Aaron Elkins - Make No Bones

Deputy Debbie Chavez, skinny and weather-bitten, walked with a cop’s confident lope and seemed very much at home in her uniform of brown shirt, snug tan trousers, and boots.

“All right, folks,” she said after talking briefly to Miranda, “here’s the drill.” She swung around so the sun was behind her, took off her sunglasses, and stuck them under the flap of a shirt pocket. Gideon heard them click against her plastic chest-protector. An unexpected dusting of little-girl’s freckles flowed over the bridge of her nose and along the untanned skin under her eyes.

“First off, if Mrs. Glass here says we’ve got a body down there, that’s good enough for me.”

“It was the consensus,” Miranda said modestly.

“Whatever. So what I’m going to do is get on the horn and call the sergeant. Till he gets here, I’m going to seal the area, and I’d appreciate it if you people wouldn’t do any more tromping around here.”

“We’re not tromping, young woman,” Leland Roach said. “For your information, we happen to be forensic anthropologists-which means we are quite experienced in just this kind of thing-and we’re thoroughly familiar with crime-scene protocol.”

“Uh-huh,” the deputy said, looking down at the muddle of scuff marks and footprints-Gideon could see his own-around the oval depression. “You betcha.”

She was right, Gideon knew. They hadn’t been thinking. As soon as the soil-compaction site had been recognized for what it was, they should have kept everyone away. It was sheer luck that no one had stepped right in the thing. Well, at least John would have an attentive audience when he gave his session.

Nellie Hobert cleared his throat. “True, we may have been a little careless, deputy. On the other hand, this site’s obviously been out in the open for years. I can’t imagine we’ve ruined any evidence. Ahum.”

Nellie was embarrassed. He was one of the country’s two or three leading authorities on crime-scene exhumations. His Exhumation Techniques had been a police-science standby for over a decade, and it came down mercilessly on careless tromping.

“Well, all the same, I just think I’ll go ahead and secure the area,” Debbie Chavez said pleasantly. “Sergeant likes it that way. Why don’t y’all just go about your business and come back in an hour if you want to?” She smiled, a quick up-and-down jog of the corners of her mouth. “We could maybe use a few experts about then.”

By 9:00 A.M. the excavating operation was humming along like a demonstration out of Nellie’s manual. Ordinarily, forensic anthropologists take care not to intrude on each other’s territory, but in this case Miranda had readily deferred to Nellie’s status and experience, and the NSFA president, with a shapeless tan fishing hat on his bald head and a stubby, unlit pipe between his teeth, was atoning for his earlier sins of carelessness with a vengeance, directing Deputy Chavez, another deputy, and several anthropology students with equal vigor.

A thirty-by-thirty-foot square had been cordoned off with yellow plastic tape and gridded. The “artifactual material” on the surface-a couple of rusty bolts, a corroded paper clip, the worn rubber heel of an old shoe, none of which anybody really thought would amount to anything-had been staked with engineering pins, mapped, and photographed from every conceivable angle, then gathered up by Dan Bell, the sheriff’s evidence officer. A crime-scene log had been established, and a line of entry had been delineated from the perimeter to the suspect depression. By means of this narrow path, those very few people permitted to enter made their way in-but not before having the patterns on the soles of their shoes recorded by Deputy Chavez.

Nellie himself had deftly exposed the edges of the pit with a whisk broom, and the digging itself was now under way, being carried out by two earnest graduate students under Nellie’s exacting supervision and the close attention of the forty or fifty people who now ringed the cordoned-off area.

John Lau had slept late, as he’d said he would, barely getting in on the dregs of the buffet. Then, seeing the crowd, he’d wandered over just as things had gotten started, looking mopey and preoccupied.

“That Leland’s like a shark,” he grumbled at Gideon. Gideon laughed. “How much did you wind up losing?” “Eighteen bucks.” He shook his head. “I still don’t think he had that flush. I should have stayed in.”

“Cheer up, John. Look at that sun. It’s supposed to be ninety today. Enjoy yourself.”

“How can I enjoy myself when I’ve got that session tomorrow?” He sighed. “I wish it was today, so I could get it over with.”

Sleepily, he looked around at the activity. “What’s this, a practice dig?” Then he saw the police uniforms and the POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape and his eyes opened all the way. “Hey, what’s going on, Doc?”

“It’s a burial. At least I think it is.” He’d begun to feel less sure of himself. The police activity, the excitement, had made him edgy. If there wasn’t a body there after all this fuss, he was going to look awfully silly. Leland was probably preparing one of his juicier little epigrams right now, just in case it was needed.

“How do they know?” John asked.

“Well, it just looked to me like a classic-”

John tilted his head toward him. “You’re the one who found it?”

“Yes, why?”

“No reason,” John said. “Just asking.”

“Look, John,” Gideon said a little tartly. “I didn’t go looking for the damn thing. I practically fell into it, over there-”

“While minding your own business…”

“Well…yes, damn it-” He laughed. “Sorry, I guess I’m starting to get nervous. Maybe I was wrong about it.” “We’ll find out pretty soon,” John said sagely.

A few minutes later Nellie took a break and walked over to chat. “How are we doing here, John?”

“You’re doing great,” John said. “I don’t know why you guys want a lecture from me.”

Nellie beamed. “Well, it always has more weight coming from someone outside the fold. Besides, you should have seen us an hour ago.”

“Nellie,” Gideon said, “does it still look to you like there’s a body in there?”

“Oh, sure, no doubt about it, none at all.”

Gideon was reassured.

At a little after ten o’clock Julie returned from her ride. “What in the world is this all about?” she asked. She looked wonderful, tousled and healthy, and she smelled of horses.

Briefly, Gideon explained.

“How did anybody even think to look for a burial here?” she wanted to know. “Who found it in the first place?” “Guess,” John said.

Julie laughed. “That’s what I thought. Well, I better go get cleaned up.”

But she stayed where she was, engrossed by the scene. “Uh, if they do find a body, it’ll just be dry bones, won’t it? Not some kind of awful, messy…you know.”

“Let us fervently hope so,” Gideon said sincerely. “It’s been there a while, so I think decomposition is long past. If not, you’ll smell it before you see it.”

But the only smells were clean ones: pine needles and pine bark, sweet and spicy, and the coarse, dry soil. It hadn’t rained for weeks, so with each scoop of the trowel a puff of red-brown dust rose and floated off. Gideon could feel it in his nostrils and at the back of his throat. Above, through the branches, the sky was enormous and beautiful, a clean, washed-out blue, marred only by the occasional silent, bright speck of a jet plane floating by. As predicted, the temperature had risen rapidly, and the humidity with it, but they were still in dappled shade. Even the diggers had hardly worked up a sweat. It was all very pleasant and unhurried, more like an archaeological dig than a forensic exhumation.