Aaron Elkins: The Dark Place

"How can you tell anything from this junk?" Fenster said. "A few vertebrae, a scapula…" He flicked the pieces disgustedly with the backs of his fingers. "It could be Eckert, could be the Hartman one. It’s been buried for five years at least. Looks like a male, maybe in his twenties, maybe older. But I’m not even sure it all belongs to one person." He folded his arms and leaned stiffly back in his chair. "This garbage is next to worthless. A waste of my time." He looked at the FBI agent with a mixture of annoyance and disapproval.

John Lau’s big, flat, Asian face remained impassive. "Well, it’s all we have, sir," he said. "Isn’t there anything else you can tell us?"

Fenster picked up one of the vertebrae and thrust it toward Lau. "See that growth on the ventral surface?"

Lau nodded. He didn’t know the ventral surface from whatever the others were, but he could see that the ugly, rough excrescence wasn’t a normal part of the bone.

"I’m not sure exactly what it is," Fenster said. "Some kind of oddball exostosis-a tumor, or a weird variation of osteomyelitis. Maybe even bone syphilis, although that usually doesn’t show up in vertebrae. Anyway, it’s a lead. Have a look at Eckert’s and Hartman’s medical records. If one of them had a bone disease in a highly advanced state, then there’s a good chance this is him."

"Okay, that’s helpful," Lau said, trying to look grateful. "You don’t suppose a physical anthropologist would be able to tell us anything more? I heard Gideon Oliver was working on a dig up near Dungeness. That’s only a few hours from Quinault."

Lau had thought it might be a mistake to mention Gideon Oliver, and it was. Fenster snorted, bringing his glasses down over his nose again. He pushed them back up. "Oh, God, spare me, will you? I know you think his reports on the Schuster case and that kidnapping in New Mexico were God’s gift to the world, but I’m a pathologist and I know. They were fantasy, garbage, crap. He was lucky. Maybe he knows his anthropometric theory- maybe, I say-but his conclusions are…speculative." He rolled his mobile lips around the word as if it might befoul them.

"Still," Lau said, knowing it was pointless, "he might-"

"Good Lord, the man’s an academic!" Clearly, that closed the case. Lau nodded resignedly. It would have been nice to have the pathologist recommend asking Oliver’s help, but it wasn’t required.

The telephone on the untidy desk against the wall buzzed, and Lau turned in his swivel chair to reach it, glad for the diversion.

"Lau," he said; then almost immediately, "Where?" He sat up straight and rummaged through the desk with both hands, twisting his neck to hold the telephone between ear and shoulder. "How many?" he said, writing on a yellow notepad. For a while he listened erectly and wrote, then fell suddenly against the back of the chair. "Oh, God," he said, "that’s all we need."

He hung up and turned toward Fenster, slapping the pad on the worktable in front of him. "Five more bodies found."

"Bodies or skeletons?"

"Skeletons. Mostly just a few bone fragments, not in good shape. Some are just four or five fragments in a basket."

"Come again?"

"Some of them were buried in baskets."

Fenster pursed his tiny red mouth like a child holding his breath and burst out suddenly: "This is ridiculous! I’m not going to spend any more time poking around a bunch of bones in baskets. They’re probably just old Indian burials anyway."

"Probably, but you know, there are unverified reports of people disappearing around here for fifty years."

"Yeah, sure, also unverified reports of the Abominable Snowman clumping around stealing sheep and scaring little kiddies."

His eyes on the pad, Lau smiled slightly. With slow, heavy strokes, he circled the last word he’d written. "Bigfoot," he said aloud. "You hit the nail on the head, sir. They’ve found some eighteen-inch, humanlike footprints nearby. They look like Bigfoot tracks, the locals say."

Fenster took off his glasses, finically disengaging the wire loops from one ear at a time. Silently he inserted the glasses into a case and snapped it shut with a sharp, terminal click. Then he rose. "I’m not going to be involved in this, Mr. Lau. I deal in real things, not fairy tales. I’ll look at your five baskets of bones this afternoon, and then I have a case waiting for me at headquarters. A hallux major ." He paused, looking at Lau as if he expected a challenge. "A woman," he said precisely, "has bitten the big toe off a would-be attacker. The toe has been recovered, and I mean to identify him from it. Now, that is the real world."

Lau barely repressed his grimace. Fenster took his jacket from the back of a chair and shrugged into it. "If you need more help than my poor abilities can provide, you have my sincere encouragement to bring in Gideon Oliver from Fantasyland University."

John knew that Julie Tendler usually showed exactly what she felt, and now her black eyes sparkled with surprise as she put her ham and cheese sandwich back down on its waxed-paper wrapping. "You mean you know Gideon Oliver? Personally? "

"The doc? Sure, why not?" He was having a cup of coffee at her desk to keep her company. As chief park ranger, she had been out with the crew that had been digging up the new burials, and she’d missed lunch. "He’s an old pal."

"I thought you just knew him because he’d consulted on some cases with the FBI."

"No, I knew him way before that. Met him when I worked for NATO in Europe, and we kicked around together for a while. We still get together fairly often. Why so amazed?"

"I’m not amazed," she said, picking up the sandwich again and nibbling at it, "I’m impressed. When I was finishing up my anthropology minor a couple of years ago, we spent a whole quarter just discussing his book."

"He wrote a book?"

The sandwich went back down to the table. "Are you serious? He wrote the most controversial-and I think brilliant-book on human evolution to come out in decades. And he must have published hundreds of articles."

"No kidding," John said. "Are you going to eat that pickle?"

She shook her head. "Well, what’s he like? He must be a lot older than you."

John bit off half the pickle and shook his head. "No, he’s about my age-forty, a little less."

"Forty! That’s hard to believe. I always assumed he was one of the grand old men of anthropology. Tell me more." She returned to her sandwich, but her mind obviously was elsewhere.

"Like is he married?"

"That’s not a bad place to start."

John finished the pickle. "No, he’s not married. Are you planning on leaving the chips over?" She handed him the bag, and he tore it open. "He was married before I knew him, for nine or ten years, and I guess they had some kind of fantastic relationship. She got killed in a car accident three, four years ago, and I don’t think he’s ever gotten over it. I think he’s still in love with her. Nora, I think her name was."

She frowned at her sandwich as if suddenly absorbed in it. "He doesn’t go out with women?"

John munched a potato chip with a loud crackle. "Do you always show this much interest in the grand old men of anthropology?"

"No, but this is going to be the first one I ever met. Does he go out?"

"Oh, yeah, he likes women, all right, if that’s what you mean. Used to go out with this girl in Heidelberg, Janet Feller, but…I don’t know, like I said, I think he’s still in love with his wife."

"What’s he like?" Julie asked with undisguised interest. "Is he good-looking?"

"I wouldn’t say he’s handsome," John said with a shrug, "but what do I know? He’s about my size, maybe a little shorter: six-one, six-two. Seems to be in pretty good shape. From what I can tell, the gals seem to like him."