quarter-ofa-mile ahead. At one point they set the bottles and sandwiches on the shoreline and took a swim, regretting that they hadn’t taken the brothers up on their offer of snorkeling masks and fins. Even without them, paddling around in the five-foot-deep water was like swimming in a giant tropical-fish aquarium, but after fifteen minutes the salt had begun to sting their eyes and they got out, rubbing their eyes but much refreshed.
The compound consisted of two structures other than the pier: a large, unlocked metal storage building (uninhabited islands made locks irrelevant, as John pointed out) with barbecue equipment, boxes of plastic eating utensils, beach chairs, and picnic tables stacked inside; and a small, canopied, thatch-roofed pavilion with a plastic-topped table in the center, a raised wooden floor, open sides, and a sign bolted to one of its four roof- support posts:
Shandara Massage. Treat yourself to a Lomi-Lomi On-the-Beach Special. Body exfoliation, seaweed and kukui nut face therapy, tropical aroma scalp treatment, sea salt foot scrub, all for $75. Liki-Liki version, $35. Charge to your cruise account.
They chose the massage hut in which to have their sandwiches, inasmuch as it was the only place that was both protected from the sun and open to the breeze. As they were finishing their first ones—the tomatoes had made the white bread soggy, but they weren’t complaining—they heard the Cessna’s engines start up and saw the plane begin to taxi slowly toward the dinghy they had left on the beach. By waving and calling, they managed to get the plane’s attention, and a minute later the Cessna was bumping gently up against the floating pier. The brothers were both looking down at them and grinning.
They had found something.
“YES, it’s human,” Gideon said, looking at the bone that
Lyle had just placed in his hand. “A mandible.”
“A jawbone,” John explained.
Lyle was delighted. “Oh, that’s why it has teeth!”
“Of course that’s why it has teeth, putzhead,” Harvey said. “Didn’t I tell you that?” If anything, their resemblance to Moe and Curly was becoming more pronounced, and Gideon half-expected Harvey to deliver a two- finger poke into Lyle’s eyes or kick him in the ankle, but all he did was shake his head.
“Where was it?” Gideon asked.
“Under the console, in front of the pilot’s seat. It was snagged around one of the hydraulic brake lines.”
“Ah, that’s probably why it didn’t get carried off.” He took it from Lyle, gently turning it from side to side. “So this is it, then? This one bone?”
“So far. We’re gonna head back now and see what else we can find, but we wanted you to see this first. Everything is shifted and kind of crumpled up. We’ll need to use the torch some more, and we’ll see what we see. I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I was you, though.”
Except for a few dead limpet shells on the inside of the left ramus—the part that rises, behind the teeth, to form the hinge that attaches the jaw to the cranium—the mandible was as whole, as clean, and almost as white, as a specimen from a biological supply house. A right lateral incisor and one of the right premolars were missing, but they had worked their way out after death; the deep, crisp-edged sockets, with no signs of the bone-resorption that would have gone along with eventual healing, made that clear. The other fourteen teeth were still in place and only a little loose, the natural result of the loss of the soft tissue surrounding them. Both first molars and one of the remaining premolars had cheap amalgam fillings in them. The bone itself had a slightly spongy feel—a “give” to it —but so would anything else that had been soaking in a warm lagoon for ten years. It would be solid enough, once dry.
With the Shertz brothers having forgotten to bring him any of the tools he’d asked for, the table wasn’t going to do Gideon any good, so along with John, he sat down at the shady edge of the wooden platform-floor, with his bare feet in the cool, damp sand. He flicked the limpets from the bone with a fingernail and slowly turned it in his hands, running his fingers over the bumps, ridges, grooves, and hollows. After a while he gently set it upright on his knee so it was “facing” him and studied it for another minute. A single drop of sweat rolled from his forehead, down his nose, and onto the leg of his shorts.
“Well, I can tell you who it isn’t,” he said at last. “It isn’t old Magnus.”
“No, it’s female,” John said promptly.
“Right. And the age, too. This came from a young— wait a minute, how’d you know it’s female?”
John had once taken a three-day forensics course for law-enforcement personnel, at which Gideon had been the lecturer for the anthropology segment, and while he had been a willing student, it quickly became apparent that osteology was never going to be his strong suit. Thus, his quick, almost instant, determination of sex came as a surprise. The mandible in Gideon’s hand would have been a good one with which to challenge his graduate students’ abilities at sexing. The overall size and ruggedness suggested a male jaw, he said half-aloud. On the other hand, the sharpness of the anterior edges of the rami and the delicacy of the condyles were more typical of females. The symphyseal height and the gonial angle could probably have gone either way, although, without measuring instruments, it was impossible to say for certain...
As Gideon droned on, detail after detail, John nodded sagely, perspiration dripping from his chin. “True, my good fellow, very true, indeed.”
“So how’d you come up with female?”
By now John was laughing out loud. For once Gideon responded with a frown. “What? What am I missing?”
“How I came up with female,” John said, “was that I figured the odds were pretty damn high that the plane really did go down that night, and if it did, there were two people aboard—Magnus and the pilot, Claudia—and since I knew it wasn’t him, it had to be Claudia. And Claudia was a fe
male. That’s how.”
“But how’d you know it wasn’t Magnus?”
“I knew because you just
