Unnatural Selection

TWELVE

He was only halfway down the stairs to the museum’s lower floor, where the buffet was set up, when he was spotted by the invitees, who were standing around the appetizer table, sipping their drinks, crunching potato chips-crisps, as the English called them-and raw veggies, and engaging in what appeared to be animated conversation. Madeleine, in particular, was nattering cheerfully about something; almost singing, her fluty voice jumped an octave at a time, her bracelets jangling in accompaniment.

Liz was the first to see him. “Speak of the devil, there’s the man now!” she exclaimed, to be followed by an eager swiveling of heads in his direction and a blizzard of questions and comments, all flung at him at more or less the same time.

“Hey Skeleton Detective, how the hell did you figure out it was Williams?” a more than usually outgoing Rudy Walker asked.

“So did Edgar really murder him, then?” Joey Dillard wanted to know. No button tonight, but he was wearing a sweatshirt with PETA: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in big blue letters across the front. There was an easy slur to his speech that made Gideon think he’d been getting steadily into the liquid refreshment for the last half hour or so. By now he’d heard that Joey had a tendency to get a bit pickled when the opportunity arose.

“And cut him up in little pieces?” Victor Waldo added with a happy little shudder.

“How exactly did he do it?” Cheryl Pinckney asked with equal avidity. “Kill him, I mean? Could you tell? With a knife, with a gun, did he poison him, did he cut his throat-”

“What are the police going to do about it?” her husband interrupted, his brow wrinkled. He was wearing a button in apparent reply to Joey’s sweatshirt: Support PETA: People for the Eating of Tasty Animals. “Don’t tell me they’re going to want to come and… and grill us?”

“Of course they are,” Victor contributed. “They’ll have to investigate. They can’t just assume Edgar did it. I assume we’ll all be suspects.” He appeared to be thrilled with the idea. “Am I not right, Gideon?”

In the expectant moment of silence that followed this barrage, Gideon wondered briefly if it was too late to get away with pretending not to have heard any of it, or better yet with snapping his fingers as if he’d forgotten something (like the absentminded professor he was, after all), muttering something to himself, and turning around and heading abstractedly back up the stairs… never to return.

No, he thought, looking at the group of eight avid, upturned faces, and one sympathetic, mildly amused one (Julie’s), there was no way to get out of it now. They certainly had a legitimate interest, and he might as well face them now as later. He just wished they weren’t going at it with such morbid relish.

Still on the stairs, he paused, one hand on the railing, took a breath, and began. “Well, first, the idea that those bones are Pete Williams’s is strictly a guess at this point. I mean, there are thousands of visitors a year here, and no one really knows how many-”

“But it’s your best guess, right?” Liz cut in. Tonight she was decked out in a fringed, open-weave purple afghan over stonewashed bib overalls and a tie-dyed T-shirt. More than one person had suggested that Liz’s wardrobe came largely from the landfills she worked in, and Gideon had to admit that they had a point.

“Well, yes, it’s our best guess because it’s our only one, but-”

“Oh, please, get real. Vistors, schmisitors, who else could it be? I mean, I know Edgar’s innocent until proven guilty and all, but the guy came right out in front of everybody and told us he was going to kill him, we just didn’t believe him.” She gave an incredulous little snort of laughter that had just a touch of nasty satisfaction in it. “God, is this bizarre, or what?”

“Liz-”

Kozlov gave him a little breathing room. “Come, come,” he proclaimed with hearty Russian authority, “man is hungry. Give him chance, let him eat. Plenty time for talk. First, eat.”

“That’s an excellent idea, Vasily,” Madeleine trilled. “Why don’t we all get our dinners and sit down?” She clapped her hands. “Come, everybody, enjoy. Our museum ladies have done a splendid job, as you can see. I particularly want to thank Louise Boger and Myrna Vandermeer for assisting with bringing the food inside, and for their artful arrangement of it under trying conditions.” She led the group in applause, at which the two white-haired ladies who had been hovering behind the buffet table responded with flustered little gestures of diffidence and gratification.

In truth, the buffet looked a bit out of place, as if it didn’t know what it was doing in the slightly fusty, exhibit-crowded museum basement, squeezed in between the main floor display, a thirty-foot, crimson-sailed nineteenth-century gig called the Klondike, and a display of nineteenth-century sail-making tools. Prepared by the museum’s Ladies’ Auxiliary with outdoor eating in mind, it was very much a typical English picnic of the potluck variety. There were bowls of varying sizes and colors heaped with couscous salad, rice salad with diced peppers, and tricolor pasta salad; finger sandwiches filled with cheese and tomato, ham salad, ham and cheese, cucumber and butter, and tuna; carrot and celery sticks; individual bags of potato chips with sour cream and salsa dip; sliced, cold pizza; loads of French bread; soft drinks, beer, and hot tea in an urn (no coffee); and two bottles of Pimm’s No. 1, along with the lemonade with which to turn it into a reasonable facsimile of Pimm’s Cup, a concoction no proper English picnic would be without.

Gideon got himself a bottle of Old Speckled Hen pale ale, which had been sitting in a bed of ice-in sensitivity to the peculiar drinking tastes of Americans (not his)-and stood to one side with it while the others got in line at the buffet. Julie, as he expected, waited with him.

She brushed the back of her hand against his wrist. “So how’s it going, big guy?” she asked, smiling. “You look a little stunned. They kind of blindsided you there, didn’t they?”

“Kind of. I guess I didn’t expect you to tell them about Williams.”

“I didn’t. How could I tell them? I didn’t know myself.”

“You didn’t? I didn’t tell you on the phone?”

“Only that the dog had turned up some more bones. Not that you thought they were Pete’s.”

“Well, who told everybody, then?”

“Madeleine.” She picked up a couple of cardboard plates and handed one to Gideon, along with a plastic knife and fork wrapped in a paper napkin.

“Madeleine? How the heck did Madeleine know?”

Julie shrugged. “It’s a small town. News gets around.” She began working her way down the table, putting a little of almost everything on her plate, in line with her current philosophy of healthy eating: lots of variety, but all in tiny portions. This “French” approach, lately recommended by their nutritionist friend Marti Lau, had recently replaced Julie’s devotion to an Atkins-style low-carb diet. Gideon gave it about a year, which would be about standard.

“I guess so,” Gideon said, shaking his head. “It made it from the police station to here before I did.” He helped himself to two cheese-and-tomato finger sandwiches, two of cucumber, a heaping scoop of couscous salad, and a bag of Brannigans Roast Beef and Mustard Flavor Thick Cut Potato Crisps. He was still able to eat just about whatever he wanted without putting on weight, knock on wood. So was Julie for that matter, but keeping up with the latest diets seemed to entertain her, and that was fine with him, as long as he wasn’t required to join in, which he wasn’t. The way they handled it was that whoever took on the cooking that night called the shots. As to dining out, they were on their own. A reasonable and satisfactory arrangement.

The dining table, made up of two folding tables pushed together end to end, was squeezed into the narrow space on the other side of the Klondike. To reach the remaining two chairs they pretty much had to climb up and over some of the others, but everyone was in good humor, and eventually they got there, Gideon at the “foot” (assuming Madeleine, at the far end, was at the head), with Julie around the corner from him on one side, and Kozlov on the other.

The group, seemingly realizing that they had more or less ambushed him on the way down, gave him ten or fifteen minutes of respite for eating and chitchat, which he appreciated. But then, one by one, the individual conversations died away and heads began turning politely in his direction, smiling and anticipatory. Time for the gruesome details, please.

Gideon smiled back. The food and drink had done him good, and simply seeing Julie had revived his spirits, as it always did, and he was ready to talk about the day’s developments. He finished the last of the Old Speckled Hen, drinking from the bottle, and began.

“Let me start at the beginning. Working with the dog on the beach where the first bone was found, we turned up three more caches of human skeletal remains, all almost certainly from the same individual: one of bones from the right arm and forearm; one of hand and foot bones from both sides; and finally, one with most of the bones from the torso-ribs, shoulder girdle, and so on.”

“No skull?” Rudy asked. “No teeth?”

They were an anthropologist’s questions. Of all the bones in the body, the skull-which was actually twenty-one bones soldered more or less solidly together, plus one (the mandible) connected by a hinge-offered the greatest likelihood of a positive identification. And excluding DNA, the teeth, with all their irregularities, patterns, and dental work, were the feature that most often led to a definitive identification.

“Unfortunately, no,” said Gideon. “No pelvis either. Altogether, I’d say we recovered, oh, a third of the skeleton.”

“So where’s the rest?” Donald asked.

Gideon shrugged. “Washed away, taken by carnivores, who knows?”

“Couldn’t they be buried on one of the other beaches?”

“Sure, but which one?”

“Almost the whole of St. Mary’s is rimmed with beaches,” Madeleine said. “It would take months to search them all. Besides, for all we know, the rest might be buried inland. Or just taken out in a boat and dropped in the sea.”

“That’s right,” Gideon agreed. “I think we just go with what we have. We’re lucky to have that much.

“But how you know is Pete Williams?” Kozlov asked.

“We don’t know it-”

“But you think, yes?”

“We don’t even think it, Vasily. As Liz said, it’s our best guess, but it’s no more than that. A guess, and only a working guess at that.”

He told them about the supinator crest and the squatting facets. He could see that it was something of a letdown.

“That’s nothing,” Donald said accusingly. “That’s no kind of proof.”

“Which is what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“Maybe he had some other kind of job turning knobs or something,” Cheryl said. “Wouldn’t that give you a supinator thingie too?”

“Yes, probably.”

“So it doesn’t mean anything,” Cheryl said, the first time Gideon had heard her agree with something her husband had said. “It could be anybody.”

“No, that’s not the way you look at it,” Liz said. “You have to consider the probabilities. Pete Williams has disappeared-that is, none of us have heard of him since the last conference,” she added to cut off Gideon’s protest. “The last any of us saw of him was right here on this island, two years ago. Most of us here now were there when Edgar threatened to kill him-”

“Oh, come on, Liz, not again,” Joey said, stumbling over his consonants a little. He was soused, all right. “He didn’t threaten him, it was just, you know-”

“It was just Edgar saying, and I quote: ‘I keel ’eem, dat leedle peepsqueak,’” Liz persisted, unwilling to let go of an appealing hypothesis.

“Yeah, he said it, but he wasn’t really-”

“No, now that I think about it, she’s right,” Victor said. “He was steaming. We had our poker game afterward, and he was so mad he could hardly sit still; punching himself on the knee, talking to himself. Remember? He spoiled it for everybody-our last night together.”

“That’s so,” Rudy agreed.

“Aw, now, look,” Joey said, “he had a short fuse, sure, but that doesn’t-”

“Now then,” Liz cut in. “Think about it. Pete Williams was an auto mechanic. Auto mechanics have well-developed supinator crests. Most other people don’t, even allowing for the occasional knob-twister. So when you put all that together-the death threat, the missing man, the skeleton on the beach, the supinator crests-it’s pretty hard not to come up with Pete Williams as the first person on your list.”

“Is making sense,” said Kozlov.

“As far as that goes, I’d have to agree,” Gideon said. “It’s a long way from proof positive, but it does make sense. Mike thinks so, too. So tomorrow he’ll start tracing Williams, seeing if he’s still alive. If he is, that’s the end of it. If no one’s seen him for two years, then maybe we have something. In the meantime, I’ll get back to the skeleton and start doing some serious analysis. I already have the sex, but I’m hoping to pin down race and age, and to come up with estimates of height, build, old injuries, and so on. If they do match what we find out about Williams’s description-”

“Well, we can help you with that right now,” Joey said with the elaborate precision of a drunk trying to prove he wasn’t drunk. He pushed his glasses, which had slipped down his nose, back up. “We all know what he looked like. Thirty or so, kind of average build, maybe five-ten-”

“Stop, stop!” Gideon yelled, so suddenly that the museum ladies, now in the process of going around pouring tea, froze trembling in their tracks.

“What did I… what did I do?” a startled Joey asked. The tic below his eye was going full blast.

“I don’t want to know what he looked like.”

Donald frowned at him. “You don’t want to know? But how… but how can you-?”

“He means he doesn’t want to know until after he’s examined the bones,” Rudy interjected smoothly. “If you know beforehand, it’s likely to affect your perception. You find what you’re looking for; the infamous principle of expectancy.”

He smiled fleetingly at Gideon. They had both had the principle of expectancy drilled into them at the same time and place, at the feet of their major professor, back at the University of Wisconsin. Gideon smiled back. He was glad to see Rudy looking a little less miserable than he had the other day; not so different, in fact, from the old Rudy, if you ignored the smudged eyes, the gaunt frame, and that gold chain.

Donald nodded, and the others seemed to get the point as well.

Accepting a cup of tea from one of the ladies, who were now in motion again, Gideon continued: “If the rest of my findings do match Williams’s description, and if he really has been missing for the last two years, then the next step would probably be to get some DNA samples from his family, assuming he has a family, and compare them to DNA from the bones. If they match, that settles it. If they don’t, we need some more guesses.”

“From bones in ground for two years, you get DNA?” a surprised Kozlov asked.

“Oh, yes, even from bones much older than that. They’ve retrieved DNA from 350,000-year-old fossils. You see-”

“Of course!” Kozlov smacked himself in the forehead. “Stupid. DNA is chemically inert molecule. Nonreactive. Big, long half-life, not going break down any time soon.”

“That’s right,” Gideon said, chiding himself for the childish explanation he’d been about to give. Kozlov’s music-hall accent made it easy to forget that he was a brilliant man with deep and wide-ranging interests-self-educated or not.

“The business with the supinator crest and the squatting facets is interesting, Gideon,” Rudy said. “Any other occupational indicators?”

Another anthropologist’s question. It was good to see Rudy’s old interests reawakening. Occupational indicators, or behavioral indicators, or skeletal markers of occupational stress were what anthropologists called the features in bones that provided clues to the person’s activities in life: squatting facets, for example.

“That’s all I’ve seen so far. I haven’t had a real chance to look at the shoulder girdle and ribs yet, though. That’ll be tomorrow. Want to help out?” he asked with sudden inspiration.

For a moment Rudy looked pleased, but then he shook his head-a little sadly, it seemed to Gideon. “Nah, I’d only get in the way; I’ve been out of things too long. Besides, I’ve got the consortium.”

“Of course. I wasn’t thinking.”

“But thanks for asking. I appreciate it.”

“What I want to know,” Victor said, “is why we keep saying this skeleton, this person, was murdered. We don’t know that, do we, or am I missing something?”

“We haven’t found any direct proof, no,” Gideon said. “Not yet, anyway, but-”

“But if you can think of another reason for cutting somebody up into little pieces and then burying them in a bunch of different places on a deserted beach, I’d love to hear it,” Liz said.

Victor thought for a moment. “I have to admit, nothing jumps to mind,” he said, straight-faced.