Aaron Elkins: Make No Bones

More interested now, he pulled the trailing brush out of the way, tucking the branches into the irregular rocks of the foundation. And there, just inside what had once been the wall of the shack, was a…was a what? He got up and stood for almost a full minute, hands on his hips, staring intensely at the ground.

At his feet was a flat, shallow trench, roughly oval, about four feet long, three feet across at its widest, and two or three inches deep, scantily grown over with strawlike grasses. The sides had mostly collapsed, but here and there they could still be seen; vertical, now disintegrating walls with convex rims, like the top of an old-fashioned bathtub. Less apparent, but still noticeable-if one knew to look for it-was a smaller depression within the outlines of the first, a slight sinking of the soil, as if someone had scooped out a few more handfuls of dirt from the middle of the larger cavity.

A historical archaeologist must have guessed he was looking at the filled-in entrance to a root cellar. A casual visitor might have guessed, if at all, at hidden treasure.

A forensic anthropologist didn’t have to guess. Gideon hunkered down again, elbows on his knees to examine it more closely. In the profession, this was what was routinely referred to as a soil-compaction site, a nice bland term that might have had to do with something comfortable and homely, like composting techniques or solid-waste landfills. But it didn’t. A soil-compaction site was what you eventually got when you buried a body and tried to leave the ground looking the way it had before, with no mound to give it away. And that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, meant homicide.

The larger depression was the result of the dug-up, redeposited soil slowly settling; it happened when you dug a grave, it happened when you planted a rosebush. The convex rim resulted from excess soil on the edges of the hole. The smaller sunken area in the center, and this is what gave it inescapably away, was a “secondary depression”-another one of those nice neutral terms-which typically formed a few weeks after burial, when the abdominal cavity bloated, burst, and finally decomposed, allowing the soil above to sink down into it.

The body, he guessed, was about two feet below the surface. Any shallower than that, and the decomposing tissues would have provided a burst of organic fertilizer to the root zone, making the plant growth above it noticeably denser, which it wasn’t. And it wasn’t much deeper than two feet, because they never were. People disposing surreptitiously of unwanted corpses didn’t like to spend any more time digging than they had to. You didn’t find neat, rectangular six-foot-deep graves in places like this. Generally they were a foot or two deep-enough to cover them over with a few inches of soil-and no roomier than they absolutely had to be.

Gideon guessed that the body inside would be folded into the smallest possible bundle, which was on its side, arms and legs pulled up. Years ago, archaeology texts had offered various ingenious theories as to the religious reasons prehistoric people so often buried their dead in the fetal position. Now, forensic anthropology had provided a simpler, more likely explanation: It was the fastest, easiest way to get somebody into the ground and covered up.

He looked up, at the sound of Nelson Hobert’s rattling laugh. Nellie had dropped off Julie and the students somewhere and was on his way to the meeting room for the first session of the day, telling Harlow Pollard about the cremains and waving the last of a glazed donut for emphasis.

“There are two sets of cremains out there,” he announced, “probably more. It’s a pretty site, that’s why. The stream, the meadows. One’s a classic sling-and-fling job-are you familiar with Willey’s typology?-the other’s a pump-and-dump…”

He saw Gideon squatting by the side of the trench. “Gideon, Julie’s gone riding. She’ll see you at-ha, what do we have here?”

Gideon stood up and moved out of the way. “Have a look.”

Nellie clambered over the foundation. “Oh, dear,” he said with sharp interest. He poked the rest of the donut into his mouth and leaned over from the waist, hands on bare, hairy knees. “Well, well.” After a moment he slapped his thighs and straightened up, eyes bright. “By cracky, look what we have here.”

“What is it?” Harlow asked, hanging back. “Soil-compaction site.”

“Soil-compaction site?” Harlow was one of the more narrowly trained people at the meeting. Although a de-greed physical anthropologist, he had made odontology his specialty long ago, as a graduate student. Now he was one of the best when it came to teeth, but he had little familiarity with burial sites or crime scenes. His specimens came to him, he didn’t go to them.

“There’s a body under there,” Nellie said happily. “A body?”

“A homicide,” Gideon said. “You can bet on it.” Harlow looked from one of them to the other. “A homicide?”

“Yes, a homicide,” Nellie said through square brown teeth. “For Christ’s sakes, Harlow!”

“A homicide,” Harlow repeated dimly. “You mean a human body?”

Nellie let his breath out. Like many good teachers, he was endlessly patient with his students, but testy with others whose minds didn’t move quickly enough to meet his standards. “The last I heard,” he said dryly, “human bodies were the only kind you could commit homicide on.”

“But that’s-no, I don’t-why would-”

Gideon gently intervened, explaining about soil-compaction sites. Not that he expected it to do much good. Explaining something to Harlow could be like talking to a tree. He listened quietly but it was hard to say how much got through.

“All right then,” he said, “it very well might be a burial…”

But, thought Gideon.

“-but why in the world would you want to say it’s human? Anyone could have buried a dog here, or a goat…”

“A goat!” Nellie exclaimed, his cheeks reddening. “What kind of a damn fool-”

“True, Harlow, it could be anything,” Miranda Glass said kindly. With eight or nine others she had drifted over. “It’ll have to be dug up to know for sure. But I will bet you dollars to dumplings that by tonight there’s going to be a set of Homo sapiens choppers for you to do your stuff on.”

Harlow shook his head emphatically. “Not me. I have to catch a three o’clock plane; Callie and I both. We have to go back to Carson City. The biological sciences curriculum committee meets tomorrow morning.”

“You’re leaving early?” Miranda said with a groan. “What about your odontology round table Thursday? Christ, Harlow, if I have to revise the whole schedule I’ll kill myself.”

“No, no, we’ll be back early Thursday morning. I’ll do the session, all right.” Harlow seemed tense and distracted, the way he got when his stomach acted up. “Didn’t I say I would?”

Nellie cleared his throat, impatient with the diversion.

“Now then,” he said, very much in authority despite his T-shirt and lumpy knees, “the police have to be notified. Miranda-”

“The police-!” Harlow exclaimed.

“Miranda,” Nellie continued, “I assume they know you around here, so you’re probably the best one to call them.”

“Right,” Miranda said, starting for the main building. After a few steps she stopped and turned back with one of her rosy smiles. “This is going to be a switch. They usually call us about mysterious bodies in shallow graves.”

Twenty minutes later, a white, brown-striped Chevrolet with a Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office emblem on the door pulled into the main parking area. By this time, there were fifty people milling about the burial site, the attendees having decided with the briefest consideration that being in on the start of an actual exhumation beat all hell out of the scheduled morning session on bilateral nonmetric cranial variation.