they're told to say; it's their job."

  Gideon laughed. "You haven't met Madame Lacouture. I'd be surprised if anybody tells her what to say."

  "She sounds something like my secretary, now that I think of it," Joly said with a slow smile.

  "And anyway, even if you're right, which I don't believe, what would Carpenter be escaping from? Let's say he actually killed whoever the bones belonged to. The body was safely buried, nobody knew about it—why would he want to disappear?"

  "And what about his humiliation over the Old Man of Tayac, or have you forgotten that?"

  "Oh, that, right," said Gideon, who had in fact forgotten for the moment.

  "Imagine further his state of mind," the inspector said, removing a stray shred of tobacco from his tongue with the tip of his finger and discarding it in an ashtray after careful study. "He would have felt that the world was closing in, that his life was incapable of reconstruction. He was an intelligent, resourceful man; would a new identity have been so terrible a prospect?"

  Gideon returned to his chair and lowered himself thoughtfully into it. Joly's doubts were getting through to him. "Maybe it wouldn't, at that. From what we've been finding out about him, he'd had several lives before."

  He drained the lukewarm remainder of his Coke, crumpled the can in his fist, and tossed it into a wastebasket already brimming with cans and paper cups. "Ely Carpenter still out there somewhere," he said slowly. "Well, I grant you, it's an intriguing thought."

  "Yes," Joly said, "but what are we to do with it? Where do we begin to search for him? It's a cold trail we have in front of us."

  "It's worse than a cold trail, Lucien; it's a dead end—two dead ends. Not just Carpenter, but the body in the cave too. Remember, we have no way of proving that he was or wasn't Bousquet; and with the bones gone, we're never going to have any."

  "Well, there you have—" Joly glanced up at the entrance of a blue-uniformed policeman, blonde, blue-eyed, and ridiculously young-looking, who had deferentially approached their table. Joly's visage stiffened to that of an inspecteur principal.

  "Que vous désirez, Noyon?"

  "I'm very sorry to interrupt, inspector," the officer said in French, "but Prefect Marielle wanted me to ask you… what do you wish done with the bones?"

  There was a moment's silence, and then:

  "Bones?" said Joly.

  "Bones?" said Gideon.

  "Yes, the bones," Noyon repeated. "The dog's bones."

  Joly smacked his forehead—harder than he'd intended, judging from the wince that followed. "The dog's bones! I forgot completely. Where is my brain? Gideon, we do have some skeletal material for you to look at."

  Gideon stared at him. "Did I miss something there, Lucien? I mean, sure, I'll be happy to look at your dog bones if you want me to, but I don't quite see—"

  "No, no," Joly said, laughing, "not the 'dog bones,' the 'dog's bones.' Toutou's bones."

  "Umm… Toutou's bones…"

  "Toutou!" Joly said impatiently. "The Peyrauds' dog, the animal that first discovered the remains in the cave and brought home some of the bones. Marielle collected them—"

  "Well, why didn't you say so?" Gideon said, jumping to his feet. "You expect me to know the damn dog's name? Where are they? Let's go."

  Joly rose more slowly, looking at his watch. "I believe I'll leave them to you, my friend; I have other things to pursue. I'll come back in an hour?"

  "Fine," said Gideon, who preferred working without an audience for a lot of reasons, not least among them that he liked to talk to himself. "Maybe I'll be able to tell you something by then."

  "I hope so, but I wouldn't get my hopes up. I've seen these bones; they don't look like very much."

  "Well, we'll see." Turning to Noyon Gideon spoke in French: "Okay, Officer Noyon, lead on. Where are they?"

  "They are in the evidence room, sir," said Noyon. "If you would care to follow me?"

  In police parlance, "evidence room" usually referred to a secure area—perhaps a steel-barred cage or a locked room with a stout metal door—in which labeled bags and boxes were neatly ranged on shelves along with carefully tagged larger items of material evidence relating to crimes, such as rifles, axes, and ball-peen hammers. In the case of the Les Eyzies municipal police department, however, the evidence room was a paper-supply cubicle attached to the office of its prefect, Auguste Marielle.

  Marielle, a bulgy man in a blue-and-white uniform, emerged from the cubicle
with a thick red folder, the old-fashioned, expandable kind with accordion sides, held closed by a string wound around a couple of cardboard grommets. "I'm afraid you won't find much of use in these, professor."

  He placed the folder on his handsome teak desk and undid the string. "Of course, one can see at once," he said in French, "that, except for a few mouse bones, they are human. There's little doubt about that much. Beyond that, however, I feel safe in saying no more than"—he cleared his throat: hm-hm-hhhmmm—"that, ah, they are clearly male, and most likely adult—yes, yes, clearly adult, and, ah… so forth. Would you agree, professor?"

  "I would, yes, but it'd probably be worth going over them again."

  "As you wish, although in my opinion there is little further helpful information to be gotten from them. You might like to know, incidentally, that Professor Émile Grize, a most eminent and well-regarded expert—perhaps you know him?—agreed with my conclusions entirely."

  "I see," Gideon said. "All the same, it couldn't hurt to have another look. Speaking as a trained forensic anthropologist."

  The only place in the mairie where a relatively private, unclaimed space could be found for Gideon was in the snack area and it was there, where he and Joly had sat earlier, that he laid the bones out, this time with a pale cup of instant coffee beside him. One of the other tables was occupied by a pair of clerks from the treasurer's office who were gobbling down a late lunch, but when they saw what was being spread out four feet away from them they re-wrapped their sandwiches in waxed paper, picked up their soft-drink cans, and silently departed.

  On the table in front of Gideon, and taking up very little of the tabletop at that, were eleven human bones—the tiny rodent bones had been discarded—or rather what was left of eleven bones after Toutou had worked them over. All were from the right side: the femur and fibula from the leg, six assorted hand and wrist bones, two partial ribs, and the ulna, the larger of the two forearm bones. As he'd expected, they were in awful shape. The femur, fibula, and ulna were no more than sticks, their ends completely chewed away, and everything bore the deep, parallel scores and furrows of prolonged, happy canine gnawing.

  They don't look like very much, Joly had told him. "Pathetic, is what they look like," Gideon answered aloud now, looking at the worn shards and slivers. Chances were, Émile had probably said all there was to say about them: they were human, they were male, and they were adult.

  Even the ribs, which had offered the most hope, weren't of any use. Gideon had reached for them first, hunting for signs of the periostitis that would point—against all odds, he now believed—to their being Bousquet's. There weren't any such signs, but even that meant nothing because they weren't the ribs he needed. Not only were they from the wrong side, but they were the bottom two, the eleventh and twelfth, the "floating" ribs, below the lungs themselves and thus lower than where the tubercular lesions would have shown up if they'd been there. So their absence told him nothing at all one way or the other.

  "Not one blessed thing," he grumbled. Maybe this person had had t.b., maybe he hadn't. Maybe he was Bousquet, maybe he wasn't. Human, male, and adult; that was it. "Damn."

  He poked at the sorry fragments without much optimism, but came to a sudden halt when he reached the forearm bone, the ulna. "Hey, no callus formation," he said, moving his thumb over the surface. "What do you know about that? No thickening, no inflammation!"

  A woman carrying a box with knitting needles and wool walked into the snack room, turning on her heel and walking out again when she saw the large male sitting at a table in earnest conversation with a bone. In English. Gideon smiled absently in her direction, seeing her but too lost in thought to quite register her. The absence of inflammation on the ulna, as far as he knew, was of no conceivable help in identifying the remains, but it had engaged his attention as a physical anthropologist, for whom the chief challenge and the chief interest of bones was always the reconstruction of the living human being from them—and the more fragmentary and incomplete the skeleton, the greater the challenge.

  What was absorbing him at the moment was a mental comparison with the skeleton's other ulna, the one he'd seen when he'd examined it in the abri. That one, as he'd told Joly, had been markedly enlarged and inflamed. He'd assumed at the time that it had probably been the result of some kind of systemic disease, but if that were true, he'd expect it to show up bilaterally—not necessarily of course, but more likely than not. Yet this one, the right one, the one in his hand, was perfectly healthy. That made him wonder if its presence on the other one had possibly been caused by some kind of trauma.

  But not your usual trauma. Not a single blow, for example—the bone hadn't been broken, or chipped, or cracked. Its condition might conceivably have been the result of a localized infection, possibly one that had ulcerated, but he didn't think so. He dearly wished he could have it in front of him now, but he remembered it pretty well as it was, and what he remembered told him it had come from some kind of repeated punishment over time—years, maybe. Some kind of friction, pressure, pounding…

  With his fingers he outlined on his own forearm the region that would have been affected: the part just below the elbow; not the "back" or "front' of the forearm so much, but the "outside" of it—the pinky side, the part protected by the volar antebrachial muscles. "Now what the heck would cause something like that?" he asked the ulna. "What kind of work, what kind of activity… hobby…?"

  He stared at it, brushing his fingers over the roughened areas, for a long time without getting anywhere. There was a reason for them, all right, but what it was he couldn't fathom. "Ah, the hell with it," he finally muttered, putting it aside for the time being and beginning to sift through the hand and wrist bones.

  The bones from the wrist were hopeless, the capitate, trapezium, and hamate gnawed to barely recognizable nubs; surprising, really, that they hadn't been consumed altogether, small as they were. Those from the hand—the first three metacarpals—were in slightly better shape but didn't promise much, metacarpals being among the less informative bones of the body. But the moment he picked one up—even before he picked it up—something leaped out at him, something important enough to make him sit up with a start. And abruptly, his heart was in his mouth. In a single instant, out of nowhere, a whole series of isolated, disconnected details, meaningless until now, had suddenly spun about and clicked unexpectedly together into a recognizable—an unmistakable—whole. He was on to something at last, but it seemed so impossible, so fanciful—

  What he was staring at was the first metacarpal bone, the one that forms the base of thumb, the part hidden in the palm of the hand. And running down the middle of this short, stout bone was something that should have jumped out at him the second he opened the folder: a sort of miniature canyon with high, craggy walls that stood out like a tiny mountain range. This, he knew was the end-product of a fracture that had healed without having been properly set. The roughened area was a dense extrusion of bone, two strong, rugged wings of lamellar bone that had formed around the break to repair and strengthen it. It wasn't one of nature's prettier healing techniques, but it was enormously effective, making the bone stronger than it had been in the first place.

  What made this particular break so unusual, so significant, was its direction; the bone hadn't snapped crosswise, as bones usually broke, but had cracked down its length, so that the healed cleavage ran in a slight spiral from one end to the other. And the two ends of the bone themselves had rotated a few millimeters in relation to one another and then remained there as the injury healed.

  It was, in other words, a torsion fracture, the kind of thing that happened as a result of irresistible twisting pressure. Most commonly, you saw them in skiing accidents, when the body spun during a fall but the foot stayed put, being enclosed in a rigidly fixed boot. When that happened, something had to give, and that something, when it wasn't the ligaments of the knee, tended to be one of the bones of the ankle or the leg.

  But thumbs—thumbs were
a different story. Unless you stuck your thumb firmly in a hole in the wall, like the little Dutch boy, and then tried a backflip, there weren't many ways you could wreck your first metacarpal in quite this manner. In fact, in all his experience, Gideon had encountered one way and one way only.

  "My God," he whispered.

  Chapter 16

  It was the first time Gideon had ever seen Joly's jaw drop, a sight made even more memorable by the unlit cigarette pasted to his upper lip. He shook out the match he'd just lit. "What did you say?"

  "I said," Gideon replied, "that these bones aren't Jean Bousquet's, they're Ely Carpenter's."

  "Not…" Irritably, Joly plucked the jiggling cigarette from his lip, gestured with it at the paltry assemblage on the table, and stared indignantly at Gideon. "From these? But, really, how can you expect me… how can you…?"

  Gideon picked up the fractured thumb bone and showed it to Joly. It was this that had cinched it, he said, shamelessly taking his own sweet time. (This was another one of those all-too-rare moments, another rabbit out of the hat, and it would have taken a stronger man than Gideon to keep from milking the situation at least a little.) A fracture of that particular kind, on that particular bone, a longitudinal torsion fracture of the first metacarpal, was so closely linked to one particular cause that it had a name: anthropologists called it "cowboy thumb."

  A better name might have been "rodeo thumb," he pointed out, because these days it didn't usually happen out on the range but during saddle-bronc-riding competitions at rodeos, when contestants instinctively grabbed for the saddle horn while they were in the process of being ejected from their saddles. And although hanging on for dear life to a relatively fixed point while the rest of the body was flying head-over-heels ten feet above the ground probably saved a good many heads, ribs, arms, and legs, it was unlikely to do anyone's thumbs any good. All too often, they wound up with ugly longitudinal torsion fractures of the first metacarpal.