by Aaron Elkins
“Hey, we better quit while we’re ahead, Doc.”
That was fine with Gideon.
The food came—big, messy, appetizing wooden platters loaded with extras—beans, more salsa, french fries, pickles—and they found that their appetites were heartier than they’d thought. Gideon was halfway through his sandwich and surrounded by soiled paper napkins when a new thought surfaced.
“There weren’t six anthropologists at that meeting, John. There were eight.”
John looked up from his hamburger. “Eight?”
“Two of them are dead. Jasper, of course, and Ned Ortiz from USC.”
John went back to the hamburger. “Yeah, well, I think I better concentrate on the live ones. Dead guys are tough to get anything out of.”
“But Jasper’s the only one with any kind of a real connection to Salish. The others didn’t even know him before the meeting. And Jasper left suddenly, without telling anybody. Doesn’t that make him worth checking out? If—”
He stopped abruptly. If he’d heard himself right, he had as much as suggested that the late, great Albert Evan Jasper was a murderer. And that really was overdoing it. “I mean,” he finished lamely, “I thought that was the way the police mind worked.”
“That’s the way the police mind works, all right,” John said. “All I have to figure out is how you check out a cigar box worth of burned bones.”
“If you can find them,” Julie said. “Nobody seems to know where they are at the moment.”
She had said it casually, but her expression suddenly changed. She put down her sandwich and spoke quietly. “There’s got to he a connection there.”
John was studying her. “Well, now, that’s something to think about.”
Gideon considered the idea. “No, how could there be a connection? We’re getting our causal sequence backwards. Jasper’s bones disappeared Sunday night. The skeleton didn’t even turn up until this morning—two days later. And Chuck Salish’s name didn’t come into the picture until just a few hours ago.”
“Yeah, I know,” John said slowly. “Far be it from me to argue with causal sequence, Doc, but I think Julie’s got something there.”
She smiled at him. “Why, thank you, John.”
And maybe she did. Julie had a way of spotting connections that other people missed. it had happened enough times before.
“There might be something else worth thinking about, John,” Gideon said heavily. He might as well get it out. “I know Nellie fairly well by now, and I get the impression he’s holding something back.”
“Huh? Twenty minutes ago you were vouching for him.”
“I’m still vouching for him. I don’t think he’s killed anybody, I just think he’s—look, Honeyman asked him if everybody got along at the 1981 meeting, and he said yes, but I got the feeling that he was—well, holding something back.”
“What makes you think so?”
Gideon shrugged. “It was just in the air. A feeling. You’d have to know him.”
John looked understandably doubtful.
Gideon banged his mug down, suddenly nettled. “Look, John, I’m just telling you the impression I got. If you want to follow it up, fine. If you don’t want to follow it up, fine. All right?”
John glanced at Julie. “What’s with him?”
“Nothing’s with me. Come on, let’s get out of here.” He swiped irritably at the check and turned it over. “Twenty-six dollars.”
John looked at Julie. “Did I say something to make him mad, or did you say something to make him mad?”
“Oh, he’s not mad at us,” Julie said, and then looked at Gideon with a smile. “He’s feeling like a rat, that’s all. These people are his friends, and he feels like a traitor to his own kind. We’re just getting the brunt of it.” She touched the back of Gideon’s hand. “Not that I’d want you any other way.”
Gideon reacted with silence and mixed feelings. It was damned irritating to have someone who knew what you were feeling before you did. On the other hand, if you were going to feel like a rat anyway, it was nice to have Julie there to understand.
“That’s about it,” he said gruffly, and squeezed her hand in return.
On the short drive back to the lodge, John chuckled to himself in the back seat. “Hey, guess what Applewhite said when I talked to him about this on the telephone.”
Gideon thought for a second. “He said: ‘I bet that sonofabitch Gideon Oliver is mixed up in this somewhere.—
John grinned. “You got it. Or words to that effect.”
The evening session was held in Whitebark Lodge’s meeting room, where the folding tables had been stowed along the walls and the seats arranged auditorium-style. Once at the lectern and into his subject, Nellie recovered all of his customary verve. His description of the skeleton was precise and dramatic, his account of the cause-of-death analysis—for which he gave Gideon generous credit—was detailed and suspenseful, if not altogether accurate in its minor points. (“Gideon looked at me. I looked at Gideon. What, we wondered, could have caused these bewildering little fractures? Our eyes met above that small, puzzling vertebra. ‘Garrote,’ we both whispered at the same time, as the grim implications…”)
His audience, so engrossed that they forgot to fidget on the uncomfortable folding chairs, consisted of the forty-some-odd anthropologists and students. The spouses, et al., had long ago had their fill of the new skeleton and had found other things to do, as was attested by the clacking of Ping-Pong balls and bleeping of video games from the recreation room next door. The only “outsiders” at the session were Julie and John, sitting with Gideon in a row of seats placed along one of the walls, and Frieda Hobert, occupying pride of place on the aisle in the first row.
The news about Chuck Salish created the expected stir, and when it was noticed that John was in the room, there was a flurry of questions: “Did the police think it was Salish?” “Was there any idea as to the motive for the killing?” “Were there any promising leads?”
“Hard to say,” John answered from his seat. Lieutenant Honeyman had barely gotten started. There were records to look at, people to talk to.
“Are you involved in the investigation?” Leland wondered. “I ask because you seem to be privy to the lieutenant’s plans.”
“I guess you could say that,” John said. “The lieutenant sort of asked me to sit in. He figured, since I’m here anyway, I could be a go-between between the department and you folks. Sort of what I’m doing right now.”
“I see,” Leland said stiffly. “And tell me this, please. Are those of us who were here at the time to consider ourselves under suspicion?”
The underlying hum of whispered conversation stopped as suddenly as if someone had turned off a tap.
“I ask only out of idle curiosity, you understand,” Leland said.
There were a few uncertain laughs, along with a head-thrown-back guffaw from Les Zenkovich.
“Let’s make sure we know who’s dead first,” John said. “Then we’ll think about who killed him.”
“I see. So your decision to remove the skeleton to the safety of the sheriff’s office is not to be taken personally?” “By who?” John said pleasantly.
Leland made a small movement with his mouth and turned in his seat to face the front again.
One of the students raised a deferential hand. “Had anybody thought about making a facial reconstruction from the skull of the dead man? Couldn’t that confirm the identification?”
There was a murmur of interest, mostly from other students.
Nellie, who was still moderating from the front of the room, made a face. “I doubt it, but why don’t we ask our resident expert? Gideon, what do you think?”
Gideon started, caught by surprise. “Uh—well, I’m not really an expert—”
“Watch out now,” Nellie said with a wink, something he could actually manage without being arch, “you’re under oath.”
Gideon laughed. “Seriously, I am not an expert.”
Seriously, he wasn’t. The science—or art; the issue was up in the air—of using modeling clay to build up a facial likeness directly on a human skull had few expert practitioners. There were perhaps two dozen in the United States, some of them anthropologists and some artists, often working together. None of them, however, was here at the meeting, and Gideon was. Two years before, he had attended a week-long workshop on the technique and had found he had a knack for it.
But he’d also found out how unobservant he’d been all his life. He’d had to learn, almost as if he’d never seen them, the way an eyelid was shaped, and an upper lip, and how people’s ears were set into their heads. But he’d stuck with it, and since then he had used it in four cases; and although no one would ever confuse his work with an artist’s, he’d been reasonably successful. Three of the four reconstructions had led to positive identifications, which put him well ahead of the national average.
Among professional anthropologists, the practice had as many scoffers as true believers, with Gideon somewhere in the middle. It was, as far as he was concerned, a helpful tool if used discriminatingly, by people who knew what they were doing, with full appreciation of its limitations. His own three-for-four batting average he put down to some extremely lucky breaks. One of the cases had been a woman with an easily recognizable bony hump on the bridge of her nose, another had had eyes set extraordinarily far apart, and a third had been a man with a jaw like Benito Mussolini’s (that one, for better or worse, had gotten national media coverage). But the fourth had been just an everyday sort of skull, with no particularly distinctive features. And of course that was the one that was still sitting in a box in the King County Medical Examiner’s Office in Seattle, unidentified.
He’d always been frank in his reservations about the process and about his own skills. All the same, when the WAFA schedule was being prepared, Miranda had asked him if he’d put on a demonstration, mainly for the students in attendance. She had offered to provide all the materials he’d need and he’d agreed. The half-day session was on the schedule for the following afternoon—and that, he supposed, made him the closest thing to an expert they were going to get.
“I think—” he began.
“Stand up so people can hear you,” Nellie said, waving him up.
Gideon stood. He didn’t have much to say. “My opinion is that there wouldn’t be much point. When you already have a pretty good idea whose skull you’ve got, there are quicker, better ways to confirm it.”
“Right you are,” Les said from the audience. “What do we need to mess around with clay for? There are some good pictures of Salish in the file, and we can use video superimposition and computer-generated imaging to see if they match the skull.” Since he’d become a consultant, Les had developed an appreciation for high-tech anthropology.
Nellie vigorously nodded his agreement. “I’ll take it a step further than that. There’s no need for any of this mumbo-jumbo here. Not only do we have virtually the man’s entire skeleton, we have his complete dentition, which can be compared directly to Mr. Salish’s dental records, once Mr. Lau locates them. What more do we need?”
In the matter of facial reconstruction, Nellie was firmly on record as a scoffer. He had written several articles on the subject. The kindest of them was an article in the Journal of Forensic Science entitled, “Facial Reconstruction: Harmless Fun but Not to Be Believed.”
“We’ll know if it’s Salish, all right,” he said, “and we won’t have to resort to facial reconstruction to do it.”
“But what if it isn’t?” one of the students asked; a mustached thirty-year-old in khakis and a scuffed slouch hat; one of several who seemed to have studied anthropological dress with Indiana Jones. “Maybe it’ll turn out to be someone else. At least a reconstruction would give us a place to start.”
“Not necessarily,” Gideon said. “You have to understand, a facial reconstruction is a long way from an exact likeness. Nobody’s going to look at it and say: ‘My God, that’s him!’ All you can do is show it around and hope; see if it looks even a little familiar to anybody.”
“But what’s wrong with that?” asked another student. “Couldn’t we do that?”
“Show it around? To whom? Who’s missing that we know about?”
The student shook her head. “I don’t follow.”
“Well, reconstructions are like fingerprints. They’re not any good unless you have something to compare them to—somebody to compare them to, and we don’t have anybody we’re looking for. Nobody but Salish, and as Les and Nellie said, there are better ways of proving it’s Salish.”
“But—”
“And if it turns out to be someone else, some other missing person, we don’t have any idea of where he’s missing from—according to the lieutenant, it’s not from around here—so where do we show it around? And to whom?”
“Oh,” the young woman said, and sank disappointedly back. “I see.”
“Thank you, Gideon,” Nellie said, pulling together his notes from the lectern. “And now I think—”
Gideon was still standing. “But on the other hand…”
He still didn’t see any forensic point in it, but by now his teacherly instincts were engaged. Throwing cold water on any glimmer of student interest went against his grain. Besides, seeing how close the reconstruction came to Chuck Salish’s face would make it interesting for him as well as them.
“On the other hand, I’m supposed to do a demonstration tomorrow afternoon anyway. I was going to use a skull from the museum collection, but I don’t see why I couldn’t demonstrate just as well on an actual murder victim.”
“Yes, it does add that certain je ne sais quoi,” Leland said, sotto voce.
“But if I’m going to go through the whole process for real,” Gideon went on, “even if we just skim through it, it’ll take more than an afternoon. I’d better get started in the morning.”
“But how can you do that?” It was Miranda. “Nellie, aren’t you still working on it?”
Nellie considered. “I’ll tell you what. You go ahead and work with the skull tomorrow, Gideon. I still have plenty to do on the postcranial skeleton. Let’s see, isn’t tomorrow afternoon’s general session going to be at the museum?”
It was, someone volunteered. The topic was blunt-force skull fractures, and they would be using Miranda’s collection.
“Well, then, why don’t we give you until…oh, four o’clock, Gideon? Since everyone will be in Bend anyway, we can all drop by and see how your work stacks up against the photos—and against the memories of those of us who remember Mr. Salish. An impartial evaluation of the art of facial reconstruction, done in the spirit of scientific inquiry.”
The smile he directed at Gideon was somewhere between that of a friend for a friend, and of a frog for a fly.
“Not fair and you know it, Nellie,” Gideon said. “A day isn’t enough for a thorough job, especially if I’m supposed to be teaching while I’m doing it. Three or four days, maybe—”
There were a few good-natured boos.
“Come on, Doc, put your money where your mouth is,” John murmured. “Give it a shot.”
Gideon sighed. “All right, fine,” he announced. “For what it’s worth. But it’s not a test of the method. And it means we’ll have to get started early tomorrow. We’d better get the reconstruction going at seven.”
The looks exchanged among some of the students suggested a slight diminution of enthusiasm.
“Miranda,” Gideon said, “is there a problem getting the materials to me that early?”
“No, I’m usually at the museum by six. Quiet time, you know. I’ll go on over to the sheriff, get a room set up for you, and see that there’s coffee and donuts.”
“Can you do that?”
“Sure, they owe me. And I can sign the skull over to you then.”
Leland, looking dissatisfied, waved a finger at Gideon. “This means you won’t be able to attend the regular morning sessi
on.”
“No, I suppose not. What’s on?”
“I am. I’m presenting an overview of recent developments in coprolite analysis and their applications to forensic archaeology. With slides and hands-on material.”
There was a near-imperceptible pause. “Damn, Leland,” Gideon said, “it looks like I’ll have to miss it.”
CHAPTER 10
“I think I’m getting bones on the brain,” Julie said.
Yawning, Gideon flipped another pebble into the creek. “Who wouldn’t?” Ploop.
They had gotten up early to spend some time together. With Gideon committed to the all-day reconstruction and Julie planning to pay a working visit to Lavalands National Monument, they wouldn’t be seeing each other until late afternoon. They’d had a quick cup of coffee and then walked along the nature trail, a wooded path following the smaller of the two streams that ran through the heart of the old resort and into the woodlands to the north.
It had been a good idea. With the heat wave predicted to continue (John was delighted), the growing but still tolerable early-morning warmth had intensified the sweet, spicy fragrances of the pine forest, so that every breath was thick with cinnamon and vanilla-like scents; markedly different from the cool, cedary aromas of coastal Washington. They had walked hand in hand, quietly, glad to be enjoying the freshness together before the rest of the world had gotten moving. Underfoot, the path lay three inches deep in pine needles as long and golden and pungent as hay. Walking through them made dry, swishing, silky sounds that soothed their ears. And when there was the unexpected, rasping crunch of a hidden pine cone being stepped on, they laughed.
After a quarter of a mile they had stopped and sat down at this pleasant, open spot where the branches filtered the sunlight and the stream lapped at the low bank. They had watched the sparkling water, and sat with their arms around their knees, and chewed wild grass stems, and talked aimlessly about nothing much. It had been too long a time since they’d had a morning like it.
“No,” Julie said, “I don’t mean generally speaking, I mean right now; specifically.”
