delicacy of the clavicles and scapulas— which in muscular men were ridged and roughened by the pull of tendinous muscle insertions—suggested gracility, perhaps even frailty. Assuming that he wasn't obese (bones held no information about body fat), his weight would have been somewhere around 130 pounds; 145 at the outside.
These conclusions were too tenuous to pass on to Inspector Joly, who made his appearance at the end of exactly two hours, which left embarrassingly little to tell: The remains were those of a male. (The proportions of the clavicles, scapulas, and sternum, while not completely reliable sex indicators on their own, were enough to provide credible support for Gideon's intuition.) The probable age was thirty-two to thirty-four. Dismemberment had been performed with a knife at the shoulder, hip, wrist, and ankle joints, and at the fifth cervical and fourth lumbar vertebrae.
Only one point seemed to rouse Joly's interest. “A knife,” he said. “Do you mean it literally? Not an axe? Or a cleaver?'
'Maybe a cleaver, but he was cut up, not chopped up. If you chop a man's foot off with an axe you naturally do it at the thinnest part of the lower leg, just above the ankle bulge.” A slow, undulating shiver rolled up his spine. What a hell of a thing for a reasonably serious, moderately scholarly professor of hominid evolution to be chatting indifferently about.
'Well,” he went on, doing his best to ignore this unprofessional reaction, “that bulge isn't made by the foot bones, it's made by the leg bones—the lower ends of the tibia and fibula—so if you chopped through the narrow point, you'd get the last inch or two of those bones in with the foot bones. But all we have here are the foot bones. It's the same with the other cuts. They were made between and around bones, not through them. You can't do that swinging an axe.'
Joly stroked the skin behind his ear with a finger. “You know, one of the men upstairs is a butcher. He boasted about once having studied medicine. You don't suppose...?'
'One of the men upstairs? This happened forty, fifty years ago.'
'He was in the area forty or fifty years ago. He's been gone since. Claude Fougeray.” He said the name with slow, thoughtful emphasis, and repeated it. “Claude Fougeray. Not an endearing man.'
'This is done pretty crudely,” Gideon said. “It doesn't suggest any anatomical knowledge.'
'I believe he only studied for a year or two.'
'Even a first-year med student would do better than this. So would a butcher.'
Joly nodded. “All right. Is there anything else you can tell me?'
'Not at this point, but I'd like to have another look at these and bring a few more tools. Something might turn up.'
'Of course,” Joly said. He did not look overly hopeful. “By the way, our Mr. Fougeray expressed interest in coming down here to watch you at work. Would you object?'
'Why would he want to?'
'Morbid curiosity, I have no doubt, but he seemed to feel that his medical skills might make him helpful. Or perhaps his butchering skills. He pointed out rather smugly that he was the one who diagnosed the bones as human.'
Gideon didn't think much of the idea, but he couldn't come up with a valid objection. “Fine, as long as he stays out of the way.'
'Good, I'll tell him. I want to be there when he comes.'
He rubbed his hands briskly together. “Now. The bones will remain here, with the room sealed, until Monday, when our forensics people will pick them up. Will that be time enough for you?'
'Sure, I'll come out tomorrow morning. I don't have any lectures scheduled, and there isn't anything particular I planned to do.'
A sudden, unexpected image of Julie jumped into his mind, and he almost allowed himself a rueful smile. To be in France with nothing particular to do! It would have been different a few years ago, but a few years ago he hadn't met Julie. Now, the idea of grand sights and great meals depressed him if he couldn't enjoy them with her.
He chided himself, a man of forty so lovesick that being away from his bright, laughing, beautiful wife of a little more than a year turned everything gray and dull. He didn't approve of it; being that dependent on anyone else was rotten psychology. But how terrific it was to have someone to miss so much. After Nora had died, he had thought for four long, black years that it could never happen to him again. But it had. In the person of a robustly pretty supervising park ranger at Olympic National Park.
It had really come home to him on this trip. When he'd agreed to speak at the conference he'd been sorry, of course, that she'd already committed herself to a week-long seminar for National Park Service supervisors at the Grand Canyon training center, but it hadn't dampened his anticipation of the pleasures of France. And yet here he was, glad for the diversion of some rat-gnawed, soiled old bones in a dank cellar . . . with Paris a few hours away.
How absurdly adolescent, he thought proudly. And now he did permit himself a little smile, while John and Joly were preceding him up the cellar steps and couldn't see.
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EIGHT
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AS the three of them walked down the hallway past the entrance to the salon, the stoop-shouldered, teacherish-looking man who'd smiled at Gideon before looked up from his chair and offered another diffident, tentative grin. With a start Gideon realized it wasn't someone who looked like Ray Schaefer, it was Ray Schaefer. He returned the grin enthusiastically, and Ray came out into the hall to shake hands, watched curiously by the knot of people in the salon.
