“It was just Edgar saying, and I quote: ‘I keel ’eem, dat leedle peep-squeak,” “ Liz persisted, unwilling to let go of an appealing hypothesis.
“Yeah, he said it, but he wasn’t really—”
“No, now that I think about it, she’s right,” Victor said. “He was steaming. We had our poker game afterward, and he was so mad he could hardly sit still; punching himself on the knee, talking to himself. Remember? He spoiled it for everybody—our last night together.”
“That’s so,” Rudy agreed.
“Aw, now, look,” Joey said, “he had a short fuse, sure, but that doesn’t—”
“Now then,” Liz cut in. “Think about it. Pete Williams was an auto mechanic. Auto mechanics have well- developed supinator crests. Most other people don’t, even allowing for the occasional knob-twister. So when you put all that together—the death threat, the missing man, the skeleton on the beach, the supinator crests—it’s pretty hard not to come up with Pete Williams as the first person on your list.”
“Is making sense,” said Kozlov.
“As far as that goes, I’d have to agree,” Gideon said. “It’s a long way from proof positive, but it does make sense. Mike thinks so, too. So tomorrow he’ll start tracing Williams, seeing if he’s still alive. If he is, that’s the end of it. If no one’s seen him for two years, then maybe we have something. In the meantime, I’ll get back to the skeleton and start doing some serious analysis. I already have the sex, but I’m hoping to pin down race and age, and to come up with estimates of height, build, old injuries, and so on. If they do match what we find out about Williams’s description—”
“Well, we can help you with that right now,” Joey said with the elaborate precision of a drunk trying to prove he wasn’t drunk. He pushed his glasses, which had slipped down his nose, back up. “We all know what he looked like. Thirty or so, kind of average build, maybe five-ten—”
“Stop, stop!” Gideon yelled, so suddenly that the museum ladies, now in the process of going around pouring tea, froze trembling in their tracks.
“What did I… what did I do?” a startled Joey asked. The tic below his eye was going full blast.
“I don’t want to know what he looked like.”
Donald frowned at him. “You don’t want to know? But how… but how can you—? ”
“He means he doesn’t want to know until after he’s examined the bones,” Rudy interjected smoothly. “If you know beforehand, it’s likely to affect your perception. You find what you’re looking for; the infamous principle of expectancy.”
He smiled fleetingly at Gideon. They had both had the principle of expectancy drilled into them at the same time and place, at the feet of their major professor, back at the University of Wisconsin. Gideon smiled back. He was glad to see Rudy looking a little less miserable than he had the other day; not so different, in fact, from the old Rudy, if you ignored the smudged eyes, the gaunt frame, and that gold chain.
Donald nodded, and the others seemed to get the point as well.
Accepting a cup of tea from one of the ladies, who were now in motion again, Gideon continued: “If the rest of my findings do match Williams’s description, and if he really has been missing for the last two years, then the next step would probably be to get some DNA samples from his family, assuming he has a family, and compare them to DNA from the bones. If they match, that settles it. If they don’t, we need some more guesses.”
“From bones in ground for two years, you get DNA?” a surprised Kozlov asked.
“Oh, yes, even from bones much older than that. They’ve retrieved DNA from 350,000-year-old fossils. You see—”
“Of course!” Kozlov smacked himself in the forehead. “Stupid. DNA is chemically inert molecule. Nonreactive. Big, long half-life, not going break down any time soon.”
“That’s right,” Gideon said, chiding himself for the childish explanation he’d been about to give. Kozlov’s music-hall accent made it easy to forget that he was a brilliant man with deep and wide-ranging interests—self- educated or not.
“The business with the supinator crest and the squatting facets is interesting, Gideon,” Rudy said. “Any other occupational indicators?”
Another anthropologist’s question. It was good to see Rudy’s old interests reawakening. Occupational indicators, or behavioral indicators, or skeletal markers of occupational stress were what anthropologists called the features in bones that provided clues to the person’s activities in life; squatting facets, for example.
“That’s all I’ve seen so far. I haven’t had a real chance to look at the shoulder girdle and ribs yet, though. That’ll be tomorrow. Want to help out?” he asked with sudden inspiration.
For a moment Rudy looked pleased, but then he shook his head— a little sadly, it seemed to Gideon. “Nah, I’d only get in the way; I’ve been out of things too long. Besides, I’ve got the consortium.”
“Of course. I wasn’t thinking.”
“But thanks for asking. I appreciate it.”
“What I want to know,” Victor said, “is why we keep saying this skeleton, this person, was murdered. We don’t know that, do we, or am I missing something?”
“We haven’t found any direct proof, no,” Gideon said. “Not yet, anyway, but—”
“But if you can think of another reason for cutting somebody up into little pieces and then burying them in a bunch of different places on a deserted beach, I’d love to hear it,” Liz said.
Victor thought for a moment. “I have to admit, nothing jumps to mind,” he said, straight-faced.
THIRTEEN
WHEN it came to work, Maude Bewley was not the sort to procrastinate. The more of tomorrow’s work you did today, the less work you’d have to do tomorrow; that was her motto. This was the reason she was still puttering
