Aaron Elkins - Fellowship Of Fear

John returned with a metal ruler. "Hey-" Gideon held up his hand and John stopped obediently, nailed to the floor.

It was the second molar that was bothering him-the oddly eroded, concave depression on the anterobuccal edge. He had seen something like that before; where was it?

With startling clarity, it came back to him. It had been one of the great triumphs of his graduate years at Wisconsin. He and the great, the studiedly eccentric, Professor Campbell had been in the laboratory studying a cranium and mandible that had been plowed up by a farmer and then turned over to the university’s physical anthropology laboratory by the Madison police, for help with identification. It was a routine occurrence. Usually such bones turned out to be remnants of centuries-old Indian burials, but this one hadn’t.

They had already identified the cranium as that of a Caucasian in his fifties, buried between ten and thirty years before. Professor Campbell had puffed away at his pipe, chewing audibly on the stem, his thick, carefully combed eyebrows arched high. He had muttered to himself about the remarkable, saucer-shaped depressions in the first and second molars. "Hmm," he said (puff), "hmm. What do you think, Oliver? What could it be (puff-puff), what could have done it? Hm?"

Gideon, a second-year doctoral student, had sat, shy and deferential, waiting for the great man to answer his own question.

"Just don’t know," Professor Campbell said, through a veil of fragrant smoke. "What could do that? Never seen it before." The celebrated eyebrows frowned in defeat.

Gideon cleared his throat. "Sir," he said, "could it be from a pipe? Would smoking a pipe for maybe decades do it?"

The professor had been delighted. He whooped, pushed his massive body from his chair, and shambled to his desk, rummaging in drawers until he came up with a dental mirror. Together they had explored his own right lower molars. Gideon was embarrassed and delighted by the intimacy, and they had quickly found it: the same depression in the same place.

"Oliver," the professor said, "that’s splendid, splendid!"

After nearly twenty years, Gideon could still bask in the glow. There was even a little more. "Professor," he had said, made bolder by success, "do you think we could hypothesize that he was right-handed? Don’t most pipe smokers hold their pipes in their dominant hands? And don’t-"

"Of course! Excellent! People who hold their pipes in their right hands generally put them into the right sides of their mouths. Wonderful! The police will never understand it. To determine handedness from a mandible! They’ll be talking about it for years!"

Gideon had checked that same afternoon on a sample of fifty pipe smokers in Sterling Hall (smoking pipes had been de rigueur for serious graduate students in 1963) and had found that forty-four of them habitually put their pipes into their mouths on the same side on which they held them in their hands, and that forty habitually held them in their dominant hands. Months later, when the police had definitely established the identity of the remains-the victim of a mass murder in the 1940s-his pipe-smoking and right-handedness had been confirmed.

And now here it was again, the same depression in the second molar. The man had smoked a pipe, and in all probability he’d been left-handed. Now-

"Uh, Doc," John said, "do you mind if I watch?"

"Of course not," said Gideon.

"Could you explain to me as you go along? That is, if I could understand it?" He was a little shy; Gideon was touched.

"Sure," he said. "It’s not complicated, really. What I’m going to do is estimate the height."

"You can tell how tall the guy was from these? "

"I can make a rough guess."

"So can I, but that doesn’t make it right." John said it aggressively, provocatively, but Gideon was beginning to understand his style. In a second he would burst into laughter.

He did, and Gideon laughed too. "Well, that’s the difference between a professor and a cop," Gideon said. Look, it is pretty iffy, but it’s a place to start. This is the tibia, the proximal part of it, anyway. That’s your leg bone, from the knee down. It’s the only one of all these pieces we can use to estimate height. You can only do it from the long bones. The idea’s simple enough; people with long tibias usually have long femurs-thigh bones-and if they have long thigh bones they probably have long vertebral columns, and so on. The same relationships hold true for short people. So if you can get a measurement on one of the long bones, you can project the others, and total height too.

"But not all tall people have long legs." John was sounding genuinely interested, like one of Gideon’s own anthropology students.

"Right, only most do. If I had a hundred tibias here, I’d feel confident in estimating the average total height. The few tall ones with short legs would balance out the few short ones with long legs. But with only one, how do I know I don’t have one of the oddballs? I don’t, but the odds are on my side."

"Fair enough."

"Okay. We can shortcut the calculations a little. If I remember correctly, we can get the approximate total height from the tibia by multiplying tibial length by ten, dividing in half, and subtracting about five percent. The taller a person is, the less reliable that becomes, but I think this guy’s short. Anyway, let’s measure it."

John sat, childlike in his concentration on the fragment in Gideon’s hand. When Gideon didn’t do anything for a long time, he finally asked, "What’s the matter?"

"You’ve got the ruler."

John chuckled delightedly and handed it over. Gideon realized he was beginning to like John Lau very much.

The tibial fragment was 113 millimeters long. "All right," Gideon said, "time for a major leap of faith. I’ll guess that we’ve got about a third of the total bone here- you can tell from the popliteal line, this ridge on the back. That would make the total length… 339 millimeters, say 340."

He jotted a few numbers on a piece of paper. "Total height, 1615 millimeters," he said. More jotting. "About five-four."

"All you have to do is know the formula? That’s all there is to it?"

"That’s what Watson was always saying to Holmes… after the fact."

"Except that Sherlock Holmes was always right." The enthralled student was giving way to the skeptical cop. "No offense, Doc, but you sure made a lot of unverifiable assumptions there. Maybe they’re okay when you’re measuring ten-thousand-year-old Neanderthals. Who could prove you were right or wrong? But this stuff would never hold up in court."

John was quite right, Gideon knew. He’d often had similar thoughts about prehistoric finds. But he also knew somehow that his estimate was accurate. "I may be an inch or two off, but no more. You can count on it." Pettishly he added, "And the Neanderthalers are a lot closer to fifty thousand years old than to ten."

"Okay, Doc, you’re the expert. Only I’m still not convinced. But what are you suggesting? That it’s the little one, Marco?"

"Marco?" Gideon had forgotten that John wasn’t aware of the rest of his findings. "No, it’s not Marco. Marco was about twenty. This one was nearly forty. And Japanese. And built like a wrestler, say 145 pounds."

All this was put rather more confidently than the data warranted, but a strong front seemed appropriate. Then the coup de grace:

"And, if it’s of any interest, he was left-handed and he smoked a pipe."

The effect was more than Gideon had hoped for. John’s mouth dropped open and he actually stammered. "You’re telling me you know all that from… some… some skull bones and a…a piece of leg bone? You don’t have any hand bones-any, any arm bones! How can you know he’s left-handed?" John was chopping at the air with both hands, his quirky temper on the rise.