Make No Bones

'Chuck Salish,” Gideon repeated. The name was completely unfamiliar. “An anthropologist? I've never heard of him.'

'Anthropologist? No, what gave you that idea? He was an FBI agent, out of the Albuquerque office. He was —'

'FBI agent?' Honeyman stood up, opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. Still, it was a few seconds before anything came out. “You're telling me I've got a—a dead FBI agent, a murdered FBI agent, lying on a table in the museum?'

'Yes, that's right,” Nellie said calmly. “He was retiring, too, at about the same time Albert was. They'd worked together on a case or two, you see, and they'd gotten along, and they'd decided to go into business together, so —'

'Dear God, why me?” With a pitiful groan Honeyman flung himself back into his chair. “Well, what was he doing around here?' he demanded accusingly.

Nellie looked mildly back at him. “Do you suppose we could get out of this room? I could stand a little fresh air. And, my word, I'd give my soul for a hot cup of coffee. Farrell, you look as if you could use something yourself, if you don't mind my saying so.'

'What I could use is unhearing what you just told me,” Honeyman muttered.

A few minutes later they were settled around one of the awning-shaded tables outside Goody's Soda Fountain on Wall Street, a block north of the Justice Building. Gideon was as glad as Nellie to be out of Honeyman's stuffy office. It was a relief, almost a surprise, to see that the air was still clean and fresh, and to be among people who weren't talking about buried skeletons and murdered FBI agents. Despite the temperature, which had now climbed into the promised nineties, Nellie had his hot coffee, a double espresso. Gideon had iced tea in front of him. Honeyman had bought a bottle of fruit-tinged mineral water.

Nellie tossed down half the coffee in two swallows and heaved a great sigh. He searched in the roomy pockets of his Bermudas, hauling out his pipe and two tobacco pouches, one a soft red leather, the other a cheap plastic one, cracked and dingy. He chose the plastic one, as Gideon knew he would. It contained the expensive, evil- smelling Latakia he loved. The red one held an aggressively perfumy blend that he smoked only when Frieda was around.

'Well, then,” he said, completing his drawn-out lighting ritual, “the two of them had worked together and gotten to be friends, and Albert invited Chuck along to our get-together to meet some of the people in the field. But the unfortunate upshot of it was that he was killed in the bus crash too.” His eyebrows came up as he glanced keenly at them. “Or so I thought until today.'

'This is the ‘81 Santiam Pass crash you're talking about?” Honeyman asked.

'That's right. Gideon, you know what we're referring to?'

'I think so. The bus accident you and the others all worked on. The one Jasper was killed on.'

Nellie nodded. “Albert and thirty-seven others. Maybe more—we had some odds and ends of people we never attributed for sure.'

Odds and ends of people, Gideon thought. Was there any other profession where this would pass for everyday conversation?

'It was on an early-morning run between Bend and the Portland Airport,” Nellie went on, “a service for people in the resorts around here.” His coffee was black and sugarless, but he stirred it anyway. “Well, what I assumed at the time—what we all assumed—was that some of those odds and ends were Chuck Salish. We had every reason to believe he was on that bus, and no reason, none at all, to think he wasn't.'

That sounded a little indefinite to Gideon. “Are you saying you actually identified some of those fragments as Salish?” he asked.

'Gideon, when I say odds and ends I mean odds and ends. I'm not talking about dentition, facial skeletons, nice big chunks of long bone and innominate—I'm talking about burnt, crumbling scraps so mutilated and tiny that they couldn't be positively attributed to anybody. Maybe they belonged with some of the people we'd identified for sure, maybe they didn't. The whole thing was a horrific jumble, just terrible. We examined what we had, we talked it out; and, where we had to, we made the best guesses we could, that's all.'

Honeyman lifted both hands pleadingly. “Wait, wait, wait. Hold it, hold it, hold it. Did I just hear you say that you just guessed he was on that bus, and that was that? An FBI agent? Tell me that's not what you told me.'

'Well, it was a little more than a guess,” Nellie said with a bit of edge to his voice. “We knew those fragments were male, we knew they were Caucasian, we knew they were at least middle-aged, we knew—I forget what else we knew. It's been ten years.'

'But thousands of people are male and middle-aged. Millions of people—'

'But millions of people hadn't made reservations on that particular bus. Chuck had. It's all in the files, Farrell, and I'll defend our decision as sound, based on what we knew at the time.'

'But—” Honeyman clumsily poured mineral water into his glass and gulped it down. Gideon doubted that he was aware of doing it. “All right, but if you feel that way about it, why are you changing your mind now? What's different now? Why are you doing this to me?'

'What's different now is that we've turned up an unidentified body in an unmarked grave. That wasn't a factor, or rather not a known factor, in 1981.'

'So? So? This person could be anybody, somebody we've never heard of. Why do you want to assume it's Salish, for God's sake?'

Nellie smiled. “You really don't want it to be Salish, do you?'

'You have no idea,” Honeyman said unhappily. “ I have no time for this. A nice unidentified John Doe, one more poor old drifter from ten years ago, with no leads—that I could cope with. But a murdered FBI agent? You don't know what you're doing to me.'

'Well, I'm sorry, Farrell, truly, but I have two basic reasons for thinking that's Chuck back there in the workroom. First'—like the old professor he was, he began ticking them off on his fingers—'according to what you've told us, this happened in 1981, and 1981 is when he happened to be with us at Whitebark Lodge.'