Aaron Elkins - Unnatural Selection

“Messy in the extreme. The bathtub makes it easier to clean up, but of course blood traces are almost impossible to get rid of. If we knew where this guy was sliced up into sections, there’d probably still be traces, even after all this time.”

“At Bramshill,” Robb said with a frown, “they told us dead bodies don’t bleed.”

“That’s not always the case, lad,” Clapper said.

“That’s right,” Gideon agreed. “Oh, there aren’t any great gouts of blood if you cut or stab them, because the heart’s not pumping anymore, so there’s no pressure, but they certainly can bleed if the blood’s still in them and it’s still liquid. The way a garden hose would continue to leak if you cut into it, after you turn it off.”

“Like a fresh piece of meat, you might say,” said Clapper helpfully. “Oozes, like, don’t it?”

“And when you’re cutting up a corpse, and hefting the segments, and trying to get them into sacks,” Gideon added, “you’re juggling some pretty heavy, awkward pieces of meat-a male torso weighs eighty or a hundred pounds, a single leg weighs about thirty-so you’re bound to get quite a lot of blood all over everything.”

“I see,” whispered a pallid Robb, and then, barely audibly, “thank you.”

Gideon had had enough too. “Look, why don’t we just concentrate on what we have here in front of us?” he muttered roughly, his head down, continuing to scrabble in the sand with his fingers. Nice, clean, dry bones, not a sign of gore.

“You’re expecting to find the forearm bones here with it, then?” Clapper asked. “If the body was cut up the way you said?”

“I was hoping so, assuming he deposited the entire fleshed arm here, but anything could have happened to them by now, and it’s starting to look as if-no, no, here we go.” His fingers had found something, and with a few strokes of the brush he uncovered two smaller, thinner bones. “They’ve just shifted in the sand a bit, but here they are: radius and ulna.”

“Cut off through the wrist,” said Robb, impressed, “exactly as you predicted.”

“Seen one, seen them all, I suppose,” Clapper said. “You’d think the blighters would cut through the joints, wouldn’t you? Disjoint, as you might say.”

“Disjoint!” said Hicks with a grimace. “Sounds like something you’d do to a chicken.”

Gideon laughed. “‘Disarticulate,’ we like to say.”

“Well, whatever you call it,” said Clapper, “it would be a lot easier than all this hacking and chopping and sawing of bones, and a good bit neater, too.”

“But not a lot faster,” Gideon said. “This is the quickest way. Getting through the articulations is a slow, tricky process, and, anyway, you couldn’t do it without a pretty thorough knowledge of anatomy.”

He placed the three bones in a sack that Robb provided and got to his feet, brushing off his knees. “That’s it for this cache, I think. The hands are probably elsewhere, possibly with the feet. They seem to do it that way a lot.”

“Shall we have the old girl carry on, then?” asked Hicks. “See what else she might turn up?”

“Lead away,” Clapper said. “Kyle, we’ll leave you to do the sifting here.”

“I’ll get started right away, Sarge,” Robb said, setting down the bucket, unrolling the length of screening, and producing a trowel.

“Search,” Hicks said to Tess.

Any expectation that she would repeat the lightning-quick results of her first effort was soon dashed. A cursory exploration of the beach at her own rapid pace produced no pool of scent. Nor did the first hour and a half of a slower, more methodical search with her master doing the guiding, after which Hicks, citing “olfactory fatigue,” declared she needed food, water, a play break, and a rest. By that time Robb had rejoined them: his sifting had produced nothing.

Looking at his watch-it was a well after 1:00 P.M.-Clapper suggested they could use a food and watering break themselves, but Hicks said it would be better if Tess wasn’t away from the scene for too long, and Robb said he wasn’t hungry, and if it was all right, he’d like to stay on and assist Hicks.

“That’s fine with me,” Gideon said. He was hungry, but he was more eager to get someplace where he could properly examine the bones; preferably somewhere indoors and out of the increasingly dank fog. “If anything else does turn up, I think you get the idea of how to unearth it, Kyle, so why don’t you go ahead and take care of it yourself?”

His graduate students would have been justifiably outraged to hear him say this, considering how often he reminded them of the importance of being in on the exhumation whenever possible. But in this case, with the bones dismembered and scattered, there was little to be learned from their precise placement. Besides, the natural shifting of beach sands made it even less likely that their positional relationships would have any similarity to the way they were originally buried. Besides that, in order to maintain even their present positions in the unstable sand and keep them from getting covered over again by dislodged fill, he would have had to erect a set of retaining walls, which, in the present circumstances, wasn’t worth the doing.

And besides, he was freezing.

“Really, would that be all right?” Robb was thrilled.

“Doesn’t seem as if there’s all that much to it,” Clapper rumbled. “Brush ’em off, pick ’em up, and put ’em in a bag. It’s the dog that does the work, innit?”

“If the hand or foot bones turn up, make sure you do a thorough search for the small ones,” Gideon said. “Some of the carpals and tarsals are pretty funny-looking, like irregular little stones, so pick up anything along those lines. Oh, and be sure and sift really thoroughly around any hand bones, Kyle; he might have neglected to pry off a ring, or even a watch, and it might still be around.”

“Can you handle that all right, lad?” Clapper asked.

“Oh, I think I can just about cope,” said Robb, but with so sunny a smile that Clapper couldn’t have taken offense if he’d wanted to.

“And if you have a problem,” Clapper said, “you know how to reach me.”

“I’ll do that, sir. And have no fear, Professor, I’ll document and photograph everything exactly as it lies in situ.”

“In situ,” Clapper repeated, shaking his head. “My, my.” And then with a sigh, “I’m sure you will, lad, I’m sure you will.”

“Pete Williams?” Clapper echoed distantly, chewing determinedly away at his double-portion haddock-and-chips lunch, periodically washing it down with a swallow of non-alcoholic ginger beer.

“He’s a writer who got into a hassle with Edgar Villarreal the last time the consortium met, two years ago.”

“And who’s Edgar Villarreal?” Clapper asked without much interest, using his knife to plaster the last of the “mushy peas” onto his fork.

Sergeant Clapper ate in what Gideon thought of as the classic English manner, holding his knife like a scalpel to cut things (so elegant), and then employing it to lather stuff on the back of his fork, which was then stuck in his mouth upside down (so inelegant). And since the English rarely put down either implement during a meal, when they chewed it was impossible not to think of Oliver Twist sitting over his paltry meal in the workhouse, holding knife and fork upright on the table. On the other hand, Gideon was ready to admit, Americans wasted a lot of motion changing hands twice every time they had to cut a piece of meat.

Gideon explained about Villarreal as he continued to work on his ploughman’s lunch of Cheddar cheese, half a baguette, relish-“pickle,” as they called it-pickled onion, and a bit of lettuce-and-tomato salad. He was a relatively fast eater, always finishing before Julie, but Clapper put him to shame.