Aaron Elkins - Old Bones

"Well, Professor, there isn’t much here. None of the criterion-bones, as I believe you called them: no skull, no pelvis, no long bones."

"No." Gideon pulled a portable heater a little closer and studied the earth-stained bones without touching them. A ribcage, including the vertebral column and both scapulas, on its back, with the ribs now collapsed one upon the other like parallel rows of dominoes and shreds of dried brown cartilage holding some of the joints together; most of a right hand underneath it, also still tenuously articulated by withered cartilage; a scattering of additional hand and foot bones. They had been there a while, all right; there was no trace left of the distinctive candle-wax odor-the smell of the fat in the marrow-that exuded from bones for many years after the soft tissue had rotted away. And the bones had coarsened and begun to crack with the temperature changes of many summers and winters. So it had been there twenty years at least, and possibly more.

Definitely more. There, in the fragile scapulas and clavicles, small pockets of calcium phosphate had been leached out by the acid soil. Make it thirty years at least…no, forty, and maybe more yet.

But not too much more. There was none of the mineralization-the "petrifaction"-that fifty or a hundred years in this soil would almost certainly produce. So: more than thirty, less than fifty. Joly’s guess of wartime murder was probably right.

"You’re right about it being old," he said. "I’d say it’s been here forty to fifty years. And you’re sure right about it being a funny kind of collection. There’s only about a third of a body here, assuming it’s all part of one body, but the bones aren’t even contiguous. Hands, feet, and torso."

"So where’s the rest of it?" John murmured. He tapped the stone floor with one foot and answered himself. "Under here, too, you think? In another neat little package all tied up with twine?"

Joly shook his head, frowning. "If you’re going to bury a body under the cellar floor, why bother to carve it up? Dismembering a corpse is a messy, cumbersome business."

"So I’ve heard," John said mildly.

Joly continued to frown. "Torso, hands, feet. It’s hard to understand the purpose."

"It doesn’t seem so hard," John said. "They could have chopped the body up in little pieces, maybe to move it from upstairs to down here without anybody knowing- you know, a few pieces at a time-and then just wrapped the chunks into packages that’d fit under individual stones. You know; randomly."

"Perhaps," Joly said without conviction.

"Well, you’re going to have the rest of the floor dug up, aren’t you?"

"Very likely."

" Likely? I mean, Christ, you’ve got a third of a corpse here-"

"I shall want," Joly said stiffly, "to talk first to some of the people upstairs. We’ll see where that leads." He turned to Gideon, who’d been poring over the bones. "And what can you tell us, Professor?"

"Hard to say much just yet," Gideon said. "As you said, the most useful bones aren’t here. But it’s definitely an adult. The epiphyses are all closed, and ossification’s complete. Not elderly, though; no obvious bone buildup in the synovial joints, and not much burnishing of the articular surfaces either."

"An adult," Joly said. "Someone from twenty to sixty, say?"

"Twenty to fifty."

"I see." He waited for Gideon to continue, but Gideon had nothing to add. "And that’s all it’s possible to tell?"

Joly asked. This, his cool gaze said, was hardly the bravura performance he had been led to expect from the Skeleton Detective of America. "Are there no clues as to race? Sex, height, identifying characteristics? Cause of death…?"

"Sorry," Gideon said with a touch of irritation. Policemen, he had learned, fell neatly into two categories in about equal measure: those who expected miracles from him, and those who expected snake oil. Joly hadn’t seemed the type to expect miracles. "Give me a couple of hours, Inspector. I need to spread these out and have a good look at them."

"All right, two hours. Fleury, you’ll come with me. Mr. Lau, perhaps you’d find it interesting to join me? I’m sure," he added, coolly polite, "it would be most helpful."

John shook his head. "Not with my French, it wouldn’t. I think I’ll stay down here with the doc. Maybe I’ll learn something." He laughed suddenly, and a hundred little wrinkles folded into well-used laughter creases around his black eyes. "I might have missed a few points during the session today."

With his head cocked, John watched the two of them mount the steps. Then he looked at Gideon. "He doesn’t like me."

"Oh, he likes you, all right. But you were crowding him on digging up the floor."

"Yeah, I probably was, but, holy cow-"

"And he probably thinks you’re a little frivolous for a cop."

"Me?" John said with genuine surprise. "Frivolous?" He shook his head. "Nah, he just doesn’t like me. I can’t understand it."

"I admit, it staggers the imagination," Gideon agreed, and began to lay out the bones in roughly their anatomical relationship, to see just what he had. Ribcage first. Everything was there: twelve pairs of ribs, sternum, both scapulas, both clavicles, seventeen vertebrae from the fifth cervical through the second lumbar. The highest and lowest vertebrae were scarred with crude gouges; in cutting up the body, someone had hacked his way through the obvious places-through the throat just under the jaw (that is, between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae), and through the fleshy waist just above the hip bones (between the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae).

He picked up a loose vertebra, the first lumbar, and ran his thumb over the bottom edge of it, then did the same with the second. "Ah, here’s something. Look, there’s just the start of some osteophytosis, here on the synarthrodial aspect of the centrum-"

"Doc…!" As far as Gideon knew, there was only one circumstance that ever brought a whine to John Lau’s voice.

"Oops, sorry," Gideon said quickly. "I meant this lipping around the rim, can you see? This sort of rampart."

"Well, why didn’t you say it in English in the first place?" John grumbled, as he had many times before. He looked hard at the bone and brushed his fingers along the rim. "Okay, I feel it…Yeah, right there," he said with pleasure. Intolerant of scientific jargon he might be, and not at his best during long lectures, but he was an eager learner, always interested. "What is it, arthritis?"

"That’s right; the kind of wear-and-tear arthritis that gets us all in time. Part of the normal ageing process. Most people show it pretty distinctly in the lower back by the time they hit forty, and it gets to be more noticeable-and more troublesome-as they get older."

"Forty," said John solemnly, as one hand crept around to his lower spine. "Jesus." He was forty-one, six months older than Gideon.

Gideon put the bone back down. "Since the lipping’s just started, I’d say he’s under forty and over thirty. Maybe thirty-two, thirty-three. That ought to please Joly." He grinned. "I’m not sure the inspector’s too happy with me either."

John nodded. "Yeah, well, you’re pretty frivolous for a professor. He probably doesn’t like it when you sit up on the desk while you lecture. Hey, did you say‘he’?"

"That’s right. It’s a male."

"So how come you told Joly you didn’t know the sex? And-" His eyes narrowed, "-didn’t you say today you couldn’t be positive about the sex unless you had the pelvis, or the skull, or what was it, the head of the femur…?"

"That’s right," Gideon said, surprised. "I’m impressed."

John shrugged modestly. "Something must have woke me up for a minute. So why is it a male?"