Aaron Elkins - Make No Bones

Slowly and stiffly, Gideon swung his legs over the side of the bed. He was not in any real distress, now that the headache and nausea had receded, but there was no mistaking the fact that he’d taken a pounding. “Better tell them forty minutes,” he said. “I’m not going to be setting any speed records.”

“If it’s all the same to you, Doc, we’ll just get on with it and leave everybody be. You can explain what you did later. How long you figure it’ll take?”

“Couple of hours, once I get there.”

“One o’clock,” John said. “Tell you what, let’s just have Nellie and the others-the ones who knew Salish-come see it then. I’d kind of like to see what they have to say.”

“Gideon, are you sure you’re up to this?” Julie asked, frowning. “Maybe it isn’t such a good idea.”

“I’m perfectly fine. I feel like I fell off a horse, that’s all.”

“Well, you’re not driving to Bend by yourself. And I can’t drive you because I got myself talked into leading a hike to Metolius Springs this afternoon.”

“I’ll drive him,” John said. “No problem.”

“And you’ll be with him the whole time?” She was starting to sound more like the old, familiar Julie.

“I won’t let him out of my sight, Julie.”

“Not that I don’t appreciate all this concern,” Gideon said, “but do you really think I’m going to be in all that much danger working at the sheriff’s office?”

“You never know,” John said, getting up. “If things get too exciting you might fall off your chair.”

Completing the reconstruction was basically cosmetic, an effort to make the final product more like life and less like a horror-movie prop. Ears were molded and stuck on, eyebrows were etched into the forehead, and the back and sides of the skull were covered with modeling clay. More clay was used to form a neck, and the whole was mounted on a clothing-store bust originally made for displaying ties and shirts. Gideon added a few wrinkles and sags to the jowls, befitting a man in his late fifties, and patted down the clay with a square of sandpaper to give it a grainy, skinlike texture. Then came a thin layer of pancake makeup and a little rouge, an artfully draped shirt, and an unfortunately youthful brown wig that looked as if Miranda had picked it up in a drugstore.

Gideon used his own comb to tuck a few stubborn plastic strands into place and stepped back. All things considered, he was reasonably pleased.

No one else was.

Everyone but Harlow had shown up, and once they’d examined it, they all expressed the same opinion. There were, they said, a few things about the reconstruction that reminded them of Salish, and a few things that didn’t, but nothing either way that was close to persuasive. In other words, the reconstruction was essentially useless, a judgment with which Gideon had to agree once he’d looked at Salish’s photograph for himself. Whatever the reason, he had missed the boat, and he freely admitted it.

“Oh, I’d hardly say that,” Nellie said, generous in his small victory. “Given the intrinsic fallibility of the process, I’d say you’ve done wonderfully well”

“I guess that’s a compliment,” Gideon said, “but-”

Miranda, who had been meticulously comparing Salish’s pictures to the reconstruction, spoke wonderingly. “Am I crazy,” she said, “or am I crazy?”

Leland pursed his lips. “A question worth pondering.”

Miranda was squinting at the reconstruction, framing different parts of the face with her hands. “Gideon, can I make a few changes in this?”

“Changes? Sure, why not?”

She studied the clay head silently for a few more seconds, her round face pensive. “Scissors,” she said, like a surgeon about to go into action. John found a pair of shears and handed them to her. Miranda removed the wig, snipped away some of the front, put it back on the naked scalp, took it off again, and cut away some more of the now-receding hairline. The others watched in attitudes of doubt or puzzlement.

Before replacing it she went to the other side of the table and turned the reconstruction so that its back was to everyone else. “I think this’ll work better if you see it all at once.” She found a thick black marking pen and made some judicious dabs on the face, out of sight of the others.

A mustache? Gideon looked again at one of Salish’s photographs. No mustache. No receding hairline either.

“What’s she supposed to be doing, Doc?” John asked.

Gideon shook his head. “Who knows?” And yet, dim and barely formed, there was the shadow of a disturbing and fantastic idea.

“Leland, lend me your glasses,” Miranda said.

“I beg your pardon?”

She held out her hand. “C’mon, Leland, give.”

Reluctantly, Leland gave. Without the massive horn-rims he was a startlingly different man, fragile and defenseless, like some squishy night creature caught unexpectedly in the glare of automobile headlights.

Miranda put the glasses on the uncomplaining clay face and studied it some more. “Gideon, you don’t mind if I smush the nose up a little?”

“What? Uh, no, smush away.” Gideon was staring uncertainly at what he could see of the reconstruction. Surely, even from this angle, there was something about the way the thick brown earpiece of the glasses lay against the broad temple, about the way the slightly depressed zygomatic arch rode low and flat on the cheek…but, no, he had to be imagining it. Miranda pushed delicately on the nose with her fingers, then stepped back to see the result better, her lips pressed together in concentration. She pushed again, picked up the shears one more time, cut away a few more tufts of hair, and disarranged what was left.

Then she turned it to face them. “You have to imagine that the hair is more gray.”

That was all she said, and all she had to say.

It seemed to Gideon that sound and movement stopped as suddenly and utterly as if they’d all been caught by the freeze-frame button on a VCR. For two or three seconds this taut, electrified stillness gripped them, and then Leland snapped it.

“Oh…dear…God,” he whispered, and followed this with a soft, nervous titter.

Gallic jerked convulsively, staring pop-eyed at the reconstruction. Her mouth was working but nothing came out.

Next to her, Nellie mumbled vaguely to himself. He looked stricken, almost as if he might faint. One hand clenched and unclenched.

Only the consistently unflappable Les remained in character. “What,” he murmured with an only slightly incredulous smile, “is wrong with this picture?” John, on the periphery, seemed not to know what was going on, as of course he didn’t. Even Miranda seemed stunned by her own handiwork.

And so it looked as if it were going to be up to Gideon to speak the words. A tiny shiver, like the touch of a spider, crawled up between his shoulder blades. He cleared his throat.

“It’s Albert Evan Jasper,” he said.

But saying it didn’t mean he was ready to believe it. And yet, what else was there to believe? So convincing, so utterly inarguable, was the likeness, that it would have been absurd for him to keep telling himself that this couldn’t be, that Albert Jasper had been killed in a bus crash, not stealthily buried in the floor of an unused storeroom; that his remains had been identified with absolute certainty by an expert and reputable team of forensic experts-by, in fact, the very people now staring with such seeming perplexity at that unmistakable, bulldoglike face.

Like tumblers clicking in a complex lock, questions, answers, and surmises turned over in Gideon’s mind, rearranged themselves, slid smoothly if bewilderingly into new niches. The uppermost uncertainties of the last few days-Was this or wasn’t this Special Agent Chuck Salish? Was he actually killed during the first WAFA meeting? Were any of the WAFA members really involved in his murder?-had suddenly become nonquestions.