Aaron Elkins: Make No Bones

“Yeah, I could see it happening like that,” John said. “In fact, it could be she really never did mean to kill Jasper. Maybe she went to see him after the roast to make a last try at keeping him quiet; you know, throw herself on his mercy.”

“With Jasper?” Gideon said. “Good luck.”

“Well, that’s what I mean. Maybe she just lost control; shoved him or something. Or maybe he fell; he was pretty drunk, from what everybody says. You said those cracks in his head were from a fall, didn’t you? Could have been unintended.”

Gideon nodded. “But not the garroting.”

“No, not the garroting. And not what happened to

Harlow.” John stood up. “Thanks a million, Doc. I’m gonna get over to Bend and see where we go from here.”

Gideon stood with him. “John, this thing about her motive, the dissertation. It sounds good, but, you know, at this point it’s just-”

“Unverified supposition.”

Gideon laughed. “Well, yes. Maybe even unverifiable, what with the workbook gone.”

John grinned back at him, the skin around his eyes crinkling. “Well, as a matter of fact, the great Julian has turned up a little something that might help. A copy of her dissertation in the library stacks-with a 125-page appendix full of statistics. In small print. I was hoping I, uh, might convince some trustworthy, public-spirited anthropologist to, uh, sort of go through it in the next few weeks and see if he could turn up anything. You know, see if the statistics match what she says, or whatever the hell you do.”

“I hate statistics.”

“It’d really be helpful. It might make or break the case, Doc.”

Gideon wilted. “How long is the dissertation?” “Long.”

“What’s it about?”

“Good question.” John took his notebook from his shirt pocket, opened it, and handed it to Gideon. “Here’s the title,”

It was printed in careful block letters. Cephalometric Sexual Dimorphism in Four Related Populations (n= 572): A Multifactorial Study Using Discriminant Function Analysis.

Gideon sagged back down into his chair with a moan of self-pity. “Great God-o-mighty.”

By the time they walked slowly back to their own cottage it had gotten dark. Another rainstorm was building; they could feel it in the heavy, damp air and see occasional pallid flickers of lightning in the northwest, probably up around the stark, lonely lava flows of McKenzie Pass. It was a long way off. The rolling booms of thunder were like echoes, faint and grumbling, and reached their ears long seconds after the lightning had flared.

They stood on the porch, looking out toward this distant display, Gideon’s arm around Julie, Julie’s head tipped to his shoulder, her hand resting in his back pocket. To their left they could see the shimmer of firelight through the trees and hear night-muffled murmurs of conversation and laughter. A few diehards were still in the cookout area, perhaps unwilling to leave before they were sure that every weird thing that was going to happen, happened.

“Gideon?”

“Mm?”

“Do you really have to stay through tomorrow?”

He tilted his head to look at her and smiled. “Had enough rest and relaxation already?”

“I don’t know if I could stand any more. Wouldn’t it be nice to go home tomorrow morning?”

“Mal.”

“Is that yes?”

“Yes.”

She hugged him. “Let’s get an early start, so we can drive in the morning. How about eight?”

“How about seven?” Gideon said.

By morning, the sky over the Cascades had cleared, but about the time they crossed the Columbia into Washington, the rain started again; not the mountain thunderstorm of the previous night, but the normal, misty, cool, gray-green rain of the coastal lowlands. Even to Gideon it looked good. He’d had enough heat and sun to last him for a while.

And you didn’t get bluebottle flies in this kind of weather.

“How would she have gotten a gun on the plane?” Julie said suddenly.

“Oh, I talked to John just before we left. She probably never did have it on the plane. She’s had a permit for a long time, and she had the gun with her in the car when she drove to the conference in the first place. That’s what she says, and John believes her.”

“She’s talking to the police, then?”

“Nope, that’s about all she’d admit to. She’s waiting for her lawyer before she says anything else.”

“Or maybe for the true-crime writers to come buzzing around. What a book this will make.”

Gideon laughed. “Probably so. Listen, I have a question for you; two, really. I can’t understand why Callie-or, who knows, maybe it was Harlow-stole those burnt bones out of Miranda’s display. What would be the point?”

“Obviously, to keep you from finding out they weren’t really Jasper’s.”

“Julie, there wasn’t a ghost of a chance I’d have figured that out, not just from seeing them in the case. They knew that.”

“I don’t mean you alone, I mean all of you. Put yourself in Callie’s and Harlow’s place. How would you feel with those telltale bones sitting out there under the beady-eyed gaze of forty professional anthropologists-people like you and Nellie-”

“Hey, thanks.”

“Wouldn’t you worry that maybe you’d forgotten something that somebody would see, something you hadn’t even thought about? You wouldn’t want to take that chance.”

“You know what? You’re right.”

“Well, you don’t have to sound so amazed. What’s your other question?”

Gideon pulled over to let a seventy-five-mile-an-hour logging truck scream by, spewing chips and dust. “This one’s harder, I think. Assuming it was Callie who stole those bones, why would she have dumped them in the creek where she did, right alongside the nature trail? She could have gotten rid of them someplace where no one would ever find them.”

“Why didn’t she crush-and-flush, you mean?”

“Exactly.”

“Oh, I think I know the answer to that.”

He looked at her. “You do?”

“Sure. It was a kind of insurance policy, just in case anyone was able to trace the theft to her. She picked a place where she could take people later on and say: ‘Don’t you see? The only reason I removed them from the museum was to give him a decent burial-here in the outdoors he loved so well, in this rippling brook among the whispering pines…oh, and look! Here are a few fragments that just happened to catch on this bush, thereby verifying my claim.”

He nodded his approval. “Could be. I never thought of that.”

“But you notice that none of the teeth-the only parts that could prove it wasn’t who it was supposed to be-happened to catch on the bush, did they? No, they were nowhere to be found.”

He smiled and shook his head. “You used to be such a nice, unsuspecting type. When did your mind start working like this?”

“Well, it didn’t before I met you, that’s for sure.”

Just before Port Angeles they rounded a broad curve that opened into a stupendous view of the Olympics, looking up the wide, densely treed Elwha River Valley to the vertical green wall of Klahane Ridge in the national park; Julie’s turf.

“Isn’t it good to be home?” she said with a sigh. “My God, what a week. WAFA will never live it down.”

“Oh, I don’t know. There’s one good thing to be said for it. Aside from wildly increased registration in 1993, I mean.”

“What would that be?”

He laughed. “I don’t imagine they’re going to have any problem picking the wildest, weirdest case of the last ten years.”