Skeleton Dance

With the help one of the two officiers de paix that Joly had brought with him, the fragile bones were individually wrapped in newspaper to prevent their grinding against each other and then placed in evidence bags—simple brown paper bags stamped with the case number, 99-4—Dordogne's fourth homicide of the year. That was nice, Gideon thought. In Seattle, they got to their fourth murder a long time before September.

Working alphabetically down the body, each bag was also individually labeled, a simple system that Gideon had been using since his graduate school days; the broken mandible in Bag A, the one remaining clavicle and scapula in Bag B, the vertebrae —except for the eighth thoracic, which Joly was taking back to Perigueux with him—in Bag C, and so on. The result was a group of sacks that fit comfortably into a cardboard carton originally used to pack four dozen cans of macaroni au fromage.

Gideon shook his head as he gently fitted in the last of the sacks. Macaroni and cheese. Now there was a hell of a way to end up.

While Gideon worked, Joly had gone back to sit on his boulder, jotting down notes and thinking aloud. “No clothing, no personal possessions whatever—you wouldn't say that there was any possibility of their having completely rotted away, would you?'

'No, not a chance. Someone took them; to keep him from being identified, I suppose.'

'Mm. I don't imagine there's any way to tell if he was killed here on the spot or carried here from somewhere else after he was murdered?'

Gideon shook his head. “You're right, there isn't. I can tell you about half of him has been carried out of the cave since he's been here, but that's about all. Either carried out or chomped down right here.'

'And are you able to tell me anything about his appearance? His height, for example?'

'There I can help. I'll give you a stature estimate later, when I run some measurements, but it looks as if he'll turn out to be around average: not real tall, not real short. For France, I mean—say about five-eight, give or take an inch or two.'

Joly, who was extraordinarily tall for a Frenchman, topping Gideon's 6'1” by an inch, wrote it down. “And what about weight?'

'If you mean was he fat or thin, there's no way to tell that from the bones, but his body type—his build—was probably average too—not particularly muscular, not particularly slight. Your average Frenchman, in other words.'

'Average, average, and average,” Joly said, sighing as he wrote. “I grow discouraged.'

'I can't give you what isn't there, Lucien. I wish I could tell you he was seven-feet-one and weighed a hundred and thirty pounds and had six fingers on his left hand.'

'Yes, that would help narrow things down,” Joly agreed.

'But, unfortunately, I haven't come across a single thing that could conceivably be used for individual identification. No useful dental abnormalities, other than that crown you spotted and a filling in one of the bicuspids. . . . wait a second, come to think of it . . .'

He opened Bag A again and took out the broken mandible—it was the right side, from the first bicuspid back— to re-examine the teeth. Four of the five were still present; the third molar having fallen out (after death, judging from the sharp, deep, well-defined socket). He held the bone on a level with his eyes and ran his finger over the teeth. “Yes, I should have realized it before. Something else for you to jot down: I think he might have been missing one of his upper right molars.'

Joly looked up from his notebook with a sympathetic smile. “I think you mean one of his lower right molars. I've been working you too hard. You are getting tired.'

'No, I mean upper.'

'But there are no—'

'Look at this tooth, the first molar. See how it sticks out beyond the other teeth?'

Joly squinted at it. “Ah . . . no.'

'Well, it does, or at least I think it does. And see how there's less wear on it than on the others?'

'Not really, no.'

'Well, there is—or at least I think there is—and that's what happens to a tooth when its opposite member—the tooth it abuts—isn't there to keep it in place and wear it down. Teeth have a way of floating around unless they're held down. And the tooth that the lower first molar abuts is the upper first molar. So my conclusion is that it's missing, and in fact that it'd been missing for a while before he died, because it takes some time before it gets noticeable.'

Joly scratched something out with his pen and slipped the notebook into his pocket. “And to think I doubted you.'

'Well, I'm not positive, you understand. I'm a little out on a limb here, so if it doesn't turn out that way don't be too—'

'Inspecteur?” said the second of the two officers, who had been combing through the dirt directly under where the skeleton had been buried. He pointed to a dull, misshapen, nugget in the red soil. “Une balle de fusil.” A bullet.

With Joly, Gideon hurried over for a closer look. What he saw was a small, squat cylinder of what looked like lead with a bluntly pointed conical head, something like a .22-caliber slug from a cheap Saturday Night Special, of which Gideon had seen more than he wished. But this one was different, with a hollowed-out base and an oddly constricted middle—as if a wire had been wound around it and pulled tight—so that the whole thing was shaped like a squat hourglass. And that was something he couldn't remember having run into before.

'What kind of bullet is that, Lucien?'

'It's not a bullet,” Joly said, bending over to peer at it, his hands on his knees. “I believe it's an air-rifle