Aaron Elkins - Make No Bones

After a quarter of a mile they had stopped and sat down at this pleasant, open spot where the branches filtered the sunlight and the stream lapped at the low bank. They had watched the sparkling water, and sat with their arms around their knees, and chewed wild grass stems, and talked aimlessly about nothing much. It had been too long a time since they’d had a morning like it.

“No,” Julie said, “I don’t mean generally speaking, I mean right now; specifically.”

“Specific bones on the brain?” Gideon said lazily, still beguiled by the water. He tossed in another pebble.

Julie got up, walked two steps to the edge of the bank, and crouched, using a twig to probe gently at the root area of a young willow that overhung the stream. She turned to look at him over her shoulder. “Gideon, I think these are cremains.”

“I wish people wouldn’t call…”

“Excuse me, cremated remains. Come look.”

Gideon got reluctantly to his feet and went to her side, leaning over with his hands on his knees. “Yup.”

“But aren’t the chunks kind of big? The ones Nellie showed us were almost like powder.”

“Well, it depends on the funeral home. Sometimes they pretty much pulverize what’s left, and other times they more or less break it up with a hammer, and you get pieces like these.” He picked up one of the two fragments; a bit of humerus. “But I grant you, these are bigger than usual.

There seem to be only these two pieces. I imagine someone was throwing the ashes into the stream, and these accidentally fell onto the bank. They don’t look as if they’ve been here very-”

“Gideon!”

Julie had continued scanning the nearby ground, and now she was staring at a small tangle of exposed roots that jutted out from the side of the bank, two or three inches above the water and a couple of feet from the bone fragments.

Gideon saw instantly what had seized her attention. He put down the burned piece and kneeled to look more closely at the bright, granular fleck of white caught among the roots. After a few seconds he sat back on his haunches and looked thoughtfully up at her.

“Jasper?” she said.

“Looks like it.”

There wasn’t much room for doubt. The fleck was a broken, half-inch-wide particle of white styrofoam; the same kind of plastic that Jasper’s remains had been wired to. And, as if the matter needed cinching, there was still a loop of white, plastic-coated wire piercing it, twisted together at one end. It was the loop that had snagged in the roots.

“They must have done it in the dark,” Gideon said, thinking aloud. “After the walk-through at the museum. They wanted to get rid of it in a hurry. They came out here, broke up the display, and tossed everything in the stream.”

“Or thought they did,” Julie said. “It would have been easy for them not to notice they’d dropped a few pieces.” “Yes. But…”

“What?”

“Doesn’t this strike you as an odd place to dump these? Right on the nature trail? I mean, if I’d wanted to get rid of them quickly, I would have maybe tossed them out of the car window on the way back from Bend, a piece at a time. No one ever would have found them.”

“Most people didn’t go to Bend in their own cars. They went in groups, or took the bus. You couldn’t have done it without other people seeing.”

“Well, then, I’d have crushed them after I got back-a couple of blows with a hammer or a rock would have done it-and flushed them down the toilet. Crush-and-flush.”

“You’d have flushed the Styrofoam?”

“All right, that I’d have broken up and tossed in the garbage. Without the bones or one of these wire loops, who would connect it to Jasper? Or maybe I’d have buried it, to be on the safe side. But somewhere out in the woods. I sure wouldn’t have left any of it right along the trail like this.”

“I agree, it’s strange.”

He nodded and straightened up. “Julie, I’d better get going. I have to be in Bend at seven. Will you let John know about this when we get back to the lodge?”

“Of course.” They began walking back. “What do you make of it, Gideon?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Still think it’s just a prank?”

He looked at her. “No,” he said, “I don’t think it’s a prank.”

Miranda was as good as her word. When Gideon arrived at the Justice Building in Bend at 7:00 A.M., the county commissioners’ meeting room, which had surely never before been used for such a purpose, was set up and ready with everything he needed.

At the head table the materials he would use were neatly laid out: a somewhat unsettling pair of dark-gray prosthetic eyes; a box of terra-cotta-colored Jolly King modeling clay; a seven-inch length of eraser rubber; a box of round toothpicks; a box of cotton; a tube of Duco cement; an X-Acto knife; a few small rulers; a couple of simple modeling tools (fingers would be the most important tools); some 80-grade sandpaper; and a folder put out by the University of New Mexico called “Tables of Facial Tissue Thickness of American Caucasoids.”

And a carton of donuts and a metal urn of hot coffee just perking its last on a long table against the wall. This was especially appreciated by the arriving students. With ninety-degree heat coming, the air conditioning had been turned up to keep the clay from slumping on the skull.

“Need anything else?” Miranda asked.

“No, this is great. You must have gotten here at five.” Miranda placed her hand on her heart. “We are here to serve.”

She had brought the skull and mandible from the room Nellie was working in and placed it on the table. Gideon quickly filled in the medical examiner’s evidence tag: Released to: Gideon Oliver. How: In person. Date: 6-19-91. Time: 7:00 A.M.

“Okay, have a ball,” Miranda said. “Yell if you need anything. I’ll be right down the hall.”

“You’re going to be working on the postcranial skeleton with Nellie?”

“Uh-huh. Me, Nellie, and Dr. Tilton from the medical examiner’s office. Since I’m the one the ME officially released it to, it makes sense for me to be there.”

“I suppose so.”

“And of course you always learn something from Nellie.”

“That’s true too.”

“And it was either that or coprolite analysis. Hands on.” “I hear,” he said, “what you’re saying.”

After Miranda had left and they had stoked up on coffee and donuts, Gideon got started, explaining as he went. First, the skull was firmly locked onto a plastic mount. Then he packed the fragile bones in the eye sockets and nasal aperture with cotton, and covered them with a protective layer of clay. The Duco was used to glue lengths of toothpick to the surfaces of the lower molars to prop the mouth slightly open. Without them, there would be an unnatural, clenched-teeth appearance. After that the mandible was attached to the skull with daubs of clay, an easy-enough process because mandibles fitted into place only one way. Inserting the eyes took more time; eyeballs do not fill their sockets, and getting them placed just right-not too protruding, not too sunken, not too high or too low-was something that took patience.

But by eight o’clock these preliminaries were out of the way. Gideon now had a skull that stared alarmingly back at him with great, goggling, lidless eyes. He explained the rest of the process.

“First of all, despite what you may have read in popular fiction, we don’t make a facial likeness by building up the musculature a layer at a time. The Russians may still do it that way, but we’ve had more success using average skin thickness as a guide.

“The folders in front of you show the average soft-tissue thicknesses of Caucasian males measured at thirty-two points on the face. What I’m going to do is cut the eraser rubber into thirty-two sections to match those thicknesses and glue them to the right places on this particular skull. That’s our guide for how thick the flesh is at those points, and we just use clay to fill in between them.” He smiled. “Nothing to it.”