Make No Bones

CHAPTER 6

Twenty minutes later, a white, brown-striped Chevrolet with a Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office emblem on the door pulled into the main parking area. By this time, there were fifty people milling about the burial site, the attendees having decided with the briefest consideration that being in on the start of an actual exhumation beat all hell out of the scheduled morning session on bilateral nonmetric cranial variation.

Deputy Debbie Chavez, skinny and weather-bitten, walked with a cop’s confident lope and seemed very much at home in her uniform of brown shirt, snug tan trousers, and boots.

“All right, folks,” she said after talking briefly to Miranda, “here’s the drill.” She swung around so the sun was behind her, took off her sunglasses, and stuck them under the flap of a shirt pocket. Gideon heard them click against her plastic chest-protector. An unexpected dusting of little-girl’s freckles flowed over the bridge of her nose and along the untanned skin under her eyes.

“First off, if Mrs. Glass here says we’ve got a body down there, that’s good enough for me.”

“It was the consensus,” Miranda said modestly.

“Whatever. So what I’m going to do is get on the horn and call the sergeant. Till he gets here, I’m going to seal the area, and I’d appreciate it if you people wouldn’t do any more tromping around here.”

“We’re not tromping, young woman,” Leland Roach said. “For your information, we happen to be forensic anthropologists-which means we are quite experienced in just this kind of thing-and we’re thoroughly familiar with crime-scene protocol.”

“Uh-huh,” the deputy said, looking down at the muddle of scuff marks and footprints-Gideon could see his own-around the oval depression. “You betcha.”

She was right, Gideon knew. They hadn’t been thinking. As soon as the soil-compaction site had been recognized for what it was, they should have kept everyone away. It was sheer luck that no one had stepped right in the thing. Well, at least John would have an attentive audience when he gave his session.

Nellie Hobert cleared his throat. “True, we may have been a little careless, deputy. On the other hand, this site’s obviously been out in the open for years. I can’t imagine we’ve ruined any evidence. Ahum.”

Nellie was embarrassed. He was one of the country’s two or three leading authorities on crime-scene exhumations. His Exhumation Techniques had been a police-science standby for over a decade, and it came down mercilessly on careless tromping.

“Well, all the same, I just think I’ll go ahead and secure the area,” Debbie Chavez said pleasantly. “Sergeant likes it that way. Why don’t y’all just go about your business and come back in an hour if you want to?” She smiled, a quick up-and-down jog of the corners of her mouth. “We could maybe use a few experts about then.”

By 9:00 A.M. the excavating operation was humming along like a demonstration out of Nellie’s manual. Ordinarily, forensic anthropologists take care not to intrude on each other’s territory, but in this case Miranda had readily deferred to Nellie’s status and experience, and the NSFA president, with a shapeless tan fishing hat on his bald head and a stubby, unlit pipe between his teeth, was atoning for his earlier sins of carelessness with a vengeance, directing Deputy Chavez, another deputy, and several anthropology students with equal vigor.

A thirty-by-thirty-foot square had been cordoned off with yellow plastic tape and gridded. The “artifactual material” on the surface-a couple of rusty bolts, a corroded paper clip, the worn rubber heel of an old shoe, none of which anybody really thought would amount to anything-had been staked with engineering pins, mapped, and photographed from every conceivable angle, then gathered up by Dan Bell, the sheriff’s evidence officer. A crime-scene log had been established, and a line of entry had been delineated from the perimeter to the suspect depression. By means of this narrow path, those very few people permitted to enter made their way in-but not before having the patterns on the soles of their shoes recorded by Deputy Chavez.

Nellie himself had deftly exposed the edges of the pit with a whisk broom, and the digging itself was now under way, being carried out by two earnest graduate students under Nellie’s exacting supervision and the close attention of the forty or fifty people who now ringed the cordoned-off area.

John Lau had slept late, as he’d said he would, barely getting in on the dregs of the buffet. Then, seeing the crowd, he’d wandered over just as things had gotten started, looking mopey and preoccupied.

“That Leland’s like a shark,” he grumbled at Gideon. Gideon laughed. “How much did you wind up losing?” “Eighteen bucks.” He shook his head. “I still don’t think he had that flush. I should have stayed in.”

“Cheer up, John. Look at that sun. It’s supposed to be ninety today. Enjoy yourself.”

“How can I enjoy myself when I’ve got that session tomorrow?” He sighed. “I wish it was today, so I could get it over with.”

Sleepily, he looked around at the activity. “What’s this, a practice dig?” Then he saw the police uniforms and the POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape and his eyes opened all the way. “Hey, what’s going on, Doc?”

“It’s a burial. At least I think it is.” He’d begun to feel less sure of himself. The police activity, the excitement, had made him edgy. If there wasn’t a body there after all this fuss, he was going to look awfully silly. Leland was probably preparing one of his juicier little epigrams right now, just in case it was needed.

“How do they know?” John asked.

“Well, it just looked to me like a classic-”

John tilted his head toward him. “You’re the one who found it?”

“Yes, why?”

“No reason,” John said. “Just asking.”

“Look, John,” Gideon said a little tartly. “I didn’t go looking for the damn thing. I practically fell into it, over there-”

“While minding your own business…”

“Well…yes, damn it-” He laughed. “Sorry, I guess I’m starting to get nervous. Maybe I was wrong about it.” “We’ll find out pretty soon,” John said sagely.

A few minutes later Nellie took a break and walked over to chat. “How are we doing here, John?”

“You’re doing great,” John said. “I don’t know why you guys want a lecture from me.”

Nellie beamed. “Well, it always has more weight coming from someone outside the fold. Besides, you should have seen us an hour ago.”

“Nellie,” Gideon said, “does it still look to you like there’s a body in there?”

“Oh, sure, no doubt about it, none at all.”

Gideon was reassured.

At a little after ten o’clock Julie returned from her ride. “What in the world is this all about?” she asked. She looked wonderful, tousled and healthy, and she smelled of horses.

Briefly, Gideon explained.

“How did anybody even think to look for a burial here?” she wanted to know. “Who found it in the first place?” “Guess,” John said.

Julie laughed. “That’s what I thought. Well, I better go get cleaned up.”

But she stayed where she was, engrossed by the scene. “Uh, if they do find a body, it’ll just be dry bones, won’t it? Not some kind of awful, messy…you know.”

“Let us fervently hope so,” Gideon said sincerely. “It’s been there a while, so I think decomposition is long past. If not, you’ll smell it before you see it.”

But the only smells were clean ones: pine needles and pine bark, sweet and spicy, and the coarse, dry soil. It hadn’t rained for weeks, so with each scoop of the trowel a puff of red-brown dust rose and floated off. Gideon could feel it in his nostrils and at the back of his throat. Above, through the branches, the sky was enormous and beautiful, a clean, washed-out blue, marred only by the occasional silent, bright speck of a jet plane floating by. As predicted, the temperature had risen rapidly, and the humidity with it, but they were still in dappled shade. Even the diggers had hardly worked up a sweat. It was all very pleasant and unhurried, more like an archaeological dig than a forensic exhumation.

And Gideon had stopped worrying about whether they’d find anything. What if they didn’t? He’d been wrong before, and he’d be wrong again. So had all of them, and everyone was accustomed to it. That, in fact, was one of the healthiest things about forensic anthropology; its practitioners were willing to be proven wrong. They had to be. It was an applied science, and your hypotheses and guesses were always being put to practical tests. And since nobody could be right all the time, people either learned to live with being wrong or they got out of the field.

Nothing like theoretical anthropology, where scholars could barricade themselves behind unverifiable pet theories for decades, ready to fight off dissenters with an old broom handle if need be. Who, after all, could prove one way or the other whether Neanderthal Man walked fully erect, or if Oreopithecus was a hominid ancestor or just another Miocene ape?

But in forensic work, either a particular bone you examined was female or it wasn’t, was Caucasian or it wasn’t. And if you said a distinctive conformation of the soil meant that a body was buried under it, either a body would be there or it wouldn’t.

It was. At eleven o’clock one of the students, using the trowel in the Hobert-sanctioned manner, horizontally scraping off about a few inches of soil at a time, caught the tip in a bit of tattered gray clothing. The rotted cloth tore, but not before dragging a bit of bone to the surface.

“Ha!” Nellie said, and Gideon was relieved in spite of himself.

Nellie dropped to his knees and leaned over to peer at the fragment through his bifocals, his stiff gray beard fixed on it like a pointer’s snout. There was a surge against the tape as anthropologists and student anthropologists jostled forward. Everyone seemed to be in a jolly mood. From the point of view of the attendees this was turning into quite a conference; one that would surely take its place in WAFA legend.

“This must be a new experience for you,” Julie said. “Bones coming up out of the ground, and you can’t do anything but watch from behind a barrier, just like the rest of us.”

“It’s awful,” Gideon agreed. They were about fifteen feet from the digging. “I can’t even make out what the hell it is. A bit of fibula? No, ulna.”

Nellie was sympathetic to his colleagues’ plight. Still on his knees, he straightened up, took the unlit pipe from his mouth, and made a terse announcement. “Proximal left ulna. And…” He leaned down again to blow away some soil. “…medial epicondyle of the humerus. Disarticulated but in anatomical apposition. Quite dessicated. Good condition.” He stretched out his hand without looking up. “Chopsticks.”

Julie turned to Gideon. “What?”

“A left elbow joint, without any soft tissue-”

“Come on, Gideon, I can understand that. But didn’t he say-”

“Chopsticks. He was talking to one of the students. When you get near the bones, you don’t want to dig with anything metal, even a trowel. Nellie favors slightly sharpened chopsticks. He sent someone out for a few a little while ago. Also some small paintbrushes to use for whisks.”

“Chopsticks,” Julie repeated. “Do you use them too?”

“Yes, I do. Sometimes a piece of bamboo. A dental pick, if nothing else works.”

“How odd,” she murmured. “All those times you’ve gone running off to dig up some murder victim in the woods the last thing I pictured was you poking around with chopsticks, like a man in pursuit of an egg roll.”

He grimaced. “Well, not quite.”

Nellie’s probing, assisted by follow-up whisking by the students, was producing quick results in the loosely packed soil. Every few minutes his head would come up again. “Coracoid process,” he announced. “Acromion…Left iliac crest…Male, on his right side, legs sharply flexed…Fine condition, just beautiful…”

He was, of course, going about it right, not just digging away at it, but first clearing the surrounding dirt a few vertical inches at a time. This the students would do with trowels, so that the skeleton, embedded in its matrix of soil, slowly emerged, mummylike, on its own pedestal of earth. As it did, Nellie would carefully go to work with his chopsticks, in effect dissecting out the skeleton.

By this time, many of the nonanthropologists had drifted away, Julie among them. “I smell like a horse,” she said. “I want to take a shower before lunch.”

Gideon nodded, absorbed in the digging. Nellie had made a preliminary determination as the bones came into view: Caucasian male of middle size, over forty, under seventy. No sign of cause of death. Finer distinctions would have to await removal and cleaning.

A little before noon, a rumpled, bearlike man with a pouchy, anxious face made his way toward Gideon and John.

“Dr. Hobert there tells me you’re FBI,” he said to John.

This, they knew, was Sheriff’s Lieutenant Farrell Honeyman, who had arrived several hours earlier to supervise the investigation. “Oh, boy, this is all I need,” had been his very first words, murmured despairingly at Deputy Chavez as he climbed out of his car.

They had not made a favorable initial impression on John, who had been standing nearby with Gideon. “That’s Homicide?” he’d said under his breath. “Good luck.”

Gideon shared his reservations. The crestfallen Honeyman, with his baggy suit and his face like a plate of runny scrambled eggs, had stood off to the side of the grave for most of the morning, uncommunicative and abstracted. In addition to repeated forlorn sighs, there were frequent glances at his watch and various other signs that he was a man of many worries. He had briefly questioned Gideon about the finding of the site, but even then his mind had seemed to be elsewhere.

But now, having found a colleague, he had perked up, at least to the extent of becoming more talkative. “God, I’m up to my earlobes,” he told John. “I have a multi-team interagency task-force meeting coming up this afternoon. This is the last thing I need.”

“What’s up, lieutenant?” John said, ready with sympathy for a fellow cop’s caseload problems. “Drug bust going down?”

“Drug bust?” Honeyman answered, his droopy eyes widening. “No, I’m talking budget restructuring, personnel reallocation, the whole schmeer.”

“Oh,” John said after a fractional pause.

“I’m the administrative lieutenant,” Honeyman explained. “Our detective sergeant’s on vacation. He’s really screwed me. I’m telling you, John, I’m really glad you’re here. If you’ve got any ideas, I wish you’d just pitch right in.”

“Oh, I’m sure you can handle it without any help from me,” John said gracefully.

“No, I mean it. I’ll take all the help I can get.”

“Hey, I’m here to get away from this stuff,” John said. “This is your show all the way.” But Gideon could see that he was grateful to be asked, something FBI agents learned not to expect from the locals.

“Not a bad guy,” John said when Honeyman moved off. “I just hope he knows what he’s doing.”

“Why don’t you take him up?” Gideon asked. “He could probably use some friendly advice.”

John shook his head. “Doc, the guy was just being nice. He doesn’t want my help, believe me. I know these people.”

After that, John spent a few more minutes restlessly shifting from one foot to the other while the exhumation inched along, punctuated by Nellie’s osteological bulletins. Finally, he gave up. “I’m gonna go sit by the swimming pool,” he grumbled. “I gotta work on my lecture notes.”

“John, you’ll do fine. They’ll love you. I’ll be there. I’ll shill for you from the audience.”

But John, not persuaded, went away talking to himself.

The exhumation proceeded. Even with frequent pauses for photographs and careful piling of the dislodged earth for later sifting by the evidence unit, much of the skeleton was exposed by twelve-thirty, its arms and legs folded up like a sleeping child’s. The small bones of the hand had been slightly scattered. Shirt, trousers, and underwear were almost completely rotted away, no more than some stiff, gray-brown scraps, but the one foot that was visible was still encased in a sturdy, well-preserved lace-up shoe.

As things wound down, Gideon found himself standing next to the solitary, woebegone Honeyman again. “Do you have any open cases that might fit this?” he asked, as much out of sympathy as anything else.

“What? Well, we haven’t even established how long that body’s been there yet.”

“Oh, I think five to ten years would be a pretty reasonable guess. The body’s completely skeletonized, so that tells us it’s a few years old anyway. And it’s not too old, or there wouldn’t have been any signs of the burial left to see in the first place.”

“Oh. Well, I suppose that makes sense. No, we don’t.” “I beg your pardon?”

“We don’t have any open cases from five to ten years ago that could fit this. Some of that was before my time, but I’ve had the files checked, and there’s nothing. No missing white males, not that age, not from around here. Hell, I don’t know what they expect me to do with this.” He nodded and moved despondently off.

Les Zenkovich, who had come up and listened in on the last few sentences, watched him go. Like most of the others, he had left for a few minutes to get something to eat from the lunch buffet, and he was now using a toothpick with an air of well-fed serenity. He looked expressively toward the burial, and then at Gideon.

“Well, somebody’s sure as shit missing from somewhere,” he said, sucking a bit of food from between his teeth. “You can bet on that.”