'Come on, Gideon, I can understand that. But didn't he say—'
'Chopsticks. He was talking to one of the students. When you get near the bones, you don't want to dig with anything metal, even a trowel. Nellie favors slightly sharpened chopsticks. He sent someone out for a few a little while ago. Also some small paintbrushes to use for whisks.'
'Chopsticks,” Julie repeated. “Do you use them too?'
'Yes, I do. Sometimes a piece of bamboo. A dental pick, if nothing else works.'
'How odd,” she murmured. “All those times you've gone running off to dig up some murder victim in the woods the last thing I pictured was you poking around with chopsticks, like a man in pursuit of an egg roll.'
He grimaced. “Well, not quite.'
Nellie's probing, assisted by follow-up whisking by the students, was producing quick results in the loosely packed soil. Every few minutes his head would come up again. “Coracoid process,” he announced. “Acromion...Left iliac crest...Male, on his right side, legs sharply flexed...Fine condition, just beautiful...'
He was, of course, going about it right, not just digging away at it, but first clearing the surrounding dirt a few vertical inches at a time. This the students would do with trowels, so that the skeleton, embedded in its matrix of soil, slowly emerged, mummylike, on its own pedestal of earth. As it did, Nellie would carefully go to work with his chopsticks, in effect dissecting out the skeleton.
By this time, many of the nonanthropologists had drifted away, Julie among them. “I smell like a horse,” she said. “I want to take a shower before lunch.'
Gideon nodded, absorbed in the digging. Nellie had made a preliminary determination as the bones came into view: Caucasian male of middle size, over forty, under seventy. No sign of cause of death. Finer distinctions would have to await removal and cleaning.
A little before noon, a rumpled, bearlike man with a pouchy, anxious face made his way toward Gideon and John.
'Dr. Hobert there tells me you're FBI,” he said to John.
This, they knew, was Sheriff's Lieutenant Farrell Honeyman, who had arrived several hours earlier to supervise the investigation. “Oh, boy, this is all I need,” had been his very first words, murmured despairingly at Deputy Chavez as he climbed out of his car.
They had not made a favorable initial impression on John, who had been standing nearby with Gideon. “That's Homicide?” he'd said under his breath. “Good luck.'
Gideon shared his reservations. The crestfallen Honeyman, with his baggy suit and his face like a plate of runny scrambled eggs, had stood off to the side of the grave for most of the morning, uncommunicative and abstracted. In addition to repeated forlorn sighs, there were frequent glances at his watch and various other signs that he was a man of many worries. He had briefly questioned Gideon about the finding of the site, but even then his mind had seemed to be elsewhere.
But now, having found a colleague, he had perked up, at least to the extent of becoming more talkative. “God, I'm up to my earlobes,” he told John. “I have a multi-team interagency task-force meeting coming up this afternoon. This is the last thing I need.'
'What's up, lieutenant?” John said, ready with sympathy for a fellow cop's caseload problems. “Drug bust going down?'
'Drug bust?” Honeyman answered, his droopy eyes widening. “No, I'm talking budget restructuring, personnel reallocation, the whole schmeer.'
'Oh,” John said after a fractional pause.
'I'm the administrative lieutenant,” Honeyman explained. “Our detective sergeant's on vacation. He's really screwed me. I'm telling you, John, I'm really glad you're here. If you've got any ideas, I wish you'd just pitch right in.'
'Oh, I'm sure you can handle it without any help from me,” John said gracefully.
'No, I mean it. I'll take all the help I can get.'
'Hey, I'm here to get away from this stuff,” John said. “This is your show all the way.” But Gideon could see that he was grateful to be asked, something FBI agents learned not to expect from the locals.
'Not a bad guy,” John said when Honeyman moved off. “I just hope he knows what he's doing.'
'Why don't you take him up?” Gideon asked. “He could probably use some friendly advice.'
John shook his head. “Doc, the guy was just being nice. He doesn't want my help, believe me. I know these people.'
After that, John spent a few more minutes restlessly shifting from one foot to the other while the exhumation inched along, punctuated by Nellie's osteological bulletins. Finally, he gave up. “I'm gonna go sit by the swimming pool,” he grumbled. “I gotta work on my lecture notes.'
'John, you'll do fine. They'll love you. I'll be there. I'll shill for you from the audience.'
But John, not persuaded, went away talking to himself.
The exhumation proceeded. Even with frequent pauses for photographs and careful piling of the dislodged earth for later sifting by the evidence unit, much of the skeleton was exposed by twelve-thirty, its arms and legs folded up like a sleeping child's. The small bones of the hand had been slightly scattered. Shirt, trousers, and underwear were almost completely rotted away, no more than some stiff, gray-brown scraps, but the one foot that was visible was still encased in a sturdy, well-preserved lace-up shoe.
As things wound down, Gideon found himself standing next to the solitary, woebegone Honeyman again. “Do you have any open cases that might fit this?” he asked, as much out of sympathy as anything else.
'What? Well, we haven't even established how long that body's been there yet.'
'Oh, I think five to ten years would be a pretty reasonable guess. The body's completely skeletonized, so that
