Make No Bones (17 page)

Everyone but Harlow had shown up, and once they’d examined it, they all expressed the same opinion. There were, they said, a few things about the reconstruction that reminded them of Salish, and a few things that didn’t, but nothing either way that was close to persuasive. In other words, the reconstruction was essentially useless, a judgment with which Gideon had to agree once he’d looked at Salish’s photograph for himself. Whatever the reason, he had missed the boat, and he freely admitted it.

“Oh, I’d hardly say that,” Nellie said, generous in his small victory. “Given the intrinsic fallibility of the process, I’d say you’ve done wonderfully well”

“I guess that’s a compliment,” Gideon said, “but—”

Miranda, who had been meticulously comparing Salish’s pictures to the reconstruction, spoke wonderingly. “Am I crazy,” she said, “or am I crazy?”

Leland pursed his lips. “A question worth pondering.”

Miranda was squinting at the reconstruction, framing different parts of the face with her hands. “Gideon, can I make a few changes in this?”

“Changes? Sure, why not?”

She studied the clay head silently for a few more seconds, her round face pensive. “Scissors,” she said, like a surgeon about to go into action. John found a pair of shears and handed them to her. Miranda removed the wig, snipped away some of the front, put it back on the naked scalp, took it off again, and cut away some more of the now-receding hairline. The others watched in attitudes of doubt or puzzlement.

Before replacing it she went to the other side of the table and turned the reconstruction so that its back was to everyone else. “I think this’ll work better if you see it all at once.” She found a thick black marking pen and made some judicious dabs on the face, out of sight of the others.

A mustache? Gideon looked again at one of Salish’s photographs. No mustache. No receding hairline either.

“What’s she supposed to be doing, Doc?” John asked.

Gideon shook his head. “Who knows?” And yet, dim and barely formed, there was the shadow of a disturbing and fantastic idea.

“Leland, lend me your glasses,” Miranda said.

“I beg your pardon?”

She held out her hand. “C’mon, Leland, give.”

Reluctantly, Leland gave. Without the massive horn-rims he was a startlingly different man, fragile and defenseless, like some squishy night creature caught unexpectedly in the glare of automobile headlights.

Miranda put the glasses on the uncomplaining clay face and studied it some more. “Gideon, you don’t mind if I smush the nose up a little?”

“What? Uh, no, smush away.” Gideon was staring uncertainly at what he could see of the reconstruction. Surely, even from this angle, there was something about the way the thick brown earpiece of the glasses lay against the broad temple, about the way the slightly depressed zygomatic arch rode low and flat on the cheek…but, no, he had to be imagining it. Miranda pushed delicately on the nose with her fingers, then stepped back to see the result better, her lips pressed together in concentration. She pushed again, picked up the shears one more time, cut away a few more tufts of hair, and disarranged what was left.

Then she turned it to face them. “You have to imagine that the hair is more gray.”

That was all she said, and all she had to say.

It seemed to Gideon that sound and movement stopped as suddenly and utterly as if they’d all been caught by the freeze-frame button on a VCR. For two or three seconds this taut, electrified stillness gripped them, and then Leland snapped it.

“Oh…dear…God,” he whispered, and followed this with a soft, nervous titter.

Gallic jerked convulsively, staring pop-eyed at the reconstruction. Her mouth was working but nothing came out.

Next to her, Nellie mumbled vaguely to himself. He looked stricken, almost as if he might faint. One hand clenched and unclenched.

Only the consistently unflappable Les remained in character. “What,” he murmured with an only slightly incredulous smile, “is wrong with this picture?” John, on the periphery, seemed not to know what was going on, as of course he didn’t. Even Miranda seemed stunned by her own handiwork.

And so it looked as if it were going to be up to Gideon to speak the words. A tiny shiver, like the touch of a spider, crawled up between his shoulder blades. He cleared his throat.

“It’s Albert Evan Jasper,” he said.

   But saying it didn’t mean he was ready to believe it. And yet, what else was there to believe? So convincing, so utterly inarguable, was the likeness, that it would have been absurd for him to keep telling himself that this couldn’t be, that Albert Jasper had been killed in a bus crash, not stealthily buried in the floor of an unused storeroom; that his remains had been identified with absolute certainty by an expert and reputable team of forensic experts—by, in fact, the very people now staring with such seeming perplexity at that unmistakable, bulldoglike face.

Like tumblers clicking in a complex lock, questions, answers, and surmises turned over in Gideon’s mind, rearranged themselves, slid smoothly if bewilderingly into new niches. The uppermost uncertainties of the last few days—Was this or wasn’t this Special Agent Chuck Salish? Was he actually killed during the first WAFA meeting? Were any of the WAFA members really involved in his murder?—had suddenly become nonquestions.

It wasn’t Salish, it was Jasper. And, oh yes, he was killed during that meeting; he’d damn sure never left it alive by bus or any other means. And if the WAFA attendees had been logical suspects from John’s point of view before, they were in it up to their eyebrows now. Who else was there to suspect?

A brief exchange of glances with John showed him that the big Hawaiian’s thoughts were running in much the same groove. Despite all the professions of astonishment, one of the stupefied expressions in that goggling half circle of anthropologists was a sham. One of them—at least one of them—hadn’t been in the least surprised to find out that Jasper’s end had come via garrote, not highway disaster. It was Callie whom Gideon naturally found himself studying hardest, but she seemed as genuinely confounded as anyone else. Which didn’t mean much when he thought about it.

But, he realized, it wasn’t necessarily someone in the room. Where was Harlow Pollard? John had contacted or left messages with everyone about being there. Why had Harlow failed to show up? Harlow…

“Preposterous,” Nellie croaked abruptly, breaking a second lengthy silence. His face, waxy only a moment before, was flooding with a dull red—visibly, from the neck up, like a pitcher being filled. “It can’t be Albert and everyone here damn well knows it!” He stared challengingly at them.

They didn’t look as if they knew it, Gideon thought, and no wonder. Preposterous as it might seem, no one could seriously doubt whose skull was propped on the table in front of them.

Except Nellie. “Gideon—if this is some—some joke…?” he began, half angrily, half hopefully.

“There’s no joke, Nellie.”

But in a way there was. It was on him, and Jasper himself was playing it, so to speak. Here Gideon had
made
the damn thing, and he’d
known
Jasper. He’d spent going-on twelve hours bent over that skull, memorizing every groove and irregularity; he’d somehow gotten just about everything right in the modeling process—which was amazing in itself—and still, in the end, it was a colossal blunder. He hadn’t come close to recognizing who it was and probably never would have, if not for Miranda’s sharp eye. Yet now, with just a few swift, superficial changes, there, beyond any possibility of doubt, was Jasper gazing at them through those bland, prosthetic eyes—or did they look just a little more amused than they had before? Surely this was a situation the old man would have relished.

“But how could we have screwed it up so royally?” Callie murmured from a faraway daze—Real? Concocted? Who knew any more?—”We were so positive it was Jasper. We had the teeth, remember?” she asked abstractedly, and then her eyes cleared, her voice firmed. “We had the damn dental report! There was never any question about it.”

“Of course there wasn’t,” Nellie said, heartened. “We were right.”

“I don’t think so, Nellie,” Gideon said quietly. “I don’t know how you all could have made a mistake like this, but there can’t be any doubt about this being Jasper’s skull. Coincidences like this don’t happen.”

Les laughed. “This is fantastic. The guy that was in that drawer for all those years, the guy we all looked at so solemnly in that museum case, the guy somebody stole out of that museum case, wasn’t Jasper all along. Can you believe it?”

“This is not funny,” Leland snapped. “It’s horrible. We have to try to—to make some sense out of this.”

“Nosir,” Les said. “Yessir.”

Leland turned on him in a shrill little spasm of outrage.

“You—you
nitwit!
Don’t you see what this means? Albert was
murdered!
We—we—“

“Goddamn it, Albert was not murdered!” Nellie interrupted hotly. “I don’t care who this…this fucking thing looks like, it isn’t Albert!” He banged the table so hard with his fist that the reconstruction tottered and would have fallen if John hadn’t caught it.

Gideon looked at him with surprise. Histrionics were Callie’s department, not Nellie’s. Nellie could be a little touchy on occasion, but in all the time Gideon had known him, this was the first time he’d ever heard him use profanity, the first time he’d heard him shout in anger at anyone. It was true that Nellie had been closer than any of the others to Jasper, so that today’s unsettling events would have had to be deeply disturbing to him, but all the same—

Leland swallowed, his naked eyes blinking. “Excuse me, Dr. Hobert,” he said stiffly, “but I beg to differ. And there’s something else too…” He quailed momentarily under Nellie’s ferocious scowl, but then drew himself up, darted his tongue at each corner of his mustache, and continued. “Don’t you think it’s high time this—this absurd secret we’ve all been keeping so religiously—”

“No, God damn you, I don’t!” The arteries at Nellie’s temples were bulging, something else Gideon hadn’t seen before. As if aware of them, Nellie massaged them, one hand on each side, and blew out a long breath.

“Leland, I’m truly sorry. I don’t have any call yelling at you or anyone else. Look, everyone, it’s easy enough to settle this. I’ll go over to the ME’s office and get Albert’s file right now. Everything’s in there, and I’m sure it’ll refresh our memories. We did a good job, you’ll see; a careful, professional job. Our identification of Albert is incontrovertible.”

“This is pretty incontrovertible too,” Les said, pointing at the reconstruction. “Now that I look at it, it even has that nasty smirk we all remember so well.”

Nellie summoned up a frail smile. “You’ll see,” he said again. “Just wait here, I’ll be right back. It’s just over on Greenwood Avenue.”

“I don’t think we can,” Miranda said. “Harlow’s odontology round table comes on at three back at the lodge, and most of us are on it.”

“Odontology round table?” Callie echoed with a laugh. “At a time like this, we’re supposed to worry about an odontology round table?”

“I think so, yes,” Miranda said simply. “A lot of the people here have paid their own way. I think we owe them the best we can give them.”

“Miranda’s right,” Nellie said. “You all go on back to the lodge. I’ll see you there later. I’ve got my own car.”

“I think I’ll go along to the ME with you,” John said, his first words in a while. “I’d like to see that file too.”

There was a fractional pause. “Well, I’m bringing it back.”

“I know,” John said pleasantly, “but I need to talk to Dr. Tilton anyway. Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

Nellie began to say something, then changed his mind. “Thank you, John.”

As Nellie bustled to the door, John spoke to Gideon. “Meet you back here.” He leaned closer. “Probably be a good idea if you didn’t leave anybody alone with that skull.”

Gideon nodded. “You better believe it.”

   “What secret?” Miranda asked when she was sure the door had clicked closed behind Nellie and John.

“Yes—” Gideon chimed in, and caught himself. In the second that Miranda’s face had been turned toward the door he had caught a furtive, flickering play of glances between the others. Of caution? Guilt? Concealment? What was going on here? What did they all know that he and Miranda—and John—didn’t? Why had Nellie jumped all over Leland about it? What was the connection to Jasper?

Gideon was suddenly struck with the odd, unwelcome feeling that he didn’t know any of these people very well; hardly at all, in fact. He’d been associating with them off and on for years, but how much of what he thought about them was real and how much had he constructed to fit his notions of what they ought to be like? Affable, laid-back Les with his DR BONES Porsche; droll, dry, harmless Leland —

“Forget it, Miranda,” Callie said, “you don’t want to know.”

“Me not want to know a secret? Somebody’s kidding. Gideon, are you in on this?”

He shook his head.

“Good, at least I don’t feel so left out. Now is anybody going to spill the beans or not?”

“Ah, what the hell—” Les began amiably.

Leland cut him off. “Why don’t you ask the great Dr. Hobert,” he said curtly to Miranda, “since he’s the one who seems to feel so passionately about it.”

For a moment Les looked as if he were going to continue anyway, but he shrugged and let it pass. In Les’s view, Gideon knew—or thought he knew—there wasn’t very much that was worth hassling about.

“All right,” Miranda said, unoffended, “I’ll ask Nellie. Well, if we’re going to have a chance to get a bite before the round table, we’d better get going. Leland and Callie are driving with me, Gideon. There’s room for you if you want.”

“No, thanks, I’ll find my own way. If I’m a few minutes late, tell Harlow to get started without me.”

“Begin without the Skeleton Detective?” Leland said. “Somehow it hardly seems worth the doing.” With the return of his horn-rims, he hadn’t taken long to become the old Leland again.