Aaron Elkins - Make No Bones

“I don’t know, Les. Does that make sense to you?”

“Hey, what can I tell you?” He looked uneasily at Gideon. “Personally, he was being weird about it from day one. This hush-hush crap-you know that’s not Nellie’s style. I couldn’t believe it; I was, like, what is the problem here?”

“Les, are you trying to tell me you think Nellie had-” it took an effort to get the words out “-had something to do with Jasper’s murder?”

Les’s low forehead folded into parallel creases. “Hell, no, when did I say that?” He looked as close to irritated as he ever did.

Gideon liked him the more for it. “You never did.” He leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Les, I’m still trying to understand how that misidentification could have happened in the first place.”

“You’re trying to understand? Hell, I was there; I was part of the team-and I’m here to tell you we did it right; by the book, man. I just don’t-”

“It was basically a dental identification, is that right?”

“It was a dental identification, period. You saw what was left. If not for the dentition we’d have been lucky to come up with ‘male’ and ‘adult.’ But we had half a mandible, with the teeth and the alveolar border in reasonable shape. So we got the reports from Jasper’s dentist, matched them to what we had here, and that was it.”

“Who matched them? Was it Harlow? Did he do the analysis?”

“Well, yeah, sure, he was our odontologist, but we worked as a team; everybody got in on it. That’s the way Nellie likes to do it-hey, where is Harlow? I haven’t seen him since he got back from Nevada.”

“Neither has anybody else, as far as I know.”

Their eyes locked for a second. “No, forget it, Gid. There was no way he could have flimflammed us. I’m not talking about any tricky odontological formulas. It was completely straightforward-a simple postmortem-antemortem comparison. Jasper’s charts had a lot of fillings anybody could recognize, and a, what do you call it, an extra tooth, a supernumerary tooth in there somewhere. It was just a matter of comparing.”

Gideon frowned. “A supernumerary tooth…”

There was, he was certain, no extra tooth in the clay-covered mandible now in its wooden cubbyhole in the evidence room; the mandible that had so startlingly transformed itself from Salish’s to Jasper’s less than an hour before. A first faint glimmer of illumination showed itself, an indication of just how they had come to make so freakish an error a decade ago. Except that, if he was right, there wasn’t any error. They had been flimflammed, all right. With a vengeance.

Les backed off. “Well, I wouldn’t swear to a supernumerary tooth. I’ve looked at a lot of skulls since then. But whatever there was, you didn’t have to be an odontologist to see there was a match.”

“And you personally compared the charts to the remains yourself? You saw that they matched? You didn’t just take Harlow’s word for it?”

“Of course I compared them. We all did.” He tilted his head, pulled on an earlobe. “Well, I think we did. Who remembers now? But, look, that mandible was right there in front of us the whole time. Anybody who felt like it could check it against the charts anytime he wanted. Harlow or anybody else would have been out of his mind to try to fudge anything.”

Not if it had been done the way Gideon thought it had. It was becoming clearer, but there were still some fuzzy edges, some pieces that didn’t fit. “Let me ask you this, Les. How positive are you those records were really Jasper’s?”

“What kind of question is that? About as positive as you can be. We found out who his dentist was, Harlow got in touch with him for the charts-you know the drill-and back they came, just like for anybody else. Well, except for the x-rays.”

Ah. Gideon’s eyes narrowed. “What about the x-rays?”

“There weren’t any. Jasper was scared of them.” He laughed. “Weird when you think about it. Here’s the number-one bone expert in the country-”

“How do you know he was scared of them?”

Les shrugged. He was beginning to tire of the conversation, or perhaps to wonder what they were talking about. “I don’t know. It wasn’t any secret.”

“I never heard about it.”

“So? What does it matter now?” Les yawned and shook himself, bearlike, the undulation seeming to roll slowly up his big torso under the skin. He took off the clay bracelet and dropped it on the table. “I guess head for-oh, hey I remember. Harlow told us. When he contacted the dentist. The guy told him Jasper was scared to death of x-rays. Okay? Satisfied?”

With a gratifying clunk, the last piece dropped tidily into place. Gideon leaned back in the chair.

“Satisfied,” he said.

“Hello, welcome to McDonald’s; may I take your order, please?”

John stuck his head out the car window to get closer to the microphone-speaker. “Hamburger, large fries, strawberry shake.” He turned back into the car. “Doc, you sure you don’t want something?”

“No, thanks.” Gideon’s stomach still wasn’t quite settled, and the heat wasn’t helping. But he was thirsty. “Well, maybe a shake. Chocolate.”

“And a chocolate shake,” John yelled into the mike.

“Yo,” the speaker said metallically, and then a moment later: “That’ll be $3.54 at the first window, please.”

John drove twenty feet to the first window and paid.

“Thank you, drive to window number two and await your order,” he was told, this time by a living person.

John drove to window number two and awaited. “And so that’s what the big secret is?” he said to Gideon. “They had a roast and Jasper took it the wrong way?”

“According to Les.”

“So what’s the big deal?”

Gideon explained some of what Les had told him.

John shook his head. “Hell, I don’t know what to make out of that. I asked Nellie about it twice and both times he told me he didn’t know what Leland was talking about.” He turned away to collect their order. “I just wish the guy would level with me,” he muttered.

As John got the car moving north on Highway 20 toward Whitebark Lodge, Gideon continued going through Albert Jasper’s old file, which John had copied at the Medical Examiner’s office.

After three or four miles, John glanced over at him. “What do you think?” He was getting restive. The hamburger had been consumed in a few bites; the french fries were being plucked one at a time from the bag beside him on the seat.

“Tell you in a minute,” Gideon said.

Side by side on his lap he had set two forms, slightly different in their layouts, but each diagramming the same thing: a set of all thirty-two human teeth, “folded out” to show the five surfaces of each. One of the forms bore the logo, “Victor MacFadden, D.D.S., 333 Montezuma Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87504.” Under it, alongside “Patient Name,” was “Jasper, Albert E.” The diagram had been crosshatched and shaded to show a variety of dental problems and treatments; to judge from them, Jasper had spent a lot of time in the dentist’s chair, as Les had implied.

And crammed in between the lower-right canine and first bicuspid was an extra tooth that had no business being in anybody’s mouth: Les’s supernumerary.

The other form, plainer and more cheaply printed, had Harlow Pollard’s finicky signature at the bottom, and a date of June 13, 1981. This was a standard odontological postmortem diagram, and it had apparently been filled out after the crash, directly from the remains. Naturally enough, only the part representing the eight teeth in the right half of the mandible had been marked up.

And those markings, as Les had told him more than once, perfectly matched those on Dr. MacFadden’s chart: five fillings, all on the identical surfaces of the identical teeth, one gold inlay, one missing molar with its space closed…and one highly unusual supernumerary, between canine and bicuspid.