Skeleton Dance

'And the other?'

'The other,” said Emile, “is an ambiguous mark that could easily have been caused by skinning, butchering, or any one of a thousand utilitarian, totally unaesthetic activities.'

Montfort looked sadly at him. “Always and forever the ready answer.'

'I may not be an archaeologist—” Emile said

Montfort muttered something inaudible.

'—but it hardly takes an archaeologist to see it's just a scratch, that's all, a simple scratch on a stone. To refer to it as an ‘incision,’ a term connoting human agency, is spurious and misleading. I don't mean this in a personal sense, of course, Michel.'

Montfort snorted. “And do you also have an answer for the complexly incised—pardon me, the scratched—bone fragment from Peche de l'Aze?” He thumped the table, making empty coffee cups rattle in their saucers.

'Natural erosion,” said Emile, uncowed, with his chin thrust out.

'—the perforated reindeer phalanges from La Quina—'

'Carnivore activity.'

Montfort, shaking his head, gazed sadly at him.

'But . . . but the perforated wolf metacarpal from Bocksteinschmiede?” said Beaupierre, taking up the argument as well as he could. “What about that?'

'Not proven to be Middle Paleolithic, as opposed to Upper Paleolithic!” cried Audrey, partway to her feet.

Beaupierre and Montfort let fly at the same time. Oh, yes? How did she explain the artifacts from Bilzingsleben? What about Repolusthohle? Arcy-sur-Cure? Cueva Morin in Spain?

Gideon had been long forgotten. All of them, including even the usually mellow Pru were talking at once, or rather shouting; banging the table and waving their arms for emphasis. Through the open door of the room Gideon saw the cafe's proprietor, standing behind the bar, exchange smiles and wags of the head with a couple of his customers. These scientists!

'I guess I'll be going,” he announced. “Thanks very much for your help.'

He thought no one had heard him over the din, but as he rose from his chair Pru touched his elbow, smiled, and said in her fluent French:

'Bienvenue chez les fous.'

Welcome back to the madhouse.

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Chapter 9

* * * *

Because Les Eyzies had neither a morgue nor a hospital, the bagged bones from the cave had been taken to the morgue-room of the hospital at St.-Cyprien, another ancient Perigord town five miles from Les Eyzies, this one clustered at the foot of an imposing twelfth-century abbey on the banks of the Dordogne. Having driven there in the compact, olive-green Peugeot that Julie had rented for them by e-mail from the United States, Gideon was told by the front-desk receptionist, a friendly, chatty woman who laughed at the end of every sentence, that he would find the morgue in the basement—right down those stairs, in the room at the end of the corridor.

'Will I need a key, madame?” he asked in French.

She chuckled good-naturedly. “No, you won't need one, monsieur, we don't usually lock the morgue. Not too many people try to get in—or out, for that matter. And besides, the other gentleman is there.'

'Other gentleman?” he said, surprised. And then: “Oh, would that be Dr. Roussillot, the police pathologist?'

'I don't know, I didn't ask his name.'

She didn't ask Gideon's name either, he reflected critically as he went down the stairs. Joly himself might run a tight ship, but this sort of evidence-storage would never pass muster under American chain-of-evidence requirements. Gideon was the second—at least the second—person to have access to the bones without having to provide identification. Aside from that, they'd been left unattended for who knew how long; that left a huge chink into which a defense attorney or a judge could toss a monkey wrench on the grounds that it could no longer be proven beyond a doubt that these bones really were the selfsame bones that had been removed from the cave. And it was on just such objections that many an otherwise solid case could—indeed, had—come apart at the seams.

The basement corridor's main purpose seemed to be to serve as a storage area for conveyances. Gideon had to thread his way around gurneys, wheelchairs, and walkers to get to the double doors at the end of the hallway. Once there, he pushed them open to enter a small, immaculate, white-tiled room furnished with a desk along one wall, a rack with clean rubber aprons and white coats, a barred, glass-fronted cabinet holding the usual blood-freezing assortment of autopsy tools, and, in the center, a single, old-fashioned, porcelain-topped autopsy table at which a heavily-built built man in a white coat was removing one of the paper bags of bones from the macaroni carton.

At Gideon's entrance, he looked up sharply, the point of his fastidiously shaped Van Dyke bristling. “What do you want? This is a restricted area. I'm extremely busy. Do you have permission to be here?'

Dr. Roussillot, I presume, Gideon thought. “I'm Gideon Oliver,” he said in French, cautiously advancing. “You must be Dr. Roussillot.'

He received a wary nod in reply.