Make No Bones

Miranda—'

'The police—!” Harlow exclaimed.

'Miranda,” Nellie continued, “I assume they know you around here, so you're probably the best one to call them.'

'Right,” Miranda said, starting for the main building. After a few steps she stopped and turned back with one of her rosy smiles. “This is going to be a switch. They usually call us about mysterious bodies in shallow graves.'

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CHAPTER 6

* * * *

Twenty minutes later, a white, brown-striped Chevrolet with a Deschutes County Sheriff's Office emblem on the door pulled into the main parking area. By this time, there were fifty people milling about the burial site, the attendees having decided with the briefest consideration that being in on the start of an actual exhumation beat all hell out of the scheduled morning session on bilateral nonmetric cranial variation.

Deputy Debbie Chavez, skinny and weather-bitten, walked with a cop's confident lope and seemed very much at home in her uniform of brown shirt, snug tan trousers, and boots.

'All right, folks,” she said after talking briefly to Miranda, “here's the drill.” She swung around so the sun was behind her, took off her sunglasses, and stuck them under the flap of a shirt pocket. Gideon heard them click against her plastic chest-protector. An unexpected dusting of little-girl's freckles flowed over the bridge of her nose and along the untanned skin under her eyes.

'First off, if Mrs. Glass here says we've got a body down there, that's good enough for me.'

'It was the consensus,” Miranda said modestly.

'Whatever. So what I'm going to do is get on the horn and call the sergeant. Till he gets here, I'm going to seal the area, and I'd appreciate it if you people wouldn't do any more tromping around here.'

'We're not tromping, young woman,” Leland Roach said. “For your information, we happen to be forensic anthropologists—which means we are quite experienced in just this kind of thing—and we're thoroughly familiar with crime-scene protocol.'

'Uh-huh,” the deputy said, looking down at the muddle of scuff marks and footprints—Gideon could see his own—around the oval depression. “You betcha.'

She was right, Gideon knew. They hadn't been thinking. As soon as the soil-compaction site had been recognized for what it was, they should have kept everyone away. It was sheer luck that no one had stepped right in the thing. Well, at least John would have an attentive audience when he gave his session.

Nellie Hobert cleared his throat. “True, we may have been a little careless, deputy. On the other hand, this site's obviously been out in the open for years. I can't imagine we've ruined any evidence. Ahum.'

Nellie was embarrassed. He was one of the country's two or three leading authorities on crime-scene exhumations. His Exhumation Techniques had been a police-science standby for over a decade, and it came down mercilessly on careless tromping.

'Well, all the same, I just think I'll go ahead and secure the area,” Debbie Chavez said pleasantly. “Sergeant likes it that way. Why don't y'all just go about your business and come back in an hour if you want to?” She smiled, a quick up-and-down jog of the corners of her mouth. “We could maybe use a few experts about then.'

* * * *

By 9:00 A.M. the excavating operation was humming along like a demonstration out of Nellie's manual. Ordinarily, forensic anthropologists take care not to intrude on each other's territory, but in this case Miranda had readily deferred to Nellie's status and experience, and the NSFA president, with a shapeless tan fishing hat on his bald head and a stubby, unlit pipe between his teeth, was atoning for his earlier sins of carelessness with a vengeance, directing Deputy Chavez, another deputy, and several anthropology students with equal vigor.

A thirty-by-thirty-foot square had been cordoned off with yellow plastic tape and gridded. The “artifactual material” on the surface—a couple of rusty bolts, a corroded paper clip, the worn rubber heel of an old shoe, none of which anybody really thought would amount to anything—had been staked with engineering pins, mapped, and photographed from every conceivable angle, then gathered up by Dan Bell, the sheriff's evidence officer. A crime- scene log had been established, and a line of entry had been delineated from the perimeter to the suspect depression. By means of this narrow path, those very few people permitted to enter made their way in—but not before having the patterns on the soles of their shoes recorded by Deputy Chavez.

Nellie himself had deftly exposed the edges of the pit with a whisk broom, and the digging itself was now under way, being carried out by two earnest graduate students under Nellie's exacting supervision and the close attention of the forty or fifty people who now ringed the cordoned-off area.

John Lau had slept late, as he'd said he would, barely getting in on the dregs of the buffet. Then, seeing the crowd, he'd wandered over just as things had gotten started, looking mopey and preoccupied.

'That Leland's like a shark,” he grumbled at Gideon. Gideon laughed. “How much did you wind up losing?” “Eighteen bucks.” He shook his head. “I still don't think he had that flush. I should have stayed in.'

'Cheer up, John. Look at that sun. It's supposed to be ninety today. Enjoy yourself.'

'How can I enjoy myself when I've got that session tomorrow?” He sighed. “I wish it was today, so I could get it over with.'

Sleepily, he looked around at the activity. “What's this, a practice dig?” Then he saw the police uniforms and the POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape and his eyes opened all the way. “Hey, what's going on, Doc?'

'It's a burial. At least I think it is.” He'd begun to feel less sure of himself. The police activity, the excitement,