Gideon frowned. “A supernumerary tooth…”
There was, he was certain, no extra tooth in the clay-covered mandible now in its wooden cubbyhole in the evidence room; the mandible that had so startlingly transformed itself from Salish’s to Jasper’s less than an hour before. A first faint glimmer of illumination showed itself, an indication of just how they had come to make so freakish an error a decade ago. Except that, if he was right, there wasn’t any error. They had been flimflammed, all right. With a vengeance.
Les backed off. “Well, I wouldn’t swear to a supernumerary tooth. I’ve looked at a lot of skulls since then. But whatever there was, you didn’t have to be an odontologist to see there was a match.”
“And you personally compared the charts to the remains yourself? You saw that they matched? You didn’t just take Harlow’s word for it?”
“Of course I compared them. We all did.” He tilted his head, pulled on an earlobe. “Well, I think we did. Who remembers now? But, look, that mandible was right there in front of us the whole time. Anybody who felt like it could check it against the charts anytime he wanted. Harlow or anybody else would have been out of his mind to try to fudge anything.”
Not if it had been done the way Gideon thought it had. It was becoming clearer, but there were still some fuzzy edges, some pieces that didn’t fit. “Let me ask you this, Les. How positive are you those records were really Jasper’s?”
“What kind of question is that? About as positive as you can be. We found out who his dentist was, Harlow got in touch with him for the charts-you know the drill-and back they came, just like for anybody else. Well, except for the x-rays.”
Ah. Gideon’s eyes narrowed. “What about the x-rays?”
“There weren’t any. Jasper was scared of them.” He laughed. “Weird when you think about it. Here’s the number-one bone expert in the country-”
“How do you know he was scared of them?”
Les shrugged. He was beginning to tire of the conversation, or perhaps to wonder what they were talking about. “I don’t know. It wasn’t any secret.”
“I never heard about it.”
“So? What does it matter now?” Les yawned and shook himself, bearlike, the undulation seeming to roll slowly up his big torso under the skin. He took off the clay bracelet and dropped it on the table. “I guess head for-oh, hey I remember. Harlow told us. When he contacted the dentist. The guy told him Jasper was scared to death of x-rays. Okay? Satisfied?”
With a gratifying clunk, the last piece dropped tidily into place. Gideon leaned back in the chair.
“Satisfied,” he said.
CHAPTER 15
“Hello, welcome to McDonald’s; may I take your order, please?”
John stuck his head out the car window to get closer to the microphone-speaker. “Hamburger, large fries, strawberry shake.” He turned back into the car. “Doc, you sure you don’t want something?”
“No, thanks.” Gideon’s stomach still wasn’t quite settled, and the heat wasn’t helping. But he was thirsty. “Well, maybe a shake. Chocolate.”
“And a chocolate shake,” John yelled into the mike.
“Yo,” the speaker said metallically, and then a moment later: “That’ll be $3.54 at the first window, please.”
John drove twenty feet to the first window and paid.
“Thank you, drive to window number two and await your order,” he was told, this time by a living person.
John drove to window number two and awaited. “And so that’s what the big secret is?” he said to Gideon. “They had a roast and Jasper took it the wrong way?”
“According to Les.”
“So what’s the big deal?”
Gideon explained some of what Les had told him.
John shook his head. “Hell, I don’t know what to make out of that. I asked Nellie about it twice and both times he told me he didn’t know what Leland was talking about.” He turned away to collect their order. “I just wish the guy would level with me,” he muttered.
As John got the car moving north on Highway 20 toward Whitebark Lodge, Gideon continued going through Albert Jasper’s old file, which John had copied at the Medical Examiner’s office.
After three or four miles, John glanced over at him. “What do you think?” He was getting restive. The hamburger had been consumed in a few bites; the french fries were being plucked one at a time from the bag beside him on the seat.
“Tell you in a minute,” Gideon said.
Side by side on his lap he had set two forms, slightly different in their layouts, but each diagramming the same thing: a set of all thirty-two human teeth, “folded out” to show the five surfaces of each. One of the forms bore the logo, “Victor MacFadden, D.D.S., 333 Montezuma Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87504.” Under it, alongside “Patient Name,” was “Jasper, Albert E.” The diagram had been crosshatched and shaded to show a variety of dental problems and treatments; to judge from them, Jasper had spent a lot of time in the dentist’s chair, as Les had implied.
And crammed in between the lower-right canine and first bicuspid was an extra tooth that had no business being in anybody’s mouth: Les’s supernumerary.
The other form, plainer and more cheaply printed, had Harlow Pollard’s finicky signature at the bottom, and a date of June 13, 1981. This was a standard odontological postmortem diagram, and it had apparently been filled out after the crash, directly from the remains. Naturally enough, only the part representing the eight teeth in the right half of the mandible had been marked up.
And those markings, as Les had told him more than once, perfectly matched those on Dr. MacFadden’s chart: five fillings, all on the identical surfaces of the identical teeth, one gold inlay, one missing molar with its space closed…and one highly unusual supernumerary, between canine and bicuspid.
“I can tell you what Nellie said,” John volunteered. “What’d Nellie say?” Gideon murmured, studying the charts.
“He said you’re nuts,” John informed him cheerfully. “He took one look at MacFadden’s chart, that one you’ve got right there, let out a yelp, and said it proves once and for all that Jasper died on that bus.”
“Mm?” Gideon said without looking up. “And how does he account for the reconstruction looking so much like Jasper?”
“I can give you his exact words.” John took out the notepad he carried in his shirt pocket and glanced at it from the corner of his eye as he drove. “‘Occultism…humbuggery…subliminal suggestion…hocus-’”
Gideon laughed and took his milkshake from the opened lid of the glove compartment. “Well, he’s wrong, John. Sharp as he is, Nellie’s got a blind spot when it comes to reconstructions. The fact is, Jasper never got on that bus. He was buried at Whitebark, and what’s left of him is now sitting on a shelf in the sheriff’s evidence room.”
“What about these charts?” John asked. “They match, don’t they? And this one’s from Jasper’s dentist, right? How do you account for that?”
“Faked,” Gideon said. “Or rather, one of them is. The postmortem one that Harlow filled out after the crash is accurate, all right. It shows exactly what was in the burned mandible that came from the bus. But this one-” he held up the form with Dr. MacFadden’s logo on it “-is a fake. It isn’t really Jasper’s chart, John.”
“Now wait a minute, Doc. You know I don’t argue with you when it comes to bones and things-”
“Oh, ho, ho,” Gideon said.
“-but you need to know I already checked this out. While I was with Nellie. I put in a call to MacFadden’s office in Santa Fe. This guy is definitely a bona fide dentist, he’s still in practice, and Jasper was his patient. He remembers the accident, he remembers getting a call from Pollard-and he remembers sending out the chart. So-”