Cross bones

12

IDIDN’T COME CLOSE TO KEEPING WITHIN TEN MILES OF THElimit, but luck was with me. Johnny Law was pointing his radar at some other road.

Arriving at Wilfrid Derome, I parked in the lot reserved for cops. Screw it. It was Saturday and I might have God in my Mazda.

The temperature had surged upward into the low forties, and the predicted snowfall had begun as drizzle. Dirty mounds were melting into cracks and puddling pavements and curbs.

Opening the trunk, I retrieved Morissonneau’s crate and hurried inside. Except for guards, the lobby was deserted.

So was the twelfth floor.

Setting the crate on my worktable, I stripped off my jacket and called Ryan.

No answer.

Call Jake?

Bones first.

My heart was thumping as I slipped on a lab coat.

Why? Did I really believe I had the skeleton of Jesus?

Of course not.

So who was in the box?

Someone had wanted these bones out of Israel. Lerner had stolen them. Ferris had transported and hidden them. Morissonneau had lied about them, against his conscience.

Had Ferris died because of them?

Religious fervor breeds obsessive actions. Whether these actions are rational or irrational depends on your perspective. I knew that. But why all the intrigue? Why the obsession to hide them but not destroy them?

Was Morissonneau right? Would jihadists kill to obtain these bones? Or was the good father lashing out against religious and political philosophies he viewed as threatening to his own?

No clue. But I intended to pursue answers to these questions as vigorously as I knew how.

I got a hammer from the storage closet.

The wood was dry. The nails were old. Splinters flew as each popped free.

Eventually, sixteen nails rested by the crate. Laying aside my hammer, I lifted the lid.

Dust. Dry bone. Smells as old as the first fossil vertebrate.

The long bones lay on the bottom, parallel, with kneecaps and hand and foot bones jumbled among them. The rest formed a middle layer. The skull was on top, jaw detached, empty orbits staring skyward. The skeleton looked like hundreds of others I’d seen, spoils of a farmer’s field, a shallow grave, a dozer cut at a demolition site.

Transferring the skull to a cork stabilizer ring, I positioned the jaw and stared at the fleshless face.

What had it looked like in life? Whose had it been?

Nope. No speculation.

One by one, I articulated every element.

Forty minutes later, an anatomically correct skeleton lay on my table. Nothing was missing save a tiny throat bone called the hyoid and a few finger and toe phalanges.

I was sliding a case form onto a clipboard when my phone rang. It was Ryan.

I told him about my morning.

“Holy shit.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Ferris and Lerner were believers.”

“Morissonneau wasn’t so sure.”

“What do you think?” Ryan asked.

“I’m just starting my analysis.”

“And?”

“I’m just starting my analysis.”

“My ass ain’t mine until this stakeout’s done. But I got a call this morning. I may have caught a break on the Ferris homicide.”

“No kidding,” I said.

“When I’m cut loose here I’ll follow up,” Ryan said.

“What’s the lead?”

“When I’m cut loose here I’ll follow up.”

“Touché.”

“Damn, we’re professional,” Ryan said.

“No reckless speculation for us,” I agreed.

“Not a hasty conclusion in sight.”

When we’d disconnected I dashed to the first-floor cafeteria, devoured a tuna sandwich and Diet Coke, and raced back to the lab.

I wanted to torpedo straight to the key questions. I forced myself to stick to protocol.

Gloves.

Light.

Case form.

Deep breath.

I started with gender.

Pelvis: narrow sciatic notch, narrow pelvic inlet, chunky pubic bones bridging an inverted V in front.

Skull: bulging brow ridges, blunt orbital borders, large crests, muscle attachments, and mastoid processes.

There was no wiggle room. This skeleton was all boy.

I turned to age.

Angling my light, I observed the left pelvic half where it would have joined hands with the right pelvic half in life. The surface was pitted and slightly depressed relative to the height of an oval rim circling its perimeter. Spiny growths protruded from the rim’s upper and lower edges.

The right pubic symphysis looked the same.

I got up and walked to the watercooler.

I took a drink.

I took a breath.

Calmer, I returned to the skeleton and selected ribs three through five from both sides of the chest. Only two retained undamaged sternal ends. Laying the other ribs aside, I observed this pair closely.

Both ribs ended in deep, U-shaped indentations surrounded by thin walls terminating in sharp-edged rims. Bony spicules projected from the superior and inferior borders of each rim.

I leaned back and laid down my pencil.

Feeling what? Relief? Disappointment? I wasn’t sure.

The pubic symphyses scored as phase six on the Suchey-Brooks age-determination system, a set of standards derived from the analysis of the pelves of hundreds of adults of documented age at death. For males, phase six suggests a mean age of sixty-one.

The ribs scored as phase six on the Iscan-Loth age-determination system, a set of standards based on the quantification of morphological changes in ribs collected from adults at autopsy. For males, this suggests an age range of forty-three to fifty-five.

Granted, Y-chromosomers are tremendously variable. Granted, I’d yet to observe the long bones and the molar roots radiologically. Nevertheless, I was certain my preliminary conclusion would hold. I jotted it on the case form.

Age at death: forty to sixty years.

There was no way this guy died in his thirties.

Like Jesus of Nazareth.

IfJesus of Nazareth died in his thirties. Joyce’s theory had him living until eighty.

This guy fit neither profile.

There was also no way this man had lived into his seventies.

So he also failed to fit the profile of the old male from Cave 2001. But had the isolated skeleton described by Jake’s volunteer-informant actually been the old male? Maybe not. Maybe Yadin’s septuagenarian was jumbled with the commingled bones, and the isolated skeleton was another individual altogether. An individual of forty to sixty.

Like this guy.

I flipped to the next page.

Ancestry.

Right.

Most systems for racial assessment rely on variations in skull shape, facial architecture, dental form, and cranial metrics. Though I often rely on the latter, there was a problem.

If I took measurements and ran them through Fordisc 2.0, the program would compare my unknown to whites, blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese.

Big help if crate-man lived in Israel two thousand years back.

I went through the trait list on my form. Prominent nasal bones. Narrow nasal opening. Flat facial profile when viewed from the side. Cheekbones hugging the face. On and on.

Everything suggested Caucasoid, or at least European-like ancestry. Not Negroid. Not Mongoloid.

I took measurements and ran them. Every comparison placed the skull squarely with the whites.

Okay. Computer and eyeballs were in agreement.

What then? Was the man Middle Eastern? Southern European? Jewish? Gentile? I knew of no way to sort that out. Nor did DNA testing offer any help.

I moved on to stature.

Selecting the leg bones, I eliminated those with eroded or damaged ends, and measured the rest on an osteometric board. Then I plugged the measurements into Fordisc 2.0, and asked for a calculation using all males in the database, with race unknown.

Height: sixty-four to sixty-eight inches.

I spent the next several hours scrutinizing every knob and crest and hole and notch, every facet and joint, every millimeter of cortical surface under magnification. I found nothing. No genetic variations. No lesions or indicators of illness. No trauma, healed or otherwise.

No penetrating wounds in the hands or feet.

Killing the fiber-optic light on the scope, I arched backward and stretched, my shoulders and neck feeling like someone had set them on fire.

Could it be I was getting older?

No way.

I crossed to my desk, dropped into my chair, and checked my watch. Five fifty-five. Midnight in Paris.

Too late to phone.

Jake answered sounding groggy and asked me to wait.

“What’s up?” Jake had returned, whooshing a pop-top.

“It ain’t Jesus.”

“What?”

“The skeleton from the Musée de l’Homme.”

“What about it?”

“I’m looking at it.”

“What?”

“It’s a middle-aged white guy of average stature.”

“What?”

“You’re not holding up your end of this conversation, Jake.”

“You have Lerner’s bones?”

“The skeleton he liberated is here in my lab.”

“Christ!”

“Not this guy.”

“You’re sure?”

“This guy saw forty come and go. My best estimate says he was at least fifty at death.”

“Not eighty.”

“No way.”

“Could he have been seventy?”

“I doubt it.”

“So it’s not the older Masada male referred to by Yadin and Tsafrir.”

“Do we know for a fact that Yadin’s old guy was the isolated skeleton?”

“Actually, no. The older bones could have been mixed in with the main heap. That would leave the isolated skeleton as one of the fourteen males aged twenty-two to sixty.”

“Or totally unaccounted for.”

“Yes.” There was a long pause. “Tell me how you got the skeleton.”

I told him about Morissonneau and my visit to the monastery.

“Holy shit.”

“That’s what Ryan said.”

When Jake spoke again his voice was almost a whisper.

“What are you going to do?”

“First off, tell my boss. These are human remains. They were found in Quebec. They’re the coroner’s responsibility. Also, the bones may be evidence in a homicide investigation.”

“Ferris?”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“Undoubtedly my boss will tell me to contact the appropriate authorities in Israel.”

There was another pause. Sleet plopped against the window above my desk and ran in rivulets down the glass. Twelve floors below, traffic clogged the streets and crawled the Jacques Cartier Bridge. Taillights drew glistening red ribbons on the pavement.

“You’re sure this is the skeleton in the Kessler photo?”

Good question. One I hadn’t considered.

“I saw nothing to rule that out,” I said.

“Anything to rule it in?”

“No.” Lame.

“Is it worth another look?”

“I’ll do it now.”

“Will you talk to me before you contact Israel?”

“Why?”

“Please promise you’ll ring me first?”

Why not. Jake had initiated this whole thing.

“Sure, Jake.”

When we hung up, I sat a moment, hand resting on the receiver. Jake sounded uneasy about my notifying the Israeli authorities. Why?

He wanted first claim on rights to publish concerning the discovery and analysis of the skeleton? He feared losing control of the skeleton? He distrusted his Israeli colleagues? He distrusted the Israeli authorities?

I had no idea. Why hadn’t I asked?

I was hungry. My back hurt. I wanted to go home, have dinner with Birdie and Charlie, and curl up with my book.

Instead I dug out Kessler’s photo and placed it under the scope. Slowly, I moved from the top of the skull south over the face.

The forehead showed no unique identifier.

Eyes. Nothing.

Nose. Nothing.

Cheekbones. Nothing.

I twisted my head right, then left to relieve the pain in my neck.

Back to the scope.

When the mouth came into view, I stared through the eyepiece. I looked up and across my worktable at the skull.

Something wasn’t right.

Returning my eyes to the scope, I increased magnification. The teeth ballooned.

I brought the central incisor into focus, then inched from the midline toward the back of the jaw.

My stomach knotted.

I got up, retrieved my magnifying glass, and picked up the skull. Rotating the palate upward, I examined the dentition.

The knot tightened.

I closed my eyes.

What the hell could this mean?