killing?” “Were there any promising leads?'
'Hard to say,” John answered from his seat. Lieutenant Honeyman had barely gotten started. There were records to look at, people to talk to.
'Are you involved in the investigation?” Leland wondered. “I ask because you seem to be privy to the lieutenant's plans.'
'I guess you could say that,” John said. “The lieutenant sort of asked me to sit in. He figured, since I'm here anyway, I could be a go-between between the department and you folks. Sort of what I'm doing right now.'
'I see,” Leland said stiffly. “And tell me this, please. Are those of us who were here at the time to consider ourselves under suspicion?'
The underlying hum of whispered conversation stopped as suddenly as if someone had turned off a tap.
'I ask only out of idle curiosity, you understand,” Leland said.
There were a few uncertain laughs, along with a head-thrown-back guffaw from Les Zenkovich.
'Let's make sure we know who's dead first,” John said. “Then we'll think about who killed him.'
'I see. So your decision to remove the skeleton to the safety of the sheriff's office is not to be taken personally?” “By who?” John said pleasantly.
Leland made a small movement with his mouth and turned in his seat to face the front again.
One of the students raised a deferential hand. “Had anybody thought about making a facial reconstruction from the skull of the dead man? Couldn't that confirm the identification?'
There was a murmur of interest, mostly from other students.
Nellie, who was still moderating from the front of the room, made a face. “I doubt it, but why don't we ask our resident expert? Gideon, what do you think?'
Gideon started, caught by surprise. “Uh—well, I'm not really an expert—'
'Watch out now,” Nellie said with a wink, something he could actually manage without being arch, “you're under oath.'
Gideon laughed. “Seriously, I am not an expert.'
Seriously, he wasn't. The science—or art; the issue was up in the air—of using modeling clay to build up a facial likeness directly on a human skull had few expert practitioners. There were perhaps two dozen in the United States, some of them anthropologists and some artists, often working together. None of them, however, was here at the meeting, and Gideon was. Two years before, he had attended a week-long workshop on the technique and had found he had a knack for it.
But he'd also found out how unobservant he'd been all his life. He'd had to learn, almost as if he'd never seen them, the way an eyelid was shaped, and an upper lip, and how people's ears were set into their heads. But he'd stuck with it, and since then he had used it in four cases; and although no one would ever confuse his work with an artist's, he'd been reasonably successful. Three of the four reconstructions had led to positive identifications, which put him well ahead of the national average.
Among professional anthropologists, the practice had as many scoffers as true believers, with Gideon somewhere in the middle. It was, as far as he was concerned, a helpful tool if used discriminatingly, by people who knew what they were doing, with full appreciation of its limitations. His own three-for-four batting average he put down to some extremely lucky breaks. One of the cases had been a woman with an easily recognizable bony hump on the bridge of her nose, another had had eyes set extraordinarily far apart, and a third had been a man with a jaw like Benito Mussolini's (that one, for better or worse, had gotten national media coverage). But the fourth had been just an everyday sort of skull, with no particularly distinctive features. And of course that was the one that was still sitting in a box in the King County Medical Examiner's Office in Seattle, unidentified.
He'd always been frank in his reservations about the process and about his own skills. All the same, when the WAFA schedule was being prepared, Miranda had asked him if he'd put on a demonstration, mainly for the students in attendance. She had offered to provide all the materials he'd need and he'd agreed. The half-day session was on the schedule for the following afternoon—and that, he supposed, made him the closest thing to an expert they were going to get.
'I think—” he began.
'Stand up so people can hear you,” Nellie said, waving him up.
Gideon stood. He didn't have much to say. “My opinion is that there wouldn't be much point. When you already have a pretty good idea whose skull you've got, there are quicker, better ways to confirm it.'
'Right you are,” Les said from the audience. “What do we need to mess around with clay for? There are some good pictures of Salish in the file, and we can use video superimposition and computer-generated imaging to see if they match the skull.” Since he'd become a consultant, Les had developed an appreciation for high-tech anthropology.
Nellie vigorously nodded his agreement. “I'll take it a step further than that. There's no need for any of this mumbo-jumbo here. Not only do we have virtually the man's entire skeleton, we have his complete dentition, which can be compared directly to Mr. Salish's dental records, once Mr. Lau locates them. What more do we need?'
In the matter of facial reconstruction, Nellie was firmly on record as a scoffer. He had written several articles on the subject. The kindest of them was an article in the
'We'll know if it's Salish, all right,” he said, “and we won't have to resort to facial reconstruction to do it.'
'But what if it isn't?” one of the students asked; a mustached thirty-year-old in khakis and a scuffed slouch hat; one of several who seemed to have studied anthropological dress with Indiana Jones. “Maybe it'll turn out to be someone else. At least a reconstruction would give us a place to start.'
'Not necessarily,” Gideon said. “You have to understand, a facial reconstruction is a long way from an exact likeness. Nobody's going to look at it and say: ‘My God, that's
