were on the floor up against the walls to provide more room around the desk.
“It’ll do fine,” Gideon said, placing the sacks of bones on the desk.
“We can put the coffeemaker elsewhere, if you want.”
“No, leave it on the desk, it won’t bother me.”
“I wouldn’t recommend drinking any, however, at least not in the afternoon after it’s been out a while. Takes a bit of getting used to.”
“Mike,” Gideon said, laughing, “stale coffee and bone dust go together like bees and honey. Don’t worry about me.”
“Very well, then. Anything you need to get you started?”
“Yes, a magnifying glass. And I need something to measure with—a ruler; a tape measure too, if you have one. Calipers would be too much to hope for, I assume.”
“They would, indeed.”
Gideon blinked up at the fluorescent tubes overhead. “And an adjustable desk lamp, if there is one—something to counter the flat lighting.”
Clapper nodded, moving toward the doorless entry of the tiny cubicle.
“Oh, and where’s the tibial fragment I brought over on Monday? Is it in here someplace?”
“No, it’s still in my office. I’ll bring it.”
While he was gone, Gideon sat down, opened the bags, and began arranging the bones, sorting left from right, and placing them roughly in their anatomical relationships. When Clapper returned, Gideon took the partial left tibia—the upper four-fifths of the bone—from him, and set it against the partial left tibia—the lower portion—that they’d found today. Carefully, he set cut end to cut end. As he then demonstrated, they fit together so perfectly that, kept upright, they didn’t have to be held in place.
“There you go,” he said with satisfaction. “Couldn’t be a neater fit, could it? You can even see how the breakaway spur from the one from the museum fits right into that little cleft in the new one. These are from the same person, absolutely no question about it.”
“Well, that’s a relief, innit?” Clapper lazily poured a splash of coffee into a mug that he took from a pegboard on the wall and sat down across the desk from Gideon. “I’d hate to think there was a whole series of dismembered corpses littering our pristine beaches.”
“Are you saying you definitely agree that that’s what we’re dealing with? A dismembered corpse? You’re convinced?”
Clapper stared at him. “Well, of course I am. What else would I think?”
“I just wanted to be sure. You never said so in so many words, and you sure weren’t that convinced a couple of days ago.”
“A couple of days ago, there was one measly piece of bone, species and context unverified, brought in unannounced by a man who claimed to be some sort of anthropologist. But now…” He gestured at the array on the table.
“Does this mean you’ll be turning the case over to headquarters?”
“Not bloody likely!” Clapper burst out, then collected himself. “That is to say,” he said serenely, “not at the present time. Let us first see what results ensue from the pursuit of our inquiries.”
That suited Gideon, who was getting to enjoy working with Clapper. “Fine. Let us begin pursuing them.” He glanced over the thirty-odd hand and foot bones. “No obvious age or sex differences—and no duplication,” he said. “And everything matches the original tibia in condition and general appearance. No reason to think there’s more than one person here.”
“I thought we’d just established that.”
“Yes, but it’s the kind of thing you like to establish more than once.”
With the goosenecked lamp that Clapper had brought now on the desk casting its light sidewise to accentuate textures, he turned the birdlike bones, one at a time, this way and that, for their first examination. “No obvious trauma or pathologies… well, except for a little osteoarthritis in some of the joints. That probably puts the age, oh, up in the thirties or forties, at any rate.”
Clapper, in the act of lighting a cigarette, looked up from under his eyebrows. “Thirty or forty years old, and the poor bugger already has arthritis?”
“Sure. So do I. So do you.”
“Get away! My joints are perfectly fine.” He waved his arms in circles to prove it. “I’m in my prime, couldn’t be primer.”
“Mike, I hate to tell you this, but you’re not in your prime. You never were. Your bones get stronger and healthier as they grow—say to twenty-five or so; thirty at the outside—and then, wham, it’s downhill from there right up to the end. The minute they reach maturity they turn around and start deteriorating. Osteoarthritis, atrophy, osteoporosis… there is no prime, as far as your skeleton goes, or if there is, it lasts about five minutes, and the chances are you were doing something else at the time and you missed it.”
Clapper blew out his first lungful of smoke. “Now there’s a charming thought.”
“And as for the rest of you, it doesn’t last all that much longer. You know those free radicals and antioxidants that start building up as you get older? Those are just your body’s way of trying to get rid of you. Nature doesn’t want you hanging around using up resources any longer than necessary—which means just long enough to get your DNA into the gene pool so the human race keeps going. So it does what it can to keep you healthy till then. After that, you’re on your own. If you’re not contributing any more DNA to the species, the hell with you. The sooner you’re out of the picture the better.” He laughed. “Hey, have another puff. Mother Nature will appreciate it.”
