Aaron Elkins - Old Bones

A reasonable question, but difficult to answer. The problem was that it was hard to explain, other than to say that after almost fifteen years of dealing with the human skeleton, his eyes and fingertips simply told him so; this sad litter of bones had supported the body of a man, not a woman. But he couldn’t quite face telling Joly-who had been so resolutely attentive at the conference, and who had asked such laboriously penetrating questions, and who had taken such regular notes in a no-doubt tidy and meticulous hand-that he just knew; it was a matter of intuitive, unquantifiable feel.

John, yes, but not Joly.

"I just know," he said.

John nodded his acceptance. Once, a long time ago, he had been in the snake-oil camp, but he’d learned to trust Gideon’s judgment on skeletons almost as much as Gideon did.

Most of the time.

"Doc?" he said half an hour later, while Gideon was pondering the meaning of the beadlike nodules on the ends of the ribs. They rang a bell, but he wasn’t sure what kind of a bell. They were something he’d seen in textbooks. What was it they were called? Prayer beads, was it? That didn’t sound right.

"Hm?"

"You done with this part?" He pointed to an oblong, ridged plate at the front of the chest cavity.

"Uh-huh. For the moment."

"Well, I think you missed something."

"What?" Gideon said abstractedly, still thinking about the bony lumps on the ribs.

"This." John touched the plate-like bone. "This is the sternum, right? The breastbone?"

"That’s right," Gideon said, puzzled. "So?"

"Well, look at it!"

Obediently Gideon looked. "What about it?"

" This, for Christ’s sake!" John said. "Are you kidding me or something? The guy’s been shot. Even I can figure that out!"

Gideon, who enjoyed John’s outbursts of forensic enthusiasm, examined the round, smooth hole in which the tip of the agent’s index finger rested. "No," he said quietly, "that’s just the sternal foramen. Perfectly natural."

"Natural!" John shot Gideon one of his old snake-oil looks. "I’ve seen sternums before, you know; they don’t have‘perfectly natural’ holes drilled right through the middle of them. There aren’t any holes," he added accusingly, "in the ones you’re using in St. Malo."

"No, but that’s because most people don’t have one. There are a lot of variable foramina in the skeleton- sternal, frontal, mastoid-Just minor defects in ossification that show up once in a while."

John was silent for a few seconds, continuing to regard him doubtfully. "Yeah, maybe." He made an irritated sound. "How can you be so sure, anyway? I mean, you haven’t even looked at it under a magnifying glass or anything."

Gideon pulled himself up to his full height and looked eye to eye at John. "Does the Skeleton Detective of America," he asked scornfully, "need a magnifying glass to tell a sternal foramen when he sees one? Look at how smooth the edges of the hole are. That shows it’s developmental. Bullets don’t leave nice, smooth holes. Round, maybe, but not smooth."

"Sometimes they do," John said doggedly. "On the way in they do."

"No, they don’t. They might leave an even, beveled perimeter, but not a soft, rounded one like this. Besides-" He flicked off the brown, onionskin-like shreds of cartilage by which some of the ribs still hung on to the sternum and turned it over. "-it’s equally smooth on the back. Have you ever seen an exit hole like that?"

John’s perseverance finally flagged. He sighed. "No, I guess not…Hey, wait, couldn’t it be a healed bullet wound?"

Gideon opened his mouth to speak, but was cut off.

"And don’t tell me they don’t look like this, all smooth and round, because you’re the one who showed me they do. And what’s more-" He noticed Gideon’s smile. "What’s the joke?"

"A healed bullet hole smack in the middle of the chest?"

"Sure, why not? The heart’s on the left side, right? So a bullet exactly through the center might miss it. It might get the spinal cord and stuff, I guess, but a guy could still live, couldn’t he?" He didn’t seem to have convinced himself. "Or couldn’t he?"

"John, the heart is in the center of the chest. Most of it’s on the left side, yes, but just how much varies. If you want to be a hundred percent sure of hitting somebody in the heart, the place to shoot him is in the middle of the chest. You can’t miss. And if you shoot him in the heart he dies. Always."

"Yeah, all right," John muttered, "but still…"

"Anyway, a healed perforation looks different because you get a bony scar tissue building up around it; the edges of the hole thicken. Now, this hole, as you see-"

"All right, all right, forget it. Jesus Christ, do you know what a pain in the ass a guy is who has to be right all the time?"

"I don’t have to be right, I am right," Gideon said with heat. "Maybe if you stayed awake during those lectures the FBI paid all that money to send you to, you might know some of these things."

"Yeah, well, maybe if they didn’t put me to sleep I would."

They glared momentarily at each other and then burst into laughter with the ease of old friends who’d been over similar ground more than once, and John stretched and said: "Hey, I’m starving. We forgot about lunch, and it’s already five o’clock."

"Already?" That was depressing. In over an hour he had learned next to nothing. "Well, let me see what else I can find before Joly gets back…But I don’t think I’m going to come up with a hell of a lot."

"Don’t worry about it. You always come up with something weird. Joly’s gonna just love it."

But results, weird or otherwise, were few. It was almost as if a prudent murderer, anticipating the attentions of a physical anthropologist, had carefully removed everything that might be useful. Without the skull, the pelvis, or any of the limb bones, he couldn’t even make a guess as to height or weight.

Well, maybe a guess. One could get a ballpark-type stature estimate from the length of the vertebral column, and he did have the vertebral column-except for the little matter of the top four and bottom three vertebrae. That left him with seventeen out of twenty-four, a little less than seventy percent of the total, to which he could apply Dwight’s old table of coefficients and extrapolate ("fudge," John said, and he wasn’t far wrong) the body height.

When he finished clicking buttons on his calculator, the result was 175.31 centimeters-about five feet, eight inches, give or take an inch or so either way. So that was something. He stood looking at the bones, thinking, his pencil eraser tapping his lips. True, the 175.31 centimeters really was little better than a guess; he needed all the vertebrae, or a femur, or a tibia to come up with a defensible estimation. But his practiced eye, not burdened with the requirement of scientific defensibility, told him 175 centimeters wasn’t far wrong. This was a small-boned man who had stood five-feet-nine at most. And he’d been slight; the near-feminine delicacy of the clavicles and scapulas- which in muscular men were ridged and roughened by the pull of tendinous muscle insertions-suggested gracility, perhaps even frailty. Assuming that he wasn’t obese (bones held no information about body fat), his weight would have been somewhere around 130 pounds; 145 at the outside.

These conclusions were too tenuous to pass on to Inspector Joly, who made his appearance at the end of exactly two hours, which left embarrassingly little to tell: The remains were those of a male. (The proportions of the clavicles, scapulas, and sternum, while not completely reliable sex indicators on their own, were enough to provide credible support for Gideon’s intuition.) The probable age was thirty-two to thirty-four. Dismemberment had been performed with a knife at the shoulder, hip, wrist, and ankle joints, and at the fifth cervical and fourth lumbar vertebrae.