He was, of course, going about it right, not just digging away at it, but first clearing the surrounding dirt a few vertical inches at a time. This the students would do with trowels, so that the skeleton, embedded in its matrix of soil, slowly emerged, mummylike, on its own pedestal of earth. As it did, Nellie would carefully go to work with his chopsticks, in effect dissecting out the skeleton.
By this time, many of the nonanthropologists had drifted away, Julie among them. “I smell like a horse,” she said. “I want to take a shower before lunch.”
Gideon nodded, absorbed in the digging. Nellie had made a preliminary determination as the bones came into view: Caucasian male of middle size, over forty, under seventy. No sign of cause of death. Finer distinctions would have to await removal and cleaning.
A little before noon, a rumpled, bearlike man with a pouchy, anxious face made his way toward Gideon and John.
“Dr. Hobert there tells me you’re FBI,” he said to John.
This, they knew, was Sheriff’s Lieutenant Farrell Honeyman, who had arrived several hours earlier to supervise the investigation. “Oh, boy, this is all I need,” had been his very first words, murmured despairingly at Deputy Chavez as he climbed out of his car.
They had not made a favorable initial impression on John, who had been standing nearby with Gideon. “That’s Homicide?” he’d said under his breath. “Good luck.”
Gideon shared his reservations. The crestfallen Honeyman, with his baggy suit and his face like a plate of runny scrambled eggs, had stood off to the side of the grave for most of the morning, uncommunicative and abstracted. In addition to repeated forlorn sighs, there were frequent glances at his watch and various other signs that he was a man of many worries. He had briefly questioned Gideon about the finding of the site, but even then his mind had seemed to be elsewhere.
But now, having found a colleague, he had perked up, at least to the extent of becoming more talkative. “God, I’m up to my earlobes,” he told John. “I have a multi-team interagency task-force meeting coming up this afternoon. This is the last thing I need.”
“What’s up, lieutenant?” John said, ready with sympathy for a fellow cop’s caseload problems. “Drug bust going down?”
“Drug bust?” Honeyman answered, his droopy eyes widening. “No, I’m talking budget restructuring, personnel reallocation, the whole schmeer.”
“Oh,” John said after a fractional pause.
“I’m the administrative lieutenant,” Honeyman explained. “Our detective sergeant’s on vacation. He’s really screwed me. I’m telling you, John, I’m really glad you’re here. If you’ve got any ideas, I wish you’d just pitch right in.”
“Oh, I’m sure you can handle it without any help from me,” John said gracefully.
“No, I mean it. I’ll take all the help I can get.”
“Hey, I’m here to get away from this stuff,” John said. “This is your show all the way.” But Gideon could see that he was grateful to be asked, something FBI agents learned not to expect from the locals.
“Not a bad guy,” John said when Honeyman moved off. “I just hope he knows what he’s doing.”
“Why don’t you take him up?” Gideon asked. “He could probably use some friendly advice.”
John shook his head. “Doc, the guy was just being nice. He doesn’t want my help, believe me. I know these people.”
After that, John spent a few more minutes restlessly shifting from one foot to the other while the exhumation inched along, punctuated by Nellie’s osteological bulletins. Finally, he gave up. “I’m gonna go sit by the swimming pool,” he grumbled. “I gotta work on my lecture notes.”
“John, you’ll do fine. They’ll love you. I’ll be there. I’ll shill for you from the audience.”
But John, not persuaded, went away talking to himself.
The exhumation proceeded. Even with frequent pauses for photographs and careful piling of the dislodged earth for later sifting by the evidence unit, much of the skeleton was exposed by twelve-thirty, its arms and legs folded up like a sleeping child’s. The small bones of the hand had been slightly scattered. Shirt, trousers, and underwear were almost completely rotted away, no more than some stiff, gray-brown scraps, but the one foot that was visible was still encased in a sturdy, well-preserved lace-up shoe.
As things wound down, Gideon found himself standing next to the solitary, woebegone Honeyman again. “Do you have any open cases that might fit this?” he asked, as much out of sympathy as anything else.
“What? Well, we haven’t even established how long that body’s been there yet.”
“Oh, I think five to ten years would be a pretty reasonable guess. The body’s completely skeletonized, so that tells us it’s a few years old anyway. And it’s not too old, or there wouldn’t have been any signs of the burial left to see in the first place.”
“Oh. Well, I suppose that makes sense. No, we don’t.” “I beg your pardon?”
“We don’t have any open cases from five to ten years ago that could fit this. Some of that was before my time, but I’ve had the files checked, and there’s nothing. No missing white males, not that age, not from around here. Hell, I don’t know what they expect me to do with this.” He nodded and moved despondently off.
Les Zenkovich, who had come up and listened in on the last few sentences, watched him go. Like most of the others, he had left for a few minutes to get something to eat from the lunch buffet, and he was now using a toothpick with an air of well-fed serenity. He looked expressively toward the burial, and then at Gideon.
“Well, somebody’s sure as shit missing from somewhere,” he said, sucking a bit of food from between his teeth. “You can bet on that.”
CHAPTER 7
For someone who knew as much as he did about the joints and what could go wrong with them, Nellie Hobert cracked his knuckles often and with relish, extending thick-wristed, fuzzy forearms with his fingers interlocked, bending them backwards, and snapping the lot with a long, rolling crackle. It generally meant he was feeling good.
As usual, Gideon flinched. “Damn, I wish you wouldn’t do that, Nellie.”
“Ah, nothing like feeling those synovial bursae pop,” Nellie said happily. “No harm to it, you should know that. Now then. You are probably wondering why I asked you here, yes?”
“Well, yes.”
It was late in the afternoon, and the two men were in the basement of the Central Oregon Museum of Natural History, in a workroom crowded with partially constructed museum “boulders” made of chicken wire, papier-mache, and wallpaper glue. In one corner a library table had been draped with heavy polyethylene plastic, and on it was the skeleton, laid out on its back.
Not literally on its back, of course, inasmuch as it didn’t have a back to lie on, but in a supine position, skull tipped gently to the side, as in sleep, its disarticulated bones arranged in anatomical order. Except for a few of the smallest bones-the hyoid, a few phalanges, and some carpals and tarsals-they were all there and all in good condition, with no damage worse than some abrading and a few gnaw marks here and there. Cleaned now, they were tinged a reddish-brown, like the soil they’d come from, and they smelled faintly of earth and decay.
It wasn’t a putrid odor-active decomposition was long past-or even unpleasant, really, but simply the way bones smelled after they’d been in the ground a long time, after even the tallowy odor of the fat had disappeared: musty, foresty, a little mildewy. A peaceful, undisturbed smell, the way old, dead bones ought to smell.
The skeleton had been removed from its grave and put in marked paper sacks at about 1:00 P.M. that afternoon. From there, according to Nellie, it had gone to the mortuary at the Saint Charles Medical Center for a pro forma autopsy by the medical examiner’s pathologist.
“The ME just looked at it and laughed,” Nellie said. “He told me: ‘With forty goddamn forensic anthropologists hanging around looking over my shoulder, you think I’m crazy enough to stick my neck out on some bags of bones?’ It was the shortest autopsy on record, let rue tell you.”