Aaron Elkins - Make No Bones

“I can tell you what Nellie said,” John volunteered. “What’d Nellie say?” Gideon murmured, studying the charts.

“He said you’re nuts,” John informed him cheerfully. “He took one look at MacFadden’s chart, that one you’ve got right there, let out a yelp, and said it proves once and for all that Jasper died on that bus.”

“Mm?” Gideon said without looking up. “And how does he account for the reconstruction looking so much like Jasper?”

“I can give you his exact words.” John took out the notepad he carried in his shirt pocket and glanced at it from the corner of his eye as he drove. “‘Occultism…humbuggery…subliminal suggestion…hocus-’”

Gideon laughed and took his milkshake from the opened lid of the glove compartment. “Well, he’s wrong, John. Sharp as he is, Nellie’s got a blind spot when it comes to reconstructions. The fact is, Jasper never got on that bus. He was buried at Whitebark, and what’s left of him is now sitting on a shelf in the sheriff’s evidence room.”

“What about these charts?” John asked. “They match, don’t they? And this one’s from Jasper’s dentist, right? How do you account for that?”

“Faked,” Gideon said. “Or rather, one of them is. The postmortem one that Harlow filled out after the crash is accurate, all right. It shows exactly what was in the burned mandible that came from the bus. But this one-” he held up the form with Dr. MacFadden’s logo on it “-is a fake. It isn’t really Jasper’s chart, John.”

“Now wait a minute, Doc. You know I don’t argue with you when it comes to bones and things-”

“Oh, ho, ho,” Gideon said.

“-but you need to know I already checked this out. While I was with Nellie. I put in a call to MacFadden’s office in Santa Fe. This guy is definitely a bona fide dentist, he’s still in practice, and Jasper was his patient. He remembers the accident, he remembers getting a call from Pollard-and he remembers sending out the chart. So-”

“I’m sure he did send one out. But this isn’t it.”

“This isn’t…?” John flicked a finger at Jasper’s name, at MacFadden’s logo. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The logo’s real,” Gideon said, “but the chart isn’t Jasper’s.”

John was beginning to show signs of exasperation. “Is that MacFadden’s form or isn’t it?”

“It’s a photocopy, not an original. To be more exact, it’s a photocopy of the photocopy that MacFadden sent. What Harlow did was the simplest thing in the world: a cut-and-paste job. Look, those ME files are full of forms from dentists, right? There were thirty-some-odd people on that bus and most of them were unrecognizable. But there were ways of coming up with almost all the names: bus reservations, unburnt pieces of ID, calls from people who were expecting to pick up other people, and so on.”

“Right, so?”

“Well, what the forensic team was trying to do was match these piles of bones and teeth to the names, so Harlow would have contacted every one of their dentists he could reach, right?”

John made an impatient, rumbling noise. “Yeah, so?” “So one of the forms that came back was for the guy who they eventually identified as Jasper-call him Mr. X. What Harlow did was take off Mr. X’s name and the name of Mr. X’s dentist, stick on MacFadden’s logo, type in Jasper’s name on the Patient’ line, and run it through a copy machine. Presto-chango, Mr. X’s chart is now Albert E. Jasper’s chart-and naturally it matches Mr. X’s dentition, since that’s what it’s a picture of.”

John chewed this skeptically over. “Assuming that it really happened that way.”

“I’m pretty sure it did, John. And so Mr. X is duly identified as Jasper, and the question of what happened to the real Jasper never comes up. It doesn’t compute. And somebody gets away with murder; Harlow, it looks like.”

John remained doubtful. “I don’t know, doc. If this Mr. X wasn’t Jasper, who was he, where’d he come from? Where’d Harlow find him?” He leveled a french fry at Gideon. “Everybody on the bus got identified, remember? Everybody’s accounted for.”

“Not exactly. Take a guess.”

“What do you mean, guess? How the hell am I supposed to know that?”

“Come on, take a stab,” Gideon said, beginning to enjoy himself just a little.

John folded the stick of potato into his mouth and shook his head. “How the hell am I-oh, shit. Salish?”

“That’d be my guess. He had a bus reservation, right? And he had to be back at work in Albuquerque that afternoon, so there’s every reason to think he was on it.”

“Only they never ID’d him,” John said thoughtfully. “Not for sure.”

“That’s right. But they did identify Jasper-from eight teeth and a handful of burned debris. Let me tell you, John, with the shape those bones were in, Harlow wouldn’t have had any trouble convincing the others they were the remains of Genghis Khan-not if he had a perfectly matched dental chart to prove it.”

John chewed mechanically, looking straight ahead through the windshield. “So it was Salish in that drawer all these years? Salish in the museum case?”

“I think so.”

John laughed unexpectedly, a brief splutter. “I know it’s not funny, but…Christ.”

They let a few miles go by without talking. In the east, but still far away, bands of clouds were beginning to form in the Cascades; the first clouds in several days. Maybe, Gideon thought hopefully, relief from the hot spell was on the way.

“Doc,” John said, “you’re not saying Harlow engineered that whole bus accident, are you? Because that’s just-”

“My God, no. I’m assuming, that he must have killed Jasper some time the night before, after the roast. Probably buried him then too. The bus crash happening the next day was probably just a lucky break. He saw a great way of disposing of Jasper for good, with no awkward questions, and he took it.”

Gideon sipped’ his shake, thinking. “Or, you know, it could be the other way around. Maybe the bus crash happened first, and when Harlow heard about it, he knew he had a chance to kill Jasper then and there-”

“Why? I don’t suppose you’ve got a motive all cooked up too?”

“-with nobody ever finding out about it, so he went to Jasper’s room-”

“Wait a minute, hold it.”

Gideon waited.

“Listen,” John said, “are we talking facts here? Or are you making it up as you go along?”

“About which came first, the crash or the murder? I’m making it up, what else?”

“No, about the whole thing, the switch of the dental charts. You got anything at all to support it? Or is this all, you know, just-”

“Unverified supposition?”

“Yeah, exactly, unverified supposition.”

“Uh,

“I knew it.”

“But there’s some circumstantial evidence to support it.” “Oh, great, now I feel better.”

“For example, this would explain why Salish’s dental chart is missing from the file. Harlow removed it, probably back in 1981, to use as Jasper’s. And he didn’t have to bother about replacing it with still another fake, because nobody was interested in Salish’s teeth right up until yesterday.”

“Why wasn’t anybody interested in Salish’s teeth?” “Because the remains that they tentatively ID’d as Salish back then didn’t have any teeth.”

John chewed for a while. “Okay,” he said slowly, “I see what you’re saying. I think.”

“Look, there’s a simple enough way to verify this. Just ask Dr. MacFadden to send Jasper’s chart again. We’ll see if it’s the same one we have here-which it won’t be-or if it matches what’s in the skull in the evidence room-which it will.” He laughed. “I think.”