“And it just occurred to me—we haven’t had anything to eat. Could you stand a little breakfast?”
She grinned up at him. “Good gosh, I thought you’d never ask.”
A few blocks back up the Corniche, the Savoy Hotel advertised a full English breakfast on its signboard, and delivered on its promise. Julie and Gideon sat in its outdoor cafe, among neat trees and potted plants, protected from the sun by a tentlike canopy, and wolfed down scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, and tea. The bacon wasn’t really bacon, and the eggs had been scrambled in something that wasn’t butter, but the tea was good, strong English tea, the marmalade was straight from Edinburgh, and all in all they had no complaints.
With every bite they could feel their strength picking up, their normally positive outlooks surging back.
“All right, I have a theory for you,” Julie said, laying marmalade on her second piece of toast.
This was announced without preface, after a long, satisfying stint of dedicated eating, but Gideon knew what she was referring to. Earlier, when he’d told her about the discovery of the el-Fuqani skeleton in the old storage enclosure, she had said little, but he could tell that she was filing the data away, and it wouldn’t be long before a hypothesis emerged.
“All right, let’s hear it,” he said.
He enjoyed her ideas. They were always inventive, frequently entertaining, and sometimes extremely helpful. He often discussed his forensic cases with her, and more than once—many times more than once—she had come up with an insight or observation that would never have occurred to him. Once she had solved a case for him by wondering aloud if the “polish” he’d been describing on the right first metacarpal and multangular (the bones at the base of the thumb) of a set of unidentified remains might not have been due to the repeated movement of striking a keyboard space bar. Indeed they had, and the remains had quickly been identified as those of a woman who had worked at a computer keyboard for ten years.
He had split his consulting fee with her.
“You said he was a scribe, right?” she said.
“Yes, apparently.”
“Okay, I was thinking: what if there was some kind of valuable papyrus in the box with him?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“What if, among the things that he was buried with, there was a papyrus that he’d written, or scribed, or whatever they did? What if it was the papyrus that someone was after, not the skeleton? And so they just got rid of the bones in the nearest convenient place and ran off with the papyrus?”‘
Gideon shook his head. “No, the el-Fuqani collection is just a bunch of remains from an ordinary, middle-class cemetery. No fancy tombs, no mummification process, no objects buried with them. Just a hole in the ground, and in they went. Besides, even if there was something in the box with him, why bother taking the bones at all, why not just the papyrus?”
“Maybe someone had to move fast, and couldn’t afford to poke around looking for it in the box, and just grabbed everything in it and ran.”
“Then why not take the whole box? It’s not that big.”
“What if someone saw him running off with it?”
“What if someone saw him running off with bones falling out of his arms?”
“Well, yes,” Julie said, “I see your point.” She poured them both more tea. “What’s your theory, then?”
“Hypothesis,” he corrected, “or conjecture, if you prefer.” The breakfast had relaxed him and made him feel more expansive. “Theory implies a reliable inference based on at least some supporting evidence.”
“Ah,” she said, lifting her eyes skyward, “the joys of being married to a professor.” She picked up the teapot. “Want some more?”
He nodded and held out his cup. “Whereas a hypothesis is little more than one of many possible tentative explanations based on incomplete—or in this case, nonexistent—evidence of any kind.”
“Keep it up,” she said, pouring for both of them, “and you’re going to get this in your lap.” She slid the milk across to him. “What’s your conjecture, then?”
“My conjecture is that one of the students who are always spending a few weeks or months at Horizon House decided that he wanted to take a knock-‘em-dead souvenir back to his room at State U, and one of the unguarded, ignored el-Fuqani skeletons made easy pickings.”
“So what was it doing in the garbage heap?”
“Cold feet, probably. Maybe it’d been taken after a few too many beers, and in the stark, clear light of the next morning, he—or she—realized that there was going to be big trouble ahead when those bones went through Customs. So they got tossed. Safer than trying to get them back into their box.” He swallowed a last forkful of eggs. “Seems like the simplest explanation to me.”
“Maybe,” she said doubtfully, “but it seems to me you have to conjecture up a pretty ghoulish student to make it work.”
“Not at all. They do things like that all the time.”
“They do?”
“They do. And not only students. Did you ever hear of the Neiman-Marcus skull fragment?”
She shook her head wearily. “Do I want to?”
“The Neiman-Marcus fragment was a piece of John Kennedy’s skull, so-called because, after disappearing from the street, it turned up in a respectable Dallas doctor’s little collection of memorabilia, swathed in cotton in a Neiman-Marcus box.”
“Ugh.”
