He looked up, at the sound of Nelson Hobert’s rattling laugh. Nellie had dropped off Julie and the students somewhere and was on his way to the meeting room for the first session of the day, telling Harlow Pollard about the cremains and waving the last of a glazed donut for emphasis.
“There are two sets of cremains out there,” he announced, “probably more. It’s a pretty site, that’s why. The stream, the meadows. One’s a classic sling-and-fling job-are you familiar with Willey’s typology?-the other’s a pump-and-dump…”
He saw Gideon squatting by the side of the trench. “Gideon, Julie’s gone riding. She’ll see you at-ha, what do we have here?”
Gideon stood up and moved out of the way. “Have a look.”
Nellie clambered over the foundation. “Oh, dear,” he said with sharp interest. He poked the rest of the donut into his mouth and leaned over from the waist, hands on bare, hairy knees. “Well, well.” After a moment he slapped his thighs and straightened up, eyes bright. “By cracky, look what we have here.”
“What is it?” Harlow asked, hanging back. “Soil-compaction site.”
“Soil-compaction site?” Harlow was one of the more narrowly trained people at the meeting. Although a de-greed physical anthropologist, he had made odontology his specialty long ago, as a graduate student. Now he was one of the best when it came to teeth, but he had little familiarity with burial sites or crime scenes. His specimens came to him, he didn’t go to them.
“There’s a body under there,” Nellie said happily. “A body?”
“A homicide,” Gideon said. “You can bet on it.” Harlow looked from one of them to the other. “A homicide?”
“Yes, a homicide,” Nellie said through square brown teeth. “For Christ’s sakes, Harlow!”
“A homicide,” Harlow repeated dimly. “You mean a human body?”
Nellie let his breath out. Like many good teachers, he was endlessly patient with his students, but testy with others whose minds didn’t move quickly enough to meet his standards. “The last I heard,” he said dryly, “human bodies were the only kind you could commit homicide on.”
“But that’s-no, I don’t-why would-”
Gideon gently intervened, explaining about soil-compaction sites. Not that he expected it to do much good. Explaining something to Harlow could be like talking to a tree. He listened quietly but it was hard to say how much got through.
“All right then,” he said, “it very well might be a burial…”
But, thought Gideon.
“-but why in the world would you want to say it’s human? Anyone could have buried a dog here, or a goat…”
“A goat!” Nellie exclaimed, his cheeks reddening. “What kind of a damn fool-”
“True, Harlow, it could be anything,” Miranda Glass said kindly. With eight or nine others she had drifted over. “It’ll have to be dug up to know for sure. But I will bet you dollars to dumplings that by tonight there’s going to be a set of Homo sapiens choppers for you to do your stuff on.”
Harlow shook his head emphatically. “Not me. I have to catch a three o’clock plane; Callie and I both. We have to go back to Carson City. The biological sciences curriculum committee meets tomorrow morning.”
“You’re leaving early?” Miranda said with a groan. “What about your odontology round table Thursday? Christ, Harlow, if I have to revise the whole schedule I’ll kill myself.”
“No, no, we’ll be back early Thursday morning. I’ll do the session, all right.” Harlow seemed tense and distracted, the way he got when his stomach acted up. “Didn’t I say I would?”
Nellie cleared his throat, impatient with the diversion.
“Now then,” he said, very much in authority despite his T-shirt and lumpy knees, “the police have to be notified. Miranda-”
“The police-!” Harlow exclaimed.
“Miranda,” Nellie continued, “I assume they know you around here, so you’re probably the best one to call them.”
“Right,” Miranda said, starting for the main building. After a few steps she stopped and turned back with one of her rosy smiles. “This is going to be a switch. They usually call us about mysterious bodies in shallow graves.”
CHAPTER 6
Twenty minutes later, a white, brown-striped Chevrolet with a Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office emblem on the door pulled into the main parking area. By this time, there were fifty people milling about the burial site, the attendees having decided with the briefest consideration that being in on the start of an actual exhumation beat all hell out of the scheduled morning session on bilateral nonmetric cranial variation.
Deputy Debbie Chavez, skinny and weather-bitten, walked with a cop’s confident lope and seemed very much at home in her uniform of brown shirt, snug tan trousers, and boots.
“All right, folks,” she said after talking briefly to Miranda, “here’s the drill.” She swung around so the sun was behind her, took off her sunglasses, and stuck them under the flap of a shirt pocket. Gideon heard them click against her plastic chest-protector. An unexpected dusting of little-girl’s freckles flowed over the bridge of her nose and along the untanned skin under her eyes.
“First off, if Mrs. Glass here says we’ve got a body down there, that’s good enough for me.”
“It was the consensus,” Miranda said modestly.
“Whatever. So what I’m going to do is get on the horn and call the sergeant. Till he gets here, I’m going to seal the area, and I’d appreciate it if you people wouldn’t do any more tromping around here.”
“We’re not tromping, young woman,” Leland Roach said. “For your information, we happen to be forensic anthropologists-which means we are quite experienced in just this kind of thing-and we’re thoroughly familiar with crime-scene protocol.”
“Uh-huh,” the deputy said, looking down at the muddle of scuff marks and footprints-Gideon could see his own-around the oval depression. “You betcha.”
She was right, Gideon knew. They hadn’t been thinking. As soon as the soil-compaction site had been recognized for what it was, they should have kept everyone away. It was sheer luck that no one had stepped right in the thing. Well, at least John would have an attentive audience when he gave his session.
Nellie Hobert cleared his throat. “True, we may have been a little careless, deputy. On the other hand, this site’s obviously been out in the open for years. I can’t imagine we’ve ruined any evidence. Ahum.”
Nellie was embarrassed. He was one of the country’s two or three leading authorities on crime-scene exhumations. His Exhumation Techniques had been a police-science standby for over a decade, and it came down mercilessly on careless tromping.
“Well, all the same, I just think I’ll go ahead and secure the area,” Debbie Chavez said pleasantly. “Sergeant likes it that way. Why don’t y’all just go about your business and come back in an hour if you want to?” She smiled, a quick up-and-down jog of the corners of her mouth. “We could maybe use a few experts about then.”
By 9:00 A.M. the excavating operation was humming along like a demonstration out of Nellie’s manual. Ordinarily, forensic anthropologists take care not to intrude on each other’s territory, but in this case Miranda had readily deferred to Nellie’s status and experience, and the NSFA president, with a shapeless tan fishing hat on his bald head and a stubby, unlit pipe between his teeth, was atoning for his earlier sins of carelessness with a vengeance, directing Deputy Chavez, another deputy, and several anthropology students with equal vigor.
A thirty-by-thirty-foot square had been cordoned off with yellow plastic tape and gridded. The “artifactual material” on the surface-a couple of rusty bolts, a corroded paper clip, the worn rubber heel of an old shoe, none of which anybody really thought would amount to anything-had been staked with engineering pins, mapped, and photographed from every conceivable angle, then gathered up by Dan Bell, the sheriff’s evidence officer. A crime-scene log had been established, and a line of entry had been delineated from the perimeter to the suspect depression. By means of this narrow path, those very few people permitted to enter made their way in-but not before having the patterns on the soles of their shoes recorded by Deputy Chavez.