“Little… tiny… teeth,” John said.
“Little tiny pointy teeth,” Gideon amended.
“Gideon, did I just hear you say you used beetles to clean your skeletons?” Phil asked.
“Uh-huh,” he said abstractedly. “Dermestids. You get them from biological supply houses. There’s nothing like them for corpses. They love to eat dead flesh.”
“Big deal, so do I,” John said.
“Mmm,” said Gideon. He had sat down on a log with the skull and was slowly turning it in his hands again, studying it from various angles, running his fingers over eminences and concavities, gently inserting them into the nasal aperture, stroking the teeth.
“I always thought you boiled the bodies or used some kind of caustic or something. You just put them in a tank with a bunch of beetles?” Phil persisted. He was fascinated with the idea. “Gideon? Are you there? I think we’ve lost him again,” he said to John.
“He’ll be back,” John said. “You just have to be patient.” They seated themselves on a log to await his return.
It took him another minute to surface again. “Well,” he murmured, “it’s a male, all right; not much doubt about that. The rugged muscle-attachment sites, and these rounded orbital margins, and the bilobate mental eminences-”
“That means he’s got a square chin,” John said for Phil’s benefit. Over the years of his association with Gideon, he had picked up the occasional bit of forensic jargon. “That’s just the way these people talk, you see. It’s to make sure no one else can understand them.”
“I know, I’m very familiar with the language myself.”
“-all those things yell ‘male.’” Gideon continued, more or less talking to himself. “And he’s a grown man, in his thirties at least, and probably not more than, oh, fifty or so. All we have to go on there are the cranial and palatine sutures. None of them are still anywhere near open, but none of them have been obliterated yet either, inside or out. Now, as to race…”
Another period of intense, silent examination and palpation before he looked up again.
“Well, I’m pretty sure he’s not an Indian, at any rate. The nasal aperture is too narrow, the nasal sill is too sharp, there’s no prognathism to speak of, the malars aren’t very prominent at all; if anything, they’re reduced. And you can see that the interorbital projection is pretty high…”
“True, true,” said John, as if he still knew what Gideon was talking about.
“… and the palatine suture… well, see? It’s really jagged, not at all straight, and the mastoid processes” – he fingered the rough, cone-shaped eminences to which the large muscles of the neck attached – “see how narrow they are? Almost pointed, not stubby. And no sign of shovel-shaping on the incisors. No, there’s nothing about this guy that makes me think ‘Native American.’ And definitely not one of the local Indians. He’s way too big.”
“What then?” Phil asked.
“White, I’d say. Everything points to Caucasian.”
He had the skull upside down on his lap, so that the palate and the teeth were uppermost. John and Phil leaned forward to see. So did the crewmen, from a distance.
“Guy could use a dentist,” John said. “It hurts just to look at those teeth.”
“Most of them, yes. They’re crumbly and discolored and full of caries, and two of them are missing and, ugh, here’s an abscess well underway. He’s let his teeth go for years, maybe decades. The poor guy must have been in some pain, and if he’d lived, it was going to get a lot worse. But it’s these two that are really interesting.” With his ballpoint pen, he tapped the two right bicuspids.
“Oh, yeah, look at that,” said Phil. “Fillings. He’s had a little dental work done.”
“But not just any dental work,” Gideon said, “excellent, expensive dental work. This is gold, gold foil, and beautifully applied. You don’t see this type of work anymore. It sure as hell isn’t the kind of work you ever would have seen down here.”
“So the guy’s not from around here, that’s what you’re saying?” Phil said.
“Well, yes, but it suggests a little more than that. When you find this kind of dentistry on a down-and-outer, a guy whose teeth haven’t seen a dentist in twenty years, it usually tells you one of two things. Either he’s somebody who once had money, but who’s seen a change in fortune, or else, more likely-”
“Or else,” John said, “he spent some time in prison, where they took better care of his teeth than he could get for himself on the outside.”
Gideon nodded. “Correct.”
“Not too surprising, considering what he was doing when he got himself killed,” said John.
“Hey, am I wrong?” Phil asked. He was staring at the shallow, eddying pool from which the skull had come. “Or are there some more bones down there? There, see? Caught in the branches, right on the bottom, a couple of yards-”
“You’re right!” Gideon said. “Vertebrae. Human too. And that’s the mandible under there!” He slapped the side of his head. “How could I not have looked! There might be more. Let’s fan out a little along the shore. Phil, could you ask these guys to do the same? I bet there is more. Something like the pelvis tends to get caught because it’s so big and irregular… I’d really like to see the pelvis…
But there wasn’t anything else. Only the mandible – the lower jaw – and a collection of vertebrae. Seven of them to be exact: all seven cervical vertebrae, the ones closest to the skull, the vertebrae of the neck. Somehow or other, the poor guy’s head and neck had gotten lodged there in that niche. The piranha had stripped them, and the bones had remained behind, almost as clean as the specimens you’d get from a supply house. Where the rest of what was left of him was at this point was anybody’s guess.
When they had fished them all from the water and laid them on a piece of plywood that one of the crew had brought from the construction area to keep them out of the mud, Gideon started with the mandible as the most likely one to provide more information, but there wasn’t much. The first thing was to fit it to the skull to make sure that they were really from the same person, and this was quickly verified. The few healthy teeth abutted perfectly and the two mandibular condyles fitted neatly into the glenoid fossae of the temporal bone, or as neatly as was allowed by the absence of the cushioning cartilage that would have been there in the living person. Beyond that, it pretty much confirmed his assessment of race and sex, and that was it. No interesting anomalies, no visible injuries, new or old. No additional clues to the living man.
On his knees in the muddy soil, he began to arrange the vertebrae in their top-to-bottom anatomical order, from C-1 to C-7, on the plywood sheet. The first two and the last one were easy, of course. C-1, the atlas, was like no other vertebra in the spinal column, essentially a simple ring – no spinous process, no vertebral body – a sort of collar on which the skull rested. C-2, the axis, had the smooth upward column of the odontoid process, essentially a pivot on which the atlas, carrying the skull, rotated, which was how one is able to freely turn one’s head. And C-7 was bigger than the others, so that was simple too. The middle four were a bit harder to differentiate, and Gideon settled down to comparing them two by two.
“Can I ask you a dumb question?” said Phil. “What are you doing all this for?”
Gideon continued working. “Well, I’m trying to learn a little more – ah, this is C-3, and this is C-4 – about who this guy was – that is, what he was like.”
“Yeah, but what difference does it make what he was like? I mean, who cares? There’s no way to actually identify him, is there?”
“Well, no, not by me-”
“He can’t help himself,” John explained. “He never met a skeleton he didn’t want to know better. You ought to know that by now.”
Gideon smiled. “You never know what you’re going to find,” he said as he figured out the final two and laid all seven in a row. “But there’s always something interesting.”