Make No Bones

'Hey, tell me about it. That's exactly what I said—I mean, the guy was over twenty-one, he made his own decisions, right? We didn't have anything to hide—but nobody would come right out and agree with me. I guess no one liked disagreeing with Nellie.'

'You mean Nellie was pressing to keep it a secret?'

'Pressing? Yeah, I think you could say that. Funny, the whole roast business was his idea in the first place, and then later he was the one who was so hot to keep it a secret.'

And who was still so hot to keep it a secret. “Why?” Gideon asked.

'I guess he just thought it made everybody look pretty terrible. Which it did. Besides, you know, we were all feeling rotten about it—about being the reason he got on the bus. I mean, there he was—these greasy, burned chunks of garbage on the table right in front of us. Not your basic happy time.'

'But now we know those weren't his remains; Jasper wasn't killed on the bus. Why would Nellie still be so eager to keep it a secret?'

'I guess he honest-to-God doesn't buy this reconstruction thing. As far as he's concerned, nothing's changed.'

'I don't know, Les. Does that make sense to you?'

'Hey, what can I tell you?” He looked uneasily at Gideon. “Personally, he was being weird about it from day one. This hush-hush crap—you know that's not Nellie's style. I couldn't believe it; I was, like, what is the problem here?'

'Les, are you trying to tell me you think Nellie had—” it took an effort to get the words out “—had something to do with Jasper's murder?'

Les's low forehead folded into parallel creases. “Hell, no, when did I say that?” He looked as close to irritated as he ever did.

Gideon liked him the more for it. “You never did.” He leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Les, I'm still trying to understand how that misidentification could have happened in the first place.'

'You're trying to understand? Hell, I was there; I was part of the team—and I'm here to tell you we did it right; by the book, man. I just don't—'

'It was basically a dental identification, is that right?'

'It was a dental identification, period. You saw what was left. If not for the dentition we'd have been lucky to come up with ‘male’ and ‘adult.’ But we had half a mandible, with the teeth and the alveolar border in reasonable shape. So we got the reports from Jasper's dentist, matched them to what we had here, and that was it.'

'Who matched them? Was it Harlow? Did he do the analysis?'

'Well, yeah, sure, he was our odontologist, but we worked as a team; everybody got in on it. That's the way Nellie likes to do it—hey, where is Harlow? I haven't seen him since he got back from Nevada.'

'Neither has anybody else, as far as I know.'

Their eyes locked for a second. “No, forget it, Gid. There was no way he could have flimflammed us. I'm not talking about any tricky odontological formulas. It was completely straightforward—a simple postmortem- antemortem comparison. Jasper's charts had a lot of fillings anybody could recognize, and a, what do you call it, an extra tooth, a supernumerary tooth in there somewhere. It was just a matter of comparing.'

Gideon frowned. “A supernumerary tooth...'

There was, he was certain, no extra tooth in the clay-covered mandible now in its wooden cubbyhole in the evidence room; the mandible that had so startlingly transformed itself from Salish's to Jasper's less than an hour before. A first faint glimmer of illumination showed itself, an indication of just how they had come to make so freakish an error a decade ago. Except that, if he was right, there wasn't any error. They had been flimflammed, all right. With a vengeance.

Les backed off. “Well, I wouldn't swear to a supernumerary tooth. I've looked at a lot of skulls since then. But whatever there was, you didn't have to be an odontologist to see there was a match.'

'And you personally compared the charts to the remains yourself? You saw that they matched? You didn't just take Harlow's word for it?'

'Of course I compared them. We all did.” He tilted his head, pulled on an earlobe. “Well, I think we did. Who remembers now? But, look, that mandible was right there in front of us the whole time. Anybody who felt like it could check it against the charts anytime he wanted. Harlow or anybody else would have been out of his mind to try to fudge anything.'

Not if it had been done the way Gideon thought it had. It was becoming clearer, but there were still some fuzzy edges, some pieces that didn't fit. “Let me ask you this, Les. How positive are you those records were really Jasper's?'

'What kind of question is that? About as positive as you can be. We found out who his dentist was, Harlow got in touch with him for the charts—you know the drill—and back they came, just like for anybody else. Well, except for the x-rays.'

Ah. Gideon's eyes narrowed. “What about the x-rays?'

'There weren't any. Jasper was scared of them.” He laughed. “Weird when you think about it. Here's the number-one bone expert in the country—'

'How do you know he was scared of them?'

Les shrugged. He was beginning to tire of the conversation, or perhaps to wonder what they were talking about. “I don't know. It wasn't any secret.'

'I never heard about it.'

'So? What does it matter now?” Les yawned and shook himself, bearlike, the undulation seeming to roll slowly up his big torso under the skin. He took off the clay bracelet and dropped it on the table. “I guess head for—oh, hey I remember. Harlow told us. When he contacted the dentist. The guy told him Jasper was scared to death of x-rays.