Aaron Elkins - Fellowship Of Fear

A little later a thin, dark policeman brought them a manila envelope on a plastic, cafeteria-style tray. John undid the metal clasp. "I’m telling you, you’re not going to be able to make much out of this."

"I am an anthropologist, you know."

"So you keep telling me." He gently shook the contents onto the butcher paper.

It was true, Gideon thought; they didn’t look like much. Seven or eight fragments, ashy and fire-bleached, not a whole bone among them… Upper end of a right tibia- an adult, that could be seen from the union of the epiphysis with the shaft; it was one of the last of the long bone fusions to occur…A piece of mandible with two teeth in place-on the small side-Marco’s perhaps…A few shards of scapula too burnt to tell him anything…A piece of occipital bone…And some splinters of wood that the "expert" from Rome had apparently thought to be bone.

"John, can I borrow some paper and a pen? And do you suppose you could see if there’s a pair of calipers around this place, or a ruler, anyway? And if you could dig up a cup of coffee, that would be nice."

John was smiling his crinkly-eyed smile.

"What’s so funny?" Gideon asked.

"You are. You just look like a professor all of a sudden. You really look like you’re in your element. All you need is a magnifying glass and a Sherlock Holmes pipe and a white coat."

"Great idea. A magnifying glass would be very helpful, thanks." He grinned. "Skip the pipe and the coat."

When he had gone, Gideon realized how correct John had been. He was in his element. Sitting in front of a pile of bones to play detective, patiently unlocking their secrets one by one; there was nothing more absorbing, nothing more satisfying, nothing he’d rather be doing. At least there hadn’t been for two years now. A shiver worked slowly down his spine. How much he used to delight in sharing with Nora the little osteological deductions he’d made. She’d pick him up at the lab, and he’d go over them with her, step by step. ("I was really puzzled until I noticed that the crack in the left parietal had partially healed. That established two things beyond doubt: that the blow to the head had been delivered while he was still alive, and that he had lived no more than three or four weeks more. Therefore…")

And she would ooh and aah.

When she had died, he had come near to killing himself, the only time in his life he’d ever thought about it. He hadn’t known how he could possibly live without her. He did, somehow, but even now he wouldn’t let himself think of her, except when he awakened sometimes in the night and dreamed, drifting back…

So what was he doing now, chin cupped in his hands, elbows on the table, staring glassily at nothing? There were things to be done. He reached for the mandible and blew off its coating of powdery ash. It was the left rear corner of the jaw, where the ascending ramus joins the basilar segment. He ran his index finger lightly over it. No, it wasn’t Marco. The face that had covered this jaw had been more heavily muscled. You could tell from the rough ridges where the powerful masseter muscle had been attached. It was a male for sure; too rough for a female.

He touched the fragment of occiput; yes, a thick, raised superior nuchal crest, evidence of a massive trapezius muscle. The man had been heavy-jawed, thick necked, and broad-shouldered. It wasn’t Marco, and it wasn’t the one with the Etonian accent either; he had been too slender. It must be the other, then, the one who had been about to shoot him. He had been muscular and big-boned… No, that wasn’t right either. These bones were strong and bulky, but not large. The jawbone was definitely on the small side, in fact.

What was more…he looked at it again to make sure…yes, he was right! It wasn’t Caucasian; it was Mongoloid. Even though much of the corner had crumbled away in the fire, you could see where it showed signs of flaring widely at the mandibular angle. That was typical of Mongoloid skulls; it was one of the things that gave an Oriental face its broad, flat appearance. The signs of powerful musculature supported a Mongoloid hypothesis too. The flaring wasn’t pronounced enough to be an American Indian, but more than you’d expect in a Chinese. Japanese, most probably.

So far so good. The teeth, now. There were two of them still in place: second and third molars. The third molar was perfectly and fully erupted, not always the case with a wisdom tooth, and further evidence that the person had been an adult. There seemed to be some evidence of differential wear on them, which might help him to pinpoint the age, but the fire had cracked them both and made it hard to tell… Damn, where was John with that magnifying glass?

Impatiently, he looked over his shoulder toward the doorway and started violently when he saw John standing only two or three feet behind him.

"Whew, John! Don’t do that! How long have you been standing there?"

"You were so deep in thought, I didn’t want to interrupt." John set down two paper coffee cups. His own was already emptied; he must have drunk it while watching. "With the great Italian coffee they brew here, I don’t know why anybody drinks this lousy instant, but that’s all there is. Here’s a magnifying glass. Do you still want calipers? So far I haven’t been able to figure out sign language for them."

"No, a ruler would be fine."

"Okay, back in a minute."

Gideon took a swig of the coffee without tasting it, and put the mandible under the glass. Yes, he had been right. The cusps of the second molar were definitely worn down.

The third molar showed less attrition-just a little abrading of the cusp tips and the tooth edges. It was impossible, of course, to make a reliable age estimate based on tooth wear unless you knew what sort of food had been habitually consumed. Diet could make all the difference in the world. The relative wear of different teeth did provide some useful information, however.

His educated eye studied the two teeth. The second molar was roughly twice as worn as the third. Now, assuming that the second had erupted at twelve and the third at, say, twenty (here plain guesswork took over, third molar eruption time being notoriously variable), then-assumig that the teeth had been wearing down at the same rate ever since they had come up-what age would the person have been when the second molar had been chewing away for twice as long as the first and was therefore twice as worn?

It was like a Sunday paper riddle. He took another sip of the coffee, tasted this one, and grimaced. Then he made a simple matrix on one of the sheets of paper that John had carefully torn from his notebook, and filled it in.

Twenty-eight. At twenty-eight the second molar would have been masticating for sixteen years, the third for eight. But twenty-eight seemed young for these bones. What if the third molar had erupted late, at twenty-five? Then he would have been… thirty-eight, at which time the second molar would have been grinding away for twenty-six years, and the third molar for thirteen years. Thirty-eight looked about right for these remains. He wasn’t sure just how he knew that, but he had long ago learned to trust his instincts when it came to bones. Anyway, they weren’t instincts; they were intuitive responses to subliminal but well-learned cues. Yes, he’d bet on thirty-eight, plus or minus a couple of years.

What had he learned so far, then? He knew the envelope held what was left of a male, about thirty-eight, short and muscular, Oriental, and definitely not one of his attackers-at least not one that he’d seen. Who was it then? What had he been doing in the car?

Suddenly realizing that he’d been leaning stiffly forward in absolute concentration for fifteen minutes, he slumped back in his chair and finished the last of the coffee, satisfied and aware that he was enjoying himself very much. He picked up the mandible again. There was something else about the tooth-wear pattern, something that rang a bell…