Aaron Elkins: The Dark Place

"Right," Gideon said. "All mushed in." He took back the bone, grasped the projecting part tightly, and wiggled it.

The point came out at once, noiselessly, without disturbing the crushed rim of bone surrounding it. A faint odor of decay came from the hole in the vertebra. Julie moved back, wrinkling her nose.

"It’s a projectile point, all right," Gideon said.

"It sure is," John said. "Goddamn."

Gideon laid the point on the table. It was a triangular piece of ivory-colored bone a little over an inch long, its base rough and jagged. "It was in there deeper than I thought," he said, "about an inch. It almost went clean through."

He placed the point on a white sheet of paper and traced its outline with a pen. Then with dotted lines he extended the shape. "It’s hard to say, but I’d guess this is what it must have looked like complete." He had drawn a tapering form about three inches long and an inch and a half wide at its base.

Julie moved closer to the table, squeezing between the two men. Gideon was aware of the nearness of her hip and of her faint, fresh fragrance as she bent over the drawing.

"I’ve read a lot of Northwest Coast ethnology and archaeology, Dr. Oliver," she said, "and this doesn’t look like an arrow. It looks a lot like the kind of spear point they’ve turned up at the Marmes Rockshelter in eastern Washington."

"Does it?" said Gideon, interested. "Yes, it could be a spear. He changed the drawing a little, sketching in a few lines. "That does look better. The wooden shaft would attach there."

"Hold it now," John said. "Are we saying this guy was killed by a spear-a wooden spear with a bone point? That’s just a little bizarre, to say the least."

Gideon leaned back in his chair and shrugged.

"So what does that add up to?" John asked. "Was he killed by an Indian?"

"With a bone spear?" Julie said. "You’re kidding. The point I was talking about is ten thousand years old. And the local Indians are tribes like the Quileute and the Quinault. They’re busy managing their fish hatcheries and motels. With computers. They don’t go running around with bone spears."

"Do you know anybody who does?" John asked with a shade of temper. He looked at Gideon. "All right, what’s your theory, Doc?"

"Uh-uh," Gideon said. "I’m the anthropologist. I’ve told you these are the remains of a husky white male about twenty-nine and that this is a bone spear point in his spinal column. You’re the one who gets paid to come up with theories. But I agree with Julie; you’re on the wrong track if you think the spear necessarily means Indians."

John shoved his chair back and thrust himself out of it. "All right," he said, pacing, huge and bearlike in the small room, "we find a body in an Indian graveyard. He’s in there with what you tell me are Indian skeletons buried in Indian baskets. He’s got a bone spear that looks just like what the local Indians used to use stuck in him. But," he said, plopping back into his chair, "in no way could it possibly be an Indian who killed him. I don’t follow the logic."

"Look," Gideon said, "I didn’t mean it couldn’t be an Indian. It could be anyone. I meant don’t assume the circumstances point to an Indian."

Julie moved away from his shoulder and swung around to sit on the table, disturbingly near. He could have rested an arm on her thigh without moving from his chair. "I’m not sure about your logic either," she said, looking down at him.

Your logic? He was aware of an absurd letdown feeling. He had expected her support. "What exactly bothers you?" he asked.

"In the first place, how do you know without doing any lab tests that the skeleton hasn’t been in the ground twenty years, or a hundred? I know you’re not familiar with the soil or the climate…" She paused to let him answer.

"I just know," he said, telling the truth. "You get a feel for it, even if you can’t quantify your methods. Color of the bone…weight…density…" He picked up the vertebra. "Five years at least, ten years at most." He turned to John. "Have you ever known me to guess wrong?"

"Lots of times. What about those hand bones in the Reilly case, or the arm bone you said was sharpened when a dog had just chewed it up?"

"Those were different. That humerus had been sharpened, only it was a dog that-" He stopped and joined John in easy laughter. John had earned the right to be critical.

He wasn’t so sure about Julie, however. "What bothers you in the second place?" he said to her.

She picked up one of the baskets. "These," she said. "I’ll check my texts later, but I’m sure these weren’t made by any recent Washington Indians. The form is wrong, and the way the decoration is overlaid. The twining itself doesn’t look right. At least I don’t think so."

Here she might have a point. Gideon knew little about basketry. "You could be right," he said, not sorry about the opportunity to agree with her.

Julie put the basket back on the table. "Besides that, there aren’t any Indians who live in the rain forest itself, and there never were, not on a steady enough basis to have graveyards."

"Doc," John said impatiently, "is this point well made? I mean, was it carved by someone who knew what he was doing?"

Gideon took the fragment in both hands, running his fingers along the facets. "It’s crude," he said, "but whoever made it had plenty of experience. Why? Were you thinking someone might have been trying to make it look like an Indian killing?"

"Yeah," John said.

"Then why bury the corpse? It was just by luck you found it at all."

John nodded soberly. "I know. I’m just trying to cover all the angles." He looked down at the desk, suddenly uncomfortable. "Look," he said, "I’ve gone out of my way not to tell you about the Bigfoot tracks they found near the body-"

"Bigfoot!" Gideon said, raising his eyes to the ceiling. "Come on, John, you’ve got a perfectly solvable crime here with a rational explanation. I’m not even going to discuss a creature for which there isn’t a sliver of physical evidence-no live specimens, no skeletal material, no fossils, no carcasses, not even a reliable photograph. The very notion that a giant anthropoid could exist unseen…" He looked suddenly at John. "What do you mean, you’ve gone out of your way not to tell me?"

John’s eyes twinkled, but his mouth kept its serious line. "I thought you might give me a lecture if I mentioned it."

Gideon laughed. "See? That confirms your good sense. So no more talk of Bigfoot." But then he said, "There were tracks?"

"Yes," John said, "but definitely made yesterday, after we found the first skeleton, so there’s no direct connection. The local Sasquatch Society got all excited and made casts, and our people made some to send to headquarters. Fenster wouldn’t have anything to do with them. Said they were pranks."

"He’s right. Forget about Bigfoot, John. You’ll make yourself and the FBI look ridiculous. And I’m sure as hell not going to get involved."

"Look," John said, "I’m not stupid. I think it was a prank, too. But I’m not forgetting about anything that might be connected." After a moment he added, "You could at least look at the tracks."

"It wasn’t Bigfoot, John, and I’m not spending my time giving credibility to a set of joke footprints."

John was up again, thrashing the air with his hands the way he did when he was excited. "It wasn’t an Indian! It wasn’t Bigfoot! What was it, your average, everyday John Q. Citizen who walks around with a bone spear and kills people and buries them in the forest? Or maybe Eckert speared himself to death?"

After a lunch of ham sandwiches and chocolate milk from Lake Quinault Merc, Gideon aged and sexed the Indian burials, explaining to Julie and John as he went along: a man in his forties, another man of about eighty, two elderly women, and two infants, possibly twins, who had been buried in one grave and misclassified by Fenster as a single burial. He had identified a horrendous abscess in the upper jaw of the old man as a probable cause of death, but there wasn’t enough left of the others to provide any more information.