Make No Bones

stem to scratch the side of his short, gray beard, and peered at Gideon from under disorderly eyebrows. “Well, now.'

Here comes a shaggy-dog story, Gideon thought.

'That reminds me of some testimony I gave in a case in Gallup,” he said, “and the defense attorney was trying to make me look bad, the way they do. Punching holes in my credibility, you know?'

'All too well.” Gideon had put in some uncomfortable hours on the expert-witness stand himself.

'Well, sir, this attorney, he says to me, ‘Now, then, Dr. Hobert,’ he says...'

Shaggy-dog story, all right, Gideon said to himself. He settled down to wait it out.

''Dr. Hobert, who would you say is the most expert forensic anthropologist in the state of New Mexico?'

'Well, I didn't quite know where he was going with that, so I just told him, nice and humble, that it was me. ‘I am,’ I said.

''I see,’ he says. ‘All right, then, Dr. Hobert, who would you say is the most highly regarded forensic anthropologist in the United States?'

''I am,’ I said, but I was starting to get nervous. I didn't like this guy.

''I see,’ he says. ‘Now then, could you tell the court, who in your opinion is the most expert forensic anthropologist in the world?'

'I look him in the eye, take a deep breath, and say: ‘I am.'

'He leans over at me with that smirk they get. ‘No one in the entire world is as good as you are?'

Not...even...close,’ I tell him, “Well, the prosecuting attorney asks for a recess and gets me aside. ‘Nellie,’ he says, ‘how could you say those things? You know that kind of thing puts the jury's back up.'

'So I said—you want to know what I said?'

'Do I have a choice?” Gideon answered, but he was already smiling. Here it came.

'I said: ‘Well, hell, man, I was UNDER OATH!'

Nellie banged his hand on the nearest table, rolled back his head, and shouted laughter at the acoustic-tile ceiling. He stuck his pipe back in his mouth. “Did I have you going there, or didn't I?'

'Not for a second,” Gideon said, laughing along with him. “Now: What was it you wanted my help on?'

The older man sobered. He turned back toward the skeleton. “Tell me what you see.'

'Well, as you said, it's male, Caucasian—'

'Yes, yes, of course. We've done all that. Caucasian male, average build, estimated stature of 69.3 inches, plus or minus 1.18—'

'You used the Trotter and Gleser equations?'

'For femur plus tibia—And Suchey-Brooks for aging from the pubic symphysis: It's a textbook Phase 5, completely rimmed, which gives us a range of say, thirty to seventy, and most likely forty-five to sixty-five. Throw in the vertebral lipping, the atrophic spots on the scapula—'

Gideon picked up the right scapula and held it up against the light from the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. There were milky patches of translucence where the bone had thinned in its normal, unstoppable progression toward disintegration.

'—the sternal rib changes,” Nellie continued, “the general bone density and so on and so forth, and you get an age of around—'

'Fifty-five or so,” Gideon said, putting down the scapula. Say fifty to sixty.'

'On the money, my boy. As for possible features of individuation, we have a healed fracture of the left ulna, probably from childhood, and an extracted first molar, also old. A few fillings. And some arthritis in the metatarsophalangeal joints, but nothing worse than any other old geezer. And that's it. Nothing much to go on. For that matter, nothing very interesting. But...' He paused weightily. “...in cause of death I think we have something else entirely.'

'Cause of death?” Scanning the bones, Gideon had seen nothing to suggest what it was.

'Yes. How was the dastardly deed done? That's what I want your opinion on. I think that we have something unusual here; a—well, I better not give you any hints. Wouldn't want to bias you. Go ahead, tell me what you think.” He bestowed a split-faced grin on Gideon and used the stubby pipe to make a gesture at the skeleton: It's all yours.

Intrigued, Gideon picked up the skull, most likely of all bony elements to tell a story of death by violence. Until now, he had seen only the front and the left side, which showed no fractures, no entrance or exit wounds. He turned it over and there on the rear, just to the right of center, was an inch-and-a-half-long horizontal crack just above the lambdoidal suture. Gideon ran his finger along it.

'Oho,” Nellie said quietly, chewing on his unlit pipe.

Gideon looked at him, puzzled. The crack was an uncomplicated linear fracture of the right parietal. No depression of the bone, no radiating fracture lines. Textbooks described this kind of injury as the probable result of an “accelerated head impacting on a fixed surface'—and not the other way around, which would have had more sinister implications. In other words, a simple fall; hardly proof of dastardly deeds.

'Nellie,” Gideon said cautiously, “I'll grant you that this could have caused death— maybe a contre-coup brain contusion, subdural hemorrhage—'

'Yes, yes.” Nellie gestured impatiently. “Could. But didn't.'

'Well, then—'