Icy Clutches

Chapter 4

Gideon started with the mandible. He picked it up in both hands, turning it slowly, his elbows on the table. Considering that it had spent thirty years or so grinding along in a glacier, it was in pretty good shape. It was male; he knew that at once from the ruggedness, the large size, and the double prominences of the chin. (In the old days, before the sexest terminology had undergone rehabilitation, males had had square jaws. Now they had chins with double prominences.)

And it was Caucasian, although here he was on less certain ground. Race was trickier than sex-to start with, you had more choices-and mandibles didn't offer a lot of clues. Like most physical anthropologists he didn't always find it easy to say precisely how he knew from looking at it that a certain mandible was Mongoloid, or black, or white. But-like most physical anthropologists-when he knew, he knew. And he had little doubt that the sophisticated calculations of discriminant-function analysis would bear him out when he got his tools to make some measurements (and his calculator to do some arithmetic).

Aging was more straightforward. The mandible had belonged to an adult; that was obvious from the one tooth in place; a third molar, a wisdom tooth with a good five to ten years’ wear on it. Exactly how old an adult? Well, if you took the average age of third-molar eruption-eighteen-and added that five or ten years to it, you came up with an age of twenty-three to twenty-eight, and that was Gideon's guess.

But here he was on shaky ground again. Eighteen might be the average age that wisdom teeth came up, but betting on averages would make you wrong more often than right, especially with something as wildly variable as third-molar eruption. As he liked to point out to his students, an awful lot of people had drowned in San Francisco Bay, which was just three feet deep-on the average.

And as for that “five or ten years of wear,” it sounded fine, but it was even less reliable. Tooth wear depended on what you chewed. If you ate a lot of gritty, abrasive stuff, your teeth were going to wear down quickly. If you lived on puddings and jellies, on the other hand, you'd have a few problems, but worn teeth wouldn't be one of them.

All of which suggested that twenty to thirty-five would be a more prudent estimate than twenty-three to twenty-eight. But what the hell, Gideon thought, why not go with his first impression, which was (as he often told himself) no mere shot in the dark, but the soundly based if intuitive assessment of a highly trained scientist? Well, make it twenty-five, plus or minus three. That would narrow things down and still be reasonably defensible.

Was there anything else the mandible could tell him? No dental work on the molar, of course; that would have made it too easy. And no signs of pathology. Eleven of the twelve tooth sockets were empty, but their margins, where they hadn't been broken or abraded, were crisp, without any sign of bone resorption, which meant that there had been no healing. Which meant in turn that they had loosened and fallen out after death. Which is what usually happened in skulls that took any kind of tossing around. The only reason the third molar was still in place was that it was slightly impacted, wedged crookedly into the angle of the ramus.

There were a few signs of trauma: a curving crack in the cusp of the molar and some crushing at the back of the left mandibular condyle, the rounded projection that fits into a recess just in front of the ear. And there were a few fracture lines radiating from the broken edge where the right side of the jaw had been sheared off just behind the empty socket of the first bicuspid. All bore signs of having happened right around the time of death-what pathologists called perimortem trauma. Nothing surprising there. When you were done in by an avalanche, there were bound to be a few dings.

So: What he had was a male Caucasian of about twenty-five, probably of at least average size and in apparent good health, with nothing to suggest that he hadn't been killed in an avalanche and a few things to suggest that he had. He'd go over it more carefully when his equipment arrived, but he didn't think there was anything else to learn from it; at least nothing that would help in making an identification.

He put it down and picked up the femoral fragment. It was the upper six or seven inches of the bone, and it had taken more of a beating than the mandible. It had obviously been well chewed over, and apparently by more than one kind of animal: bear for certain, and something smaller, a marten or weasel. From the looks of it the crows or ravens had had a go at it too. Still, there was always something to be learned…

He fingered the head, the caput femoris, the golfball-sized hemisphere that fitted into the acetabulum to make the ball-and-socket joint of the hip. Most of it had been gnawed away, but he could see enough to tell that it was mature; the very end of the bone, the epiphysis, was securely attached to the shaft, which happened at seventeen or eighteen for this particular union. And the sex was male. He didn't need measuring calipers to see that the diameter of the head was somewhere near fifty millimeters, well above the normal female range.

And that was all there was to say about the femur. No way, unfortunately, to tell if it had come from the same person as the mandible. Later he'd try calculating a total height estimate from it, but for now he had to settle for adult male, period.

That left the contents of the boot, and there wasn't much to learn there. The twenty-six bones of the human foot-seven irregularly shaped tarsals comprising the ankle and heel, five long metatarsals forming the arch, and fourteen stubby little phalanges making up the toes-were singularly lacking in information of use to the forensic anthropologist. Either that, or feet had understandably failed to capture the forensic anthropological imagination enough to stimulate any detailed studies.

Whichever it was, all Gideon could say about them after he'd cleaned them, arranged them, and briefly examined them was that the foot, like the mandible and femur, had belonged to a fairly large adult male. The large talar surface told him that, and the bulky metatarsals. (Not that it took an anthropologist to figure it out. How many people were there walking around in size twelves who weren't male, adult, and reasonably large?) He'd know more after his tools and tables came, but even then he wasn't expecting much of anything to come from it.

He stretched, wandered around the room until he found a chipped mug on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, and poured himself some coffee from the automatic maker on the corner of one of the desks. He gave serious consideration to the two withered cake donuts in the open Hostess box, but decided in the end to heed Parker's warning. No place to wash his hands first anyway.

He stepped out onto the wooden porch. The crisp breeze, straight off the glaciers, sent a shiver crawling down his back (or was that the bitter black coffee?), but it felt good to be out in the fresh air after bending over those stale, sad fragments. He felt a little stale himself, or perhaps just disappointed. He hadn't come up with much of anything. He didn't even know how many people were represented on that table.

He changed his mind about having a donut, went back in, got a paper towel to hold it in, and came back out, munching slowly.

The scanty results weren't his fault, of course; there simply were no distinctive features, nothing to separate one individual human being from another; no healed fractures, no signs of surgery, no distinctive anomalies or peculiar genetic formations. The only interesting features, really, were those perimortem injuries to the mandible. Funny, when you thought about it, how much they…

He frowned, finished off the donut with his third bite, and went back inside. He picked up the mandible again, thoughtfully stroking the broken margin with his thumb. Then he fingered the cracked molar, the crushed condyle. Was there something to think about here after all, or was he just The door opened. “Hey, are you still at it?” Parker asked. “You need some more time?” He waited at the door. Behind him Tibbett peered warily over his shoulder.

Gideon glanced up at the wall clock. They'd been gone almost an hour. It had seemed like fifteen minutes, but he was used to that when he got absorbed in skeletal material. Reluctantly he put the mandible down: He could give it some more thought tomorrow, when he had a decent lens.

"No, come on in,” he said. “I'm just about finished."

Parker approached. Tibbett kept pace with him, remaining a gingerly half-step behind.

Gideon told them as much as he was relatively sure of. The mandible was from a male Caucasian of twenty-five, give or take three years, probably above average size. The femur and the foot were also both adult male, both above average size. No indicators of race, but no reason to think they weren't also Caucasian. That was it. His materializing questions about the mandible he kept to himself for the time being.

"Well-does that mean they're all from one person?” Tibbett asked.

Gideon spread his hands. “It could be one person, could be three. There isn't any duplication of parts, so there's no obvious proof that it's more than one, but that doesn't mean it isn't. And the appearance of the bones isn't different enough-or similar enough-to say for sure whether they all belong to the same person. And except for the bones in the boot, none of them are adjacent to each other in the living body, so we can't even put them together to see how well they fit or don't fit."

Tibbett's eyebrows went up. "That's the way you tell?"

Gideon smiled. Explaining skeletal analysis was like telling someone how you made a matchstick disappear or plucked a coin out of nowhere. A lot of otherwise intelligent people were disappointed when they found out there wasn't any magic involved.

"Well,” he said, looking soberly at the assistant superintendent, “I'm thinking of applying the Baker and Newman regression equations for determining bone association from relative weights in ostensibly commingled remains. If I can get an accurate scale."

"Ah,” Tibbett said, his sense of propriety restored. “We'll certainly see that you get an accurate scale."

"Well, it's not three people,” Parker said. “I can tell you that right now."

Gideon looked inquiringly at him.

"There were three people on that survey team,” Parker said, “but only two of them were men. The other was a woman, Jocelyn Yount. And since these bones are all from men, they can't be her, right? That leaves James Pratt and Steve Fisk."

"Why, that's right,” Tibbett said appreciatively.

"But we still don't know for a fact that these are from the survey,” Gideon said.

Parker shook his head. “Nah, those are the only missing people we've ever had in that section of the bay. Since they started keeping records, anyway. Arthur's right about that."

"Well, of course I am,” Tibbett agreed.

And he probably was. Certainly there was nothing about the bones that suggested that they hadn't been there for twenty-nine years. True, they still had a trace of the distinctive candle-wax odor that meant the fat in the marrow was somewhere beyond the rancid stage but short of the dried-up stage. Ordinarily this would mean the time of death had been anywhere from six months to four or five years earlier. But this too was wildly variable, depending on conditions, and cold could slow it down tremendously, as it retarded all degenerative changes in dead tissue. And with bones that had been in a glacier for two or three decades, you were going to get one hell of a slowdown.

"Owen,” Gideon said, “did you have a chance to talk to anyone about what these people looked like?"

"Sure did. Dr. Henckel and Professor Tremaine both."

"And? Did either of the men fit what we seem to have here? Caucasian, twenty-five or so, tall, probably well built?"

Parker laughed, dropped into a wheeled swivel chair, and pushed off a few inches, heels in the air. “They both did. Both big healthy guys, twenty-four, twenty-five years old."

Gideon hesitated. “Did they say either of them had anything wrong with his face?"

"His face?"

"A wired jaw, maybe; something like that?"

"No, why?"

"Yes, why?” Arthur asked. “What are you getting at?"

"No matter. Well, the bones could belong to either of them, or both. I'm afraid I can't do any better than that."

"Well, that's that, then.” Tibbett rubbed his hands briskly together. “All we can do is what we can do. Thanks so much for your help, Gideon. I'll initiate procedures to see that the remains-"

"Wait a minute, Arthur,” Gideon said, “I think you're jumping the gun. I haven't given those bones a decent going-over yet. Besides, you're going to want to go back to the Tirku area to see if there's anything else out there."

"I'm going to want to do no such thing.” Tibbett's voice ratcheted up a notch. “We've already searched. I found that horrible jawbone. It was the most macabre experience I've ever had in my life.” His eyes rolled up. “Alas, poor Yorick."

"I think Dr. Oliver's right,” Parker said.

"Why? What is there to be gained? What-"

But the ranger knew how to get his supervisor's attention. “We'll have to submit a recovery report on this. How will it look to Washington if we can't put down that we instituted a systematic search for remains?"

"I just told you-"

"With equipped, professional park-ranger personnel.” Tibbett sagged. “All right, all right. Let's get it done. What do you suggest?"

"Jesus Christ,” Parker said abruptly, looking at the empty Hostess box. “You ate one of those donuts?"

"I get hungry when I work,” Gideon said. “It wasn't that bad."

"Yeah, but still-"

"Owen, this is serious,” Tibbett snapped. “Now what do you suggest?"

Parker grunted good-naturedly. “Bill Bianco's taking the glacier rescue class up Tarr Inlet for tomorrow's field training. Why don't Russ, Frannie, and I hop a ride on the boat? They can drop us off at Tirku and pick us up on the way back. It'll give us a good three hours or so to look around."

"Fine,” Tibbett said, sighing. “You have my approval."

"You'll probably want to come too, Dr. Oliver,” Parker said.

"I sure do."

Tibbett made fluttery motions with his hands. “Just a minute. I don't know about that. We have to be careful here. Our insurance provisions wouldn't cover anybody who isn't on official government business."

"Well, what the hell would you call this?” Parker asked, then added, “sir."

"Well, I don't…Gideon, would you say it's absolutely necessary for you to be present?"

Gideon leaned forward. “Absolutely,” he said earnestly. “If they do find some more bones, it'd be extremely important for me to observe the contextual and relational conditions firsthand."

It would also beat hell out of spending the day moping through the rest of the Alaska Geographics.

The resident manager of Glacier Bay Lodge had been doubtful about the wisdom of opening the Icebreaker Lounge from 5:00 to 6:00 P.M. each day with only two small groups staying at the hotel. Servicing a bar for a total of twenty hotel guests, Mr. Granle thought, was likely to be a losing proposition. As it turned out, he was wrong. The members of M. Audley Tremaine's group were on all-inclusive expense accounts and drank accordingly. The Park Service people were not on all-inclusive expense accounts, but they drank like it anyway. For the second evening in a row, there wasn't an empty table, and most people were on their second rounds, a few on their third.

M. Audley Tremaine himself was holding court at the bar, oozing urbane charm. In attendance were a tipsy, wisecracking Shirley Yount, who had obviously started her cocktail hour in her room, and half-a-dozen star-struck park rangers in jeans and sweaters. Anna Henckel, Walter Judd, and Gerald Pratt made an unlikely trio at a table by the big window looking west over the cove. Anna, reading from a sheet of paper, was grimly and methodically ticking off points. Judd, not overly responsive, chuckled and joshed. Pratt, between them, was leaning back out of the way in his chair, Seven and Seven in one hand, pipe in the other, equably gazing over their heads at the clouds obscuring the Fairweathers, and himself off somewhere in clouds of his own making. Elliott Fisk was nowhere to be seen.

Most of the other tables were taken up by park rangers in groups of two or three, and Julie and Gideon had been lucky to find a table of their own near the stone fireplace.

"You want my honest opinion?” Julie was saying.

"Of course I want your honest opinion."

"I think you're…well…"

"Inventing things?"

"No, not inventing. Reaching…exaggerating. It's natural. You're at loose ends, and you're bored, and I just wonder if your imagination isn't getting the better of you."

Gideon leaned back in the comfortable captain's chair, stretched out his legs, and crossed them at the ankles. He'd been wondering the same thing himself. “Maybe so, but I'm not exaggerating that break in the mandible."

"I don't mean that you're exaggerating the physical facts, I mean that you're exaggerating-inventing-well, the-"

"The cause of them?"

"No, not the cause. The-"

"Antecedents. Determinants."

She sighed and picked up her white wine. “How am I supposed to argue with you if you keep telling me what I mean?"

He smiled at her. “Are we arguing?"

"No, we're just-I guess we're just-"

"Speculating. Deliberating. Conferring."

Julie raised her eyes to the rough-beamed ceiling. “I'm going to kill him. All right, tell me what you found."

"I already told you. I spent fifteen minutes telling you."

"I was in the shower washing my hair. And you were yelling from the other room. I missed a word here and there. Tell me again."

"All right, I found-"

"It might help if you kept it to words that a simple, unsophisticated park ranger is capable of understanding this time."

"Such as yourself?"

"Such as myself."

"A park ranger who minored in anthropology."

"Nevertheless."

"Uh-huh.” Gideon took a few kernels of popcorn from the bowl on the table. “All right, I found that the mandible was broken off on the right side, a sharp, vertical break, and the broken margin was beveled, not jagged. And the fracture lines were what we call ‘stepped.’ That means, well…stepped. Like stairs. Okay?"

"Okay."

"I also found that the left M3 mesiolingual cusp had a menisciform fracture."

She eyed him over the rim of her wineglass.

"The left third molar had a sort of crescent-shaped crack,” he explained.

"That I can handle."

"And, finally, there were signs of pressure damage on the posterior surface of the left mandibular condyle, which is-"

"The little round thingy on the hack of the jawbone, that fits in that socket on the skull. Right?"

He sipped his Scotch and soda. “Not bad for a simple park ranger."

"Watch it, don't press your luck. And in your mind all this adds up to what? In a nutshell, please."

Gideon helped himself to a handful of popcorn while he put what it all added up to in a nutshell. “If that mandible had been found in a shallow grave near Green Lake, and I'd been asked for my opinion-my expert opinion, I modestly call to your attention-I would have said that this particular profile of indicators is consistent with an extremely forceful ante-mortem impact in the region of the protuberantia mentalis."

She nodded soberly. “Sounds like you, all right.” Gideon let it pass. “An extremely strong blow to the point of the chin. The living chin."

"All right, I'm with you so far. Where you lose me is when you say it wasn't caused by the avalanche."

"I'm not saying it wasn't, Julie. I'm just saying that every time I've ever run into that particular combination of injuries up to now, it was the result of one human being hitting another human being. Either with his fist, if he happened to have a fist like a gorilla's, or more likely with some heavy object, like a rock, or maybe a bat or a hammer. It just makes me wonder, that's all. Which is what they're paying me to do. Or would be, if they were paying me. Want another drink?"

"Nope.” She munched popcorn for a while. “Would a blow like that have killed him?"

"Impossible to say. The specific injuries to his jaw, no. But he was hit hard. There might easily have been associated injuries to his brain or his spine."

"So you're saying this may have been a murder."

He spread his hands. “I'm saying that just before he died, this guy-either James Pratt or Steven Fisk-was hit in the face with tremendous force."

"But how can you be so sure it was before? How do you know his jaw wasn't damaged long after he was killed, even years later, by pressures in the glacier itself?” She shook her head. “We sure have the damndest discussions."

"I know for several reasons. First, the collagen fibers in the bone tissue were intact at the time-which I know because the distortion of the trabeculae-"

She held up her hand. “I'm convinced. All right, then, why-dare I ask-was it ‘just’ before? Why not a week before, two weeks before? A separate accident, a separate fight?"

"Again, several reasons. No signs of healing. No signs of treatment-and that jaw would have needed wiring. Also, for what it's worth, Tremaine and Henckel don't remember either of the men having anything wrong with his jaw."

"What did Arthur say when you told him all this?"

"Are you serious? Just having the bones turn up is about all the poor guy can handle right now. I'm not telling him we might be dealing with a murder until I have more than this to go on."

She ate some more popcorn, kernel by kernel. “Look,” she said reasonably, “you've never examined anyone who died in an avalanche before, have you?"

"No."

"So you don't really know firsthand what avalanche injuries look like."

"Well, no, not firsthand."

"You said that getting hit on the chin with a rock could do this. There would have been rocks flying around in the avalanche, or at least big pieces of ice, right? Why couldn't one of those have done it?"

"Right smack on the point of the chin?"

"Why not?"

"No other signs of injury; no impact points but this one, flush on the jaw?"

"Why not?"

He finished his Scotch and considered. Why not, indeed. True, it would be odd for a piece of flying ice to duplicate this kind of injury so exactly, but he had run into things a lot more improbable than that.

He put his glass on the table with a thump. “Maybe you're right."

Julie looked at him, head cocked. “But?"

"No ‘buts.’ I've been jumping to conclusions. You're right, that's all."

She was still recovering from this when Tremaine appeared at the table, one hand in his jacket pocket, suave and amiable.

"Dr. Oliver? I hope I'm not intruding?"

"Of course not. This is my wife, Julie."

"Mrs. Oliver, my pleasure."

Gideon gestured at the third chair at the table. “Please."

"No, thank you, I'll just take a minute of your time. I'd like to apologize for not knowing who you were yesterday, Dr. Oliver."

"No reason why you should. I just wanted to tell you how much I admire your work."

"Well, ‘Voyages’ isn't a one-man show, you know.” He smiled with practiced modesty. “I get all the glory, but a great many people are involved behind the scenes, each making his own unique contribution to the whole."

"Ah,” said Gideon. There didn't seem to be any point in explaining that it was not “Voyages” he admired.

Tremaine leaned both hands on the table. “I wonder if I might ask a favor. Do you know why I'm here at Glacier Bay?"

"I understand you're working on a book about the Tirku survey expedition."

"Yes, it's quite close to finished, really, and I'm being assisted by several people who are either members of the original team or relatives of the members who were killed. Well, naturally, today's discovery of those, ah, remains has stimulated a great deal of interest among them. They were wondering if you'd be good enough to spend a little time with us and tell us what you've found."

"I'm afraid there isn't a lot to tell. There's no way I can make a positive-"

"Would tomorrow at ten be convenient? We meet in the upstairs lounge."

"No, tomorrow morning I'm going out to Tirku myself to have a look around."

"I see. What about the afternoon, then? Will you be back by four?"

"Well, I'm not really-"

"Sure you will,” Julie said. “You're getting a lift with my class, aren't you? Bill said he'd have us back by four."

"Splendid,” Tremaine said. “We'll see you at four then, Dr. Oliver. I'll look forward to it.” He inclined his shaggy but well-groomed head at Julie. “Mrs. Oliver."

"Uh, did I do something wrong?” Julie said when he had left. “Do I detect a little reluctance on your part?"

Gideon shrugged. “No, that's okay. I'm not reluctant, exactly. It just makes me uncomfortable. I mean, what am I supposed to do, bring in the bones for a show-and-tell?"

"I've never known you to object to talking about bones before."

"But these are their relatives-brothers, sisters, whatever. That makes it different."

"Yes, I see what you mean. Sorry about that. Are you going to tell them about the fractured mandible?"

"Not a chance. No reason to."

There was a pause. “You're not going to tell Tremaine either, are you?"

"I'm not telling anyone. Just you. Not until I put in some more work."

"Because, you know, I just realized,” Julie said, thoughtfully running her finger around the rim of her empty glass, “if you just happen to be right about how that mandible got broken-"

"Which we've agreed I'm not."

"-and there was a murder all those years ago-"

"Which we've agreed there wasn't."

"-then the finger of suspicion would have to point to M. Audley Tremaine himself, wouldn't it, since he was the only one who got out alive?"

"Well, not necessarily, but I admit the thought did cross my mind."

She leaned across the table toward him. “All right now, tell the truth. Do you or don't you think that jaw damage came from the avalanche?"

"I don't know,” Gideon answered honestly. “Intellectually, I think you're right about it. But intuitively I can't help-"

"Oh-oh, intuitively. That's always a bad sign."

He laughed. “Okay, you're right.” He reached up and stretched luxuriously. “I'm letting my imagination get the better of me. Maybe I'm just looking for some way to get him off the airwaves before he fouls up the American mind for good."

"Come on,” Julie said, standing up. “You've been sitting around deducing all day, but I've been working and I need some crab-stuffed halibut."