by Aaron Elkins
“Okay, but tell me this. These crabs and things, they chewed off the whole end of the clavicle, but they never touched the humerus. Why is that?”
“Well, since the humerus finishes ossifying several years before the clavicle does, it would have been too hard for those tiny pincers to have any effect on them. But the clavicle, newly fused, would still have been a little soft, which is more inviting to bone scavengers.”
“Yeah? I never thought of that. That’s interesting.” Then, having picked up something dubious about the way Gideon had tossed it off, added: “Is it true?”
“John, I don’t have a clue, but I know you always need a reason for everything, so I thought that would sound good. I don’t know, it probably is true, but the reality of it is, there’s no accounting for something like that. Could be a million reasons. Maybe the humerus got stuck under a rock where it couldn’t be gotten to, maybe—”
At the sound of the door opening, Gideon started, and when Julie’s face and her short, wind-tousled dark hair peeked through, his heart quickened first, then relaxed. After five years of marriage, he was still deeply in love with her, still capable of being thrilled when she walked into a room.
But there was more than that to it. He’d been married before, to the only other woman he’d ever loved, and when Nora had been killed in a traffic accident, it had plunged him into a sinkhole of grief and despair. For almost three years he’d been among the walking dead. It had been lively, lovely Julie Tendler who had brought him back to life. But that old, terrible day had left its mark, so that whenever Julie was out on her own, there was a lingering flicker of worry (for the first couple of years it had been full-fledged dread) that stayed with him until she was back, safe and sound. As she was now.
He smiled. “Hi, Julie.”
CHAPTER 18
“Hi, there, fellas,” she called back, shouldering her way in, both hands engaged in holding a cardboard drink tray with three cups in it. “Glenda told me you were both up here, so I brought us up some lattes.”
“Great, thanks,” Gideon said, “I know I can use one.”
“Roddy Carlisle and Bertrand Peltier, I presume,” she said, looking at the bones as she handed out the drinks. “Boy, not much left of them, is there?”
“Enough for Doc to start screwing around with what everybody thought they knew,” John said. “As usual. He’s been telling me it’s just Carlisle. No sign of Peltier.”
“Really?” She smiled. “Well, didn’t I say it wouldn’t take you long to start standing things on their heads? But how do you know that, Gideon?”
“What do you say we take a short break first?” Gideon said. “I’m ready to sit down for a few minutes.”
“His spinal extensors are acting up on him, poor old guy,” John said, going into the kitchen. “Hey,” he called from there, “I picked up some Figaloos. They’ll go good with the coffee.”
Julie looked at Gideon. “Figaloos?” she mouthed.
“French Fig Newtons,” John said, returning and setting down a packet of cookies. “Only better. Bigger, anyway.”
Julie laughed when she saw the label. “Oh, Figolu,” she read aloud, then repeated it, simply for the tactile pleasure of getting her mouth around those delicious French vowels a second time.
“Oh, excuse me,” John said. “Feeeguhhlllyieuuww. I tell you what, if you don’t like the way I say it, you don’t have to—”
But Gideon was quicker, getting to the packet before John could snatch it away and grabbing a couple for himself and Julie. “We like the way you say it just fine.”
They each munched one, washing them down with coffee, and Gideon brought Julie up to date.
“Well,” she said, “that’s really interesting about the crabs and things, but I do see a slight problem there.”
“Yeah, so do I,” said John. “I was just about to say, when you walked in.”
Gideon smiled. “Bravo. I expected no less from the two of you.”
“I’m pretty sure crabs can’t live in a tar pit,” John said. “Or crayfish either.”
“Right,” Julie agreed, “so what chewed up his bones?”
Gideon nodded. “That’s the question, all right.”
Julie looked at John. “You are aware, of course, that he’s just stringing us along? He’s got the answer right there in his back pocket, waiting to astound and flabbergast us.”
“Hey, you’re telling me? Don’t forget, I know the guy longer than you do.”
“No, I’m not about to flabbergast anyone this time. The fact is, I don’t have a good answer. The only possible answer I can think of doesn’t make much sense. Someone moved him—moved the bones.”
“Moved,” echoed John, scowling. He reached for another fig bar.
“Yes, I think Roddy spent long enough in an ordinary pond or river—weeks, months, years—for the little critters to nip away at him enough to get down to the bone, after which they got dumped into the tar pit—the bones, not the critters.”
“That’s crazy, Doc. Why would anybody do that?” John asked. “Moving a body, I could see. But a pile of bones?”
“And into a commercial, working tar pit at that?” Julie added. “Wouldn’t it be safer and easier to just bury them somewhere? Or toss them into the Channel? Or . . . or . . .”
Gideon shrugged. “Sounds weird, I agree, but if anybody can come up with a better explanation, I’d love to hear it.”
They were silent for a while, pensively sipping coffee, and then John said abruptly: “Oh, hey, Doc, there’s something I almost forgot. Graydon’s got something else he says proves there are two people there.” He scrabbled through the report, looking for the relevant section.
“I hope he’s got something better than the epiphyses.”
“I don’t know, you tell us. Here we go: ‘The most compelling evidence for the presence of more than one individual lies in the differing and incompatible states of suture closure found in the two cranial fragments.’”
“Oh, boy.” Gideon couldn’t help rolling his eyes. Graydon had stepped into some really muddy waters here. The idea of using cranial sutures as a way of estimating age had been around for going on two hundred years, and on the face of it, it made sense. The human skull, so solid-seeming, is made up of twenty-two different bones (plus three tiny ones that you can’t see—the ossicles, deep in the ears) that, in the first half of life, are separated by sutures—hairline “cracks,” some squiggly, some relatively straight, lined with dense, fibrous connective tissue. This tissue does a good job of holding the skull firmly together while allowing just enough “stretch” to let the brain keep growing through adolescence and early adulthood, at the end of which your brain is as big as it’s ever going to get and your skull might just as well be one solid, immovable hunk of bone. Which is what it becomes. The sutures now begin to ossify and meld with the surrounding bone and slowly start disappearing.
And since the rate at which they ossify is broadly predictable, one would—and did—think they could be used for aging in the same way that epiphyses are used. Hundreds of scientific papers have been published on the subject through the years, along with a steady, seemingly never-ending flood of master’s theses presenting yet more “new” ways of evaluating them, of which Gideon himself had (reluctantly) supervised two so far and hoped never to see another.
The verdict had taken a long time to arrive, but now it would seem to be in: They don’t work, except—maybe, a little—when they’re used in conjunction with some pretty abstruse aggregate statistics. Yes, they do ossify in a moderately predictable order, at a moderately predictable rate, but the differences between people are too great to provide anything but the broadest kind of estimate. Are all of the sutures clearly open? This is a young person. Are all of the sutures so thoroughly ossified that barely a trace of them here and there is all that can be seen? This is an old person. And that was about it. But in 1969, when this report was written, the idea still had some life in it.
Gideon’s eye rolling had made John hesitate in his reading aloud. “You don’t want me to read this?”
“No, I can take it. Read on. The Figaloo has fortified me.”
John cleared his throat. “‘Fragment A comprises adjacent portions of the left parietal and frontal bones. Thus, it necessarily crosses the coronal suture, which separates the two bones. This suture has not completely ossified, but it is well on the way, enough so that these segments of the two bones remain firmly attached. Since ossification of this suture does not begin until the age of twenty-five, it is safe to assume that Fragment A comes from an individual of at least twenty-six or twenty-seven years.’” He waited for Gideon’s response.
“That would be this one,” Gideon said, picking up one of the two cranial fragments, “and I don’t really have any major argument with him on it. His description is right, and obviously, he thinks it belongs to Carlisle, and so do I. So then what about the other one, Fragment B, I assume? That’s an interesting one. What’s he got against it?”
“Okay. His reading is . . . here we go: ‘Fragment B, originally two adjacent fragments, now glued together, consists of a wedge-shaped piece of the right parietal, roughly opposite to the position of Fragment A on the left, but slightly more posterior. Two of the three sides of this fragment are the results of fracturing. The third, however, is not the result of fracture. What we have instead is the bone’s natural border, where in life it would have been part of the parietal rim of the coronal suture.’
“And then he’s got a footnote at the bottom. ‘It should be noted that Fragment B is composed of two adjacent fragments that were glued together.’”
“Right, I was just looking at that when you came in.”
“And the footnote also says, ‘The small matching discrepancies to be found along the joined borders are the result of the warping of the bone over time.’”
“Oy,” said Gideon, in respectful memory of his beloved mentor Abe Goldstein, who would surely have said the same thing. “I don’t know where to begin. That is fouled up from the first word to the last.”
“Gideon,” Julie said, “I know you must be right about all this doctor’s mistakes, but what I can’t help wondering is why in the world they would have used someone who was so . . . well, incompetent.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say incompetent. I’m being harder on him than I should be. Really, his problem was that he was ahead of his time. He was doing forensic anthropology before it existed, before there was a sufficient database, let alone the statistical tools, to make the kind of hard-edged generalizations he makes: coronal closure begins at exactly twenty-five, the medial end of the clavicle begins fusion at exactly sixteen, and so on. Nothing about human growth is that predictable. My guess is that he got his information from his old anatomy texts, for which variation was a nonissue. For them, it still is, pretty much. It’s not what they’re about.”
“All right, fine, he’s off the hook,” John said. “So let me tell you his conclusion.”
“Let me tell you. He says that, using the same reasoning, the still-open suture proves that this fragment comes from somebody under twenty-five.”
John nodded.
“And he couldn’t be more wrong. The suture’s open, all right, but it’s not still open.”
Utterly blank looks from Julie and John.
“I think I’m getting a little overwhelmed here,” Julie said.
John put it slightly differently. “Please, somebody put me out of my misery.”
“Look, you two, I know you think I’m being mysterious for the fun of it—”
“Nah, why would we think that?” John said.
“—but really, I’m not. Or, well, maybe only just a very little. The thing is, this is pretty complex, and I’m just trying to present it logically. Cogently.” Gideon finished his coffee and stood up. “Come on, let’s get back in there. Stick with me a little longer, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.”
At the worktable, he slid the clavicle and the humerus to one side, leaving just the two cranial fragments in the center of the table. “Now. I’m sure you both remember the two parietal bones are the biggest ones in the skull and each one makes up virtually one entire side of the skull. They come together at the top. And the frontal bone—”
“Is the one in front of ’em,” John said. “Duh.”
“Good man. And the coronal suture, running from temple to temple, over the top of the head, is the suture between the frontal bone and the two parietals behind it. And on this fragment, Fragment A, it’s closed, as he says. Okay?”
They both nodded. “We’re with you, Prof,” Julie said.
Now that fragment was swept aside too, leaving the slightly larger Fragment B all alone in front of them. “With this one we have a problem. This is the one he glued together from two smaller pieces. Have a look.” He gave them time to examine it.
“He’s right,” John said, “these two edges here are from getting broken, even I can tell that. But this third side is different. Not sharp, doesn’t look like a fracture. Almost looks like it’s from a jigsaw puzzle.”
“And that would be the side he says was the border of the suture?” Julie suggested.
“Yes, and about that he’s also right. You’d never get a squiggly, curvy edge like that from a fracture. What happened is that he got hit in the head and the blow popped that suture open.”
“Popped open a suture,” John said. “I didn’t know that could happen.”
“It can happen.”
“So he was hit right on top of the suture, is that what does it?” asked Julie.
“No, this crack down here is more likely where he got hit.”
“Where he glued the fragment together.” Julie again.
“Right.”
Julie was running her finger along the glue line. “I don’t know, are you positive they really go together? They’re a little off. Shouldn’t they fit better than that?”
Leaning over beside her, John agreed. “Did he glue two pieces that really don’t belong together, is that what’s wrong?”
“No, actually, they do go together. But you’re right, Julie, they should fit perfectly. Remember he mentioned that there’s some warping in the bone that throws off the fit a little? Well, that’s what we’re seeing here.”
John stepped back from the table and folded his arms. Willing learner though he was, he could only go so long before his impatience broke through. “Okay, I don’t know about you, Julie, but I am really ready to cut to the chase. To quote from you yesterday, Doc, ‘Where are you going with this?’”
“We’re practically there. Hang with me just a little longer.” He held up the fragment. “Okay. Warped, yes, but warping over time . . . no. It just doesn’t happen. Dead bone doesn’t warp, not unless you have a one-in-a-million situation—say, an Australopithecus skull stuck in a limestone deposit that’s been putting it under steady, inconceivably slow pressure for the last three million years. But in five years? No way.”
“But live bone does warp, is that where you’re heading with this?” Julie asked.
“Exactly. Or rather, it can warp . . . although maybe ‘bend’ is a better term for it.”
“Bones can bend?”
“Sure. Mostly, it happens with kids—their arm and leg bones. The ulna or the fibula can get bent right up to the point of breaking, but not quite all the way there—and when that happens, sometimes it’s bent so far it can’t bounce back.”
“It’s bent forever?”
“No, in a kid it will usually straighten out as the bone grows. But sometimes it does have to be reset.”
“But this isn’t a kid, this isn’t some skinny fibula,” said John. “It’s a skull. It’s thick.”
“Correct, but traumatic stress can do it in a grown man’s skull too, which is what happened here. When Roddy’s head was struck, his skull bent inward—gave—at the point of contact. And when that happens, when a semirigid object—stiff, solid, but not a hundre
d percent inflexible—is forced to bend in one direction, there has to be some give somewhere else in the opposite direction to compensate.”
“Umm . . .” Julie said, “. . . okay, got it.”
“Now most of the time, bone does fracture—shatter—pretty quickly, before it bends too far, so once it breaks, it bounces right back, and you glue the pieces, they fit fine. You’d never know there’d been any give. But if the force is slow-loading enough—it won’t happen with a bullet, for example; the force is too overwhelmingly fast—but if it’s a rock, or a hammer, say, the bone can bend so much before it breaks that it can’t bounce back. It’s permanently deformed. That’s what happened here. That’s why the pieces wouldn’t fit together perfectly.”
John and Julie were slowly nodding, fully absorbed again.
“And when it’s going through that bending phase, just looking for a weak spot to crack open, and it crosses an incompletely ossified suture—”
“The suture pops,” Julie said.
Gideon nodded. “It doesn’t happen every day, but it happens. It happened here.”
“And the suture on the other side, on Fragment A, didn’t pop because it was . . . well, on the other side, too far away from the blow?”
“Probably so.”
John was still thoughtfully fingering the fragment. “So something that did this much damage—would that have been enough to kill him?”
“Oh, yes. Can’t say for certain that this was the cause of death, because there’s so much of him we don’t have. There might have been other wounds. But it sure didn’t do him any good. ‘Presumptive cause of death’—that’s what’ll go in my report.”
Julie was worrying the gold chain of her pendant necklace. “Gideon,” she said slowly, “if the fragments in the tar pit all belonged to Roddy Carlisle—”
“Then what happened to Bertrand Peltier?” John finished for her. “And where the hell is he?”
“That too,” Julie said, “but I was going to raise something else: If Roddy wasn’t killed in a fight with Peltier after all . . . then who did kill him? Was it Peltier?”
