Aaron Elkins - Make No Bones

And Gideon had stopped worrying about whether they’d find anything. What if they didn’t? He’d been wrong before, and he’d be wrong again. So had all of them, and everyone was accustomed to it. That, in fact, was one of the healthiest things about forensic anthropology; its practitioners were willing to be proven wrong. They had to be. It was an applied science, and your hypotheses and guesses were always being put to practical tests. And since nobody could be right all the time, people either learned to live with being wrong or they got out of the field.

Nothing like theoretical anthropology, where scholars could barricade themselves behind unverifiable pet theories for decades, ready to fight off dissenters with an old broom handle if need be. Who, after all, could prove one way or the other whether Neanderthal Man walked fully erect, or if Oreopithecus was a hominid ancestor or just another Miocene ape?

But in forensic work, either a particular bone you examined was female or it wasn’t, was Caucasian or it wasn’t. And if you said a distinctive conformation of the soil meant that a body was buried under it, either a body would be there or it wouldn’t.

It was. At eleven o’clock one of the students, using the trowel in the Hobert-sanctioned manner, horizontally scraping off about a few inches of soil at a time, caught the tip in a bit of tattered gray clothing. The rotted cloth tore, but not before dragging a bit of bone to the surface.

“Ha!” Nellie said, and Gideon was relieved in spite of himself.

Nellie dropped to his knees and leaned over to peer at the fragment through his bifocals, his stiff gray beard fixed on it like a pointer’s snout. There was a surge against the tape as anthropologists and student anthropologists jostled forward. Everyone seemed to be in a jolly mood. From the point of view of the attendees this was turning into quite a conference; one that would surely take its place in WAFA legend.

“This must be a new experience for you,” Julie said. “Bones coming up out of the ground, and you can’t do anything but watch from behind a barrier, just like the rest of us.”

“It’s awful,” Gideon agreed. They were about fifteen feet from the digging. “I can’t even make out what the hell it is. A bit of fibula? No, ulna.”

Nellie was sympathetic to his colleagues’ plight. Still on his knees, he straightened up, took the unlit pipe from his mouth, and made a terse announcement. “Proximal left ulna. And…” He leaned down again to blow away some soil. “…medial epicondyle of the humerus. Disarticulated but in anatomical apposition. Quite dessicated. Good condition.” He stretched out his hand without looking up. “Chopsticks.”

Julie turned to Gideon. “What?”

“A left elbow joint, without any soft tissue-”

“Come on, Gideon, I can understand that. But didn’t he say-”

“Chopsticks. He was talking to one of the students. When you get near the bones, you don’t want to dig with anything metal, even a trowel. Nellie favors slightly sharpened chopsticks. He sent someone out for a few a little while ago. Also some small paintbrushes to use for whisks.”

“Chopsticks,” Julie repeated. “Do you use them too?”

“Yes, I do. Sometimes a piece of bamboo. A dental pick, if nothing else works.”

“How odd,” she murmured. “All those times you’ve gone running off to dig up some murder victim in the woods the last thing I pictured was you poking around with chopsticks, like a man in pursuit of an egg roll.”

He grimaced. “Well, not quite.”

Nellie’s probing, assisted by follow-up whisking by the students, was producing quick results in the loosely packed soil. Every few minutes his head would come up again. “Coracoid process,” he announced. “Acromion…Left iliac crest…Male, on his right side, legs sharply flexed…Fine condition, just beautiful…”

He was, of course, going about it right, not just digging away at it, but first clearing the surrounding dirt a few vertical inches at a time. This the students would do with trowels, so that the skeleton, embedded in its matrix of soil, slowly emerged, mummylike, on its own pedestal of earth. As it did, Nellie would carefully go to work with his chopsticks, in effect dissecting out the skeleton.

By this time, many of the nonanthropologists had drifted away, Julie among them. “I smell like a horse,” she said. “I want to take a shower before lunch.”

Gideon nodded, absorbed in the digging. Nellie had made a preliminary determination as the bones came into view: Caucasian male of middle size, over forty, under seventy. No sign of cause of death. Finer distinctions would have to await removal and cleaning.

A little before noon, a rumpled, bearlike man with a pouchy, anxious face made his way toward Gideon and John.

“Dr. Hobert there tells me you’re FBI,” he said to John.

This, they knew, was Sheriff’s Lieutenant Farrell Honeyman, who had arrived several hours earlier to supervise the investigation. “Oh, boy, this is all I need,” had been his very first words, murmured despairingly at Deputy Chavez as he climbed out of his car.

They had not made a favorable initial impression on John, who had been standing nearby with Gideon. “That’s Homicide?” he’d said under his breath. “Good luck.”

Gideon shared his reservations. The crestfallen Honeyman, with his baggy suit and his face like a plate of runny scrambled eggs, had stood off to the side of the grave for most of the morning, uncommunicative and abstracted. In addition to repeated forlorn sighs, there were frequent glances at his watch and various other signs that he was a man of many worries. He had briefly questioned Gideon about the finding of the site, but even then his mind had seemed to be elsewhere.

But now, having found a colleague, he had perked up, at least to the extent of becoming more talkative. “God, I’m up to my earlobes,” he told John. “I have a multi-team interagency task-force meeting coming up this afternoon. This is the last thing I need.”

“What’s up, lieutenant?” John said, ready with sympathy for a fellow cop’s caseload problems. “Drug bust going down?”

“Drug bust?” Honeyman answered, his droopy eyes widening. “No, I’m talking budget restructuring, personnel reallocation, the whole schmeer.”

“Oh,” John said after a fractional pause.

“I’m the administrative lieutenant,” Honeyman explained. “Our detective sergeant’s on vacation. He’s really screwed me. I’m telling you, John, I’m really glad you’re here. If you’ve got any ideas, I wish you’d just pitch right in.”

“Oh, I’m sure you can handle it without any help from me,” John said gracefully.

“No, I mean it. I’ll take all the help I can get.”

“Hey, I’m here to get away from this stuff,” John said. “This is your show all the way.” But Gideon could see that he was grateful to be asked, something FBI agents learned not to expect from the locals.

“Not a bad guy,” John said when Honeyman moved off. “I just hope he knows what he’s doing.”

“Why don’t you take him up?” Gideon asked. “He could probably use some friendly advice.”

John shook his head. “Doc, the guy was just being nice. He doesn’t want my help, believe me. I know these people.”

After that, John spent a few more minutes restlessly shifting from one foot to the other while the exhumation inched along, punctuated by Nellie’s osteological bulletins. Finally, he gave up. “I’m gonna go sit by the swimming pool,” he grumbled. “I gotta work on my lecture notes.”

“John, you’ll do fine. They’ll love you. I’ll be there. I’ll shill for you from the audience.”

But John, not persuaded, went away talking to himself.