Aaron Elkins: Skeleton dance

"Yes, sir!" said Noyon. Freshly graduated from the national police academy at Nice and newly assigned to Les Eyzies for his field training, he was grateful for this early opportunity to show his mettle.

"And to do that it is necessary first of all to locate the place from which the dog has been bringing the bones, so that the scene can be properly examined, wouldn't you say?"

"Yes, sir, exactly!"

"And to accomplish that, it would seem logical to let the animal lead us to it, no?"

"Yes, sir," Noyon said a little less eagerly, beginning to have some reservations.

"What I want you to do, then, Noyon, is to find an unobtrusive spot within sight of the Peyraud backyard, keeping your eye on the dog. It's brought home bones before. It will bring them home again. See if you can find out from where. That's your assignment. Are there any questions?"

"You want me to… to stake out the dog?"

Marielle eyed him frigidly. "Unless you have an objection?"

"No, sir, no objection at all! I think it's a fine plan. I'm sure it'll work. I'll do my best. Thank you, sir, I appreciate your confidence. I'll get over there right now."

Damn, Noyon thought, you sure know when you're the new man on the team.

Three days later, a dusty and bramble-scarred Officer Noyon was back at his commander's desk with discouraging results. The dog was cunning, devious, two-faced, malicious, he said with a tremor of real hatred in his voice. "He tricked me. He wouldn't let me follow him. He left by different routes, and he never came home the same way twice. When he brought bones back, I swear he laughed at me! I know when a dog's laughing."

Marielle listened with narrowed eyes. "So after three days we're no closer to finding out where they're coming from than we were when we started, is that the substance of your report?"

"Well, yes," Noyon replied, scrambling for a good side to things, "but we do have several more bones than we started with."

Marielle lifted his eyes to the ceiling and resigned himself to the inevitable; he'd come to the end of the line and he knew it. To wait still longer without notifying the judicial police would be disastrous.

And turning to his secretary with a heavy heart, he said: "Get me Perigueux."

The Peyraud "vegetable garden" was scarcely large enough to hold the four men, one woman, and one dog that stood in it. Lucien Anatole Joly, inspecteur principal of the Police Nationale's Directorate of Judicial Police, Department of Dordogne, had been looking steadily at Marielle for some time without speaking.

"You are telling me, then," he said without expression, "that since the matter has been in your charge, no action has been taken other than to observe the animal? For three days?"

He wasn't really surprised. He had had dealings with Marielle before: a puffed-up functionary better suited to have been the village postmaster, where he could have known everybody's business even better, and without having to exert himself.

Under his stiff, blue uniform collar the back of Marielle's neck burned, but he wasn't about to let this bloodless dandy in his fine Paris suit get on his nerves, especially not in front of Noyon and that old crank, Peyraud. He smiled knowledgeably at Joly, colleague to colleague. "Well, it's not as if the bones were going to go bad in three days, you know, inspector."

"The bones?" Joly replied without returning the smile. "No, the bones won't have been harmed by the passage of a few days. The site from which they come, however, is a different matter. Three days, we may add, during which an active and inquisitive dog has been permitted-encouraged-to disturb the scene to its heart's content."

The aggravatingly superior tone was too much for Marielle. "And you would have done it differently, inspector?"

Joly, his head tipped back, eyed the shorter, stubbier Marielle down his nose. The man was forever arguing, forever questioning. In themselves, these were commendable traits in Joly's eyes, but only when they went along with listening and learning, which Marielle, for all his quibbling, rarely did.

"To begin with," Joly said crisply, "I would not have permitted the animal to continue to disrupt the site," he said.

"Very true," old Peyraud contributed from the sidelines. "There you have it. Not permit the animal to continue to disrupt the site." He scratched at the gray stubble on his jaw.

Marielle threw him a scalding glance but addressed Joly. "Oh? And how then would you propose to find this 'site'?"

"Yes, that's the question, isn't it?" Joly said, speaking mostly to himself. There wasn't any point, and certainly no pleasure, in quarreling with Marielle. "What is the dog's name?" he asked Peyraud.

"He doesn't have a name."

"Sometimes we call him Toutou," offered Madame Peyraud.

Joly turned to the dog and bent from the waist so that his hands were on his knees. "Come here, Toutou, come on now." Smiling, he held out one hand.

To Marielle's amazement, the cur came, sniffing at the inspector's fingers. Did it think it was going to get its bones back? Ha, good luck to it. When Joly scratched it behind a fleabitten ear, the dog licked his wrist. Well, they said Hitler had gotten along with dogs too.

"Now, Toutou," Joly said, his tone friendlier than the one he'd been using with Marielle, "now, old fellow, we'll need to find out where you've been getting those bones. Are you going to help us?"

Toutou grinned and wagged his tail.

"Good dog." Joly straightened up. "You won't mind," he said to Peyraud, "if these gentlemen and I take Toutou out for an hour and look about the countryside? You have something we can use as a leash, perhaps?"

Marielle stifled his irritation. How like Joly that was. That smug assumption that the great and wise inspecteur principal could accomplish in an hour or two what the poor, benighted police force of Les Eyzies couldn't manage in three days

"Any particular direction you'd care to go in, Inspector?" he asked lightly as Joly was knotting a length of rope around the dog's collar.

"I was hoping you might help me with that, Marielle."

"I? If I knew-"

"The wind, does it usually come from this direction?"

Marielle gawked at him. "What?"

Peyraud cut in. "Yes, almost always from the northeast. It rides up the valley."

"Well, then, Marielle," said Joly, "I suggest we stroll northeast with a good hold on Toutou, permit him to follow his nose, and see what we find."

"Now that's a good idea!" cried Officer Noyon, who instantly made himself as small as possible.

"All set, Toutou?" Joly asked, coiling the end of the seven-foot rope around his hand. "Lead away, then."

It was as if the dog had been waiting all along to be asked. Straining at the rope, his narrow red tongue lolling between stretched black lips, he led the three men along the sloping shelf at the base of the limestone cliffs that backed up against the village, into a copse of stunted oak and juniper and out again, still skirting the undulating, cave-riddled foot of the cliffs as they curved into the forest, away from the village and the river. Never once did he stop to mark a bush, investigate an intriguing hole, or chase a rabbit, real or imaginary. Without deviating he led them to a fall of jumbled boulders that had dropped away from the face of the overhanging cliffs not so many years before-one could still look up and see the whitish patch near the top from which a vast block of the limestone had sheared off and slid down to fracture into huge pieces below.

Once there, the eager Toutou dragged them among the rocks, then sidled into a narrow crevice that had been invisible until they were almost on it. Pulling the panting, excited dog back and keeping it still with a handhold on the collar of rope around its neck Joly squatted on his haunches to peer into the opening. The crevice was an irregular, waist-high space between the base of the concave wall of the cliff and the lower part of one of the big boulders that leaned against it, forming a constricted corridor, narrowing toward the top, about four meters long and less than a meter high. At the far end, dim and shadowed, was what appeared to be a shallow, low-ceilinged cave in the base of the cliff; what the locals called an abri -the sort of place that little boys were forever stumbling into and turning up one prehistoric find or another, bringing real and would-be archaeologists out in droves.