Aaron Elkins - Unnatural Selection

“And you don’t think it happened that way?”

Gideon gently touched a scapula. “I don’t think he ever went home,” he said soberly. “I think he’s been right here at Halangy Point Beach all along.”

“But how do you explain the fax?” Robb called.

“What does it prove?” asked Gideon. “Anybody could have sent it. And what else is there to show that he was really alive after he left here?”

Clapper sucked furiously on his Gold Bond and expelled a haze of smoke from his mouth and nostrils. He was thinking hard, Gideon could see. “If you’re right… if you’re right, then someone went to some pretty elaborate lengths to mislead everyone.”

“It looks that way, yes.”

Clapper thought some more. “All right, then, go ahead. What makes you so sure about this?”

“All right. First of all, you have to know that Edgar Villarreal had once been an agricultural worker, a fruit picker.”

Clapper began to say something, but then clamped his mouth shut.

“His parents were Cuban immigrants who worked in the citrus groves in Florida, and Edgar worked right with them for a long time-from the time he was five until he was seventeen, if I remember right.”

Clapper nodded. “Continue.”

Gideon cleared a small area around the scapulas. “If you look here, on both these bones, immediately medial to the supraglenoid tubercles, which are these-”

“Let’s keep it simple,” Clapper muttered.

“Okay, right. This general area”-using the right scapula, he fingered the ovoid, concave surface of the glenoid fossa-“is the place where the head-the ball-of the humerus fits.”

“The shoulder socket, you might say.”

“Exactly, and this small, flattened area at the top of it-”

“That? You’d better not tell me that’s another squatting facet.”

Gideon laughed. “Well, but that’s what it is, in a way. It’s been worn, or polished, into the bone as a result of another bone moving against it during a certain kind of activity. Only in this case it’s not squatting, of course. This is what you’d get in a person who spent a whole lot of time with his arms raised and moving above shoulder-level, okay? And look, here on the head of the humerus, exactly where it would come into contact with that facet, you can see a slight flattening. You can feel it better than you can see it.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Fine. Well, that goes along with the arms-above-the-shoulder idea. With me so far?”

“Yes, of course I see what you’re getting at. But Gideon, agricultural workers are hardly the only people who hold their arms up. So do barbers, or orchestra conductors, or, or-”

“Sure, but I’m only getting started. Give me a chance. Now, these are a couple of the cervical vertebrae-C6 and C7. They’d be right at the base of the neck. The lipping on the bodies of these vertebrae strongly suggest that this person regularly extended his neck and head dorsally-” He tipped his own head sharply back to demonstrate. “And I don’t think a barber or an orchestra conductor would be doing that too much. But a fruit picker on a ladder would, when he leaned his head back to see the fruit.”

Clapper smoked silently and frowned. He was coming around.

“Now here’s the clincher,” Gideon said. “Most right and left scapulas look pretty much alike, but these are really different. The right one is pretty standard; your basic, everyday shoulder blade. But the left one is anything but. Look at how much bigger the acromial end of the scapular spine is, and-”

A hollow, rumbling growl from Clapper made him change course. “Let’s just say there are several indications of a lot more stress being placed on the left shoulder girdle than the right. Well, migrant citrus workers typically carry those long heavy ladders they work with over their left shoulders. Not only that, but that’s where they hang the bag of fruit as they pick, and a full bag of oranges weighs ninety pounds. That’s a lot of stress, Mike.” He waited for Clapper’s reaction.

Clapper had finished his cigarette. He stubbed it out in the Goat and Compass ashtray. “Can I ask a question?”

“Of course.”

“A full bag of oranges weighs ninety pounds.”

“Yes.”

“And is that also something you just happen to know? I mean I’m just curious, but doesn’t seem the sort of fact a person would just happen to-”

“I don’t just happen to know it,” Gideon said, laughing. “Back in the eighties, an anthropologist named Curtis Wienker did a paper on the skeletal anomalies that go along with this kind of agricultural work. My prof in graduate school made it the core of his seminar on applied anthropology, so I remembered it, and Kyle let me use his laptop to look it up again on PubMed, and that’s where I saw the ninety pounds. That’s where I got most of the rest of what I’m telling you, too.”

“I’m relieved to hear it,” Clapper said.

“There’s one more thing,” Gideon said. “This rough, bulgy area on the left scapula is an old enthesopathy, an inflammation, at the point where the tendon of the trapezius inserts. That too is usually a result of stress, heavy stress, and when you consider the function of the trapezius and the-”

“Tut-tut-tut-tut-tut, you’re losing me.”

“In a nutshell, Mike, if you went around reaching up with your left arm to pick fruit-thereby rotating your scapula-while your left shoulder was already bearing the weight of that heavy bag, this is exactly what you’d expect that shoulder to look like.”

Gideon put the bone down and leaned both hands on the table. “I rest my case.”

Clapper nodded slowly and sat down in the other chair, thinking it over, patting his breast pocket in search of the cigarette pack that he’d left in his office, but not bothering to get up to get it. “But what of the squatting facets? Where do they come in?”

“Well, I was wrong there too-”

“They’re not squatting facets?”

“No, they are squatting facets, but they probably didn’t come from squatting. Remember, what causes them isn’t necessarily squatting as we generally picture it. Specifically, you get them from repeated dorsiflexion of the foot.” Again, he illustrated as he had the day before, placing his hand palm-down on the table, then bending it sharply upward. “And-think about it for a moment-climbing up and down a ladder, especially with a heavy bag on your back, would involve a whole lot of highly stressful dorsiflexion.”

He, too, sat down. “It all fits, Mike.”

“Yes, it does. It’s also all circumstantial.”

“Well, naturally. I can’t positively ID this guy-not so far, anyway-but what would you say the odds are of finding a dismembered fruit picker buried on a beach on St. Mary’s?”

“Well, now, maybe not so poor as you think. There’s a lot of agriculture here. A lot of farms.”

“Yes, but what are the crops?”

“The crops? Ah, well, mm…”

“Flowers, bulbs, and potatoes,” Robb called as he hung up the phone. “And then they harvest kelp, too.”

“There you are,” Gideon said. “Unless they grow their potatoes on trees here, he’s not a local.”

“I take your point,” Clapper said with a smile as the phone rang again and Robb picked it up. “All right, this deserves some looking into. I believe I’ll start by seeing what there is to be learned about Mr. Villarreal’s supposed demise in the wilds of Montana.”

“Alaska,” Gideon said.

Robb held out the telephone. “Sarge, it’s for you.”

“Take it for me, lad.”

“No, he wants you. Sounds serious. Something’s up.”

“All right, all right, I’ll take it at my desk.” Clapper slapped his thick, corduroyed thighs and thoughtfully stood up. “Very interesting, Gideon. Back in a tick.”