Aaron Elkins: Make No Bones

Gideon laughed. Leland was Leland. It was the way he was made, and you couldn’t take what he said personally.

The pale-eyed, amber-mustached Leland Vernon Roach was another of Jasper’s students. Unlike Miranda he’d managed to complete his doctorate, but like her his main interests had strayed from the forensic. In Leland’s case they were in the direction of the relatively new science of coprolite analysis-the study of fossilized excrement to determine food content and eating habits.

Once, when Gideon had asked him how it was that he’d gotten into so arcane a subfield, Leland had shrugged. “You happen to like bones,” he’d said with his prissy, exquisite diction. “ I happen to like shit.” Gideon still didn’t know if he’d meant it to be funny.

Now he clapped the smaller man lightly on the shoulder. “I’ll give it some serious thought, Leland,” he said. “Assuming I can talk Julie into it.”

Julie muttered something as they moved on to the next exhibit with the others.

“What?”

She arranged her mouth to speak with Lelandlike precision.

“Fat,” she said, “chance.”

Gideon was shaving the next morning, listening to Julie tell him from the shower about her plans for the day-she was driving to the Lava Butte Geological Area south of Bend to talk shop with the head ranger-when the telephone rang.

“Gideon, this is Miranda. Something peculiar’s come up. Would you mind skipping the first session today?”

He had glanced at the schedule a few minutes before. The first session was Recent Developments in Quantitative Microradiography and Histomorphometric Analysis.

“Urn, I think I could manage that,” he said. “What’s come up?”

“Albert Evan Jasper’s disappeared.”

It took a second to make any sense at all of this. “I don’t-what did you say?”

“His skeleton-it’s missing.”

“Missing?”

“It’s been stolen.”

“Stolen?”

Miranda’s sigh crackled in his ear. “As wildly enchanting as this conversation is, I need to break it off and make some more calls. I want to get the FMs together. Meet in the lounge in half an hour? I’ll have coffee and stuff sent in.”

“Yes, sure, be there.” He hung up, replaying the brief conversation. Now how the hell could…

“Who was that, Gideon?” Julie called.

“Miranda,” he said, walking abstractedly back to the bathroom. He used a towel to dab shaving cream from under his ear. “Jasper’s skeleton is missing.”

The shower door opened. Julie stuck her head out, looking puzzled.

“Missing?”

“FMs” was shorthand for Founding Members, also sometimes called the Board of Directors, although this last was something of an exaggeration. As scientific organizations went, the Western Association of Forensic Anthropologists was more laid back than most. There were no officers, no formal chair, no standing committees. The people Miranda had gathered were, except for Gideon, simply those ex-students of Albert Evan Jasper who had come together ten years earlier to pay homage to their teacher and talk about their profession. After WAFA had sprouted from this nucleus, what little direction was necessary continued to be handled by this group, largely by default.

There were seven Founding Members. One of the original ones, Ned Ortiz of USC, had died a year earlier and Gideon had accepted an invitation to replace him, but 110 one had bothered to change the FM appellation to something else. Of the six others, only Nellie Hobert, who wouldn’t arrive until that evening, wasn’t there. The rest were all present in the lounge (the Tack Room, according to a tiny brass plate on the door), a roomy, comfortable, seedy place with well-worn chairs and sofas, roughly finished bookshelves stuffed with glittering rows of Reader’s Digest condensed books, and a generally rustic atmosphere (more acres of knotty-pine paneling).

Miranda was in front of the empty fieldstone fireplace, explaining and gesturing. Gideon was in a scarred, cane-backed chair near an open window that let in the piney fragrance that still smelled like perfume to him. Another day, and he wouldn’t smell it anymore. Next to him sat Leland Roach, looking like an undernourished turtle with his thin shoulders hunched up and his head pulled in, and giving off his usual aura of complacent disapproval.

Sitting earnestly-and not many people could sit earnestly-on a table in a corner near the television set was Callie Duffer, smoking furiously. A toothy, big-boned woman in her early forties, with wire-coat hanger shoulders and long, restless hands, she was a full professor at Nevada State University and department chair besides. Fidgeting at Miranda’s eccentric and rambling recitation, she was clicking one lacquered fingernail against another, making fitful, insectlike snapping sounds. These brought pointed little mustache twitches of annoyance from Leland, to which she appeared oblivious.

More relaxed, if not overly attentive, was the youngest member of the board, Les Zenkovich, who had stationed himself on a decaying leather couch within easy reach of the sweet rolls. With a neck like a tree trunk, a stubbly blond beard, and kinky, receding hair tied into a short ponytail, Les looked more like an amiable, over-the-hill linebacker than a scientist, an effect heightened by the loose tank top and flimsy shorts he wore. His arm muscles bulged, his thickening midsection bulged, everything bulged.

When Gideon had left Northern California State for the University of Washington a few years earlier, it had been Les who was hired to fill in behind him, but the appointment had failed to work out. Academic considerations aside, this was no surprise to Gideon. He couldn’t imagine Amanda Righter, the decorous and genteel head of the department, being much taken with Les’s view on academic ceremony (“meaningless bullshit”), or the gold stud he wore in his right ear, or his weekend gigs as bass player with a country-western group in Oakland. Even Les’s bulginess had probably been an affront to Amanda’s well-cultivated sense of proportion. To the relief of all concerned, he had resigned after a year, opening his own consulting business-Golden State Forensic Services-and settling happily into life as an anthropological private eye. He had arrived at the meeting in a red Porsche with a DR BONES license plate.

On the couch next to Les was Harlow Pollard, a fiftyish associate professor from Nevada State. Once he had been Callie’s doctoral committee chairman. Now he was her subordinate. Not a comfortable situation for either of them, Gideon imagined.

A gray-faced man who had stomach problems and looked it, Harlow sat perfectly erect, perfectly still, feet flat on the floor and close to each other, knees pressed together, hands on his knees. His anxious, somewhat vague gaze was fixed on Miranda with his familiar blend of misgiving and incomprehension. The total effect was something like that of a worried squirrel trying to make sense of an unfamiliar sound.

It wasn’t dimness of mind that was Harlow’s problem, or so Gideon had always believed, as much as an almost desperate need to have his facts ordered and classified, with every last ambiguity resolved. When they weren’t, he fretted until he got everything straight, which could take a long time.

And what Miranda was telling them was particularly hard going. Sometime between five o’clock and ten o’clock the previous evening, while the museum was closed to the public for the WAFA dinner and reception, the charred partial skeleton of Albert Evan Jasper had disappeared from its case. On his seven-thirty round, the morning guard had discovered that someone had taken out the eight screws holding on the front of the case and removed the bones; an easy task inasmuch as they were wired to their backing, a breadboard-sized rectangle of white Styrofoam that was not itself firmly attached to anything. The case front had then been replaced and loosely attached with two of the screws.