Aaron Elkins - Make No Bones

“Sort of like connect-the-dots,” someone said.

“Sort of,” Gideon agreed.

What he didn’t tell them was that this was the easy part. The basic form of the face, which is what connecting the dots gave you, was relatively simple and reasonably accurate. The trouble was that nobody ever recognized anybody else from his basic facial form. What made you distinguishable from a hundred million other people was not your facial form but your ears and eyes, your lips and nose, the “cast of your eye and your own singular and indefinable mien,” as his seminar instructor had put it.

And, as of yet, no one had figured out a way to determine the curve of a lip or the droop of an eyelid from the bone beneath. To say nothing of an indefinable mien.

But that could wait until later, after they understood how the early part was done. First, he would measure and cut the rubber, glue the cut lengths to the skull, then cut the clay into strips and roll them into “worms,” which would be laid down from rubber marker to rubber marker, crisscrossing the face until those disturbing gray eyes goggled from behind a tightly fitted grid, like the eyes of the Man in the Iron Mask. And getting it that far was going to take most of the morning.

The eight students showed a lively interest, which naturally pleased Gideon, but their frequent questions slowed things up. It was almost 1:00 P.M. before the open spaces in the wafflelike facial grid had been filled in and smoothed out. The results, as always at that point, were bland and disappointing, featureless in the literal sense of the word. Without nose, lips, eyelids, eyebrows, and ears, the “face” didn’t look like much of anything.

Over take-out pizzas, Gideon explained that, to make it look like something, you had to stop being an anthropologist and start being an artist. Except for providing a few clues on the shape and size of the nose, the skull had nothing further to tell them; there was no way of gauging from the bone beneath how wide the mouth was, or how thick the lips were, or what the form of the eyelids was, or anything at all about the ears. There were lots of artists’ rules of thumb, however-the eyebrows were three to five millimeters above the orbital rim; the ears were tipped back fifteen percent and about as long as the nose; the mouth was as wide as the distance between the canine teeth, and so on. They would spend the rest of the day applying them.

In the tiny sheriff’s snack room, twenty yards from where the clay face was slowly developing into something humanlike under Gideon’s hands, John Lau was looking at his watch. Nellie Hobert was late for their appointment, not that that was much of a surprise. If Hobert was anything like Gideon Oliver, he went into a trance when you put a skeleton in front of him. You had to nudge him every now and then to make sure he kept breathing.

Idly he contemplated the display behind the glass front of the candy machine, trying to decide if he really wanted anything. Probably so; there were still almost three hours until dinner. Behind him, the door to the room opened.

“Don’t do it, John,” Nellie called. “Resist all temptation.” He came up to the machine beside him and silently scanned the rows. “You’d think they’d have Paydays,” he grumbled after a few seconds.

John pointed. “G-4.”

Nellie brightened, digging in the pocket of his shorts while John made his selection. A moment after John’s Three Musketeers bar clunked into the tray, a Payday followed.

“Peanuts are good for you,” Nellie explained. “Loaded with thiamine and riboflavin. Good-quality protein source.”

“Yeah, but it’s incomplete protein,” John said. What that meant he wouldn’t have wanted to explain, but he had heard his wife Marti say it, and it always paid to establish your expertise when you were dealing with scientific types.

Not that Nellie seemed so hard to deal with. In a lot of ways he reminded John of an older Gideon: a little stuffy, a little touchy, but with a sense of humor that was never very far below the surface. And under all the technical bullshit there was a likable, unaffected guy who didn’t take himself too seriously.

“In that case I’ll make sure and have some milk with dinner.” Nellie pulled a chair away from the single chipped table, sat down, and unwrapped the candy bar, blissfully twisting off a chunk with his teeth. He looked like a five-year-old with a beard. His T-shirt showed a raised fist, with lettering that said: “Stop Continental Drift!”

John laughed. “So how’s it going in there?”

“Just fine, but I’m sorry to say I don’t have anything definitive to tell you.” Hopefully he eyed the large envelope under John’s arm. “I don’t suppose that’d be Chuck’s file, would it now?”

John handed it to him. “Copy just for you, straight from the ME,”

“Aah!” Nellie laid the Payday on the table, brushed crumbs from his fingers, and began riffling through the ten-year-old file. He stopped at what John recognized as the report from Salish’s physician. The anthropologist scanned down the sheets with his finger, making a humming noise through his nose. “Mmmmmm…well, hell.”

“Problem?” John said.

“No, not a problem, but not much help either. I think you know the skeleton in there’s got an old broken arm and some arthritis in one foot. Well, there’s no mention of either one here.”

John frowned at him. “Are you saying maybe that isn’t Salish’s skeleton now?”

“Good heavens, no,” Nellie said, “not at all. That broken arm was probably fifty years old. Salish probably never even told his doctor about it-assuming he remembered it himself. As for the lack of mention of any arthritis, well, it wasn’t very severe, and it’s quite possible Salish never complained to his physician about that either. Just one more nagging little ache among the many we all have to start getting used to eventually.”

He shrugged. “All I’m saying is that it’s not going to be quite as simple as I thought, coming up with a definite identification. It would have been nice to have laid any remaining doubts completely to rest.”

He leafed through the rest of the material. “I don’t see much else of use here.” At a sheet of Salish’s photographs he paused, slowly shaking his head.

John had a moment’s uneasiness. “That is him in those pictures, isn’t it?”

Nellie glanced up. “Yes, certainly.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course. They’re good likenesses, actually.”

“Well, what about using them? Can’t you do-what was it, video imposition?”

“Video superimposition. You use a computer program to impose the face from a photograph onto an image of the skull and see if it seems to fit.”

“Well?”

“Well, there’s some as swears by it and some as don’t.” He twisted off another hunk of the Payday. “Me, I don’t. They’re a long way from proof positive, John. Look, have you had any luck turning up those missing dental records? Something tells me we’re going to need them.”

Let’s hope not, John thought. So far, the Albuquerque office hadn’t even found out who Salish’s dentist was. “We’re working on it. Nellie, you have any idea at all who took them out of the file?”

Nellie stopped chewing. “Oh, I can’t believe anybody took them. They probably got put back in the wrong file, that’s all. It happens every day. I expect a search through the adjacent files would turn them up soon enough.”

Not so far, it hadn’t. John had spent half an hour in the morning doing just that, and now a clerk was going through the entire file cabinet. Other misfiled items had indeed shown up, but not Chuck Salish’s dental records.

“They were there, though?” John asked. “You remember seeing them?”