Icy Clutches (6 page)

Yes, he had told her gratefully, yes, it would be possible, it would be highly possible. Forget the fee.

She had driven him in a Park Service pickup truck to the compound and left him at the station. Since then he had been listening to Parker and Tibbett go back and forth over the same ground: Tibbett indecisive, cautious, obstructive; Parker calmly reassuring and consistent.

"And you, Gideon?” Tibbett said.

Gideon's attention had been wandering. “And me what?"

Tibbett continued his nervous rocking. “How do you feel about publicity?"

Tibbett's attitude toward him had become more subdued, more wary, since he'd realized that Gideon was the Skeleton Detective (a sobriquet hung on him by an over-imaginative reporter who'd participated in a case at another national park, Olympic, a few years earlier). Gideon was sympathetic; he wasn't too keen on being the Skeleton Detective himself.

"I'm sorry, Arthur. What do you mean, publicity?"

"I'm asking if you see any problem with low-profile involvement here?"

"Low-profile—” He caught himself before he laughed. This was what came of being the Skeleton Detective. “Arthur, I'm happy to help out on this if I can. As far as I'm concerned, I don't see the need for any publicity at all."

Tibbett, mollified, finally brought his chair to a halt. “I'm relieved to hear that. Fine, then. I just wanted to hear you say it."

"Well, then,” Gideon said, “maybe we ought to have a look at the bones."

Parker shot him a grateful look and was out of his chair before Tibbett had a chance to do any more vacillating. “Here they are, right here."

They were in a Del Monte tomato-sauce carton on top of the bookcase. Parker took the box down, used his forearm to clear a space in the center of the table, and put the box there. Tibbett unobtrusively pushed off with his feet to roll his chair a few inches farther away.

Gideon got up to look into the open carton. There wasn't much. A warped, split shoe, still damp, with the bony remains of a foot inside; the upper third of a right femur; and most of a mandible with a single tooth still in place. There were some animal bones too: part of a sacrum and two ribs—mountain goat, probably.

He handed the animal bones to Parker. “Not human."

One at a time the ranger flipped them basketball-style at a wastepaper basket. The sacrum took a second try. Tibbett watched the acoustical-tiled ceiling with practiced forbearance.

"Well, there isn't much,” Gideon said, “but I think we ought to be able to come to a few general conclusions about just who we have here. Tell me, do you lose many people out there?"

"We don't lose
any,"
Tibbett said defensively. “Well, a few every year, of course, what with crevasses, and slides, and people who refuse to take commonsense precautions, but as far as I know, the only people who ever died right there, right on Tirku Glacier, were the ones in 1960."

"So these pretty much have to be from the expedition?"

"Well, yes, certainly, I'd say so. Narrows it down, doesn't it?"

"To three people,” Gideon agreed. He pulled some old newspapers from the top of a file cabinet, spread them on the table next to the box, and took the boot out. “Got something that will cut through this?"

Parker produced a utility knife. Gideon used it to cut the still-knotted leather thong, then slit the boot itself down the middle from toe to heel, and peeled the two halves downward. The mildewy smell that had hung in the air thickened noticeably.

Tibbett made a face and rolled himself a little farther back. Parker flinched but held his ground.

"The smell's not from the bones,” Gideon reassured them. “It's just rotting wool.” He tugged gently at the soggy, moldering tufts of material and pulled them easily apart, revealing a complete set of tarsals—ankle bones somewhat crushed but still pretty much in place, and most of the metatarsals and phalanges—the foot and toe bones—considerably jumbled. Here and there were shreds of brown skin and shriveled ligament.

"Ah, would you prefer that we leave while you examine them?” Tibbett asked hopefully. “We wouldn't want to get in your way."

"It's up to you. This'll probably take no more than half an hour, but I don't really think you'll find it too fascinating."

Tibbett leaped at the opportunity. “Well, then, we'd better get going. We have things to do."

"What things?” Parker asked.

"Things,” Tibbett said.

"Actually,” Gideon said, “if you wouldn't mind, maybe one of you could do me a favor and get some information from Tremaine, or maybe from Judd or Henckel."

Parker brightened. “Sure, what do you need?"

"I want to know what the three people who were killed looked like. Height, weight, build, that kind of thing. Distinguishing physical characteristics. And if they know about any old injuries that might show up on the bones."

Parker nodded. “Sure, you bet.” He hesitated, frowning. “Am I wrong, or didn't I read somewhere that you didn't want to be told those things when you were working on a case?"

"No, you're right. Anthropologists are like anybody else. Other things being equal, they see what they expect to see. I'm more objective if I don't know who I'm supposed to be looking at. But by the time you come back I'll be done, and we can see how well my findings match what you find out."

"Right, got it.” Parker took his flat-brimmed hat from a peg on the wall. “Anything you need here, Gideon? Paper...?"

"No, thanks. This is just going to be a quick-and-dirty run-through. I called my department from the lodge and asked them to Fed-Ex my tools. They ought to be here tomorrow or the next day, and that's when I'll get down to the nit-picking."

"Well, there's coffee if you want some.” He placed the hat on his head and carefully adjusted it. “I wouldn't mess with those donuts if I were you. Been here about three weeks."

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Gideon started with the mandible. He picked it up in both hands, turning it slowly, his elbows on the table. Considering that it had spent thirty years or so grinding along in a glacier, it was in pretty good shape. It was male; he knew that at once from the ruggedness, the large size, and the double prominences of the chin. (In the old days, before the sexest terminology had undergone rehabilitation, males had had square jaws. Now they had chins with double prominences.)

And it was Caucasian, although here he was on less certain ground. Race was trickier than sex—to start with, you had more choices—and mandibles didn't offer a lot of clues. Like most physical anthropologists he didn't always find it easy to say precisely how he knew from looking at it that a certain mandible was Mongoloid, or black, or white. But—like most physical anthropologists—when he knew, he knew. And he had little doubt that the sophisticated calculations of discriminant-function analysis would bear him out when he got his tools to make some measurements (and his calculator to do some arithmetic).

Aging was more straightforward. The mandible had belonged to an adult; that was obvious from the one tooth in place; a third molar, a wisdom tooth with a good five to ten years’ wear on it. Exactly how old an adult? Well, if you took the average age of third-molar eruption—eighteen—and added that five or ten years to it, you came up with an age of twenty-three to twenty-eight, and that was Gideon's guess.

But here he was on shaky ground again. Eighteen might be the average age that wisdom teeth came up, but betting on averages would make you wrong more often than right, especially with something as wildly variable as third-molar eruption. As he liked to point out to his students, an awful lot of people had drowned in San Francisco Bay, which was just three feet deep—on the average.

And as for that “five or ten years of wear,” it sounded fine, but it was even less reliable. Tooth wear depended on what you chewed. If you ate a lot of gritty, abrasive stuff, your teeth were going to wear down quickly. If you lived on puddings and jellies, on the other hand, you'd have a few problems, but worn teeth wouldn't be one of them.

All of which suggested that twenty to thirty-five would be a more prudent estimate than twenty-three to twenty-eight. But what the hell, Gideon thought, why not go with his first impression, which was (as he often told himself) no mere shot in the dark, but the soundly based if intuitive assessment of a highly trained scientist? Well, make it twenty-five, plus or minus three. That would narrow things down and still be reasonably defensible.

Was there anything else the mandible could tell him? No dental work on the molar, of course; that would have made it too easy. And no signs of pathology. Eleven of the twelve tooth sockets were empty, but their margins, where they hadn't been broken or abraded, were crisp, without any sign of bone resorption, which meant that there had been no healing. Which meant in turn that they had loosened and fallen out after death. Which is what usually happened in skulls that took any kind of tossing around. The only reason the third molar was still in place was that it was slightly impacted, wedged crookedly into the angle of the ramus.

There were a few signs of trauma: a curving crack in the cusp of the molar and some crushing at the back of the left mandibular condyle, the rounded projection that fits into a recess just in front of the ear. And there were a few fracture lines radiating from the broken edge where the right side of the jaw had been sheared off just behind the empty socket of the first bicuspid. All bore signs of having happened right around the time of death—what pathologists called perimortem trauma. Nothing surprising there. When you were done in by an avalanche, there were bound to be a few dings.

So: What he had was a male Caucasian of about twenty-five, probably of at least average size and in apparent good health, with nothing to suggest that he hadn't been killed in an avalanche and a few things to suggest that he had. He'd go over it more carefully when his equipment arrived, but he didn't think there was anything else to learn from it; at least nothing that would help in making an identification.

He put it down and picked up the femoral fragment. It was the upper six or seven inches of the bone, and it had taken more of a beating than the mandible. It had obviously been well chewed over, and apparently by more than one kind of animal: bear for certain, and something smaller, a marten or weasel. From the looks of it the crows or ravens had had a go at it too. Still, there was always something to be learned...

He fingered the head, the caput femoris, the golfball-sized hemisphere that fitted into the acetabulum to make the ball-and-socket joint of the hip. Most of it had been gnawed away, but he could see enough to tell that it was mature; the very end of the bone, the epiphysis, was securely attached to the shaft, which happened at seventeen or eighteen for this particular union. And the sex was male. He didn't need measuring calipers to see that the diameter of the head was somewhere near fifty millimeters, well above the normal female range.

And that was all there was to say about the femur. No way, unfortunately, to tell if it had come from the same person as the mandible. Later he'd try calculating a total height estimate from it, but for now he had to settle for adult male, period.

That left the contents of the boot, and there wasn't much to learn there. The twenty-six bones of the human foot—seven irregularly shaped tarsals comprising the ankle and heel, five long metatarsals forming the arch, and fourteen stubby little phalanges making up the toes—were singularly lacking in information of use to the forensic anthropologist. Either that, or feet had understandably failed to capture the forensic anthropological imagination enough to stimulate any detailed studies.

Whichever it was, all Gideon could say about them after he'd cleaned them, arranged them, and briefly examined them was that the foot, like the mandible and femur, had belonged to a fairly large adult male. The large talar surface told him that, and the bulky metatarsals. (Not that it took an anthropologist to figure it out. How many people were there walking around in size twelves who
weren't
male, adult, and reasonably large?) He'd know more after his tools and tables came, but even then he wasn't expecting much of anything to come from it.

He stretched, wandered around the room until he found a chipped mug on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, and poured himself some coffee from the automatic maker on the corner of one of the desks. He gave serious consideration to the two withered cake donuts in the open Hostess box, but decided in the end to heed Parker's warning. No place to wash his hands first anyway.

He stepped out onto the wooden porch. The crisp breeze, straight off the glaciers, sent a shiver crawling down his back (or was that the bitter black coffee?), but it felt good to be out in the fresh air after bending over those stale, sad fragments. He felt a little stale himself, or perhaps just disappointed. He hadn't come up with much of anything. He didn't even know how many people were represented on that table.

He changed his mind about having a donut, went back in, got a paper towel to hold it in, and came back out, munching slowly.

The scanty results weren't his fault, of course; there simply were no distinctive features, nothing to separate one individual human being from another; no healed fractures, no signs of surgery, no distinctive anomalies or peculiar genetic formations. The only interesting features, really, were those perimortem injuries to the mandible. Funny, when you thought about it, how much they...

He frowned, finished off the donut with his third bite, and went back inside. He picked up the mandible again, thoughtfully stroking the broken margin with his thumb. Then he fingered the cracked molar, the crushed condyle. Was there something to think about here after all, or was he just—

The door opened. “Hey, are you still at it?” Parker asked. “You need some more time?” He waited at the door. Behind him Tibbett peered warily over his shoulder.

Gideon glanced up at the wall clock. They'd been gone almost an hour. It had seemed like fifteen minutes, but he was used to that when he got absorbed in skeletal material. Reluctantly he put the mandible down: He could give it some more thought tomorrow, when he had a decent lens.