Aaron Elkins - Make No Bones

John grunted. “Okay, I will. We’ll see what happens.”

“There’s something else. When a dentist sends in records, some x-rays usually come with them. But there aren’t any here. According to Les, that’s because Jasper was afraid of them. So said Harlow.”

John glanced at him. “This is supposed to tell us something?”

It told them, Gideon explained, that Harlow had been lying. Gideon recounted how the hapless Casper Jasper had been knocked cold by an awning rod, and how his solicitous father had immediately hustled him off to the hospital to be x-rayed. Did it stand to reason that a man leery of fluoroscopic radiation would unhesitatingly put his son through it?

“Maybe not,” John admitted. “So why is that important?”

“John, if you photocopy x-rays onto ordinary paper, they’re not much good because so much of the clarity is lost. So dentists use a special copying machine to reproduce them onto transparent film. Well, that’s what MacFadden would have done-and that would have been hell for Harlow to fake. You’re not talking about a simple cut-and-paste job to change the names anymore. And he would have had to get access to the right kind of machine himself. Not easy to do without anybody knowing.”

John nodded, finally beginning to come around. “Easier just to say there weren’t any x-rays, and invent a reason for it.”

“That’s right. I’m betting MacFadden actually did send a set and Harlow just tossed them. Any dental reports corning in would have gone straight to him, so who would know? And there wasn’t a chance in a million MacFadden would ever find out about it. He’d just read in the newspapers like anybody else that Jasper was identified from his teeth, period. And maybe he’d get a nice, polite thank-you call from Harlow.”

“Yeah, but what about the rest of the file?” John said. “There’s a report from a doctor, something from a physical therapist. How could he fake all that stuff and hope to get away with it? He’d be bound to slip up somewhere,”

“He didn’t have to fake anything else. The rest of the file is really Jasper’s, Look.”

He thumbed through the folder until he found the physician’s report, a three-page form signed with a looping flourish by Willa Stover, M.D. -Post-traumatic osteoarthritis, right first and second metatarsophalangeal joints,” he read. “That’s the big toe and the one next to it. And here: ‘Fractured left ulna, childhood fall.’”

John nodded slowly. “Just like on the skeleton Nellie dug up.”

“Sure, because the skeleton’s really Jasper. But at the time, it was buried under the floor of the shack where nobody knew about it-and the remains Harlow said were Jasper’s were nothing but those teeth and a few splinters of bone that were just about unreadable. Every damn joint in the body could have been arthritic, and nobody would have known the difference. So there wasn’t any risk. All Harlow had to fake was the dental stuff. And that’s what he did.”

“You think.”

“I think.”

They pulled off the highway and into the graveled parking area at the entrance to the lodge. Even in the shade of the ponderosas, getting out of the car was like stepping into a smelter. Gideon glanced at the rusting metal Dr. Pepper thermometer nailed to the bulletin board. Ninety-four, it said, and it felt as if the relative humidity was about the same.

“God, what weather.”

“Yeah,” John said absently, “great, isn’t it?”

They began walking toward the main building. John had a ruminative look on his face. “Harlow,” he said, as if he were testing the name on his tongue. “Seems like such a meek, harmless little guy. Kind of hard to see him as a killer.”

Gideon nodded. “It’s a surprise. I was starting to wonder if Julie might not be right, if you want to know. About Callie.”

“Let’s concentrate on Harlow. Any idea why he’d want to do in Jasper?” He looked up at Gideon’s laugh. “Did I say something funny?”

“John, let me quote Les Zenkovich on Albert Jasper: ‘To know him was to want to punch him out.’ That would have applied to Harlow as much as any of them.”

“Why? What’d they have against him?”

“Well, he wasn’t the kindliest man in the world. From what I know about him, he was short-tempered, spiteful, contentious…inconsiderate…”

John waved an impatient hand. “Doc, you don’t usually kill people because they’re inconsiderate. Or even inconsiderate and contentious.”

“John, you asked me what they had against him, and I’m trying to tell you.”

“Right, sorry.”

“I’m doing the best I can.”

“Right, go ahead.”

“I mean, don’t expect me to solve your whole case for you.”

John emitted a rolling growl. “Will you go ahead?” “With pleasure, if you’ll let me. The thing is, they were all his graduate students at one time or another-” “All of them? Even Nellie?”

“All of them. Nellie was the first. And from the war stories I’ve heard, none of them had an easy time. If I remember right, it took Harlow eleven or twelve years to get his Ph. D. Jasper kept changing the ground rules on him. It was the way he was with them all, I guess.”

“But he finally got his degree?”

“Oh, he got it, but his marriage came apart during the struggle, and I understand Harlow’s always blamed Jasper for that. In his own quiet way, of course. Had two kids, I think, but he never talks about them. Never remarried either, as far as I know.”

John weighed this. “Well, I guess it’s a place to start.”

With Gideon, he stood at the entrance to the lodge building. “This where your round table is?”

“Yes, it started ten minutes ago.”

“Well, don’t let me hold you up. When’s it over?”

“Five o’clock. But the later it gets in the week, the earlier the sessions seem to let out. It’s a natural law. I’d say four-thirty.”

“Good enough. I’ve got some stuff to write up, and Harlow’ll keep till then.”

“I guess so. He’s kept for ten years.”

“Yeah.” John took the last, cold french fry from the bag he’d carried from the car and crumpled it into his mouth. “Boy, am I ever gonna spoil his day.”

With blinds drawn against the sun and air conditioners groaning, the meeting room’s temperature was wonderfully cool, but the atmosphere was heated with hypothesis and conjecture. The startling news about Jasper had quickly spread, and knots of academics had turned their chairs around to face each other, the better to argue over what it might mean.

Gideon made his way to the front, where seven of the nine participants in the odontology round table were seated: Miranda, Les, Leland, Callie, and three others. Gideon, taking the empty chair next to Leland, made eight. The ninth, Harlow, had yet to arrive to take his place as moderator.

“HAAAR-lowww,” Les was singing softly to the ceiling, “where AAARRRE you?”

Leland looked irritably at the wall clock, then at Callie. “Yes, where is he?”

It took a few seconds for Callie to look up from her notes. “What are you asking me for?”

“Well, he came back with you, didn’t he?”

She laid down her notebook and concentrated on getting a cigarette out of its slim metal case. “From where?” she asked absently.

Leland looked at her. “From where?”

They stared at each other with the bafflement of communication gone askew.

“From Nevada,” Leland finally said. “Where else?”

Callie had gotten her cigarette going. She squinted at him through the first acrid explosion of smoke. “Leland, Harlow didn’t go to Nevada with me.”

“Of course he did.’

“Are you telling me?” Her voice was beginning to rise. “I’m telling you, he didn’t go. He didn’t feel well, he didn’t want to fly.” She had taken only two puffs of the cigarette, but she jammed it out angrily against a flat metal ashtray, smoke pouring from her nostrils. “A year’s planning, and he misses the whole damn thing. How is he going to hold up his end of the reciprocal contracting if he doesn’t share ownership ‘u the development process, tell me that.”