Aaron Elkins - Make No Bones

The exhumation proceeded. Even with frequent pauses for photographs and careful piling of the dislodged earth for later sifting by the evidence unit, much of the skeleton was exposed by twelve-thirty, its arms and legs folded up like a sleeping child’s. The small bones of the hand had been slightly scattered. Shirt, trousers, and underwear were almost completely rotted away, no more than some stiff, gray-brown scraps, but the one foot that was visible was still encased in a sturdy, well-preserved lace-up shoe.

As things wound down, Gideon found himself standing next to the solitary, woebegone Honeyman again. “Do you have any open cases that might fit this?” he asked, as much out of sympathy as anything else.

“What? Well, we haven’t even established how long that body’s been there yet.”

“Oh, I think five to ten years would be a pretty reasonable guess. The body’s completely skeletonized, so that tells us it’s a few years old anyway. And it’s not too old, or there wouldn’t have been any signs of the burial left to see in the first place.”

“Oh. Well, I suppose that makes sense. No, we don’t.” “I beg your pardon?”

“We don’t have any open cases from five to ten years ago that could fit this. Some of that was before my time, but I’ve had the files checked, and there’s nothing. No missing white males, not that age, not from around here. Hell, I don’t know what they expect me to do with this.” He nodded and moved despondently off.

Les Zenkovich, who had come up and listened in on the last few sentences, watched him go. Like most of the others, he had left for a few minutes to get something to eat from the lunch buffet, and he was now using a toothpick with an air of well-fed serenity. He looked expressively toward the burial, and then at Gideon.

“Well, somebody’s sure as shit missing from somewhere,” he said, sucking a bit of food from between his teeth. “You can bet on that.”

For someone who knew as much as he did about the joints and what could go wrong with them, Nellie Hobert cracked his knuckles often and with relish, extending thick-wristed, fuzzy forearms with his fingers interlocked, bending them backwards, and snapping the lot with a long, rolling crackle. It generally meant he was feeling good.

As usual, Gideon flinched. “Damn, I wish you wouldn’t do that, Nellie.”

“Ah, nothing like feeling those synovial bursae pop,” Nellie said happily. “No harm to it, you should know that. Now then. You are probably wondering why I asked you here, yes?”

“Well, yes.”

It was late in the afternoon, and the two men were in the basement of the Central Oregon Museum of Natural History, in a workroom crowded with partially constructed museum “boulders” made of chicken wire, papier-mache, and wallpaper glue. In one corner a library table had been draped with heavy polyethylene plastic, and on it was the skeleton, laid out on its back.

Not literally on its back, of course, inasmuch as it didn’t have a back to lie on, but in a supine position, skull tipped gently to the side, as in sleep, its disarticulated bones arranged in anatomical order. Except for a few of the smallest bones-the hyoid, a few phalanges, and some carpals and tarsals-they were all there and all in good condition, with no damage worse than some abrading and a few gnaw marks here and there. Cleaned now, they were tinged a reddish-brown, like the soil they’d come from, and they smelled faintly of earth and decay.

It wasn’t a putrid odor-active decomposition was long past-or even unpleasant, really, but simply the way bones smelled after they’d been in the ground a long time, after even the tallowy odor of the fat had disappeared: musty, foresty, a little mildewy. A peaceful, undisturbed smell, the way old, dead bones ought to smell.

The skeleton had been removed from its grave and put in marked paper sacks at about 1:00 P.M. that afternoon. From there, according to Nellie, it had gone to the mortuary at the Saint Charles Medical Center for a pro forma autopsy by the medical examiner’s pathologist.

“The ME just looked at it and laughed,” Nellie said. “He told me: ‘With forty goddamn forensic anthropologists hanging around looking over my shoulder, you think I’m crazy enough to stick my neck out on some bags of bones?’ It was the shortest autopsy on record, let rue tell you.”

“So he turned them over to you for analysis?”

“Yes, this morning. To Miranda, officially, but she asked me if I wouldn’t take charge.” He smiled. The unlit, metal-stemmed pipe between his teeth bobbed up and down. Nellie’s sudden, wide smile was one of his most disarming features; his lips seemed to disappear, his face to split into two equal parts, like a Muppet’s.

“And you know me,” he said, “taking charge is what I love to do. Anyhow, we bagged it up again, brought it over here, and Miranda and I worked the thing over. She’s good, Miranda. Just doesn’t get enough cases to give her any confidence. She needs to get her hands dirty a little more.”

“Uh-huh. So what am I doing here, Nellie?”

Nellie had telephoned him at the lodge half an hour earlier, at three-thirty, and asked if he could drop by the workroom. Gideon had left the conference session on forensic data nets and driven to Bend. He still didn’t know what for.

“Well, I asked you to come over because I need your help, Gideon. I’m pretty sure I found something, and I want you to tell me if I’m right.”

Gideon was honestly surprised. “You want me to tell you?”

“That’s right. Between us girls, you’re the only one of ’em that’s worth a damn, whippersnapper though you are.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say-”

“Yes, you would. Who’s better? Harlow knows everything there is to know about teeth but damn-all about bones. Callie’s off in never-never land-and anyway, they’re both back in Nevada right now. And as for-”

“All right, but what-”

“-Leland, he doesn’t have time anymore for anything but his precious turds; Les wouldn’t know a-a-well, who else am I going to ask?”

“Ask what? Nellie, you’re the president of the association. You’re the dean of American forensic anthropologists. If you’re sure you found something, then that’s good enough for me. It’s there.”

“Think so?” He leaned his rump against the table, crossed his arms, took the pipe from his mouth, used the stem to scratch the side of his short, gray beard, and peered at Gideon from under disorderly eyebrows. “Well, now.”

Here comes a shaggy-dog story, Gideon thought.

“That reminds me of some testimony I gave in a case in Gallup,” he said, “and the defense attorney was trying to make me look bad, the way they do. Punching holes in my credibility, you know?”

“All too well.” Gideon had put in some uncomfortable hours on the expert-witness stand himself.

“Well, sir, this attorney, he says to me, ‘Now, then, Dr. Hobert,’ he says…”

Shaggy-dog story, all right, Gideon said to himself. He settled down to wait it out.

“‘Dr. Hobert, who would you say is the most expert forensic anthropologist in the state of New Mexico?’

“Well, I didn’t quite know where he was going with that, so I just told him, nice and humble, that it was me. ‘I am,’ I said.

“’I see,’ he says. ‘All right, then, Dr. Hobert, who would you say is the most highly regarded forensic anthropologist in the United States?’

“’I am,’ I said, but I was starting to get nervous. I didn’t like this guy.

“’I see,’ he says. ‘Now then, could you tell the court, who in your opinion is the most expert forensic anthropologist in the world?’

“I look him in the eye, take a deep breath, and say: ‘I am.’