Aaron Elkins: Skeleton dance

Well, why wouldn't it be, it was an early-man site, an abri; maybe Cro-Magnon as Joly thought, but probably Neanderthal. The sloping roof of the cave, a few inches higher than Gideon was tall, was black with the soot of hundreds of fires, and embedded here and there in the earthen floor he could see small shards of chert and flint, dozens of them-not the scrapers, or choppers, or hand axes that you saw in museums, but the waste material, the discarded flakes that had been chipped away to form the stone tools. Long ago, some ancient, fur-wrapped flintknapper, possibly more than one, had squatted there by the fire, patiently hunched over his work, slowly shaping household implements or crude weapons from the smooth, dark stones of the nearby valley.

Much later, millennia later, others had come. A pair of archaeological test trenches, only faintly perceptible now, had been sunk at right angles to one another. It had been some time ago, perhaps thirty years, perhaps fifty. Whoever had dug them had apparently found nothing to encourage a full-scale excavation; the trenches had been filled in again and the excavators had gone elsewhere.

Later still, another visitor had found his way there, but this one had never left, or at least some of him hadn't, and Gideon had spent part of the morning and most of the afternoon working over what remained, using trowel, toothbrush, paintbrush, tongue depressors, and fingers in roughly that order. Gradually, he had freed the reddish-tinged bones from the dirt floor of the cave, where the body had been buried in the backfill at the intersection of the trenches. In the relatively soft, loose soil, and with most of what was left of the skeleton already disturbed by rodents or carnivores, it was an easy job and a quick one-or it would have been, had not Joly insisted on having his people draw charts, take photographs, bag insect remains, put the dug-up dirt through a sieve, and generally get in the way after each couple of millimeters of earth had been scraped away. Well, it was nobody's fault but Gideon's; it was at his forensic seminar in St. Malo that Joly had learned the proper techniques of retrieving skeletal material, and Joly, as Gideon well knew, was nothing if not a stickler.

Moreover, with the inspector watching his every move, he'd been forced to do everything by the book himself. At first he'd tried to justify a little judicious corner-cutting, but his argument (" You have to do it the way I taught you because the rules are there for a reason, but I can do it this way because I'm an expert and I know when it's all right to break them.") had met with the contempt it deserved.

And so what should have been an hour's work had ended up taking almost four, but now the grubwork was done. All of the bones that had remained in place were exposed. Inasmuch as the body had been buried on its left side, the right side, being uppermost, had suffered the greatest depredation. Much of the left half was still intact. In total, Gideon estimated that a little more than half the bones, the skull among them, had been carried off or consumed, but the official count could wait until later, when the remains were in the morgue, where the light would be better and he wouldn't have to work kneeling on a kneepad (provided by a considerate Joly) and balancing a clipboard on his thigh. For the moment he was after information of the most basic sort, much of which had already come to light and which he was now presenting to the inspector.

First things first: the remains appeared to be those of a single individual-they matched in general size and appearance and there were no duplicates-but even that conclusion would have to be checked in the lab. Until you placed each bone against its apposite member to see if they fitted together, you couldn't be sure; joints were as individual as fingerprints. Second, it was a male; half-a-dozen hard-to-miss indicators on the pelvis told him that. Race was trickier, not only because race was always trickier than sex (in sex, you only had two choices-flipping a coin would give you the right answer half the time-but when it came to races anthropologists were still arguing about how many there were, or even if the concept of race had any usable meaning), but because most of the better racial criteria were in the skull, and there wasn't any skull. For the moment he was guessing Caucasian, but later he would do a set of metric analyses and run discriminant function coefficients on the long bones to see if he could come up with something definitive.

As to age, the one pubic symphysis that was relatively ungnawed was rimmed and moderately hollowed, putting it at an advanced phase five on the Suchey-Brooks scale, which suggested a man somewhere around fifty, give or take a decade. The only sign of pathology that had jumped out so far was an interesting area of thickening and callus formation on the top half of the left ulna, just below the elbow; an indicator of inflammation that might have been the result of skin ulceration, or part of a disease syndrome such as syphilis, or perhaps the effect of an injury, although he was fairly sure there hadn't been a fracture. Unfortunately, the right forearm wasn't present, so it was impossible to say if the hypertrophy was bilateral or "Yes, yes," Joly said tartly. He'd been either perched uncomfortably on a rounded boulder near the cave entrance, one well-creased trouser leg crossed over the other and lighting up an occasional Gitane, or else leaning over Gideon's shoulder, for the whole time, and his patience, never one of his strong points, was beginning to fray. "And how long would you say he's been here?"

Gideon leaned back on his haunches. "Hard to say with any precision, Lucien. All there is in the way of soft tissue, aside from some dried goop, are a few shreds of ligament and some cartilage from the joint capsules, so at least we know he's been here a while." He reached around behind him for one of the scattered bones, the right tibia, held one end of it to his nostrils, and inhaled, first gently, then deeply. Joly made a face.

"Well now, wait a second," Gideon said. "I can still pick up some candle wax odor."

"Candle wax? I don't understand."

Gideon looked up. "I thought I talked about bone smells at the seminar. Where were you?"

"Very possibly you did," Joly said. "I may have disregarded it as being irrelevant to any activity in which I might conceivably find myself engaged in the future."

Completely understandable, Gideon thought, smiling. He couldn't picture the refined and elegant Joly sniffing bones either. "Well, the smell is the odor of the fat in the bone marrow. After it passes through the rancid stage-and you don't have to hold it anywhere near your nose to recognize that-it develops this characteristic waxy smell that lasts for a few years. At a guess, I'd say these have been here a minimum of two or three years, but fewer than ten. Less than I thought at first."

He sniffed at the tibia again. "Let's say between two and five years, right around there. The skeletonization is a little more advanced than you might expect for that amount of time, but that's probably because it's such a shallow burial and the soil was already disturbed by these trenches, which made it easy for bugs and things to get in. Two to five that's my guess."

Joly looked pleased. "Excellent. I've had our chemist analyze the what-is-it-called, the level of acidity-"

"The pH level?"

"Yes, the pH level of some of the soil that was adhering to the bones. His conclusion was that it was consistent with a time since death of three to six years. Putting the two estimates together we arrive at a range of three to five years. "

"Approximately," Gideon warned. "I don't know about your chemist, but speaking for myself, I'm not talking high science here. This stuff is variable as hell-the composition of the soil, the amount of moisture, the temperature-all kinds of things. If you have any unsolved missing-person cases from anywhere around that time, I wouldn't rule them out. We're probably looking at one of them."