Miranda was as good as her word. When Gideon arrived at the Justice Building in Bend at 7:00 A.M., the county commissioners’ meeting room, which had surely never before been used for such a purpose, was set up and ready with everything he needed.
At the head table the materials he would use were neatly laid out: a somewhat unsettling pair of dark-gray prosthetic eyes; a box of terra-cotta—colored Jolly King modeling clay; a seven-inch length of eraser rubber; a box of round toothpicks; a box of cotton; a tube of Duco cement; an X-Acto knife; a few small rulers; a couple of simple modeling tools (fingers would be the most important tools); some 80-grade sandpaper; and a folder put out by the University of New Mexico called “Tables of Facial Tissue Thickness of American Caucasoids.'
And a carton of donuts and a metal urn of hot coffee just perking its last on a long table against the wall. This was especially appreciated by the arriving students. With ninety-degree heat coming, the air conditioning had been turned up to keep the clay from slumping on the skull.
'Need anything else?” Miranda asked.
'No, this is great. You must have gotten here at five.” Miranda placed her hand on her heart. “We are here to serve.'
She had brought the skull and mandible from the room Nellie was working in and placed it on the table. Gideon quickly filled in the medical examiner's evidence tag:
'Okay, have a ball,” Miranda said. “Yell if you need anything. I'll be right down the hall.'
'You're going to be working on the postcranial skeleton with Nellie?'
'Uh-huh. Me, Nellie, and Dr. Tilton from the medical examiner's office. Since I'm the one the ME officially released it to, it makes sense for me to be there.'
'I suppose so.'
'And of course you always learn something from Nellie.'
'That's true too.'
'And it was either that or coprolite analysis. Hands on.” “I hear,” he said, “what you're saying.'
After Miranda had left and they had stoked up on coffee and donuts, Gideon got started, explaining as he went. First, the skull was firmly locked onto a plastic mount. Then he packed the fragile bones in the eye sockets and nasal aperture with cotton, and covered them with a protective layer of clay. The Duco was used to glue lengths of toothpick to the surfaces of the lower molars to prop the mouth slightly open. Without them, there would be an unnatural, clenched-teeth appearance. After that the mandible was attached to the skull with daubs of clay, an easy-enough process because mandibles fitted into place only one way. Inserting the eyes took more time; eyeballs do not fill their sockets, and getting them placed just right—not too protruding, not too sunken, not too high or too low—was something that took patience.
But by eight o'clock these preliminaries were out of the way. Gideon now had a skull that stared alarmingly back at him with great, goggling, lidless eyes. He explained the rest of the process.
'First of all, despite what you may have read in popular fiction, we don't make a facial likeness by building up the musculature a layer at a time. The Russians may still do it that way, but we've had more success using average skin thickness as a guide.
'The folders in front of you show the average soft-tissue thicknesses of Caucasian males measured at thirty- two points on the face. What I'm going to do is cut the eraser rubber into thirty-two sections to match those thicknesses and glue them to the right places on this particular skull. That's our guide for how thick the flesh is at those points, and we just use clay to fill in between them.” He smiled. “Nothing to it.'
'Sort of like connect-the-dots,” someone said.
'Sort of,” Gideon agreed.
What he didn't tell them was that this was the easy part. The basic form of the face, which is what connecting the dots gave you, was relatively simple and reasonably accurate. The trouble was that nobody ever recognized anybody else from his basic facial form. What made you distinguishable from a hundred million other people was not your facial form but your ears and eyes, your lips and nose, the “cast of your eye and your own singular and indefinable mien,” as his seminar instructor had put it.
And, as of yet, no one had figured out a way to determine the curve of a lip or the droop of an eyelid from the bone beneath. To say nothing of an indefinable mien.
But that could wait until later, after they understood how the early part was done. First, he would measure and cut the rubber, glue the cut lengths to the skull, then cut the clay into strips and roll them into “worms,” which would be laid down from rubber marker to rubber marker, crisscrossing the face until those disturbing gray eyes goggled from behind a tightly fitted grid, like the eyes of the Man in the Iron Mask. And getting it that far was going to take most of the morning.
* * * *
The eight students showed a lively interest, which naturally pleased Gideon, but their frequent questions slowed things up. It was almost 1:00 P.M. before the open spaces in the waffle-like facial grid had been filled in and smoothed out. The results, as always at that point, were bland and disappointing, featureless in the literal sense of the word. Without nose, lips, eyelids, eyebrows, and ears, the “face” didn't look like much of anything.
Over take-out pizzas, Gideon explained that, to make it look like something, you had to stop being an anthropologist and start being an artist. Except for providing a few clues on the shape and size of the nose, the skull had nothing further to tell them; there was no way of gauging from the bone beneath how wide the mouth was, or how thick the lips were, or what the form of the eyelids was, or anything at all about the ears. There were lots of artists’ rules of thumb, however—the eyebrows were three to five millimeters above the orbital rim; the ears were tipped back fifteen percent and about as long as the nose; the mouth was as wide as the distance between the canine teeth, and so on. They would spend the rest of the day applying them.
* * * *
In the tiny sheriff's snack room, twenty yards from where the clay face was slowly developing into something humanlike under Gideon's hands, John Lau was looking at his watch. Nellie Hobert was late for their appointment, not that that was much of a surprise. If Hobert was anything like Gideon Oliver, he went into a trance when you put
