medium-heavy musculature. “A mesomorph,” he said, using the archaic terminology.
Gideon nodded. Clear enough.
Next to this was a columnar segment about five inches long; a piece of another left humerus, from the middle of the shaft.
'As you remarked, this was quite crucial to the analysis,” Worriner told him, “because it meant that there were at least two individuals represented, and both of them were adult males. As you see.” He rolled the bone over, showing a well-defined, lumpy crest that ran almost the length of the piece.
Again Gideon nodded. The crest was the deltoid tuberosity, so named because it was the insertion point of the deltoid, the big muscle that formed the beefy mass of the shoulder. As with any other tendon-bone connection, the larger and more powerful the muscle, the rougher and more pronounced the bony insertion point. And the rougher and more pronounced the insertion point, the greater the likelihood that it was male.
Of course it was chancy to assign sex or anything else on the basis of a single criterion, but on this otherwise smooth piece of bone there wasn't anything else to go on. Except for the tuberosity, everything about it was borderline, just the kind of fragment an anthropologist hates: maybe male, maybe female. Fortunately, it was one heck of a deltoid tuberosity; nothing borderline about it.
As he told Worriner, he would have drawn the same conclusion. Adult male; there was nothing else to say about it.
Worriner looked highly gratified. He lowered himself into a disreputable old wooden swivel chair. “Well then. I hope coming here hasn't been a complete waste of time?'
No, Gideon told him, he'd learned just what he'd hoped to learn. When he arrived in Juneau he hadn't had a victim.
Now he had Steven Fisk.
* * * *
Gideon walked from Worriner's hillside house to downtown Juneau by way of three flights of wooden street stairs and then took the elevator to the top floor of the federal building, a white, nine-story cube of concrete aggregate pierced by windows shaped like coffins. The FBI resident agency was in Room 957, and there, with a sense of relief, he delivered the bone fragments into the hands of the agent, receiving an itemized receipt in return. He then used the telephone in the office to call Glacier Bay and waited while Mr. Granle went to find John.
'Doc! How's it going?'
'Great. The bones are safely stored in the evidence room here—'
'Good.'
'—and I can now tell you who the murdered man was.” He paused, the better to impart dramatic impact. “It was—'
'Steven Fisk,” John said.
'—Steven...how the hell did you know?'
John's happy laugh burbled from the receiver. “I read it in a book.'
'Damn, you spoiled my big scene,” Gideon muttered. “What do you mean, you—'
'Gotta run. I'll pick you guys up at the airport at five. Tell you all about it then.'
There was time for a late lunch at the Fiddlehead, just down the block on West Willoughby. There, in a country-kitchen atmosphere of knotty-pine paneling, flowered wallpaper, and the smell of baking bread, he sat at a butcher-block table wolfing down black bean soup with wedges of dark rye bread and wondered how John had come up with Steven Fisk. Well, at least it was a good thing they'd arrived at the same conclusion.
Restored, he caught the bus to the airport an hour before the flight for Gustavus. Twenty minutes later Julie arrived, having spent her truant afternoon on a bus tour of Juneau's major tourist attraction.
Mendenhall Glacier.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Chapter 18
* * * *
John didn't believe in keeping things mysterious. Before the borrowed green Park Service car had pulled out of the parking area at the Gustavus Airport he was handing a sheaf of papers to Gideon and Julie, who were in back.
'Tremaine's manuscript,” he announced.
'You're kidding,” Gideon said. “Where'd you find it? I figured it was on the bottom of the bay.'
'It isn't the one that was stolen,” Julian Minor explained from the driver's seat. “It's a copy, faxed from Los Angeles.'
'There's a fax machine up here?” Julie asked.
'Faxed to Juneau, then flown here,” John explained. “I got to thinking, maybe the guy used a word processor, and if he did there'd be a disk someplace, and maybe if our L.A. guys got into his safe deposit box they'd find it. And they did.'
'Good thinking,” Gideon said, opening the folder.
'I believe it was my idea, John,” Minor said mildly.
