Aaron Elkins - Make No Bones

Gideon hoped so too. He stood looking down at the table in an odd reverie. What an enormous difference there was between the livid, flagrant corpses a pathologist had to work with and this, the anthropologist’s quiet and unassuming skeleton. This man’s life had ended horrifically, yet the bones gave no signs of upset or fright. Or even of pain. Just two clean, inconsequential-looking little cracks in one tiny, inessential-looking bone. The skull grinned like any other skull, no different from that of a man who had died peacefully in his bed. There were no bulging eyeballs, no purple and protruding tongue, no cruelly bruised and swollen flesh.

A good thing too, or he’d have been out of this business a long time ago.

Nellie smacked his hands together. “Well, then, if that’s settled, let’s lock up and get out of here. If you’ve got time, let’s stop by Honeyman’s office and give him the good news.”

He took off the lab apron he’d been wearing and tossed it onto a coat hook. Today’s T-shirt was a bright and cheerful blue. “Our day begins when yours ends,” it said. “Dallas PD, Homicide Unit.”

“So,” a sweating, shirt-sleeved Honeyman said bleakly, turning the stub of a pencil end-over-end on the big old desk that took up a full third of his tiny office. “It’s definitely homicide. There’s no doubt about it anymore.”

“Was there ever?” Nellie asked. “Or did you seriously consider that he might have buried himself?”

Honeyman glared at him, then permitted himself a baggy smile. “I could always hope.”

“What about you?” Gideon asked. “Making any progress?” “Progress!” Honeyman said with a snort. “The budget meeting was a total disaster! They actually expect us-” “I meant on the burial,” Gideon said.

“Oh, the burial. Well, there are these.” From an ink-stained shirt pocket bulging with half a dozen pens he pried out a small yellow envelope, which he opened and upended on the desk. A quarter and two nickels rolled out. “These came out of the grave after you finished. Right under the body, about an inch below.”

“Must have rotted out of his pocket,” Nellie said.

“Yes, or somebody dropped them while they were burying him. Same difference.”

Gideon turned the coins over to read the dates: “1981, 1972, 1978.” He looked up. “So at least you know something you didn’t know before. He couldn’t have been buried before 1981.”

“No, or after, either. Not that I know what that does for us.

“Or after?” Nellie repeated. “Why the devil not? Just because a 1981 coin-”

“Well, it’s not the coin,” Honeyman said, “it’s the shed.” “The shed,” Nellie said.

“Yes, the shed.”

Gideon tried helping things along. “The shed that used to stand where we found the grave?”

“Sure, what else are we talking about? I talked with the management, and they said part of it blew down in a huge windstorm we had in October 1981, and they bulldozed away what was left of it a few days later. So there you are. That body was buried in 1981. Before October.”

“Where are we?” Nellie demanded. “So the shed blew down in October. Who’s to say the body wasn’t buried later?”

Surprisingly, Honeyman was ready for him. “It’s always possible, but what would be the point? It would have been right out in the open, only a few feet from some of the guest cottages. And you can see it from the road. You’d have to be crazy to try to bury a body there.”

“Well, yes…”

“But…” Honeyman said, and Gideon began to think he might actually be enjoying himself. Not many people got a chance to lecture Nelson Hobert. “But while the shed was still standing, it was perfect. Easy to get into, a nice dirt floor to dig in, plenty of junk in it to hide the grave-and with the open side facing away from the cottages and the road. What more could you ask? The chances of that grave ever being found were just about zero.”

Gideon nodded his agreement. If Honeyman ever decided to get out of administration and into detective work, he just might do all right.

“Not quite zero,” Nellie pointed out. “It did get found.”

“Oh, certainly,” Honeyman said with another of his sad-eyed smiles, “but only because our poor, dumb perp never bothered to calculate the probability of a convention full of forensic anthropologists showing up and crawling all over the place ten years later. Just goes to show the limitations of the criminal mind.”

“Nineteen eighty-one,” Gideon said slowly. “Wasn’t that the year of the first WAFA meeting?”

“WAFA?” Honeyman said.

“Western Association of Forensic Anthropologists. Their first meeting was at Whitebark Lodge. In 1981.” Honeyman laid down his pencil. For the first time a flicker of real interest showed in his eyes. “Is that so? All these same people?”

“Well, just a few of us,” Nellie said. “We’ve grown quite a bit since then, you know. Back in 1981 there were only…”

He stopped in mid-sentence, forgetting to close his mouth, his head tilted as if he were listening for something.

“What?” Honeyman said nervously. “What is it?”

“By gum,” Nellie said softly, incredulously. Jammed between the side of Honeyman’s desk and the wall, he leaned as far back as he could in the straight-backed chair, locked his hands behind his neck, and stared, seemingly at the marked-up boxes of a big “Executive Plan-Your-Month” calendar over Honeyman’s head. But his eyes were unfocused and Gideon could see that his mind was racing. He sat like that for a long time, then lowered his gaze and faced them, still not altogether back from wherever he’d been.

“By gum,” he said again. “I believe I know who that skeleton is.”

“Well…who?” Honeyman asked.

“Chuck Salish,” Nellie said, and looked dreamily at Gideon. “Has to be. Think about it.”

Gideon frowned back at him. “Nellie, I don’t know who Chuck Salish is. Was.”

It took a moment for this to register. “You don’t No, of course you don’t. You weren’t there. Forgive me, I forgot. Chuck and Albert were going to go into business together when Albert retired, you know. Albert-”

“Albert, Albert, who’s Albert?” Honeyman was growing increasingly edgy.

The interruption seemed to wake Nellie up. His eyes drifted back into focus. “Albert Evan Jasper, of course. They were going to open a forensic consulting outfit. It would have been one of the first.”

“Chuck Salish,” Gideon repeated. The name was completely unfamiliar. “An anthropologist? I’ve never heard of him.”

“Anthropologist? No, what gave you that idea? He was an FBI agent, out of the Albuquerque office. He was-”

“FBI agent?” Honeyman stood up, opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. Still, it was a few seconds before anything came out. “You’re telling me I’ve got a-a dead FBI agent, a murdered FBI agent, lying on a table in the museum?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Nellie said calmly. “He was retiring, too, at about the same time Albert was. They’d worked together on a case or two, you see, and they’d gotten along, and they’d decided to go into business together, so-”

“Dear God, why me?” With a pitiful groan Honeyman flung himself back into his chair. “Well, what was he doing around here?” he demanded accusingly.

Nellie looked mildly back at him. “Do you suppose we could get out of this room? I could stand a little fresh air. And, my word, I’d give my soul for a hot cup of coffee. Farrell, you look as if you could use something yourself, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“What I could use is unhearing what you just told me,” Honeyman muttered.