Of course it was chancy to assign sex or anything else on the basis of a single criterion, but on this otherwise smooth piece of bone there wasn't anything else to go on. Except for the tuberosity, everything about it was borderline, just the kind of fragment an anthropologist hates: maybe male, maybe female. Fortunately, it was one heck of a deltoid tuberosity; nothing borderline about it.
As he told Worriner, he would have drawn the same conclusion. Adult male; there was nothing else to say about it.
Worriner looked highly gratified. He lowered himself into a disreputable old wooden swivel chair. “Well then. I hope coming here hasn't been a complete waste of time?"
No, Gideon told him, he'd learned just what he'd hoped to learn. When he arrived in Juneau he hadn't had a victim.
Now he had Steven Fisk.
Gideon walked from Worriner's hillside house to downtown Juneau by way of three flights of wooden street stairs and then took the elevator to the top floor of the federal building, a white, nine-story cube of concrete aggregate pierced by windows shaped like coffins. The FBI resident agency was in Room 957, and there, with a sense of relief, he delivered the bone fragments into the hands of the agent, receiving an itemized receipt in return. He then used the telephone in the office to call Glacier Bay and waited while Mr. Granle went to find John.
"Doc! How's it going?"
"Great. The bones are safely stored in the evidence room here-"
"Good."
"-and I can now tell you who the murdered man was.” He paused, the better to impart dramatic impact. “It was-"
"Steven Fisk,” John said.
"-Steven…how the hell did you know?"
John's happy laugh burbled from the receiver. “I read it in a book."
"Damn, you spoiled my big scene,” Gideon muttered. “What do you mean, you-"
"Gotta run. I'll pick you guys up at the airport at five. Tell you all about it then."
There was time for a late lunch at the Fiddlehead, just down the block on West Willoughby. There, in a country-kitchen atmosphere of knotty-pine paneling, flowered wallpaper, and the smell of baking bread, he sat at a butcher-block table wolfing down black bean soup with wedges of dark rye bread and wondered how John had come up with Steven Fisk. Well, at least it was a good thing they'd arrived at the same conclusion.
Restored, he caught the bus to the airport an hour before the flight for Gustavus. Twenty minutes later Julie arrived, having spent her truant afternoon on a bus tour of Juneau's major tourist attraction.
Mendenhall Glacier.
Chapter 18
John didn't believe in keeping things mysterious. Before the borrowed green Park Service car had pulled out of the parking area at the Gustavus Airport he was handing a sheaf of papers to Gideon and Julie, who were in back.
"Tremaine's manuscript,” he announced.
"You're kidding,” Gideon said. “Where'd you find it? I figured it was on the bottom of the bay."
"It isn't the one that was stolen,” Julian Minor explained from the driver's seat. “It's a copy, faxed from Los Angeles."
"There's a fax machine up here?” Julie asked.
"Faxed to Juneau, then flown here,” John explained. “I got to thinking, maybe the guy used a word processor, and if he did there'd be a disk someplace, and maybe if our L.A. guys got into his safe deposit box they'd find it. And they did."
"Good thinking,” Gideon said, opening the folder.
"I believe it was my idea, John,” Minor said mildly.
"Hey, are we a team, or what? Turn to where the paper clip is, Doc. That's where he talks about it."
Gideon opened the folder and spread it so that both he and Julie could read.
Even now, writing in comfort and security during the twilight of my life, it stands out in my mind with a real and terrible clarity. Not the great cataclysm itself; not the endless day and night I lay, crushed and broken, locked in the freezing, blue-white embrace of the ice; not even the miraculous, dimly perceived appearance of my rescuers the next day, long after I had given up hope and longed only for oblivion from pain.
No, what I need only close my eyes to call up in harrowing detail is an image rooted not in the great forces of nature, but in the equally ungovernable passions of men. In the blinking of an eye, everything-the sexual jealousies and antipathies of the last several days; the exasperation over Walter's costly errors; the natural tensions that arise in any isolated group which has been in too-intimate contact for too long under too-trying circumstances-all of it came to an explosive, tragic head over an incident so trivial as to be absurd.
Until that moment the day had gone well, due, I think, to my one-more-fight-and-you-flunk warning before we started. James was affecting his brooding-genius mood: quiet, aloof, darkly contemplative-and wisely keeping his distance from both Steven and Jocelyn. For his part, Steven was doing his Zorro imitation: all handsome, flashing smiles, cavalier unconcern, and graceful bounds from boulder to boulder, Jocelyn was…well, Jocelyn was Jocelyn: vague, placid, and off somewhere in her own thought-free world. Thus far, our excursion had produced nothing more traumatic than Walter's gallant but ultimately unsuccessful battle with a fierce mosquito, which had cost us the pleasures of his company.
The tragic incident to which I refer occurred a little before 2:00 P.M., as we made our slow way back across the glacier, having successfully concluded our resampling in the area beyond its eastern lateral moraine. I should explain that our pace was slowed not by massive obstacles or yawning abysses (despite the pompous and officious warnings of the Park Service); on the contrary, we proceeded slowly because we were tired and warm-even on a glacier, the temperature in late July can reach the sixties-and because walking across the surface of Tirku is something like walking on a colossal natural garbage heap. No smooth, pristine ice field, this. One has constantly to pick one's way among the litter of “erratics"-boulders scraped from the flanks of the mountains above. It is all gritty black ice and debris, rocks and bumps, depressions and ruts.
In summer, things are at their worst because of the meltwater rivulets that cut shallow, meandering furrows into the grimy ice, necessitating numerous leaps (the streams are seldom wider than four feet) or tiresome deviations. It was at one of these rivulets that the trouble occurred; an inconsequential V-shaped channel two or three feet wide, with perhaps eight inches of water flowing along its bottom. Leaping it would have been an easy matter except that the far bank rose some four feet higher than the near one and overhung it like a protruding upper lip. Making it up that bank without getting our feet wet was the problem.
Steven, always ready to demonstrate his physical abilities, clambered up with the aid of his ice ax. Then he knelt while the rest of us, one at a time, extended our own axes to him, grasping the handle while he held firmly to the head, providing support while we scrambled up the bank. It was neither a dangerous nor a difficult maneuver. Jocelyn went first, then I did, both without incident. Then it was James's turn. Steven held out the handle. James grasped it, stretched one leg across the stream to prop his foot against the opposite bank, and began to haul himself up.
Whether by accident or design I cannot say-no one can say-but just as James's back foot came off the ice the ax slipped from Steven's hand. James dropped straight into the stream. There was no danger-the fall was a matter of a foot or two-and although getting wet during glacier travel is not generally a laughing matter, James had barely been moistened, having landed on his elbows and knees in only a few inches of water. In any case, hypothermia was hardly a problem with the temperature where it was and the plane due to pick us up in an hour.