Aaron Elkins - The Dark Place

"No," she said angrily, and two spots of color appeared on her cheeks. "He just caught me by surprise. And I didn’t know how you’d feel if people knew you were here. You are on the stuffy side, you know."

"I am?" he said, surprised. That he was a little stuffy, he knew. That Julie knew it was a bit of a shock.

"Well, sometimes, yes. How would you feel, anyway?"

"About people knowing I’m here? Julie, you must be kidding. I’m proud of it. I’d like it if everyone knew."

"Well," she said, still looking angry, "I wasn’t sure." She giggled suddenly. "I think I need another kiss, and a hug, too. I guess I’m feeling insecure."

He rose and took her in his arms, squeezing until she yelped. "Enough!" she cried. "I’m secure, I’m secure!" He kissed her and felt her throat tremble, and trembled himself. Again he almost told her he loved her, and again a niggling prudence held him back. "What was the call about?" he asked.

"Oh. Two things. First, a couple of teenagers from Hoquiam admitted faking those Bigfoot tracks."

"No surprise there. And second?"

She took her head from his shoulder. "Gideon, they’ve found another body. They think so, anyway."

What they thought was a body had been fished from Pyrites Creek only about a mile downstream from the ledge. It lay on a rubber mat in the workroom, a gummy, greasy mass of brownish-black tissue, formless and tattered, with bones sticking through, like a gobbet from the lion cage at the zoo. Julie had taken one look at it and fled. Gideon wished he could do the same. There was a great deal of difference between the impersonal, dry bones of archaeology and this hideous thing.

"We’d appreciate your help, Doctor. Can you tell if it’s human?" Julian Minor was John’s assistant, a middle-aged black in a dark suit and tie, with rimless glasses, neat, grizzled hair, and a tidy, complacent chubbiness that gave him the air of a self-satisfied accountant.

Gideon nodded. "Yes, it’s a human pelvic girdle, but I can’t tell any more than that until we get the bones cleaned."

"You mean remove the soft tissue?" the agent said with a delicate scowl. "I don’t know if I’m authorized to let you do that."

Let’s hope not, Gideon thought.

"But I’ll call Seattle and inquire," Minor said.

He dialed, muttered a few secretive syllables into the telephone, nodded three times, said, "Very well then," and hung up. "Mr. Lau says go ahead, but you’re to save the soft tissue for the pathologist."

"Okay," Gideon said with a sigh. "We’ll need some chemicals, though." Which would, with any luck, turn out to be unavailable.

No luck. When he went to Julie with the list she called in a young, redheaded ranger who prepared exhibits of birds and animals for the Hoh Information Center and who had everything needed. The young man was patently aggrieved when Minor told him he could not sit in on the operation.

In twenty minutes Gideon and Minor were back in the workroom at the far end of the table from the grisly chunk of flesh. In front of Gideon were dissection tools, rubber gloves, and measuring cups and containers of various sizes. He prepared a solution of water, sodium carbonate, and bleaching powder in a large dented pot and set it aside. "That’s antiformin," he said. "We’ll boil the flesh off the bones with it." A slightly different mixture was poured into a stone jar.

"But what about saving the tissue?"

"I’ll cut away everything I can first, and we’ll preserve it. Now," he said grimly, "to the dirty work."

He chose a heavy-duty scalpel, a rugged pair of forceps, a probe, and a pair of scissors. Then he talced his hands, slipped on a new pair of rubber gloves, went to the shapeless thing at the other end of the table, and began to work.

After years of dealing with human remains, Gideon still maintained a remarkable squeamishness. Through long practice he had developed the trick of not quite focusing his eyes on what he was doing at such moments, at least no more than was necessary to keep his own fingers out of the way of the scalpel. He employed the technique now.

Minor sat primly at the other end of the table some ten feet distant, watching him cut away the dark shreds of flesh and put them in the jar.

"The fact that it’s only a pelvis…" Minor said. "Was mutilation involved?"

"No sign of it. The body’s been in the water a while. I think it was just pulled apart by the current and the rocks."

"I see," Minor said. "May we assume that the remains are those of an individual of the, ah, Negroid race?"

"Negroid?" said Gideon, puzzled. "No, why?"

"The color of the skin is quite dark. Or isn’t that the skin?"

"Some of it’s skin, some of it’s muscle, and other, tissue. Gluteus maximus, mostly, and some of the other flexors and extensors; a little fascia lata. The soft inside stuff and the external genitalia are gone, decomposed or eaten by the fishes."

Minor’s lips twitched downward. Gideon didn’t blame him. With the forceps he teased out a black ribbon of flesh. "This still has some skin on it," he said, "and you can see it’s black, but once decomposition has begun, the color isn’t any guide to race. Caucasian skin turns brown or black a lot of the time, and black skin is likely to turn whitish-gray."

"I see," said Minor, slightly whitish-gray himself.

"You’re welcome." With his own stomach churning. Gideon stripped off the greasy gloves and stood up. "Now comes your part," he said.

"My part?" Minor blinked, and his hand went reflexively to the knot of his tie. "I don’t take your meaning."

"The solution in the pot needs to be stirred every thirty minutes for about three hours. Then mix this into it." He held up a bottle of sodium hydroxide in fifteen percent solution. "Then, if I’m not back yet, put the pot on the burner, heat it to a low simmer, and put in the pelvis. Take it out in a hour-but I’ll be back before then."

"My understanding," Minor said, not at all pleased, "was that you would be responsible for all the technical details."

Gideon shrugged. "If you’d rather not do it, you can ask the kid with the beard. I’m sure he’d be delighted."

"I think I can manage," Minor said. "I take it this is some sort of caustic solution."

"Yes, using one’s finger to do the stirring is not recommended."

Minor did not seem to find this amusing. Neither did Gideon. He was anxious to get out of the workroom, into the open air. "In the meantime," he said, "I thought I’d run over to Amanda Park and see the man who has the bone spear points."

Minor brightened. "Old Mr. Pringle? That shouldn’t take you any three hours. Amanda Park is only a couple of miles away. His house is a bit off the beaten path, but I can give you directions. It’ll take you fifteen minutes to get there."

It took him two hours. "Off the beaten path" was an understatement, and Gideon got hopelessly lost on back roads more than once before he stumbled on the place. When he finally pulled up at the side of the road next to the worn, birdhouse-shaped mailbox, he was ready to admit that Julie had a point about his being a city person. He got out of the car and stood looking at the ramshackle old bungalow of dingy white with faded green trim. On a gray day, with no other houses around, and made tiny by the thick forest, it was a forlorn sight. Only after a few seconds did he become aware that a very old man was sitting hunched in a corner of the porch, deep in the gloomy shade of a corroded tin roof.

Sleeping, or perhaps senile, Gideon thought. He walked to the house with a smile but with a distinct sinking of the heart. For an anthropologist he was peculiarly loath-nearly obsessively so-to intrude on others’ privacy.

"Mr. Pringle?" he said quietly when he reached the porch.