Aaron Elkins: Icy Clutches

"Which means,” Julie said, “that she could still be alive."

"All right, sure, she could be,” John said reluctantly.

"For the sake of argument,” Minor interposed.

"But how could she kill Tremaine? How could she get here without anybody seeing her? We're really talking boonies here, Julie. There aren't exactly any crowds to melt into. And nobody saw anybody who wasn't supposed to be here."

"I know, but they saw Shirley." Julie jerked her head impatiently, as John and Minor continued to look at her with tolerant incomprehension. “Maybe I'm not being very clear. Look, how do we know that woman over there is Shirley Yount? How do we know it isn't her sister Jocelyn?"

"No,” John said, “it won't wash. Tremaine, Judd, Henckel-they all knew Jocelyn. They'd recognize her."

"Would they? It's been thirty years. They were twin sisters."

"Not identical twins,” John said.

"Even so, everybody would expect them to look alike. And from what you told us, Shirley does look like Jocelyn."

"I take your point,” Minor said.

"Yeah,” John said thoughtfully. “I take your point."

"In fact,” Julie said, heartened, “for all we know, maybe Jocelyn never had a twin sister. Maybe the whole thing was made up just for this."

Minor shook his head. “In point of fact, I'm afraid not. Shirley Yount quite definitely exists. She's been employed by Montgomery Ward for twenty-two years. She has a valid Social Security number, a driver's license-"

"Those can be faked,” Julie said, like an old hand at false IDs. “Maybe after the avalanche she took on another identity, maybe-” She stopped with a laugh. “How do I get myself into these positions? All right, forget it. I hereby retire from the case. Again."

All the same, as if on signal, the four of them cast lidded, sidewise glances at Shirley, who was at that moment staring emptily across the misted cove and shoving a quarter of a buttermilk donut into her mouth with a large and spatulate thumb.

The Jocelyn-as-Shirley theory failed to survive the day. At 3:30 P.M. the Spirit of Adventure returned with Julie and the other trainees, back from their final field session; with Frannie and Russ, who had put in some more bone hunting; and with a small box of bone fragments. Pickings had been slimmer today. At Frannie's request, Gideon had given her a copy of Bass's Human Osteology field manual, and the ranger had been able to eliminate most of the nonhuman material herself. There were only three objects in the box. One was the sacrum of a large bird. One was the partial skeleton of a bear's foot, still held together by dried-out ligaments. And one was a complete human femur.

Jocelyn Yount's right thigh bone.

"It has to be,” Gideon said half an hour afterward. “It's from an adult female, somewhere in her mid-twenties, obviously well muscled. Tall too, it looks like. Let's see…” He slid the adjustable segment of the osteometric board up against the end of the bone. “Maximum morphological length is 53 centimeters. Yeah, she's going to be big, all right.” He flipped open the cover of his pocket calculator and punched in the Trotter and Gleser formula to calculate overall stature from the femur. “Yup, that's what I thought.” More key-clicking to convert from centimeters to inches. “Estimated height between 71.37 and 74.30 inches."

He looked up from the calculator to Julie, who was sipping tea and lounging deservedly in the contact station's only armchair after her day on the ice field. “Tall."

She was frowning over the rim of her cup at the long, gracefully bowed bone. “Can I ask a question, or will you go all defensive on me again?"

"I?” Gideon said. “Defensive?"

"Well, yesterday you said that, basically, the way you tell male bones from female bones is that the male ones are bigger and more rugged. Right?"

"Right."

"But here you have a big bone, a rugged bone, and what's your conclusion? That it's a big, rugged woman. I don't get it. Why isn't it a man?"

"If that's all I had to go on, you'd have a point. Fortunately, the femur has some good sex criteria of its own. Lateral pitch, for instance.” He stood the bone upright on the board, resting it on the condyles, the smooth, rounded upper surface of the knee joint. “See how the bone tilts instead of standing straight up and down, when I just let it rest naturally? Well, that happens to be a seventy-six-degree angle. Anything lower than eighty is probably a female, and seventy-six is a near certainty."

She sighed. “I guess it's easy when you know how."

"And why. That inward tilt is there because women have wider hips than men, so they have to be built more knock-kneed to get their feet back under them."

"Watch it, Oliver,” Julie warned.

"In a most attractive manner, of course,” he added sincerely. “I wouldn't have it any other way."

Julie's openly skeptical reply was interrupted by Russ's arrival at the door. “Dr. Oliver? Ma'am? Mr. Lau sent me to look for you. The press conference started half an hour ago, and they have some questions for you. They're getting sort of impatient."

"Damn,” Gideon said, laying the femur down, “I forgot all about it. Let's go."

They followed Russ up the path to the lodge at a trot. Julie, normally a faster jogger than Gideon, lagged a few steps behind.

Concerned, Gideon slowed. “Is anything wrong?"

"Oh, no,” she said sweetly, “but running's not that easy when you're thick-hipped and knock-kneed."

Silence seemed the wisest response.

The sun had come out for the first time in almost a week, hanging twenty degrees above the hazy Fairweathers, flat and wan, but still able to burnish the air with a welcome, golden tinge of warmth. The meeting was being held outside, on the broad wooden deck at one end of the main building, and the attendees seemed less interested in the subject matter than in the sunlight. Folding fabric lawn chairs had been pulled into an arc facing the sun, and most of the people in them had their eyes closed and their faces tipped gratefully up.

It was an unusual press conference in that respondents outnumbered reporters. There were, in fact, only four journalists taking part: one reporter from the Ketchikan Daily, one from the Juneau Empire, and two wire-service stringers. The other two media people were a television crew from Anchorage who, having completed their filming for the day, were unashamedly sprawled on their backs on the bench that ran around the edges of the deck, soaking up sunshine. Tremaine's crew sat in attitudes ranging from detachment and indifference (Anna and Shirley, respectively), through boredom (Fisk) and glassy-eyed woolgathering (Pratt), to outright sleep (Judd).

John, his broad face up to the sun, was sitting next to Minor, his chair tipped back against the sun-drenched wall of the lodge, his interest level somewhere between Pratt's and Judd's.

One reason for all this lethargy was the unaccustomed effect of the sunlight. The other was Arthur Tibbett, who was holding forth and apparently had been at it for some time.

"Ah, here he is now,” he said as Gideon and Julie arrived and took chairs at the end of the semicircle. “You can ask him yourselves."

The reporters turned their chairs to get a better look at Gideon. Notebook pages were flipped. A tape recorder was turned on.

"I've been telling them about your exploits,” Arthur said, preening.

"Is it true that you've identified the murdered man from 1960 as Steven Fisk?” The speaker was one of the wire-service people, a thin-lipped, severe woman who spoke with a cigarette jouncing at the corner of her mouth and her eyes narrowed against the smoke.

"Yes, it is."

"There's no doubt in your mind?"