Skeleton dance

Chapter 9

Because Les Eyzies had neither a morgue nor a hospital, the bagged bones from the cave had been taken to the morgue-room of the hospital at St.-Cyprien, another ancient Perigord town five miles from Les Eyzies, this one clustered at the foot of an imposing twelfth-century abbey on the banks of the Dordogne. Having driven there in the compact, olive-green Peugeot that Julie had rented for them by e-mail from the United States, Gideon was told by the front-desk receptionist, a friendly, chatty woman who laughed at the end of every sentence, that he would find the morgue in the basement-right down those stairs, in the room at the end of the corridor.

"Will I need a key, madame?" he asked in French.

She chuckled good-naturedly. "No, you won't need one, monsieur, we don't usually lock the morgue. Not too many people try to get in-or out, for that matter. And besides, the other gentleman is there."

"Other gentleman?" he said, surprised. And then: "Oh, would that be Dr. Roussillot, the police pathologist?"

"I don't know, I didn't ask his name."

She didn't ask Gideon's name either, he reflected critically as he went down the stairs. Joly himself might run a tight ship, but this sort of evidence-storage would never pass muster under American chain-of-evidence requirements. Gideon was the second-at least the second-person to have access to the bones without having to provide identification. Aside from that, they'd been left unattended for who knew how long; that left a huge chink into which a defense attorney or a judge could toss a monkey wrench on the grounds that it could no longer be proven beyond a doubt that these bones really were the selfsame bones that had been removed from the cave. And it was on just such objections that many an otherwise solid case could-indeed, had-come apart at the seams.

The basement corridor's main purpose seemed to be to serve as a storage area for conveyances. Gideon had to thread his way around gurneys, wheelchairs, and walkers to get to the double doors at the end of the hallway. Once there, he pushed them open to enter a small, immaculate, white-tiled room furnished with a desk along one wall, a rack with clean rubber aprons and white coats, a barred, glass-fronted cabinet holding the usual blood-freezing assortment of autopsy tools, and, in the center, a single, old-fashioned, porcelain-topped autopsy table at which a heavily-built built man in a white coat was removing one of the paper bags of bones from the macaroni carton.

At Gideon's entrance, he looked up sharply, the point of his fastidiously shaped Van Dyke bristling. "What do you want? This is a restricted area. I'm extremely busy. Do you have permission to be here?"

Dr. Roussillot, I presume, Gideon thought. "I'm Gideon Oliver," he said in French, cautiously advancing. "You must be Dr. Roussillot."

He received a wary nod in reply.

"Well, I'm the anthropologist who's been working with Inspector Joly. I'm supposed-"

"Of course, forgive me, the anthropologist," he said, not really rudely, but making it amply clear whose turf this was, who was encroaching on whom, and who'd better not try getting away with any snake oil. He leaned over to shake hands, briefly and formally-one businesslike flap down, one up-then made room for Gideon at the table, shoving to one side the marred leather satchel at his feet. "Be so good as to bring me up to date, please, professor."

Gideon did, resorting to shaky Latin when his French didn't extend to the diffuse periosteal lesions that he would be hunting for on the ribs.

"How interesting. Shall we examine the ribs, then?"

"If you don't mind, I'd rather set everything out in anatomical order first. It'll only take a minute. Will you give me a hand?"

"Certainly," said Roussillot.

Gideon started at the head-end. Roussillot began with the lower body, removing the left femur from its sack, and grasping it firmly around the shaft. "I'm sorry about this," he said. "I don't see any other way."

"Hm?" Gideon said absently, absorbed in scraping a bit of dirt from a clavicle. "Sorry about-"

He was sitting on the floor.

His legs were crumpled in front of him. His head hung loosely forward with his chin digging into his sternum. He was staring dully at his hands, one of which lay, palm-down, flat against the cool smoothness of the linoleum floor; the other was loosely curled in his lap. A hard, sharp, vertical edge, a corner of something, cut into his spine. When he shifted to ease the discomfort, the sudden loss of support sent him flopping bonelessly over backwards, banging his head on the floor and wrenching a grunt of pain out of him.

Whooh!

The sound startled, then steadied, him. His body and his mind began to come together. He waited for the white flash of pain to dim and for the billows of nausea to recede, then gingerly reopened his eyes. He was looking at a ceiling bank of blue-white neon lights shielded by metal grills. When they began a slow, circling tilt from left to right he shut his eyes again and kept them shut while strength and consciousness flowed-trickled-back into him.

Where was he? What had happened to him? He'd had a quick lunch with Julie in Les Eyzies, he remembered that. They'd taken marinated roast-beef-and-tomato sandwiches, bottles of Orangina, and paper cones of French fries to a bench near the river and he'd told her about the unexpected direction the staff meeting had taken. Then, while she went back to the hotel to put her feet up for an hour before going off to her symposium, he'd driven to St.-Cyprien to finish his examination of the bones, and there he'd met The bones! His eyes flew open. The ceiling started its tilt again but this time he stuck it out, staring hard at the lights and willing them to be still. When they settled down to no more than a shimmering wobble, he gathered himself together and pulled himself slowly up with the aid of the autopsy table. For the first time he was aware of a jack-hammer pain behind his left ear, just above the mastoid process. He put his fingers on the spot and winced when they touched a tender, walnut-sized knot. At least he now knew what had put him on the floor in the first place.

He also knew, even before he'd made it to his feet, what he would find, and find it he did. The bones were gone, the satchel was gone, Dr. Roussillot-the so-called Dr. Roussillot-was gone.

But the macaroni au fromage carton was still there. Grasping the table hard for support he stared at the empty box until his blurry vision cleared a little more. And in one of its corners, caught under a flap of cardboard, he saw a single tooth, a familiar one with a dull gray filling, a first bicuspid that had come loose from the mandible; all that was left of the skeleton from the abri.

As he got his fingers clumsily around it, the walls began their slow wheeling again, the edges of his sight to grow dark. Clutching the table Gideon let himself back down to the floor, making it just as the black, sick void reared up and engulfed him again.