Aaron Elkins: Make No Bones

“Except that Callie couldn’t have had anything to do with Harlow’s murder. She was four hundred miles away.” “Oh.” The grass blade was nibbled and discarded. “Are you sure about that?”

“Pretty much, unless I’m way off on the time Harlow was killed.”

“Oh,” she said again. “You don’t suppose she only pretended to go away? Or that she snuck back, or-no, I guess not.”

“I sincerely doubt it. It’d be awfully easy to check.”

Julie shrugged and smiled. “Well, it was a pretty good theory anyway, don’t you think? I mean, except for that little detail?”

“It’s a great theory, Julie.”

At the porch of their cottage she stopped him. “Gideon, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“If that reconstruction you made was such a good one-”

“Which it was, but the skull gets all the credit. The bony landmarks were all in the right places, for a change.” He smiled. “Not that I’d expect anything else from the skull of Albert Evan Jasper.”

“And if all you people are trained professional anthropologists-”

“Which we are, certifiably.”

“Then how come none of you certified experts knew it was Jasper until Miranda revamped everything you did?”

He laughed. “You’ve put your finger on the problem with reconstruction. That’s what bothers people like Nellie so much. No matter how right you get the bony stuff, the rest of it involves a lot of guesswork, and that’s the most critical part.”

“I’m not following you. What’s the most critical part?”

“Look at it this way. Forget about reconstructions. Do you think you’d recognize me on the street if I changed just a few inconsequential, soft-tissue details on my face?”

“What kind of details?”

“Oh…different nose, different mouth, different hair, different eyebrows, different ears, different eyes-”

“But those aren’t inconsequential details. They’re what make you you.”

“Exactly. Well, I got most of them wrong, which is what usually happens-there’s no way to tell from the skull-but Miranda was sharp enough to pick up the similarity in the basic shape of the face. She just altered a few of those details and Albert Jasper jumped right out at us.”

“Hm. Impressive, but I think I’m starting to come over to Nellie’s side.”

Inside the cottage the telephone rang. “I’ll get it,” Julie said. “You’re being brave about it, but I can see you’re still stiff.” She took the three steps at a leap.

“What a hot dog,” Gideon called after her. But she was right. He was glad to let her make the run for the telephone.

The call was from John. The on-scene processing was done, the body was on its way to the morgue. Dr. Tilton, the deputy medical examiner, had come to his preliminary conclusions. Would Gideon like to join them for a drink in the bar to talk about them?

“Hot enough for you?” Dr. Tilton asked. He pulled the toothpick from the left corner of his mouth, put it in the right corner, twirled it as if to set it in more firmly, and with a noisy sigh rearranged himself more deeply in the wooden lawn chair. “Great God-o-mighty.”

Forensic pathologists, in Gideon’s experience, tended to be lively sorts, and Deschutes County Deputy Medical Examiner Floyd Tilton was no exception. A sweating, balding cabbage of a man with a hopelessly scroungy beard that failed to disguise the absence of discernible chin, he was a nonstop talker with the astonishing ability to gnaw on a toothpick, chew gum, and eat popcorn at the same time. All without missing a word.

They had gotten their drinks in the bar-Scotch and soda for Gideon, beer for John, rum and Coke for Tilton-and taken them outside, to a shaded spot on the edge of the lawn, near a rust-mottled children’s play set that looked as if it hadn’t seen any use for a decade or two.

“I tell you,” Tilton said, “when I heard we had ourselves a deceased in some out-of-the-way cabin in this heat, I expected the worst. You know, everybody gets used to looking at decomposing bodies after a while-”

“Not this guy,” John said, directing a thumb at Gideon. “-but nobody ever gets used to the damned smell. God-o-mighty. So I came armed.”

He lifted a small plastic bag halfway out of the pocket of his damp plaid shirt. Oil of wintergreen, Gideon saw, and a couple of gauze plugs to saturate and insert into the nostrils. A lot of people in the field did that. Others preferred Noxzema, or Vicks Vapo-Rub, or strong cigars. Most, like Gideon, found that nothing really helped.

“As it was,” Tilton continued, reaching into the cardboard bucket of popcorn he’d carried from the bar-did he chew the popcorn and the gum on different sides of his mouth? Tuck one of them in a cheek while he worked on the other?-”the putrefaction process’d hardly gotten underway. Whoo. Thank the Lord for small favors. Well, what can I tell you gentlemen?” He raised his glass to Gideon. “Much obliged.”

“Cause of death?” John asked.

“Blunt-force trauma, it would appear, inflicted by the table leg. The blows were delivered from behind, the victim being seated at the time. Either three or four of them, any one of them sufficient to cause death.”

John nodded. “Can you give us a TOD estimate?”

“Ali, time of death; every policeman’s favorite question. Well, there’s lab work to be done, but I think you’d be on pretty safe ground assuming it happened sometime yesterday.”

“You couldn’t make it any more specific?”

Tilton closed one eye and squinted at John with the other. He fiddled with the toothpick, sliding it in and out between two teeth.

“Maximum, twenty-four hours; minimum, eighteen hours. That’s counting back from four o’clock today.”

“Between 4:00 P.M. and 10:00 P.M. yesterday,” John said.

It was what Gideon had guessed, but narrowed down to a degree that surprised him. Time-of-death estimation was tricky work, especially when it came to establishing the early part of the range, and most pathologists would have been leery of pinning themselves down to a six-hour span.

“That’s cutting it pretty close, isn’t it?” he asked.

He could see that Tilton was happy to get the question. “Most of the time it would be, yes,” he said spiritedly, “but we’ve got a few things going for us here, and what they add up to is eighteen to twenty-four hours.” He chuckled. “Between us, nineteen to twenty-four, but I hate to sound cocky.”

First of all, Tilton explained, there was the rigor mortis to be considered, or rather the passing of it. A notably unreliable indicator, but it was surely safe enough to conclude that Harlow had been dead a good twelve hours or more, putting the latest possible time of the murder at four that morning. The other extreme was established by the general lack of putrefaction; there had been no bloating yet, no overall discoloration of the abdomen; merely some blue-green marbling of the lower-left quarter. Under ordinary circumstances, that would mean that the death had occurred less than thirty-six hours ago. Given the heat, it was reasonable to make that thirty hours in this case. Would they agree with that?

They agreed.

“So,” Tilton said, “that puts it somewhere between twelve and thirty hours, are you with me? This is supported by the ocular changes-advanced corneal cloudiness, but nothing like opacity yet. Now, let’s see if we can narrow it some more. Let us consider…” He paused.

…carrion insect activity.”

That was another thing about forensic pathologists. To a one, they loved to lecture when they got a willing audience. Possibly that came from the infrequency with which they got hold of willing audiences. Julie, for example, although invited to this conversation, had known enough to beg off and have her predinner glass of wine with some of the others.