He put it down and picked up the femoral fragment. It was the upper six or seven inches of the bone, and it had taken more of a beating than the mandible. It had obviously been well chewed over, and apparently by more than one kind of animaclass="underline" bear for certain, and something smaller, a marten or weasel. From the looks of it the crows or ravens had had a go at it too. Still, there was always something to be learned…
He fingered the head, the caput femoris, the golfball-sized hemisphere that fitted into the acetabulum to make the ball-and-socket joint of the hip. Most of it had been gnawed away, but he could see enough to tell that it was mature; the very end of the bone, the epiphysis, was securely attached to the shaft, which happened at seventeen or eighteen for this particular union. And the sex was male. He didn't need measuring calipers to see that the diameter of the head was somewhere near fifty millimeters, well above the normal female range.
And that was all there was to say about the femur. No way, unfortunately, to tell if it had come from the same person as the mandible. Later he'd try calculating a total height estimate from it, but for now he had to settle for adult male, period.
That left the contents of the boot, and there wasn't much to learn there. The twenty-six bones of the human foot-seven irregularly shaped tarsals comprising the ankle and heel, five long metatarsals forming the arch, and fourteen stubby little phalanges making up the toes-were singularly lacking in information of use to the forensic anthropologist. Either that, or feet had understandably failed to capture the forensic anthropological imagination enough to stimulate any detailed studies.
Whichever it was, all Gideon could say about them after he'd cleaned them, arranged them, and briefly examined them was that the foot, like the mandible and femur, had belonged to a fairly large adult male. The large talar surface told him that, and the bulky metatarsals. (Not that it took an anthropologist to figure it out. How many people were there walking around in size twelves who weren't male, adult, and reasonably large?) He'd know more after his tools and tables came, but even then he wasn't expecting much of anything to come from it.
He stretched, wandered around the room until he found a chipped mug on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, and poured himself some coffee from the automatic maker on the corner of one of the desks. He gave serious consideration to the two withered cake donuts in the open Hostess box, but decided in the end to heed Parker's warning. No place to wash his hands first anyway.
He stepped out onto the wooden porch. The crisp breeze, straight off the glaciers, sent a shiver crawling down his back (or was that the bitter black coffee?), but it felt good to be out in the fresh air after bending over those stale, sad fragments. He felt a little stale himself, or perhaps just disappointed. He hadn't come up with much of anything. He didn't even know how many people were represented on that table.
He changed his mind about having a donut, went back in, got a paper towel to hold it in, and came back out, munching slowly.
The scanty results weren't his fault, of course; there simply were no distinctive features, nothing to separate one individual human being from another; no healed fractures, no signs of surgery, no distinctive anomalies or peculiar genetic formations. The only interesting features, really, were those perimortem injuries to the mandible. Funny, when you thought about it, how much they…
He frowned, finished off the donut with his third bite, and went back inside. He picked up the mandible again, thoughtfully stroking the broken margin with his thumb. Then he fingered the cracked molar, the crushed condyle. Was there something to think about here after all, or was he just The door opened. “Hey, are you still at it?” Parker asked. “You need some more time?” He waited at the door. Behind him Tibbett peered warily over his shoulder.
Gideon glanced up at the wall clock. They'd been gone almost an hour. It had seemed like fifteen minutes, but he was used to that when he got absorbed in skeletal material. Reluctantly he put the mandible down: He could give it some more thought tomorrow, when he had a decent lens.
"No, come on in,” he said. “I'm just about finished."
Parker approached. Tibbett kept pace with him, remaining a gingerly half-step behind.
Gideon told them as much as he was relatively sure of. The mandible was from a male Caucasian of twenty-five, give or take three years, probably above average size. The femur and the foot were also both adult male, both above average size. No indicators of race, but no reason to think they weren't also Caucasian. That was it. His materializing questions about the mandible he kept to himself for the time being.
"Well-does that mean they're all from one person?” Tibbett asked.
Gideon spread his hands. “It could be one person, could be three. There isn't any duplication of parts, so there's no obvious proof that it's more than one, but that doesn't mean it isn't. And the appearance of the bones isn't different enough-or similar enough-to say for sure whether they all belong to the same person. And except for the bones in the boot, none of them are adjacent to each other in the living body, so we can't even put them together to see how well they fit or don't fit."
Tibbett's eyebrows went up. "That's the way you tell?"
Gideon smiled. Explaining skeletal analysis was like telling someone how you made a matchstick disappear or plucked a coin out of nowhere. A lot of otherwise intelligent people were disappointed when they found out there wasn't any magic involved.
"Well,” he said, looking soberly at the assistant superintendent, “I'm thinking of applying the Baker and Newman regression equations for determining bone association from relative weights in ostensibly commingled remains. If I can get an accurate scale."
"Ah,” Tibbett said, his sense of propriety restored. “We'll certainly see that you get an accurate scale."
"Well, it's not three people,” Parker said. “I can tell you that right now."
Gideon looked inquiringly at him.
"There were three people on that survey team,” Parker said, “but only two of them were men. The other was a woman, Jocelyn Yount. And since these bones are all from men, they can't be her, right? That leaves James Pratt and Steve Fisk."
"Why, that's right,” Tibbett said appreciatively.
"But we still don't know for a fact that these are from the survey,” Gideon said.
Parker shook his head. “Nah, those are the only missing people we've ever had in that section of the bay. Since they started keeping records, anyway. Arthur's right about that."
"Well, of course I am,” Tibbett agreed.
And he probably was. Certainly there was nothing about the bones that suggested that they hadn't been there for twenty-nine years. True, they still had a trace of the distinctive candle-wax odor that meant the fat in the marrow was somewhere beyond the rancid stage but short of the dried-up stage. Ordinarily this would mean the time of death had been anywhere from six months to four or five years earlier. But this too was wildly variable, depending on conditions, and cold could slow it down tremendously, as it retarded all degenerative changes in dead tissue. And with bones that had been in a glacier for two or three decades, you were going to get one hell of a slowdown.
"Owen,” Gideon said, “did you have a chance to talk to anyone about what these people looked like?"
"Sure did. Dr. Henckel and Professor Tremaine both."
"And? Did either of the men fit what we seem to have here? Caucasian, twenty-five or so, tall, probably well built?"
Parker laughed, dropped into a wheeled swivel chair, and pushed off a few inches, heels in the air. “They both did. Both big healthy guys, twenty-four, twenty-five years old."
Gideon hesitated. “Did they say either of them had anything wrong with his face?"
"His face?"