Old Bones

SIXTEEN

This time when Julie called him at 7 a.m., he’d been up almost two hours, ostensibly getting his notes ready for class, but mostly brooding about letter-bombs, murders, dismemberments, and the all-around nastiness of people.

"Hi," she said. "Isn’t it Wednesday there yet?"

It was as if someone had opened a window and let a fresh breeze into a fetid room. Her voice was sleepy and warm, bringing a vivid image of what it was like to awaken next to her in the morning, her warm, naked bottom snuggled sweetly against his thighs and belly, his arm lying loosely over her waist, his face against the silky, fragrant, sleep-damp nape of her neck.

He put down the ballpoint pen and closed Stewart’s Essentials of Forensic Anthropology. "I wish it was," he said sincerely. "Were," he corrected. That was what came of being around Ray again.

"Me too. It’s crazy, but I can’t sleep when you’re not with me; not very well, anyway. There are all kinds of creepy noises in the house that aren’t there when you’re here."

"What?" he said, pleased and flattered. "This from a thirty-year-old, self-sufficient park ranger who slept alone her whole life until recently?"

"Well, I wouldn’t exactly say my whole life. I mean, there were a few nights here and there-"

"Okay, okay, I’m sorry I sounded smug. But it’s nice to be needed."

"Oh, you’re needed, all right," she said with agreeable warmth. "Gideon, how are you? I’ve been worrying about you."

"Worrying? Why?"

"Because you-I don’t know, you always get into… adventures that never happen to anyone else. There isn’t anything wrong, is there?"

"Wrong?" He laughed. "No, of course not." What was a bomb in the morning mail to the truly adventurous? Besides, why bring it up now when it couldn’t serve any purpose other than to worry her? Later was good enough. If there was going to be any comforting and soothing as a result, he didn’t see why he shouldn’t be there in person for the benefits. "Not that things haven’t been exciting," he said. "Let’s see, when did we talk last?"

"Friday night; Saturday morning your time."

"Two days ago. Let me think now… No progress on the Guillaume thing, but it looks as if those bones in the cellar belong to a cousin named Alain who was murdered by the Nazis. Joly doesn’t think so, but I’m ninety-nine percent sure."

"But what were they doing in Guillaume’s cellar, then?"

"Ah, you cut right to the heart of things, don’t you? Nobody knows."

He took the electric coil out of the mug of water he’d been heating and tipped in a little Nescafe out of the jar. "I suppose the only other interesting thing is that we’ve had a murder; another cousin, a distant one named Claude Fougeray, who everyone blames for Alain’s death. He knew the SS was coming for Alain and didn’t warn him. Someone put cyanide in his wine. He expired in the drawing room, as a matter of fact, with everyone right there, including me."

He searched without success for a plastic spoon he thought he had somewhere, gave up, and stirred in the powdered coffee with his pen, listening all the while to her quiet breathing. "No comment?"

"I was just trying to decide whether or not you’re serious."

"And?"

"I decided you are." Another brief silence. "Aren’t you?"

"Sure."

"Gideon, you’re absolutely amazing. Never a dull moment. Do you know who did it?"

"No, but we think it might have something to do with Alain’s death, which makes most of the older members of the family suspects. They all loved him. Oh, and there’s even a chance the butler did it. The Nazis killed his father at the same time; also with Claude’s knowledge."

"Claude sounds like a wonderful guy. I agree with you; the murder’s probably got something to do with that, all right."

"I appreciate the vote of confidence."

"You’re welcome, but actually I was thinking about the cyanide."

"Come again?"

"Didn’t the Nazi bigwigs use cyanide to commit suicide if they were caught? Or am I thinking of arsenic?"

"No, you’re right. It was cyanide; because it works so fast. Goering killed himself with it in Nuremberg. Himmler bit into a glass capsule too. What makes you ask?"

"I was just thinking that if somebody was getting back at Claude for cooperating with the SS, cyanide would be a logical choice-you know, a kind of symbol, linking him with Nazi war criminals. Does that make any sense?"

"Well, it seems a little theatrical, but I guess it’s a point. I’ll mention it to Joly. Any other hints I ought to pass along?"

"You’re being snide, but yes, there is something else. You can tell him that Mathilde’s husband… What’s his name?"

"Rene."

"You can tell him that Rene isn’t guilty."

"Fine, I’ll sure do that. This morning. Did you want me to give him any particular reason?" He sipped the coffee.

"Uh-huh. You can point out that since he’s the one who let the workmen in to dig up the basement-You did tell me that, didn’t you?"

"Yes…"

"Then he couldn’t have had anything to do with Alain’s body being down there, or he’d never have let them get near the place."

Gideon put down the mug. "Julie, that is really a good point! Of course he wouldn’t have! I was being snide, and I hereby apologize. Abjectly. You’re making more progress back there in Port Angeles than I am in St. Malo."

She laughed, delighted. "You really hadn’t thought about that yourself?"

"I hadn’t even thought about thinking about it." He had another sip of coffee and ran the idea through his mind. "So if it’s true that Claude’s murder has its roots in the Occupation, and if it’s true that it was an act of revenge, and if Rene’s out of the picture… that just leaves Mathilde du Rocher and Sophie Butts. And Marcel, of course. They were all young then, but they haven’t forgotten."

"Don’t get carried away now; that’s a lot of if’s."

"There are a few," he admitted.

"Now that I’ve made my contribution, you don’t suppose we could talk about something besides murders, and skeletons, and Nazis for a while, do you? Things are getting creepier than ever around here."

He smiled. "You bet. You all settled down for the night?"

"Uh-huh. I’m in bed."

"Good," he said, his voice softening. "What are you wearing? That silky tan thing, I hope; the one that accentuates that lovely, long, marvelous intra-sacrospinalis sulcus you have."

"Ah," she said with a sigh, "that’s more like it."

Joly brought the three hoards of bones to the seminar in separate boxes, and he, Gideon, and John tagged each set with different-colored plastic tape to identify them. Then Gideon had the attendees lay them all out in proper anatomical position.

This was accomplished to his and the students’ satisfaction. Of the 200 visible bones of the human body (the other six were ear bones, deep in the skull), 197 were present, mice apparently having made off with three small wrist bones.

Gideon then told them in general terms about the circumstances of the find, discussed the sternal foramen, and pointed out and explained the knife-scarring on the fifth rib.

"Now, what I’d like you to do," he said to the twenty-odd trainees gathered around the table, "is to estimate sex, age, and height on your own, going through the same steps I would; by now you should know what they are. See what you can do with race too. You’ll split into three groups and we’ll get three separate reports, and then I’ll tell you how I see it. Any questions? If not-"

"Hold on one moment, please, Doctor." The speaker was a slender, delicate black police captain from Nairobi; voluble, articulate, and animated. And always ready to argue. "How do we know," he demanded in his machine-gun English, "that, these bones are a single individual? They were found in three separate packages. Perhaps they are parts of three individuals. Or two, or four. Who can tell for certain?"

"It’s obvious," retorted an officer of the Parisian Surete Urbain irritably, anxious to get on with the exercise. "We found a hundred and ninety-seven bones, all different. If there were more than one person here there would have been some duplications: two mandibles, two left clavicles-"

"True," Gideon heard Joly say quietly behind him, apparently talking to John.

"No, no, no," the Kenyan said. "To find duplications would indeed prove that there is more than one burial. But not to find them does not prove that there is not more than one burial." He folded his slender arms. "It is not warranted by the facts."

"That’s true too," Joly allowed.

But the class grumbled predictably at the Kenyan: Hadn’t Dr. Oliver said a hundred times that science doesn’t deal with proof, but with probability? And to find 197 bones without a single duplication-

"No, wait," Gideon said. "Captain Morefu’s making a sound point. We can do better than that. As a matter of fact, I have; while you were putting the skeleton together, I did a little matching."

He picked up the fifth cervical vertebrae, which was tagged with blue tape, and the fourth, tagged with green. "Vertebrae are the most complexly shaped and probably the most variable bones in the body, and they nestle into each other more closely than any others do; that’s what gives the spinal column its strength. Now, this C4 and C5 were in two different packages; if they were from two different people, they might fit roughly into each other-but not like this."

He held up the small, hollow-centered bones and slipped them against each other. They fit perfectly; as neat, tight, and inescapably matching as a pair of stackable chairs.

"No. No, Dr. Oliver, no." Captain Morefu was shaking his fine head. "How can I accept this as proof? How can we say with certainty that no two people have ever had greatly similar spinal columns? Many times have I seen-"

"Wait, Captain; give me a chance. There’s something else, and it’s about as close to proof as we’re going to get in this business. If you look at these two vertebrae-" He paused and held them out. "Here, have a look. Tell me if you see anything."

The Kenyan took them, turning them slowly around, frowning hard. After a few seconds he looked up, his face transformed and smiling. "These scratches. They match."

"That’s it," Gideon said and explained to the others. "The captain’s referring to the cut marks made during the dismemberment. If you hold the adjacent bones together in their natural positions, you can see how some of the marks start on one bone and end on the other. How could that happen unless they were together when the cuts were made? Case closed; We’re dealing with a single body."

He put the vertebrae down. "Now get going with your analysis. And remember, start with the sex."

"What difference does it make what we start with?" someone wanted to know. "Why the sex first?"

"Partly because you have to know the sex to draw other conclusions from it. Men and women have different proportions, as you may have noticed."

"No shit," one of the Americans said.

"But also," Gideon said with a smile, "sexing a skeleton is easier than anything else, and it’s nice to start with something easy. If you just flipped a coin you’d be right half the time. Compared to determining age, there’s nothing to it."

"For you, maybe," someone muttered.

"For you too," he said, not quite truthfully. "You’ve all watched me do it. Now let’s get to it."

The exercise went slowly while the groups measured, calculated, and debated. Gideon was itching to have a go at the new material himself, but resigned himself to wait, enjoying the teacherly satisfaction of watching his students put to competent use what they had learned from him.

At a little before ten, the three groups began their reports. They were unanimous in their determination of sex: the skeleton was that of a male. Gideon congratulated them and announced his agreement. A moment’s glance at the pelvis had confirmed what he already knew.

The groups also agreed on height; not surprising since all the long bones were there, and the application of the Trotter and Gleser equations was an easy task. But the estimate was surprisingly low: five-feet-four, plus or minus two inches. His own quick and dirty estimate from the vertebrae had been five-eight, and he couldn’t possibly have been four inches off. Two, maybe. Besides, Joly had already told him his findings matched Alain’s description. The attendees had fouled up somehow. He’d go over their work with them in a few minutes and straighten them out. Odd that all three groups should get it so wrong.

The reports on race were next. Given the complexity- some anthropologists said the impossibility-of determining ancestry from the skeleton, he hadn’t been going to ask it of them. But they had wanted to try, using the few simplified guidelines he’d given them (and, he was sure, the various stereotypes about skull thickness, brain-cavity-size, and "primitive" features that many of them had brought with them). Gideon let them go ahead, confident the experience would be instructive if nothing else.

It was. Two of the groups couldn’t agree among themselves and gave up trying, their preconceptions in tatters. This Gideon thought of as salutary and not unexpected. But the final group’s report was a dandy.

"We have determined," said the grave, slow-spoken female CID inspector who presented their report, "that the remains are those of a person of the Mongoloid race."

"Mongoloid?" echoed Gideon.

"Mongoloid," he was assured. "Quite probably northeastern Asiatic."

Anyone but the solid, relentlessly sober Inspector Hawkins and he might have thought his leg was being pulled. "Now where the hell did you get Mongoloid from?" he asked.

Inspector Hawkins was unfazed. "We applied intermembral ratio analysis and got a tibial-femoral index of 81.4," she replied without tripping over a syllable.

Well, she had her theory right, if nothing else. A tibial-femoral index of 81.4 meant that the tibia-the shin bone-was 81.4 percent as long as the thigh bone. And anything less than 83 percent was generally accepted as Mongoloid, reflecting the shortness of the Asiatic lower leg compared to the upper leg. In other races the typical ratio was much higher.

"Did you take the physiological lengths of the bones, not the maximum lengths?" he asked.

For the first time the sturdy Inspector Hawkins faltered. "The…ah…physiological lengths?"

That explained it, he thought with some relief. For a moment there he’d started to wonder what was going on. As racial criteria went, intermembral ratios weren’t bad, but they required trickier measurements than he’d been able to present in class. He’d spent a few minutes talking about the principles involved, but he hadn’t expected anyone to try and apply them. Fine, it would be one more good lesson for them to take back: using half-understood techniques was a mistake that could result in ludicrous errors. Better to call in an expert when you weren’t sure what you were doing.

"Here, let me show you how it’s done," he said, and taking the sliding calipers he moved to the table and picked up the right tibia. "Now, the physiological length of a long bone is its functional length, which you…"

His voice faded as he became aware of the odd heft of the bone. Puzzled, he looked more closely at it. Then quickly at the other tibia, and then both femurs. It was the first time he’d really examined them, and after twenty or thirty seconds’ study, he was still puzzled.

For one thing, Inspector Hawkins was right, even if she’d gone about it wrong. He didn’t need the calipers to tell him that the tibia was quite short compared to the femur. But it was the lightness of these normally dense leg bones that bothered him; that and their shape. There was something odd about them; not wildly odd, but

…something.

"Strange…" he said, more to himself than anyone else, and ran his fingers down the dusty, dry, brown length of a femur.

The class had seen him at work before and they were used to this. They waited patiently.

Not Joly. He stepped up to the table. "What’s strange?"

"The bowing," Gideon said abstractedly, continuing to move his hand over the bone. "Look at the shaft. And do you see the torsion in both tibias-just a little, as if someone grabbed each end and gave it a small twist?"

"No," Joly said.

"Do you know what that means?" Gideon went on, still staring at the bones.

"No," Joly said again, this time with a wary edge to his voice.

"Oh-oh," John murmured from outside the jellyfish-ring. "Looks like another case of cleidocranial whatsamatosis."

The circle of trainees surged silently forward with interest, all at the same time, like a jellyfish flexing inward.

Gideon looked at Joly. "Inspector, I know who this is."

Joly looked down his nose at him, head tilted back, lips pursed, eyes narrowed. "You knew who it was yesterday."

"I was wrong," Gideon said.