Skeleton Dance (19 page)

He stared at it, brushing his fingers over the roughened areas, for a long time without getting anywhere. There was a reason for them, all right, but what it was he couldn't fathom. "Ah, the hell with it," he finally muttered, putting it aside for the time being and beginning to sift through the hand and wrist bones.

The bones from the wrist were hopeless, the capitate, trapezium, and hamate gnawed to barely recognizable nubs; surprising, really, that they hadn't been consumed altogether, small as they were. Those from the hand—the first three metacarpals—were in slightly better shape but didn't promise much, metacarpals being among the less informative bones of the body. But the moment he picked one up—even before he picked it up—something leaped out at him, something important enough to make him sit up with a start. And abruptly, his heart was in his mouth. In a single instant, out of nowhere, a whole series of isolated, disconnected details, meaningless until now, had suddenly spun about and clicked unexpectedly together into a recognizable—an unmistakable—whole. He was on to something at last, but it seemed so impossible, so fanciful—

What he was staring at was the first metacarpal bone, the one that forms the base of thumb, the part hidden in the palm of the hand. And running down the middle of this short, stout bone was something that should have jumped out at him the second he opened the folder: a sort of miniature canyon with high, craggy walls that stood out like a tiny mountain range. This, he knew was the end-product of a fracture that had healed without having been properly set. The roughened area was a dense extrusion of bone, two strong, rugged wings of lamellar bone that had formed around the break to repair and strengthen it. It wasn't one of nature's prettier healing techniques, but it was enormously effective, making the bone stronger than it had been in the first place.

What made this particular break so unusual, so
significant
, was its direction; the bone hadn't snapped crosswise, as bones usually broke, but had cracked down its length, so that the healed cleavage ran in a slight spiral from one end to the other. And the two ends of the bone themselves had rotated a few millimeters in relation to one another and then remained there as the injury healed.

It was, in other words, a torsion fracture, the kind of thing that happened as a result of irresistible twisting pressure. Most commonly, you saw them in skiing accidents, when the body spun during a fall but the foot stayed put, being enclosed in a rigidly fixed boot. When that happened, something had to give, and that something, when it wasn't the ligaments of the knee, tended to be one of the bones of the ankle or the leg.

But thumbs—thumbs were a different story. Unless you stuck your thumb firmly in a hole in the wall, like the little Dutch boy, and then tried a backflip, there weren't many ways you could wreck your first metacarpal in quite this manner. In fact, in all his experience, Gideon had encountered one way and one way only.

"My God," he whispered.

   It was the first time Gideon had ever seen Joly's jaw drop, a sight made even more memorable by the unlit cigarette pasted to his upper lip. He shook out the match he'd just lit. "What did you say?"

"I said," Gideon replied, "that these bones aren't Jean Bousquet's, they're Ely Carpenter's."

"Not…" Irritably, Joly plucked the jiggling cigarette from his lip, gestured with it at the paltry assemblage on the table, and stared indignantly at Gideon. "From
these
? But, really, how can you expect me… how can you…?"

Gideon picked up the fractured thumb bone and showed it to Joly. It was this that had cinched it, he said, shamelessly taking his own sweet time. (This was another one of those all-too-rare moments, another rabbit out of the hat, and it would have taken a stronger man than Gideon to keep from milking the situation at least a little.) A fracture of that particular kind, on that particular bone, a longitudinal torsion fracture of the first metacarpal, was so closely linked to one particular cause that it had a name: anthropologists called it "cowboy thumb."

A better name might have been "rodeo thumb," he pointed out, because these days it didn't usually happen out on the range but during saddle-bronc-riding competitions at rodeos, when contestants instinctively grabbed for the saddle horn while they were in the process of being ejected from their saddles. And although hanging on for dear life to a relatively fixed point while the rest of the body was flying head-over-heels ten feet above the ground probably saved a good many heads, ribs, arms, and legs, it was unlikely to do anyone's thumbs any good. All too often, they wound up with ugly longitudinal torsion fractures of the first metacarpal.

"Just like this one," he concluded, handing it to Joly. "You were right about Ely's not going down in that plane, Lucien. The plane crash was a sham, all right, but it wasn't Carpenter who pulled it off. He was right here; he never left. That's his left thumb you're holding."

"Mm." Joly gave it barely a glance, and a doubtful one at that, before putting it on the table.

"You don't buy it?" Gideon asked, a little deflated in spite of himself.

Silently, Joly rolled the unlit cigarette back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. "It's not that I doubt you Gideon—not necessarily—but there are others I have to convince, and to take such a leap—
such
a leap—on the basis of a single small bone…"

"What difference does it make how big it is? Would you be more comfortable with it if it was some kind of skull fracture?"

Joly shrugged.

"The point is, it's almost certainly a rodeo injury, so unless you think there might be any other ex-rodeo cowboys around—
missing
rodeo cowboys, that is—that just about has to mean it's Ely Carpenter."

"We don't have rodeos in France," a grumpy Joly said. "Not your kind of barbaric rodeos, riding wild bulls and such things. "

"Well, then—" He blinked. "What did you just say?"

Joly looked at him. "I merely said we don't—"

"Of course!" Gideon exclaimed, his mind racing. "Why didn't I—"He reached excitedly for the right ulna. "That does it!"

Joly took the bone from him and turned it uncomprehendingly from one side to the other. "And what's wrong with this one?"

"Nothing; that's the point."

Ordinarily it would have been another golden opportunity for showboating, but Gideon, taking his cue from a low warning rumble somewhere in Joly's chest, explained succinctly what it was that he himself had only just realized. It was Joly's mention of wild bulls that had done it. Gideon had been to a couple of rodeos in Arizona, and he remembered that in bull-riding competition, bareback-riding rules allowed only one hand to come in contact with the rigging that was cinched to the bull. The other had to wave free. That meant that one forearm, and one forearm only, suffered hard, repeated pounding, rodeo after rodeo, against the bull's spine and the cowboy's thighs and pelvis. "And that," he told Joly, "was more than enough to account for the inflammation in the left ulna but not the right.

Joly squinted at him. "And you're positive nothing else could account for it?"

"No, of course I'm not positive—how could I be positive of that?—but I sure can't think of anything else that makes sense under the circumstances, can you?"

"Nothing comes immediately to mind," Joly allowed, apparently on the edge of being persuaded.

"All right, then. That makes
two
rodeo-related injuries found in a body buried here in rural southwest France—where there aren't any rodeos—approximately three years ago. And if we take into account the fact that Ely Carpenter, former rodeo competitor, disappeared from sight, from this very area, three years ago and his body was never found, what would you say the odds are against its being anybody but him? A thousand to one? A million to one?"

Joly picked up the metacarpal and studied it again, silently shaking his head.

"I hope you'll put that someplace safer than Marielle's back room," Gideon said. "Safer than the St.-Cyprien morgue too."

Joly nodded. "These will go to Périgueux with me this afternoon." He wrapped the metacarpal in a paper napkin, put it carefully in the folder with the rest of the fragments, and rewound the string around the grommets, then continued to sit there, motionless and contemplative. "So then, what happened to the plane?" he murmured at last.

"What do you mean, what happened to it?"

"Where is it?"

"Well—what you said. The pilot probably landed it in some farmer's field in the dark."

"And then what? Where is it now?"

"Who knows? Gotten rid of some way or another. Maybe it really was ditched in the ocean to get rid of it."

"A $150,000 airplane? I think not."

"All right, the black market, then. What difference does it make?"

"Perhaps none. Still…" He sank into another long, heavy silence, emerging to mutter: "Did we have it backwards then? Was it Bousquet who killed Carpenter, and not the other way around?"

"Maybe, but I don't see why you want to limit it to Bousquet."

"Yes, you're right about that," Joly agreed. "All right, whom would you suggest?"

"Well, remember, this thing happened while feelings about the Tayac hoax were still running pretty high. There was a lot of tension in the air, a lot of anger and recrimination."

With his eyebrows lifted, Joly studied him. "You think he was killed over the hoax, then."

"No, not necessarily
over
it. I'm just suggesting that there's a link between the two."

"And your basis?"

"Look, murders and hoaxes aren't exactly everyday occurrences, and here they are happening at the same time, in the same little town, involving the same people. The probability of their being two completely separate, completely unrelated incidents seems pretty remote to me. There has to be a connection."

The unlit cigarette that Joly had been playing with finally came apart in his fingers. He made an annoyed clicking sound, tongue against teeth, and scooped the tobacco into an ashtray, automatically taking another
Gitane
from the pack, but not lighting that one either.

"
Non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem,
" he intoned in bishoplike cadence.

Gideon couldn't help laughing.
Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.
In other words, always choose the simplest explanation that fits the facts. Occam's Razor, the law of parsimony. What made it funny was that he knew exactly where Joly had gotten it—from Gideon himself at the forensic seminar he'd conducted in St. Malo.

"Well, what do I know, Lucien," he said good-naturedly, "I'm just the guy who looks at the bones."

"The bones," Joly repeated, shaking his head slowly back and forth. "Cowboy thumb," he muttered, his tone somewhere between wonder and reproach. "The things you tell me."

   Situated in a pleasant, wooded valley lined by low cliffs, Préhistoparc wasn't nearly as bad as Gideon had feared; neither seedy nor phony-baloney, although there was a definite Disney World feel to it. One paid an admission fee and then walked along a footpath that meandered through the natural forest, where two dozen life-sized, extensively labeled groupings of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon men and women going about their lives were artfully placed. The Neanderthals were perhaps a little exaggeratedly brutish-looking and the Cro-Magnons were maybe a tad over-clean and refined for people who lived in muddy rockshelters and wore animal skins, but on the whole the displays were interesting and within the bounds of scientific knowledge.

"So what's
your
opinion, Gideon?" Julie asked after he had filled her in on the day's bizarre developments while they strolled between the exhibits. "
Did
we all have it backwards? Was it Bousquet who killed Carpenter and not the other way around?"

"Maybe, but there are other possibilities." He stepped aside to let a couple of French kids waving rubber "Neanderthal" axes bought in the gift shop romp by hooting Plains Indian war whoops out of North Dakota by way of Warner Brothers.

"All we know for certain," he said, getting back on the path, "is that it's Ely Carpenter, not Bousquet, who's dead. But who killed him—that's anybody's Just because he had problems with Bousquet doesn't mean he didn't have them with somebody else."

"Somebody else at the institute, you mean."

"Well… yes. I didn't want to think so at first, but there's sure something funny going on. It's not just that everybody's playing it so cagey and close to the vest—well, everyone except Émile, who may just have his own axe to grind. There's also the theft of the bones from the morgue in St.-Cyprien, what about that? We assumed it was to keep me from identifying the skeleton as Bousquet's—which might conceivably have implicated Ely—but now we know it
wasn't
Bousquet's skeleton, it was Ely's, so what was that all about?"

"Oh, that," said Julie. "I already explained that."

"You did? When? Where was I?"

"It was right after we got back from the hospital, and you were right there. You brushed it off at the time. I can even give you your exact words: you said no way, impossible, uh-uh, couldn't be, you knew these people, they thought like scientists, and so forth. You went on for quite a while. If I'm not mistaken there was even a 'whereas' and a 'therefore' in there somewhere. It was quite impressive."

"Oh, gosh, did I really do that? I'm sorry, it must have been the concussion. Um, what was it you said again?"

"It wasn't the concussion, it was just you being professorial and smarter-than-thou," she said pleasantly. "You can't help it; I'm used to it. Anyway, what I said was that the bones might not have been Bousquet's at all—and
that
was exactly what someone didn't want anybody to know."

"I have admit, that has a familiar ring," Gideon said. "It's also starting to make sense, given what we know now." They paused briefly to take in the next scene, a messy but probably fairly accurate rendition of "Dismembering the Reindeer with Stone Implements."