Where there's a will

SIX

Seen from an altitude of fifteen hundred feet, Maravovo Atoll lay at one end of a curving archipelago of tiny islands, the first land they’d seen since leaving Hawaii. Maravovo itself was the largest, or at least the longest, of them-an elongated, C-shaped island, its spine thickly covered with vegetation, and perhaps a mile from end to end and no more than a hundred yards wide at its broadest point. The inside rim of the “C” was a narrow sliver of white sand bordering a lagoon of the brightest, greenest aquamarine imaginable, strikingly different from the deep blue of the sea that surrounded it. The only signs that man had ever set foot on the atoll were a floating pier and a couple of small, new-looking structures on one horn of the “C,” at the mouth of the lagoon, built by the cruise line for their picnicking day-trippers.

On the ocean side of the low coral reef that formed the outer border of the lagoon two brown-skinned, loinclothclad men paddling an outrigger canoe waved as the plane passed over them.

“I thought the island was uninhabited,” Gideon said.

“It is,” said Lyle Shertz, one of the two salvage divers, who was in the co-pilot’s seat. “But according to the CIA Factbook, there are some people living on a couple of nearby islands, and they come here to fish along the reef. Hey, what do you know, there’s the Grumman. Up ahead, about one o’clock, right in close to shore. Boy, that didn’t take long!”

“Well, you were right; we’re sure not gonna need the sonar,” the pilot, Harvey Shertz, said to him. “That’d be pretty hard to miss.”

The two men were brothers; identical twins in their thirties, with husky, well-padded frames. Although they dressed similarly-tank tops, baggy khaki shorts, and flip-flops-they had resorted to different techniques for disguising their receding hairlines. Lyle’s head was shaved, although he was overdue for the razor, so that his rippled, globular skull was coated with black stubble. Harvey wore his equally black hair long enough to comb it forward over his forehead, where he cut it straight across. From Gideon’s point of view, it gave them a worrisome resemblance to two-thirds of the Three Stooges.

Sitting in the seats behind them, John and Gideon peered around them and through the front windows. “But it’s plain as day,” John said. “Even if the tail wasn’t sticking up out of the water. How could it take ten years for anybody to find it?”

Harvey answered. “It took ten years because we’re a hundred and fifty miles from any commercial airline route and four hundred miles from the nearest land. No one flies over it. No one sails to it; not on purpose, anyway.”

“What about those natives down there? They must have seen it,” Lyle said.

“Sure they did, dumb ass,” his brother answered. “So what were they supposed to do, call 911? Even if they had cell phones, which they don’t, there aren’t any communication satellites down here to tap into. Oops, sorry about that,” he said as the floats hit the water more heavily than they might have and the four men were jounced in their seats. “I haven’t landed this baby very much.”

“I’m the regular pilot,” Lyle volunteered.

“Now they tell us,” John said.

Two more long, slow, glancing skips, much softer, and the Cessna settled onto the surface of the lagoon, turned, gunned its engines, taxied to within a few yards of the wrecked plane, and let out its “lunch hook,” a small anchor that immediately snagged in the sandy floor of the lagoon. With the water as clear as glass and the cabin roof of the downed plane only a few feet below them, it was perfectly visible: a smaller craft than Gideon had anticipated, white with dark blue trim, lying right-side up but tipped forward onto its nose cone and listing to the left, the collapsed strut of its nose wheel twisted to the side and both ends of the propeller blade bent straight back. A few unidentifiable chunks of metal and plastic lay scattered on the bottom nearby.

Gideon had been expecting a rusting hulk thickly encrusted with sea life, but in fact, other than a heavy layer of dull green algae on those windows that were intact, the encrustations were minimal and the oxidation was pretty much limited to the damaged areas, to seams in the metal, and to the regions around the rivets. (The corrupters of metal, it occurred to him, operated on the same principle as the putrefiers of flesh: go for the weak spots first; the weak spots and the natural openings.) The fuselage number, N7943U, painted on the horizontal blue stripe, seemed as bright as the day it had been put there. The tail, which was in the open air, seemed to have weathered a bit more than the submerged part.

From the Cessna it was impossible to see inside, even with the Grumman’s right window broken out-a patch of almond-colored seat trimmed with blue plastic, a glimpse of the rightmost rudder pedal, nothing more.

Lyle and Harvey tethered a small wooden raft to the Cessna and set it on the water loaded with a few pieces of equipment: an oxyacetylene torch and an open toolbox with some simple implements in it-a cold chisel, a hammer, a hand axe, a couple of pry bars, a few pairs of pliers, and some unfamiliar-looking wrenches. Then, not bothering with wet suits, they strapped on their scuba gear and weight belts. “This is gonna be easy,” Harvey said.

“As pie,” Lyle happily agreed. “No pumps, no compressors, no nothing. We’re gonna be home for dinner. Okay, we’ll take a look-see now,” he told Gideon. “Don’t go ’way.”

They hooked on weight belts, slipped their masks over their faces, got their flippers on, climbed clumsily out onto the Cessna’s wing, and slipped backwards into the water, not taking any of the tools with them. As they approached the Grumman, a school of tiny fish darted out of it, flashed silver as they wheeled, and disappeared. A crab or something like it flopped out of the broken window and scuttled its way into the sand under the fuselage. After a few seconds Harvey popped back up, water streaming from his shining hair.

“What did you-” Gideon began.

“Can’t talk now,” Harvey said cheerfully. He grabbed the torch, cleared his mask, said “Glub-glub,” and pushed himself back down. This time they stayed under for a few minutes, first using the torch to cut through the canopy, after which Lyle squeezed inside.

After a few seconds an orange and blue flickering showed through the algae on the front window.

“They’re working on something with the torch,” John said.

“Let’s hope it’s not the skeleton.”

A minute later, they were at the surface again, with Lyle hanging on to the raft with one hand while grasping in the other a white, angular object about the thickness of a human long bone, and shaped like a distorted, square-cornered “U.” Barnacle colonies clung to it here and there, tightly closed against this unexpected depredation.

“Well, here’s your skeleton,” he said, holding it up for inspection. “And there’s another one just like it, if you want it.”

“What is it?” Gideon asked, feeling let down. He had known from long experience that most of the “human” bones found and reported by laymen turned out to be from bears, or rabbits, or deer, or dogs, or sharks, or just about any animal other than humans, but still he’d been hoping. But whatever this was, it had never been part of the structural framework of any living thing.

“It’s the yoke-the steering wheel-from the co-pilot’s side. You want it?”

When Gideon shook his head, Lyle said, “Happy, happy barnacles, this is your lucky day. Go in peace, my friends.” He dropped the yoke and watched it drift slowly down, gently turning over, until it came to rest on the floor of the lagoon.

“Hey, prof, don’t look so blue,” Harvey said. “We could find something yet. We hardly looked in there. Things are all messed up. It’ll take us a while to go through the inside. You guys want to stretch your legs on the island while we work?”

That sounded like a good idea to both of them. At six-two, an inch taller than Gideon, John had been even more cramped during the flight. And inasmuch as the space behind the passenger seats had been crammed with salvage gear, neatly stowed and secured, but taking up every available inch (even the third row of seats had been removed to make room for it), they had been unable to move around the plane.

Ten minutes later they were seated, canvas tennis hats on their heads, sunglasses on their noses, and smeared all over with sunscreen, in a yellow, eight-foot inflatable dinghy that Harvey had pulled from a rack, inflated with an electric pump, and set in the water. Beside them on the seat-slats were a couple of liter-bottles of water and a bag with four thin ham-and-tomato sandwiches from the Cessna’s cooler. John, on the center-slat, had the oars.

Gideon gave the brothers a few brief instructions-they were to extract anything at all that they thought might be bone, they were to handle all such objects with great care, doing nothing more to them than rinsing them in fresh water, and they were to be on the lookout for any personal belongings-clothing, jewelry, credit cards, etc.-that might be useful in confirming the identity of the occupants. And if they found anything, he would appreciate the use of a ruler and a tape measure, and any kind of measuring calipers they might happen to have. Oh, and a magnifying glass “Yeahyeahyeah,” Harvey said, adjusting his mask and regulator preparatory to going back down. “Have a good time, don’t talk to any strangers. See you later.”

Walking on Maravovo was easier said than done. The seemingly inviting beach of smooth white sand was appallingly hot-even John wilted-and the thousands, the many thousands, of grayish land crabs stirring underfoot and scuttling for their holes made walking unpleasant.

The “interior” of the island-the outside of the “C”-was even worse; crammed with palm trees and pandanus, breezeless, stifling, and practically impenetrable. Creeping lantana and morning glory vines grabbed like snakes at their ankles, and gnarly, above-ground roots tripped them up at almost every step. Before they’d gone a hundred yards they were pouring with sweat, and clouds of gnats and biting black flies were hungrily gathering on them, retreating only a few feet when they batted at them, and then even more aggressively buzzing back.

“Talk about carnivores,” Gideon said, swatting away.

Retreating to the beach again-at least there was a sea breeze and no flies-they took off their shirts and shoes, left them in the dinghy, and waded up to their knees in the calm, crabless, blessedly cool water of the lagoon, occasionally sipping from the water bottles, toward where the cruise line had set up its compound about a quarter-of-a-mile ahead. At one point they set the bottles and sandwiches on the shoreline and took a swim, regretting that they hadn’t taken the brothers up on their offer of snorkeling masks and fins. Even without them, paddling around in the five-foot-deep water was like swimming in a giant tropical-fish aquarium, but after fifteen minutes the salt had begun to sting their eyes and they got out, rubbing their eyes but much refreshed.

The compound consisted of two structures other than the pier: a large, unlocked metal storage building (uninhabited islands made locks irrelevant, as John pointed out) with barbecue equipment, boxes of plastic eating utensils, beach chairs, and picnic tables stacked inside; and a small, canopied, thatch-roofed pavilion with a plastic-topped table in the center, a raised wooden floor, open sides, and a sign bolted to one of its four roof-support posts:

SHANDARA MASSAGE. TREAT YOURSELF TO A LOMI-LOMI ON-THE-BEACH SPECIAL. BODY EXFOLIATION, SEAWEED AND KUKUI NUT FACE THERAPY, TROPICAL AROMA SCALP TREATMENT, SEA SALT FOOT SCRUB, ALL FOR $75. LIKI-LIKI VERSION, $35. CHARGE TO YOUR CRUISE ACCOUNT.

They chose the massage hut in which to have their sandwiches, inasmuch as it was the only place that was both protected from the sun and open to the breeze. As they were finishing their first ones-the tomatoes had made the white bread soggy, but they weren’t complaining-they heard the Cessna’s engines start up and saw the plane begin to taxi slowly toward the dinghy they had left on the beach. By waving and calling, they managed to get the plane’s attention, and a minute later the Cessna was bumping gently up against the floating pier. The brothers were both looking down at them and grinning.

They had found something.

“Yes, it’s human,” Gideon said, looking at the bone that Lyle had just placed in his hand. “A mandible.”

“A jawbone,” John explained.

Lyle was delighted. “Oh, that’s why it has teeth!”

“Of course that’s why it has teeth, putzhead,” Harvey said. “Didn’t I tell you that?” If anything, their resemblance to Moe and Curly was becoming more pronounced, and Gideon half-expected Harvey to deliver a two-finger poke into Lyle’s eyes or kick him in the ankle, but all he did was shake his head.

“Where was it?” Gideon asked.

“Under the console, in front of the pilot’s seat. It was snagged around one of the hydraulic brake lines.”

“Ah, that’s probably why it didn’t get carried off.” He took it from Lyle, gently turning it from side to side. “So this is it, then? This one bone?”

“So far. We’re gonna head back now and see what else we can find, but we wanted you to see this first. Everything is shifted and kind of crumpled up. We’ll need to use the torch some more, and we’ll see what we see. I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I was you, though.”

Except for a few dead limpet shells on the inside of the left ramus-the part that rises, behind the teeth, to form the hinge that attaches the jaw to the cranium-the mandible was as whole, as clean, and almost as white, as a specimen from a biological supply house. A right lateral incisor and one of the right premolars were missing, but they had worked their way out after death; the deep, crisp-edged sockets, with no signs of the bone-resorption that would have gone along with eventual healing, made that clear. The other fourteen teeth were still in place and only a little loose, the natural result of the loss of the soft tissue surrounding them. Both first molars and one of the remaining premolars had cheap amalgam fillings in them. The bone itself had a slightly spongy feel-a “give” to it-but so would anything else that had been soaking in a warm lagoon for ten years. It would be solid enough, once dry.

With the Shertz brothers having forgotten to bring him any of the tools he’d asked for, the table wasn’t going to do Gideon any good, so along with John, he sat down at the shady edge of the wooden platform-floor, with his bare feet in the cool, damp sand. He flicked the limpets from the bone with a fingernail and slowly turned it in his hands, running his fingers over the bumps, ridges, grooves, and hollows. After a while he gently set it upright on his knee so it was “facing” him and studied it for another minute. A single drop of sweat rolled from his forehead, down his nose, and onto the leg of his shorts.

“Well, I can tell you who it isn’t,” he said at last. “It isn’t old Magnus.”

“No, it’s female,” John said promptly.

“Right. And the age, too. This came from a young-wait a minute, how’d you know it’s female?”

John had once taken a three-day forensics course for law-enforcement personnel, at which Gideon had been the lecturer for the anthropology segment, and while he had been a willing student, it quickly became apparent that osteology was never going to be his strong suit. Thus, his quick, almost instant, determination of sex came as a surprise. The mandible in Gideon’s hand would have been a good one with which to challenge his graduate students’ abilities at sexing. The overall size and ruggedness suggested a male jaw, he said half-aloud. On the other hand, the sharpness of the anterior edges of the rami and the delicacy of the condyles were more typical of females. The symphyseal height and the gonial angle could probably have gone either way, although, without measuring instruments, it was impossible to say for certain…

As Gideon droned on, detail after detail, John nodded sagely, perspiration dripping from his chin. “True, my good fellow, very true, indeed.”

“So how’d you come up with female?”

By now John was laughing out loud. For once Gideon responded with a frown. “What? What am I missing?”

“How I came up with female,” John said, “was that I figured the odds were pretty damn high that the plane really did go down that night, and if it did, there were two people aboard-Magnus and the pilot, Claudia-and since I knew it wasn’t him, it had to be Claudia. And Claudia was a female. That’s how.”

“But how’d you know it wasn’t Magnus?”

“I knew because you just said it wasn’t, two minutes ago,” John said, breaking out laughing again, and this time Gideon went along. When he sobered, he went back to turning the mandible in his hands and running his fingers over it again.

John, whose interest in forensic anthropology did not extend to sitting around watching Gideon stare at a bone and mumble to himself, stretched, stood up, and announced that he was going off to take another swim.

“Okay, right,” said Gideon, absorbed in the examination.

However he’d arrived at it, John was correct about the mandible being Claudia Albert’s. According to the Torkelssons, she had been a big, sturdily built woman (a lummox, Dagmar had called her) of twenty-five, troubled with bulimia. And the jawbone perched on his knee had almost certainly belonged to a big, sturdily built woman of twenty-five or so, afflicted with an eating disorder, most likely bulimia. Given the context and the circumstances, there wasn’t much room for doubt as to who she was.

Despite some of the ambiguous criteria, determining the sex had been the easy part. (Determining the sex was always the easy part, given that you started with a fifty percent chance of getting it right if you simply flipped a coin.) But beyond that, the classic curvature of the chin (in anthrospeak, the convexity of the mental protuberance), as opposed to the two-cornered squareness (the bilobatedness) of the male chin, was so archetypically female that it overrode everything else, even the ruggedness and size. It was female; he was certain.

But the ruggedness and size were useful in their own right, in that they were what had told him that the mandible’s owner had probably been large and strongly built. When a mandible, or any other bone, was robust and heavily ridged and roughened by muscle attachments, it meant that the muscles that had been attached to it were strong and well-developed. And if the mandibular muscles were well-developed, it was reasonable to assume that the cranial and neck muscles were well-developed, and if that was the case, then it was only reasonable to suppose that the trunk and limb muscles were well-developed, etc., etc. The good old Law of Morphological Consistency.

So it was possible, even from a single bone-the mandible-to make some assessment of overall size and physical condition. Of course, the Law of Morphological Consistency wasn’t exactly a law, it sometimes happened that a person might have a strongly developed jaw and neck coupled with a weak thorax, or thick arms coupled with spindly legs, and when such things occurred, anthropological assessments went awry. But they didn’t happen very often, and unless something turned up to contradict it, Gideon would stick with his reading. He’d rather have had a few more bones to look at, but in this kind of work, fragmentary remains were the rule.

Ageing skeletal material was trickier than sexing it (to begin with, you had a lot more than two possibilities), but in this case it was made easier by the presence of the two partially erupted third molars-the deservedly much-maligned wisdom teeth. Inasmuch as third molars, the most variable of the human teeth as to time of eruption, generally came in (when they came in at all) somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, and these particular ones had not quite broken all the way through, it followed that the person had probably been somewhere between those ages when she died. (Forensic anthropology, he thought, not for the first time, involved an awful lot of “probablys.”)

The eating disorder? That had been easy, the work of a single glance. The edges of the incisors were thinned and “scalloped,” almost as if they’d been gently filed. And the lingual surfaces-the sides toward the tongue-were deeply eroded and discolored, almost through the enamel. On the two central incisors, it looked as if the dentin might be showing through in spots. When you saw incisors like these, especially on a young person, the most likely cause, and the first thing that came to mind, was bulimia: the habitual, repeated vomiting that went along with it brought up stomach acid that ate the enamel away.

Ergo, he was looking at the mandible of a large-boned female. In her early- to mid-twenties. With an eating disorder.

Claudia Albert. And the fact-well, the high probability-that it was Claudia Albert added weight to the idea that Magnus Torkelsson had been aboard, too, even if nothing of him were to turn up.

All these observations had been made without benefit of measuring instruments, regression equations, or statistical tables, but he had been at this long enough to feel reasonably comfortable about his conclusions without them. The numbers and tables came in handy when you were trying to convince a jury or a skeptical defense lawyer that you knew what you were talking about, but Gideon, like most of his colleagues, trusted more to his instincts-that is, his educated and well-honed instincts-than anything that came out of a computer. Anyway, in this case, there were no lawyers or juries to worry about.

Drowsy with the heat, his back against a post, his head drooping, he sat musing over the mandible for a while. If she had lived, those third molars would have given her a lot of trouble. They were both impacted-tipped toward the second molars in front of them-so that when they had fully erupted they would have been pressing hard against them, putting a strain on the fabric of the entire mouth. Most likely, they would have had to come out.

Wisdom teeth, he reflected; one of those little mistakes that the evolutionary process makes, or rather one of those little lapses. What most people never seemed to get clear about the way evolution worked was that Mother Nature didn’t give much thought to the big picture. She fussed and tinkered with the details that caught her interest, and let the rest take care of themselves. Once the hominid brain-case began to expand and the snout to retreat a million and a half or so years ago, the new, shorter face had less and less room for its mouthful of big, grinding, crushing teeth. They began to be squeezed uncomfortably together, not that that bothered Mother Nature. She just kept on squeezing, and the third molars, being the last to erupt, were always being faced with a shortage of space by the time they got there, so that they started coming up sideways or back-to-front, or any which way they could.

The way she usually took care of annoying little problems like that was to let us solve them for ourselves. That is, if impacted, diseased wisdom teeth and unhealthy, crowded mouths got to be enough of a problem, people would die from them earlier than the general population did, and as a result their representation in the gene pool would diminish, and eventually, given enough time, the trait would die out and be no more. In other words, Mother Nature left it to us to work the bugs out of her program. (“Sort of like we do for Bill Gates,” a student had aptly remarked the previous quarter.)

In the case of third molars, we were obviously still going through the process-they seemed to be becoming rarer with time-but modern dentistry, well-intentioned as it might be, had complicated things.. .

He became aware that the Cessna’s engines had been chattering for a while, and, looking up, he saw that the plane was slowly motoring over the lagoon toward them again. Had he been dozing? Apparently so; John had returned from the lagoon without his noticing and was just finishing his second sandwich and crumpling up the plastic wrap.

“Welcome back,” John said. “Have a good snooze?”

“I was thinking,” Gideon said. “Turning things over in my mind.”

“Yeah, right. I always snore when I turn things over in my mind, too. Listen, I got a question. This girl, this pilot, she had bulimia, right?”

“Right, bulimia nervosa.”

“Which is where you make yourself throw up after you eat.”

“Mm-hm.” He yawned, scratched his back against the post, and straightened up.

“But she was supposed to be this big, strapping kid. Aren’t bulimics underweight?”

“Interestingly enough, no. They’re never very much underweight, and usually above average weight, actually. You see, they don’t do it all the time. They go on periodic binges where they overeat, then make themselves vomit. You’re thinking of anorexics, who starve themselves or make themselves throw up or take laxatives or whatever, but they do it day in, day out.”

John cocked an eyebrow. “They’re never underweight?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“No.”

“It’s impossible to have a bulimic who’s skinny?”

“That’s right, because technically you can’t be a bulimic and an anorexic at the same time, so if a bulimic is morbidly underweight, she’s automatically classified as having anorexia, not bulimia.”

John, who had thought he was closing in for a rare Socratic kill, was clearly disappointed. “That’s… but that’s…”

“That is a salutary example of one of the tools of modern science,” Gideon said. “We experts use it all the time. It’s known as disposing of nonconforming data by means of semantic recategorization.”

“Science,” John said, shaking his head. “It’s wunnerful.”

“Hey, we’re done!” one of the brothers yelled from the plane as it neared the pier. “Got some good stuff for you.”

Gideon got up, stretched, swished some water around his dry mouth, and went with John to meet them. This time they tied up and Lyle quickly climbed down holding a small mesh basket. “Possible personal effects,” he said.

In the basket were the bent, lens-less frame of a pair of wire-rimmed glasses; a few coins-two quarters, a dime, a penny; a lidded coffee mug with a hula dancer on it; an enameled metal tourist souvenir, probably a trivet or a wall ornament, in the shape of the Big Island, complete with its two white-capped volcanic peaks in relief; a black plastic comb; and the rubber heel of a boot or shoe.

The Big Island souvenir was snarled in a crumpled tangle of gray duct tape, which Gideon picked at and managed to unstick.

“Amazing,” he said. “This stuff really does last forever.”

“That and Twinkies,” said John.

Some of the metal objects had a layer of green patina on them, but otherwise everything was in fairly good condition, and the ornament, the mug, and the glasses could well turn out to be helpful in identification. No bones, however, and Gideon had a hard time hiding his disappointment. “Well, this is good,” he said. “Somebody might remember some of this. See anything you recognize, John?”

John fingered the glasses. “These, maybe,” he said doubtfully. “I don’t know.”

“We can do better than that, prof,” Harvey said, jumping down onto the pier. “Lookee here, what we found jammed down under the right rudder pedal on the co-pilot’s side.” In his hand was a sodden, water-blackened cowboy boot, swollen and distorted, and missing its heel, but with the intricate stitching still in place. “You’ll love this.”

“A boot?”

“No, no, boot-shmoot, take a peek inside.” He tipped it so that Gideon could look into the top.

And there, nestled deep within, was the skeleton of a right foot, or at least all that could be seen of it: the talus and the calcaneus, the two uppermost bones of the human ankle and foot. There was little doubt that the rest of the foot was there, too. The bulky talus and calcaneus, their anatomical relations to each other only minimally disturbed, blocked the opening, and with the leather whole and the sole of the boot still attached, there was no place for the other bones to go.

“Hey, how about that?” he said, his enthusiasm reviving. The twenty-six bones of the foot and ankle were far from the most useful parts of the skeleton when it came to ageing, sexing, and so on (given his druthers he’d naturally have chosen a skull or pelvis or even a femur), but he had long ago found that there was always-always-something to be learned, whatever turned up. And a complete foot was not to be sneered at.

The boot, oozing water, was placed, sole down, on the massage table. With a pair of metal shears from the plane, Gideon sliced it open from the top down, first at the back, then down the front, and then-very carefully-over the instep, while John held it upright for him. When he had finished, he peeled the halves of leather apart, snipping a little more at the sole where it was necessary to get the halves completely spread. The few falling-apart shreds of sock still present were picked off and put aside.

“Wow,” breathed Lyle.

“Whoa,” said Harvey. “Fantastic.”

The skeletal foot, ossa pedis, lay upon the bed of clean, moist, white sand that covered the sole like an illustration in an anatomy text. Only a few of the phalanges-the toes-had been disarranged. The four men silently admired it for a few seconds, until Harvey abruptly sang out: “Lunch time, we got chicken fingers, we got barbecue chips, Twinkies, uh, we got Ding Dongs, uh, uh…”

“You got Ho Hos?” John asked hopefully.

“Of course, Ho Hos. Uh, Zingers, uh-”

“You guys go ahead,” Gideon said. “I want to look this over a little more. I still have a sandwich left. I could use a Coke or something, if there is one.”

The Shertz brothers, with chicken fingers on their minds and their interest in bones exhausted, retired to the Cessna for their meal.

“John, give me a hand with the table, will you?” Gideon said. By now the sun had started down and the massage table was no longer fully shielded by the thatched roof. “I don’t want the bones baking in that hot sun. They’ve been in the water too long; they’ll split if they dry too fast.”

“Thanks,” he said after they moved the heavy table a couple of feet. “Go get yourself something to eat if you want, John. I’m fine here.”

“Nah, I’m fine, too, Doc.”

Gideon stood looking down at the foot again. His sunglasses, smeared with perspiration and sunscreen, were laid on the table. He’d already made his first determination: The foot and the mandible were from two different people. You didn’t see feet like this in twenty-five-year-olds. The signs of arthritis in the joints, especially the metatarsals, the incipient osteoporosis, and the trivial and not-so-trivial deformities that sadly but predictably plague the ageing shoed (or booted) human foot suggested a minimum age in the fifties and probably older. The grainy look and feel of the bone went along with this; nothing like the young, baby-bottom smoothness of the mandible. As to sex…

“Well, you know,” John said brightly, “maybe I’ll just go see what the situation is with those Ho Hos, after all.”

“Hm? Okay, sure,” Gideon mumbled abstractedly.

“I’ll bring you that Coke when I come back.”

“Uhm.”

As to sex, he wouldn’t want to make a guess at this point; not with just a foot to go on. The bones were neither too big and robust to be female, nor too gracile to be male. There was a method, not a hundred percent reliable but better than guessing, for determining sex from combined measurements of the talus and calcaneus, but it took discriminant function analysis to do it, a statistical technique requiring a table of coefficients carried out to the fifth decimal place. And that he didn’t have. Besides which, the only measuring instruments the Shertzes had come up with were a metal tape measure and a yardstick, neither of which could come close to handling the tricky measurements involved on these asymmetrical, uniquely shaped bones.

There was also a way to estimate height from the length of the metatarsals, the long bones of the foot, but that, too, would have to wait, and for the same reasons.

For the moment, he was absorbed in looking closely at the calcaneus, which he now held in his left hand, turning it this way and that to examine the rough, curving, asymmetrical surfaces. Yes, this was a row of tiny exostoses-little spicules of bone-just forward of the calcaneal tuberosity, on the underside. And another little ridge that didn’t belong there, running longitudinally just in front of it, and a third bumpy, inch-long crest of bone on the upper side, where the bone was narrowest, behind the posterior articular surface. These irregularities were calluses, the strong, bony reinforcements the body laid down to heal fractures and strengthen repairs.

So this heel bone had been broken at least three times, maybe more (bone calluses could disappear completely, given long enough). All appeared to have been “stress” or “fatigue” fractures: not the result of sudden compression or blunt-force trauma, but of the building-up of repeated, relatively low-grade stress over time. Gideon examined the rest of the bones, looking for similar injuries. Nothing. So here was a man that had fractured his heel bone three times, but had never, as far as he could tell, broken any of the other bones in his foot.

Now that was interesting. The usual fatigue- or stress-related foot injuries-from walking, running, jogging-were found in the metatarsals and the toes; not in the calcaneus. Heel spurs, yes; you got those in spades, but not fractures, not usually. When you did see stress fractures of the calcaneus, however, they tended to be found in people who jumped or otherwise dropped from heights, with recreational parachutists and hang-gliding enthusiasts topping the list of orthopedic surgeons’ favorites. In those cases, however, associated injuries of the other bones of the foot could be expected; you didn’t just break your heel bone, you snapped a couple of metatarsals or crunched a cuneiform as well.

But recurring stress fractures of the calcaneus with no accompanying damage? Repeated forceful impact of the heel, but not the rest of the foot, against an unyielding surface? He had come upon the phenomenon in monographs before, but never in the flesh (so to speak). It was called “rider’s heel,” and it came from the way cowboys typically dismounted a horse, swinging their right leg-never the left-up and over the saddle and coming down hard on their foot, their right foot, smack on the narrow, raised heel of their boot. Again and again and again. Ouch. And the older the bone got, the thinner the cortex, the less dense the trabeculae, the more susceptible it would be to breaking.

Putting everything together, that seemed to mean “Lyle and Harvey-they need to know how long you’re gonna be.” Gideon, deep in his ruminations, hadn’t noticed John’s return.

“Not long.” He turned toward the plane and called: “If you can let me have a carton”-with his hands he indicated something shoe-box-sized-“and some paper for packing material, we can be on our way in ten minutes.”

“Roger, prof,” Harvey yelled back.

Gideon turned back to John, gesturing at the bones with a sweep of his hand. “It’s Magnus, all right, John.”

“Yeah?” John said, looking at the bones with renewed interest. “You know that?”

“Ninety percent sure,” Gideon said with a shrug. “Well, make it eighty-five.” He went over his reasoning, using the small, folding magnifying glass the brothers had provided, to show John the calluses, which John dutifully, respectfully, fingered.

“Of course,” Gideon said, “for all I know, there might be other things that would account for a repeatedly stress-fractured right calcaneus without signs of injury to the metatarsals or anything else-but I sure as hell can’t think of any likely ones.”

“Hold on a minute, Doc. If you don’t have his left, uh, calcaneus, how do you know that wasn’t broken, too? And if it was, then this dismounting theory wouldn’t work, would it?”

“No, it wouldn’t. And, of course it would have been nice to have the left foot, too, but there isn’t very much I can do about that, is there?”

“Hey, don’t go all defensive on me, Doc. I’m just asking a question.”

“Who’s getting defensive?” Gideon said.

But of course he was. He’d just completed what seemed to him a neat bit of reasoning, and he could have used a little amazement, or at least approbation, and not a string of skeptical questions. “Come on, John, you’re a cop. How often do you get every single piece of evidence you’d like to have? You play the hand you’re dealt, and this particular hand plays out to one conclusion: Magnus Torkelsson.”

It wasn’t just the foot, he pointed out. Everything added up, and there was nothing to lead off in any other direction. An airplane from the Hoaloha Ranch, lost since the very night Magnus flew off in it and disappeared; a woman that nicely fit the description of his pilot;-he ticked the items off on his fingers-and a male of advanced age who, as it happened, had spent a lot of time in the saddle. How many other people-missing people-would that combination fit?

John held up his hands. “Hey, if you say it’s him, that’s good enough for me. Magnus it is. What do I know?”

A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth, and then the skin around his eyes crinkled up, and then they both were laughing.

“I’m sorry I got defensive there, John.”

“No problem, Doc.”

There was only one thing that nagged at him a little, he admitted, and that was the fact that he’d known too much about the case to start with. Forensic anthropology was like anything else: You tended to find what you were looking for. It wasn’t supposed to work that way. When he consulted for the police or the FBI, he made a point, when possible, of not knowing anything about the suspected identity of the remains he was to examine: not the sex, not the age, not the race, nothing. But here he’d been aware of how old Magnus was, of his sex, of the fact that he rode a horse, of the age and sex of the pilot, even of her bulimia. And what do you know, his analysis of a very few bones had confirmed every single expectation. That was slightly worrisome: Had he over-reached for what he’d believed, a priori, to be the facts?

“Nah,” said John airily. “You’re never wrong about that kind of thing. Well, not that often.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence, if that’s what that was. Anyway, I have an ace up my sleeve. When I was checking the bones for fractures, I saw that a couple of toe bones were missing after all, and when I took a closer… well, take a look at the middle phalanges of the second and third toes.”

“The, uh, middle…?”

“These two,” Gideon said. “The distal phalanges-the outermost parts, the segments that had the toenails-are the missing ones, and these two are the ones that adjoined them.”

“They are?” John said, bending closer. “They don’t look like the others, do they? They’re barely half as long. And they’re thinner, and they, like, come to a point, almost…”

“The toes have been amputated, John. The distal phalanges and a segment of the middle phalanges have been removed. And when that happens the bone that’s left-the proximal portion of the middle phalanges, in this case-is likely to develop osteoporotic atrophy over time and become resorbed-absorbed back into itself-starting at the end where the amputation occurred. That’s why they look that way.”

“So this happened a long time ago?”

“Oh, yes. Years and years. Decades, probably.”

“And when you say ‘amputation,’ you mean by a doctor? An operation? Not some kind of accident?”

“No way to tell, not anymore. There’s been too much remodeling. The site of the original separation is long gone.”

John was looking a little confused. “So… why is this an ace up your sleeve? What does it tell you?”

“It doesn’t tell me anything, but it ought to tell the Torkelssons something. It’s a ‘factor of individuation,’ as we so grandly call it. If it turns out that Magnus Torkelsson had two toes missing-which it will, I think-that’ll settle it for good. Case closed, all doubts resolved.”

Harvey had brought the materials he asked for, and Gideon began wrapping the individual bones loosely in newspaper. “You wouldn’t happen to know, would you, John?”

“If he was missing any toes?” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t know. He didn’t have a limp; nothing I noticed, anyway.”

“Well, we’ll be seeing Felix tonight in Waikiki,” Gideon said, fitting the cover on the carton with the satisfying sense of having accomplished what he’d come for. “He’ll know.”