Aaron Elkins - Make No Bones

It wasn’t Salish, it was Jasper. And, oh yes, he was killed during that meeting; he’d damn sure never left it alive by bus or any other means. And if the WAFA attendees had been logical suspects from John’s point of view before, they were in it up to their eyebrows now. Who else was there to suspect?

A brief exchange of glances with John showed him that the big Hawaiian’s thoughts were running in much the same groove. Despite all the professions of astonishment, one of the stupefied expressions in that goggling half circle of anthropologists was a sham. One of them-at least one of them-hadn’t been in the least surprised to find out that Jasper’s end had come via garrote, not highway disaster. It was Callie whom Gideon naturally found himself studying hardest, but she seemed as genuinely confounded as anyone else. Which didn’t mean much when he thought about it.

But, he realized, it wasn’t necessarily someone in the room. Where was Harlow Pollard? John had contacted or left messages with everyone about being there. Why had Harlow failed to show up? Harlow…

“Preposterous,” Nellie croaked abruptly, breaking a second lengthy silence. His face, waxy only a moment before, was flooding with a dull red-visibly, from the neck up, like a pitcher being filled. “It can’t be Albert and everyone here damn well knows it!” He stared challengingly at them.

They didn’t look as if they knew it, Gideon thought, and no wonder. Preposterous as it might seem, no one could seriously doubt whose skull was propped on the table in front of them.

Except Nellie. “Gideon-if this is some-some joke…?” he began, half angrily, half hopefully.

“There’s no joke, Nellie.”

But in a way there was. It was on him, and Jasper himself was playing it, so to speak. Here Gideon had made the damn thing, and he’d known Jasper. He’d spent going-on twelve hours bent over that skull, memorizing every groove and irregularity; he’d somehow gotten just about everything right in the modeling process-which was amazing in itself-and still, in the end, it was a colossal blunder. He hadn’t come close to recognizing who it was and probably never would have, if not for Miranda’s sharp eye. Yet now, with just a few swift, superficial changes, there, beyond any possibility of doubt, was Jasper gazing at them through those bland, prosthetic eyes-or did they look just a little more amused than they had before? Surely this was a situation the old man would have relished.

“But how could we have screwed it up so royally?” Callie murmured from a faraway daze-Real? Concocted? Who knew any more?-”We were so positive it was Jasper. We had the teeth, remember?” she asked abstractedly, and then her eyes cleared, her voice firmed. “We had the damn dental report! There was never any question about it.”

“Of course there wasn’t,” Nellie said, heartened. “We were right.”

“I don’t think so, Nellie,” Gideon said quietly. “I don’t know how you all could have made a mistake like this, but there can’t be any doubt about this being Jasper’s skull. Coincidences like this don’t happen.”

Les laughed. “This is fantastic. The guy that was in that drawer for all those years, the guy we all looked at so solemnly in that museum case, the guy somebody stole out of that museum case, wasn’t Jasper all along. Can you believe it?”

“This is not funny,” Leland snapped. “It’s horrible. We have to try to-to make some sense out of this.”

“Nosir,” Les said. “Yessir.”

Leland turned on him in a shrill little spasm of outrage.

“You-you nitwit! Don’t you see what this means? Albert was murdered! We-we-“

“Goddamn it, Albert was not murdered!” Nellie interrupted hotly. “I don’t care who this…this fucking thing looks like, it isn’t Albert!” He banged the table so hard with his fist that the reconstruction tottered and would have fallen if John hadn’t caught it.

Gideon looked at him with surprise. Histrionics were Callie’s department, not Nellie’s. Nellie could be a little touchy on occasion, but in all the time Gideon had known him, this was the first time he’d ever heard him use profanity, the first time he’d heard him shout in anger at anyone. It was true that Nellie had been closer than any of the others to Jasper, so that today’s unsettling events would have had to be deeply disturbing to him, but all the same Leland swallowed, his naked eyes blinking. “Excuse me, Dr. Hobert,” he said stiffly, “but I beg to differ. And there’s something else too…” He quailed momentarily under Nellie’s ferocious scowl, but then drew himself up, darted his tongue at each corner of his mustache, and continued. “Don’t you think it’s high time this-this absurd secret we’ve all been keeping so religiously-”

“No, God damn you, I don’t!” The arteries at Nellie’s temples were bulging, something else Gideon hadn’t seen before. As if aware of them, Nellie massaged them, one hand on each side, and blew out a long breath.

“Leland, I’m truly sorry. I don’t have any call yelling at you or anyone else. Look, everyone, it’s easy enough to settle this. I’ll go over to the ME’s office and get Albert’s file right now. Everything’s in there, and I’m sure it’ll refresh our memories. We did a good job, you’ll see; a careful, professional job. Our identification of Albert is incontrovertible.”

“This is pretty incontrovertible too,” Les said, pointing at the reconstruction. “Now that I look at it, it even has that nasty smirk we all remember so well.”

Nellie summoned up a frail smile. “You’ll see,” he said again. “Just wait here, I’ll be right back. It’s just over on Greenwood Avenue.”

“I don’t think we can,” Miranda said. “Harlow’s odontology round table comes on at three back at the lodge, and most of us are on it.”

“Odontology round table?” Callie echoed with a laugh. “At a time like this, we’re supposed to worry about an odontology round table?”

“I think so, yes,” Miranda said simply. “A lot of the people here have paid their own way. I think we owe them the best we can give them.”

“Miranda’s right,” Nellie said. “You all go on back to the lodge. I’ll see you there later. I’ve got my own car.”

“I think I’ll go along to the ME with you,” John said, his first words in a while. “I’d like to see that file too.”

There was a fractional pause. “Well, I’m bringing it back.”

“I know,” John said pleasantly, “but I need to talk to Dr. Tilton anyway. Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

Nellie began to say something, then changed his mind. “Thank you, John.”

As Nellie bustled to the door, John spoke to Gideon. “Meet you back here.” He leaned closer. “Probably be a good idea if you didn’t leave anybody alone with that skull.”

Gideon nodded. “You better believe it.”

“What secret?” Miranda asked when she was sure the door had clicked closed behind Nellie and John.

“Yes-” Gideon chimed in, and caught himself. In the second that Miranda’s face had been turned toward the door he had caught a furtive, flickering play of glances between the others. Of caution? Guilt? Concealment? What was going on here? What did they all know that he and Miranda-and John-didn’t? Why had Nellie jumped all over Leland about it? What was the connection to Jasper?

Gideon was suddenly struck with the odd, unwelcome feeling that he didn’t know any of these people very well; hardly at all, in fact. He’d been associating with them off and on for years, but how much of what he thought about them was real and how much had he constructed to fit his notions of what they ought to be like? Affable, laid-back Les with his DR BONES Porsche; droll, dry, harmless Leland -