Make No Bones

CHAPTER 7

For someone who knew as much as he did about the joints and what could go wrong with them, Nellie Hobert cracked his knuckles often and with relish, extending thick-wristed, fuzzy forearms with his fingers interlocked, bending them backwards, and snapping the lot with a long, rolling crackle. It generally meant he was feeling good.

As usual, Gideon flinched. “Damn, I wish you wouldn’t do that, Nellie.”

“Ah, nothing like feeling those synovial bursae pop,” Nellie said happily. “No harm to it, you should know that. Now then. You are probably wondering why I asked you here, yes?”

“Well, yes.”

It was late in the afternoon, and the two men were in the basement of the Central Oregon Museum of Natural History, in a workroom crowded with partially constructed museum “boulders” made of chicken wire, papier-mache, and wallpaper glue. In one corner a library table had been draped with heavy polyethylene plastic, and on it was the skeleton, laid out on its back.

Not literally on its back, of course, inasmuch as it didn’t have a back to lie on, but in a supine position, skull tipped gently to the side, as in sleep, its disarticulated bones arranged in anatomical order. Except for a few of the smallest bones-the hyoid, a few phalanges, and some carpals and tarsals-they were all there and all in good condition, with no damage worse than some abrading and a few gnaw marks here and there. Cleaned now, they were tinged a reddish-brown, like the soil they’d come from, and they smelled faintly of earth and decay.

It wasn’t a putrid odor-active decomposition was long past-or even unpleasant, really, but simply the way bones smelled after they’d been in the ground a long time, after even the tallowy odor of the fat had disappeared: musty, foresty, a little mildewy. A peaceful, undisturbed smell, the way old, dead bones ought to smell.

The skeleton had been removed from its grave and put in marked paper sacks at about 1:00 P.M. that afternoon. From there, according to Nellie, it had gone to the mortuary at the Saint Charles Medical Center for a pro forma autopsy by the medical examiner’s pathologist.

“The ME just looked at it and laughed,” Nellie said. “He told me: ‘With forty goddamn forensic anthropologists hanging around looking over my shoulder, you think I’m crazy enough to stick my neck out on some bags of bones?’ It was the shortest autopsy on record, let rue tell you.”

“So he turned them over to you for analysis?”

“Yes, this morning. To Miranda, officially, but she asked me if I wouldn’t take charge.” He smiled. The unlit, metal-stemmed pipe between his teeth bobbed up and down. Nellie’s sudden, wide smile was one of his most disarming features; his lips seemed to disappear, his face to split into two equal parts, like a Muppet’s.

“And you know me,” he said, “taking charge is what I love to do. Anyhow, we bagged it up again, brought it over here, and Miranda and I worked the thing over. She’s good, Miranda. Just doesn’t get enough cases to give her any confidence. She needs to get her hands dirty a little more.”

“Uh-huh. So what am I doing here, Nellie?”

Nellie had telephoned him at the lodge half an hour earlier, at three-thirty, and asked if he could drop by the workroom. Gideon had left the conference session on forensic data nets and driven to Bend. He still didn’t know what for.

“Well, I asked you to come over because I need your help, Gideon. I’m pretty sure I found something, and I want you to tell me if I’m right.”

Gideon was honestly surprised. “You want me to tell you?”

“That’s right. Between us girls, you’re the only one of ’em that’s worth a damn, whippersnapper though you are.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say-”

“Yes, you would. Who’s better? Harlow knows everything there is to know about teeth but damn-all about bones. Callie’s off in never-never land-and anyway, they’re both back in Nevada right now. And as for-”

“All right, but what-”

“-Leland, he doesn’t have time anymore for anything but his precious turds; Les wouldn’t know a-a-well, who else am I going to ask?”

“Ask what? Nellie, you’re the president of the association. You’re the dean of American forensic anthropologists. If you’re sure you found something, then that’s good enough for me. It’s there.”

“Think so?” He leaned his rump against the table, crossed his arms, took the pipe from his mouth, used the stem to scratch the side of his short, gray beard, and peered at Gideon from under disorderly eyebrows. “Well, now.”

Here comes a shaggy-dog story, Gideon thought.

“That reminds me of some testimony I gave in a case in Gallup,” he said, “and the defense attorney was trying to make me look bad, the way they do. Punching holes in my credibility, you know?”

“All too well.” Gideon had put in some uncomfortable hours on the expert-witness stand himself.

“Well, sir, this attorney, he says to me, ‘Now, then, Dr. Hobert,’ he says…”

Shaggy-dog story, all right, Gideon said to himself. He settled down to wait it out.

“‘Dr. Hobert, who would you say is the most expert forensic anthropologist in the state of New Mexico?’

“Well, I didn’t quite know where he was going with that, so I just told him, nice and humble, that it was me. ‘I am,’ I said.

“’I see,’ he says. ‘All right, then, Dr. Hobert, who would you say is the most highly regarded forensic anthropologist in the United States?’

“’I am,’ I said, but I was starting to get nervous. I didn’t like this guy.

“’I see,’ he says. ‘Now then, could you tell the court, who in your opinion is the most expert forensic anthropologist in the world?’

“I look him in the eye, take a deep breath, and say: ‘I am.’

“He leans over at me with that smirk they get. ‘No one in the entire world is as good as you are?’

Not…even…close,’ I tell him, “Well, the prosecuting attorney asks for a recess and gets me aside. ‘Nellie,’ he says, ‘how could you say those things? You know that kind of thing puts the jury’s back up.’

“So I said-you want to know what I said?”

“Do I have a choice?” Gideon answered, but he was already smiling. Here it came.

“I said: ‘Well, hell, man, I was UNDER OATH!”

Nellie banged his hand on the nearest table, rolled back his head, and shouted laughter at the acoustic-tile ceiling. He stuck his pipe back in his mouth. “Did I have you going there, or didn’t I?”

“Not for a second,” Gideon said, laughing along with him. “Now: What was it you wanted my help on?”

The older man sobered. He turned back toward the skeleton. “Tell me what you see.”

“Well, as you said, it’s male, Caucasian-”

“Yes, yes, of course. We’ve done all that. Caucasian male, average build, estimated stature of 69.3 inches, plus or minus 1.18-”

“You used the Trotter and Gleser equations?”

“For femur plus tibia-And Suchey-Brooks for aging from the pubic symphysis: It’s a textbook Phase 5, completely rimmed, which gives us a range of say, thirty to seventy, and most likely forty-five to sixty-five. Throw in the vertebral lipping, the atrophic spots on the scapula-”

Gideon picked up the right scapula and held it up against the light from the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. There were milky patches of translucence where the bone had thinned in its normal, unstoppable progression toward disintegration.

“-the sternal rib changes,” Nellie continued, “the general bone density and so on and so forth, and you get an age of around-”

“Fifty-five or so,” Gideon said, putting down the scapula. Say fifty to sixty.”

“On the money, my boy. As for possible features of individuation, we have a healed fracture of the left ulna, probably from childhood, and an extracted first molar, also old. A few fillings. And some arthritis in the metatarsophalangeal joints, but nothing worse than any other old geezer. And that’s it. Nothing much to go on. For that matter, nothing very interesting. But…” He paused weightily. “…in cause of death I think we have something else entirely.”

“Cause of death?” Scanning the bones, Gideon had seen nothing to suggest what it was.

“Yes. How was the dastardly deed done? That’s what I want your opinion on. I think that we have something unusual here; a-well, I better not give you any hints. Wouldn’t want to bias you. Go ahead, tell me what you think.” He bestowed a split-faced grin on Gideon and used the stubby pipe to make a gesture at the skeleton: It’s all yours.

Intrigued, Gideon picked up the skull, most likely of all bony elements to tell a story of death by violence. Until now, he had seen only the front and the left side, which showed no fractures, no entrance or exit wounds. He turned it over and there on the rear, just to the right of center, was an inch-and-a-half-long horizontal crack just above the lambdoidal suture. Gideon ran his finger along it.

“Oho,” Nellie said quietly, chewing on his unlit pipe.

Gideon looked at him, puzzled. The crack was an uncomplicated linear fracture of the right parietal. No depression of the bone, no radiating fracture lines. Textbooks described this kind of injury as the probable result of an “accelerated head impacting on a fixed surface”-and not the other way around, which would have had more sinister implications. In other words, a simple fall; hardly proof of dastardly deeds.

“Nellie,” Gideon said cautiously, “I’ll grant you that this could have caused death-maybe a contre-coup brain contusion, subdural hemorrhage-”

“Yes, yes.” Nellie gestured impatiently. “Could. But didn’t.”

“Well, then-”

“Keep looking. You haven’t found it yet.”

Gideon turned the skull, millimeter by millimeter. He shook his head. “I don’t see anything else on the skull.” “Not on the skull.”

“Below the skull?”

Nellie cocked his head. “Is there another way to go from the skull?”

Gideon smiled. “Okay, below the skull.” He lifted the sternum.

Nellie shook his head. “Higher.”

Gideon put down the sternum and picked up the first cervical vertebra, the atlas, so named because the globe of the skull rested on it.

“Lower,” Nellie said.

Gideon put it down. “I’m sure glad you’re not giving me any hints.” He moved to the second cervical vertebra.

Nellie shook his head. “Nope, but you’re getting warmer.”

Gideon sighed. “Nellie, how about just-all!”

Inconspicuous as it was, it seemed to leap out and catch his eye. On the sixth cervical vertebra, located just below the level of the Adam’s apple-a minuscule break zigzagging its way across the front of the right transverse process, one of two small, winglike spurs jutting out from the body of the vertebra.

Gideon leaned closer, nudged the bone with a forefinger. The crack was perhaps a quarter of an inch long. “Hinge fracture,” he said, using the conventional term for a break that went only partway through the bone, something like what happened when you snapped a fresh twig.

“Exactly,” Nellie said with enthusiasm. “Precisely. And you’ll also notice, on the posterior root-”

“Another fracture,” Gideon said. “Hairline. And as for the adjacent vertebrae…” One by one he lifted them and carefully examined the convoluted surfaces.

Nellie nodded vigorously, urging him along.

“…nothing,” Gideon said. “No sign of trauma.” Another crisp nod from Nellie. He paused in lighting his pipe. “So? What’s your conclusion, doctor?”

Gideon leaned against a lab stool. There wasn’t much room for doubt. Injuries like these, in these particular places, meant that enormous squeezing force had been applied to the neck. One saw them in hangings, or even in manual strangulations if the killer happened to be built along the lines of King Kong. But in such cases, the wholesale wrenching of the neck muscles generally produced injuries to more than one vertebra, often to four or five. To have only a single vertebra cracked, and that one in two places, meant that the constriction had been extraordinarily localized.

It wasn’t something one came across often; in Gideon’s experience only twice. And each time it had been caused by the same thing.

“Garrote,” he said.

“Aye, mate,” Nellie said with satisfaction as he got his pipe going. “The old Spanish windlass.”

The technique dated back at least to the time of Christ. In its basic version a cord-in ancient times it had been made of animal sinew-was looped twice around the neck, and a stick or other firm object inserted between the loops. Rotating the stick would then twist the cord, much like a tourniquet, and create terrific pressure, first closing the windpipe and then, with a few more twists, snapping the spinal column; thus combining the virtues, so to speak, of strangling and hanging. When applied at the level of the sixth cervical vertebra, it would also compress the carotid sheath, thereby shutting off blood flow to and from the brain. Just for good measure.

The Spanish Inquisitors, who used the method as a merciful alternative to the stake, claimed that it was painless, but there was a lack of definitive data on this point. What it demonstrably was, however, was simple, efficient, and silent. And, if the cord was knotted at close intervals, bloodless.

Gideon touched the crack in the skull. “You think he was knocked out by a fall, then garroted?”

“Let’s hope so,” Nellie said, “for his sake.”

Gideon hoped so too. He stood looking down at the table in an odd reverie. What an enormous difference there was between the livid, flagrant corpses a pathologist had to work with and this, the anthropologist’s quiet and unassuming skeleton. This man’s life had ended horrifically, yet the bones gave no signs of upset or fright. Or even of pain. Just two clean, inconsequential-looking little cracks in one tiny, inessential-looking bone. The skull grinned like any other skull, no different from that of a man who had died peacefully in his bed. There were no bulging eyeballs, no purple and protruding tongue, no cruelly bruised and swollen flesh.

A good thing too, or he’d have been out of this business a long time ago.

Nellie smacked his hands together. “Well, then, if that’s settled, let’s lock up and get out of here. If you’ve got time, let’s stop by Honeyman’s office and give him the good news.”

He took off the lab apron he’d been wearing and tossed it onto a coat hook. Today’s T-shirt was a bright and cheerful blue. “Our day begins when yours ends,” it said. “Dallas PD, Homicide Unit.”

“So,” a sweating, shirt-sleeved Honeyman said bleakly, turning the stub of a pencil end-over-end on the big old desk that took up a full third of his tiny office. “It’s definitely homicide. There’s no doubt about it anymore.”

“Was there ever?” Nellie asked. “Or did you seriously consider that he might have buried himself?”

Honeyman glared at him, then permitted himself a baggy smile. “I could always hope.”

“What about you?” Gideon asked. “Making any progress?” “Progress!” Honeyman said with a snort. “The budget meeting was a total disaster! They actually expect us-” “I meant on the burial,” Gideon said.

“Oh, the burial. Well, there are these.” From an ink-stained shirt pocket bulging with half a dozen pens he pried out a small yellow envelope, which he opened and upended on the desk. A quarter and two nickels rolled out. “These came out of the grave after you finished. Right under the body, about an inch below.”

“Must have rotted out of his pocket,” Nellie said.

“Yes, or somebody dropped them while they were burying him. Same difference.”

Gideon turned the coins over to read the dates: “1981, 1972, 1978.” He looked up. “So at least you know something you didn’t know before. He couldn’t have been buried before 1981.”

“No, or after, either. Not that I know what that does for us.

“Or after?” Nellie repeated. “Why the devil not? Just because a 1981 coin-”

“Well, it’s not the coin,” Honeyman said, “it’s the shed.” “The shed,” Nellie said.

“Yes, the shed.”

Gideon tried helping things along. “The shed that used to stand where we found the grave?”

“Sure, what else are we talking about? I talked with the management, and they said part of it blew down in a huge windstorm we had in October 1981, and they bulldozed away what was left of it a few days later. So there you are. That body was buried in 1981. Before October.”

“Where are we?” Nellie demanded. “So the shed blew down in October. Who’s to say the body wasn’t buried later?”

Surprisingly, Honeyman was ready for him. “It’s always possible, but what would be the point? It would have been right out in the open, only a few feet from some of the guest cottages. And you can see it from the road. You’d have to be crazy to try to bury a body there.”

“Well, yes…”

“But…” Honeyman said, and Gideon began to think he might actually be enjoying himself. Not many people got a chance to lecture Nelson Hobert. “But while the shed was still standing, it was perfect. Easy to get into, a nice dirt floor to dig in, plenty of junk in it to hide the grave-and with the open side facing away from the cottages and the road. What more could you ask? The chances of that grave ever being found were just about zero.”

Gideon nodded his agreement. If Honeyman ever decided to get out of administration and into detective work, he just might do all right.

“Not quite zero,” Nellie pointed out. “It did get found.”

“Oh, certainly,” Honeyman said with another of his sad-eyed smiles, “but only because our poor, dumb perp never bothered to calculate the probability of a convention full of forensic anthropologists showing up and crawling all over the place ten years later. Just goes to show the limitations of the criminal mind.”

“Nineteen eighty-one,” Gideon said slowly. “Wasn’t that the year of the first WAFA meeting?”

“WAFA?” Honeyman said.

“Western Association of Forensic Anthropologists. Their first meeting was at Whitebark Lodge. In 1981.” Honeyman laid down his pencil. For the first time a flicker of real interest showed in his eyes. “Is that so? All these same people?”

“Well, just a few of us,” Nellie said. “We’ve grown quite a bit since then, you know. Back in 1981 there were only…”

He stopped in mid-sentence, forgetting to close his mouth, his head tilted as if he were listening for something.

“What?” Honeyman said nervously. “What is it?”

“By gum,” Nellie said softly, incredulously. Jammed between the side of Honeyman’s desk and the wall, he leaned as far back as he could in the straight-backed chair, locked his hands behind his neck, and stared, seemingly at the marked-up boxes of a big “Executive Plan-Your-Month” calendar over Honeyman’s head. But his eyes were unfocused and Gideon could see that his mind was racing. He sat like that for a long time, then lowered his gaze and faced them, still not altogether back from wherever he’d been.

“By gum,” he said again. “I believe I know who that skeleton is.”