“I’ll bring you that Coke when I come back.”
“Uhm.”
As to sex, he wouldn’t want to make a guess at this point; not with just a foot to go on. The bones were neither too big and robust to be female, nor too gracile to be male. There was a method, not a hundred percent reliable but better than guessing, for determining sex from combined measurements of the talus and calcaneus, but it took discriminant function analysis to do it, a statistical technique requiring a table of coefficients carried out to the fifth decimal place. And that he didn’t have. Besides which, the only measuring instruments the Shertzes had come up with were a metal tape measure and a yardstick, neither of which could come close to handling the tricky measurements involved on these asymmetrical, uniquely shaped bones.
There was also a way to estimate height from the length of the metatarsals, the long bones of the foot, but that, too, would have to wait, and for the same reasons.
For the moment, he was absorbed in looking closely at the calcaneus, which he now held in his left hand, turning it this way and that to examine the rough, curving, asymmetrical surfaces. Yes, this was a row of tiny exostoses-little spicules of bone-just forward of the calcaneal tuberosity, on the underside. And another little ridge that didn’t belong there, running longitudinally just in front of it, and a third bumpy, inch-long crest of bone on the upper side, where the bone was narrowest, behind the posterior articular surface. These irregularities were calluses, the strong, bony reinforcements the body laid down to heal fractures and strengthen repairs.
So this heel bone had been broken at least three times, maybe more (bone calluses could disappear completely, given long enough). All appeared to have been “stress” or “fatigue” fractures: not the result of sudden compression or blunt-force trauma, but of the building-up of repeated, relatively low-grade stress over time. Gideon examined the rest of the bones, looking for similar injuries. Nothing. So here was a man that had fractured his heel bone three times, but had never, as far as he could tell, broken any of the other bones in his foot.
Now that was interesting. The usual fatigue- or stress-related foot injuries-from walking, running, jogging-were found in the metatarsals and the toes; not in the calcaneus. Heel spurs, yes; you got those in spades, but not fractures, not usually. When you did see stress fractures of the calcaneus, however, they tended to be found in people who jumped or otherwise dropped from heights, with recreational parachutists and hang-gliding enthusiasts topping the list of orthopedic surgeons’ favorites. In those cases, however, associated injuries of the other bones of the foot could be expected; you didn’t just break your heel bone, you snapped a couple of metatarsals or crunched a cuneiform as well.
But recurring stress fractures of the calcaneus with no accompanying damage? Repeated forceful impact of the heel, but not the rest of the foot, against an unyielding surface? He had come upon the phenomenon in monographs before, but never in the flesh (so to speak). It was called “rider’s heel,” and it came from the way cowboys typically dismounted a horse, swinging their right leg-never the left-up and over the saddle and coming down hard on their foot, their right foot, smack on the narrow, raised heel of their boot. Again and again and again. Ouch. And the older the bone got, the thinner the cortex, the less dense the trabeculae, the more susceptible it would be to breaking.
Putting everything together, that seemed to mean “Lyle and Harvey-they need to know how long you’re gonna be.” Gideon, deep in his ruminations, hadn’t noticed John’s return.
“Not long.” He turned toward the plane and called: “If you can let me have a carton”-with his hands he indicated something shoe-box-sized-“and some paper for packing material, we can be on our way in ten minutes.”
“Roger, prof,” Harvey yelled back.
Gideon turned back to John, gesturing at the bones with a sweep of his hand. “It’s Magnus, all right, John.”
“Yeah?” John said, looking at the bones with renewed interest. “You know that?”
“Ninety percent sure,” Gideon said with a shrug. “Well, make it eighty-five.” He went over his reasoning, using the small, folding magnifying glass the brothers had provided, to show John the calluses, which John dutifully, respectfully, fingered.
“Of course,” Gideon said, “for all I know, there might be other things that would account for a repeatedly stress-fractured right calcaneus without signs of injury to the metatarsals or anything else-but I sure as hell can’t think of any likely ones.”
“Hold on a minute, Doc. If you don’t have his left, uh, calcaneus, how do you know that wasn’t broken, too? And if it was, then this dismounting theory wouldn’t work, would it?”
“No, it wouldn’t. And, of course it would have been nice to have the left foot, too, but there isn’t very much I can do about that, is there?”
“Hey, don’t go all defensive on me, Doc. I’m just asking a question.”
“Who’s getting defensive?” Gideon said.
But of course he was. He’d just completed what seemed to him a neat bit of reasoning, and he could have used a little amazement, or at least approbation, and not a string of skeptical questions. “Come on, John, you’re a cop. How often do you get every single piece of evidence you’d like to have? You play the hand you’re dealt, and this particular hand plays out to one conclusion: Magnus Torkelsson.”
It wasn’t just the foot, he pointed out. Everything added up, and there was nothing to lead off in any other direction. An airplane from the Hoaloha Ranch, lost since the very night Magnus flew off in it and disappeared; a woman that nicely fit the description of his pilot;-he ticked the items off on his fingers-and a male of advanced age who, as it happened, had spent a lot of time in the saddle. How many other people-missing people-would that combination fit?
John held up his hands. “Hey, if you say it’s him, that’s good enough for me. Magnus it is. What do I know?”
A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth, and then the skin around his eyes crinkled up, and then they both were laughing.
“I’m sorry I got defensive there, John.”
“No problem, Doc.”
There was only one thing that nagged at him a little, he admitted, and that was the fact that he’d known too much about the case to start with. Forensic anthropology was like anything else: You tended to find what you were looking for. It wasn’t supposed to work that way. When he consulted for the police or the FBI, he made a point, when possible, of not knowing anything about the suspected identity of the remains he was to examine: not the sex, not the age, not the race, nothing. But here he’d been aware of how old Magnus was, of his sex, of the fact that he rode a horse, of the age and sex of the pilot, even of her bulimia. And what do you know, his analysis of a very few bones had confirmed every single expectation. That was slightly worrisome: Had he over-reached for what he’d believed, a priori, to be the facts?
“Nah,” said John airily. “You’re never wrong about that kind of thing. Well, not that often.”
“I appreciate the vote of confidence, if that’s what that was. Anyway, I have an ace up my sleeve. When I was checking the bones for fractures, I saw that a couple of toe bones were missing after all, and when I took a closer… well, take a look at the middle phalanges of the second and third toes.”
“The, uh, middle…?”
“These two,” Gideon said. “The distal phalanges-the outermost parts, the segments that had the toenails-are the missing ones, and these two are the ones that adjoined them.”
“They are?” John said, bending closer. “They don’t look like the others, do they? They’re barely half as long. And they’re thinner, and they, like, come to a point, almost…”
“The toes have been amputated, John. The distal phalanges and a segment of the middle phalanges have been removed. And when that happens the bone that’s left-the proximal portion of the middle phalanges, in this case-is likely to develop osteoporotic atrophy over time and become resorbed-absorbed back into itself-starting at the end where the amputation occurred. That’s why they look that way.”