Where There's a Will

And if it was, then this dismounting theory wouldn’t work, would it?”

“No, it wouldn’t. And, of course it would have been nice to have the left foot, too, but there isn’t very much I can do about that, is there?”

“Hey, don’t go all defensive on me, Doc. I’m just asking a question.”

“Who’s getting defensive?” Gideon said.

But of course he was. He’d just completed what seemed to him a neat bit of reasoning, and he could have used a little amazement, or at least approbation, and not a string of skeptical questions. “Come on, John, you’re a cop. How often do you get every single piece of evidence you’d like to have? You play the hand you’re dealt, and this particular hand plays out to one conclusion: Magnus Torkelsson.”

It wasn’t just the foot, he pointed out. Everything added up, and there was nothing to lead off in any other direction. An airplane from the Hoaloha Ranch, lost since the very night Magnus flew off in it and disappeared; a woman that nicely fit the description of his pilot;—he ticked the items off on his fingers—and a male of advanced age who, as it happened, had spent a lot of time in the saddle. How many other people—missing people—would that combination fit?

John held up his hands. “Hey, if you say it’s him, that’s good enough for me. Magnus it is. What do I know?”

A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth, and then the skin around his eyes crinkled up, and then they both were laughing.

“I’m sorry I got defensive there, John.”

“No problem, Doc.”

There was only one thing that nagged at him a little, he admitted, and that was the fact that he’d known too much about the case to start with. Forensic anthropology was like anything else: You tended to find what you were looking for. It wasn’t supposed to work that way. When he consulted for the police or the FBI, he made a point, when possible, of not knowing anything about the suspected identity of the remains he was to examine: not the sex, not the age, not the race, nothing. But here he’d been aware of how old Magnus was, of his sex, of the fact that he rode a horse, of the age and sex of the pilot, even of her bulimia. And what do you know, his analysis of a very few bones had confirmed every single expectation. That was slightly worrisome: Had he over-reached for what he’d believed, a priori, to be the facts?

“Nah,” said John airily. “You’re never wrong about that kind of thing. Well, not that often.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence, if that’s what that was. Anyway, I have an ace up my sleeve. When I was checking the bones for fractures, I saw that a couple of toe bones were missing after all, and when I took a closer... well, take a look at the middle phalanges of the second and third toes.”

“The, uh, middle...?”

“These two,” Gideon said. “The distal phalanges—the outermost parts, the segments that had the toenails— are the missing ones, and these two are the ones that adjoined them.”

“They are?” John said, bending closer. “They don’t look like the others, do they? They’re barely half as long. And they’re thinner, and they, like, come to a point, almost...”

“The toes have been amputated, John. The distal phalanges and a segment of the middle phalanges have been removed. And when that happens the bone that’s left—the proximal portion of the middle phalanges, in this case— is likely to develop osteoporotic atrophy over time and become resorbed—-absorbed back into itself—starting at the end where the amputation occurred. That’s why they look that way.”

“So this happened a long time ago?”

“Oh, yes. Years and years. Decades, probably.”

“And when you say ‘amputation,’ you mean by a doctor? An operation? Not some kind of accident?”

“No way to tell, not anymore. There’s been too much remodeling. The site of the original separation is long gone.”

John was looking a little confused. “So...why is this an ace up your sleeve? What does it tell you?”

“It doesn’t tell me anything, but it ought to tell the Torkelssons something. It’s a ‘factor of individuation,’ as we so grandly call it. If it turns out that Magnus Torkelsson had two toes missing—which it will, I think—that’ll settle it for good. Case closed, all doubts resolved.”

Harvey had brought the materials he asked for, and Gideon began wrapping the individual bones loosely in newspaper. “You wouldn’t happen to know, would you, John?”

“If he was missing any toes?” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t know. He didn’t have a limp; nothing I noticed, anyway.”

“Well, we’ll be seeing Felix tonight in Waikiki,” Gideon said, fitting the cover on the carton with the satisfying sense of having accomplished what he’d come for. “He’ll know.”

SEVEN

“WHOO,” said John, having completed his first long swallow of the frosted Mai Tai that had been placed before him. “I’m in heaven.”

So was Gideon. After the stagnant heat of Maravovo Atoll, the ocean breezes of Waikiki Beach, perfumed with gardenia and frangipani, flowed over them like balm. They had arrived at the Honolulu airport two hours earlier and had taken a taxi to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel—the posh, venerable “Pink Palace”—where the desk clerk had apologized for not having two ocean-view rooms available, but Gideon, if not John, was happy to be looking out over the green canopy of the giant banyan tree and the quiet, shaded gardens, rather than the jammed beach with its pungent smells of sunscreen and its multitudes of bare, glistening, not-so-beautiful bodies slow-cooking on their roll-up straw mats.

There had been a message from Felix waiting for them: He had been delayed at a meeting on Kauai and would not be back until five. And he had to be on a red-eye flight to San Francisco later in the evening, but with any luck he would meet them for a drink at six-thirty at the House Without a Key, the open-air restaurant-bar at the