"A wired jaw, maybe; something like that?"
"No, why?"
"Yes, why?” Arthur asked. “What are you getting at?"
"No matter. Well, the bones could belong to either of them, or both. I'm afraid I can't do any better than that."
"Well, that's that, then.” Tibbett rubbed his hands briskly together. “All we can do is what we can do. Thanks so much for your help, Gideon. I'll initiate procedures to see that the remains-"
"Wait a minute, Arthur,” Gideon said, “I think you're jumping the gun. I haven't given those bones a decent going-over yet. Besides, you're going to want to go back to the Tirku area to see if there's anything else out there."
"I'm going to want to do no such thing.” Tibbett's voice ratcheted up a notch. “We've already searched. I found that horrible jawbone. It was the most macabre experience I've ever had in my life.” His eyes rolled up. “Alas, poor Yorick."
"I think Dr. Oliver's right,” Parker said.
"Why? What is there to be gained? What-"
But the ranger knew how to get his supervisor's attention. “We'll have to submit a recovery report on this. How will it look to Washington if we can't put down that we instituted a systematic search for remains?"
"I just told you-"
"With equipped, professional park-ranger personnel.” Tibbett sagged. “All right, all right. Let's get it done. What do you suggest?"
"Jesus Christ,” Parker said abruptly, looking at the empty Hostess box. “You ate one of those donuts?"
"I get hungry when I work,” Gideon said. “It wasn't that bad."
"Yeah, but still-"
"Owen, this is serious,” Tibbett snapped. “Now what do you suggest?"
Parker grunted good-naturedly. “Bill Bianco's taking the glacier rescue class up Tarr Inlet for tomorrow's field training. Why don't Russ, Frannie, and I hop a ride on the boat? They can drop us off at Tirku and pick us up on the way back. It'll give us a good three hours or so to look around."
"Fine,” Tibbett said, sighing. “You have my approval."
"You'll probably want to come too, Dr. Oliver,” Parker said.
"I sure do."
Tibbett made fluttery motions with his hands. “Just a minute. I don't know about that. We have to be careful here. Our insurance provisions wouldn't cover anybody who isn't on official government business."
"Well, what the hell would you call this?” Parker asked, then added, “sir."
"Well, I don't…Gideon, would you say it's absolutely necessary for you to be present?"
Gideon leaned forward. “Absolutely,” he said earnestly. “If they do find some more bones, it'd be extremely important for me to observe the contextual and relational conditions firsthand."
It would also beat hell out of spending the day moping through the rest of the Alaska Geographics.
The resident manager of Glacier Bay Lodge had been doubtful about the wisdom of opening the Icebreaker Lounge from 5:00 to 6:00 P.M. each day with only two small groups staying at the hotel. Servicing a bar for a total of twenty hotel guests, Mr. Granle thought, was likely to be a losing proposition. As it turned out, he was wrong. The members of M. Audley Tremaine's group were on all-inclusive expense accounts and drank accordingly. The Park Service people were not on all-inclusive expense accounts, but they drank like it anyway. For the second evening in a row, there wasn't an empty table, and most people were on their second rounds, a few on their third.
M. Audley Tremaine himself was holding court at the bar, oozing urbane charm. In attendance were a tipsy, wisecracking Shirley Yount, who had obviously started her cocktail hour in her room, and half-a-dozen star-struck park rangers in jeans and sweaters. Anna Henckel, Walter Judd, and Gerald Pratt made an unlikely trio at a table by the big window looking west over the cove. Anna, reading from a sheet of paper, was grimly and methodically ticking off points. Judd, not overly responsive, chuckled and joshed. Pratt, between them, was leaning back out of the way in his chair, Seven and Seven in one hand, pipe in the other, equably gazing over their heads at the clouds obscuring the Fairweathers, and himself off somewhere in clouds of his own making. Elliott Fisk was nowhere to be seen.
Most of the other tables were taken up by park rangers in groups of two or three, and Julie and Gideon had been lucky to find a table of their own near the stone fireplace.
"You want my honest opinion?” Julie was saying.
"Of course I want your honest opinion."
"I think you're…well…"
"Inventing things?"
"No, not inventing. Reaching…exaggerating. It's natural. You're at loose ends, and you're bored, and I just wonder if your imagination isn't getting the better of you."
Gideon leaned back in the comfortable captain's chair, stretched out his legs, and crossed them at the ankles. He'd been wondering the same thing himself. “Maybe so, but I'm not exaggerating that break in the mandible."
"I don't mean that you're exaggerating the physical facts, I mean that you're exaggerating-inventing-well, the-"
"The cause of them?"
"No, not the cause. The-"
"Antecedents. Determinants."
She sighed and picked up her white wine. “How am I supposed to argue with you if you keep telling me what I mean?"
He smiled at her. “Are we arguing?"
"No, we're just-I guess we're just-"
"Speculating. Deliberating. Conferring."
Julie raised her eyes to the rough-beamed ceiling. “I'm going to kill him. All right, tell me what you found."
"I already told you. I spent fifteen minutes telling you."
"I was in the shower washing my hair. And you were yelling from the other room. I missed a word here and there. Tell me again."
"All right, I found-"
"It might help if you kept it to words that a simple, unsophisticated park ranger is capable of understanding this time."
"Such as yourself?"
"Such as myself."
"A park ranger who minored in anthropology."
"Nevertheless."
"Uh-huh.” Gideon took a few kernels of popcorn from the bowl on the table. “All right, I found that the mandible was broken off on the right side, a sharp, vertical break, and the broken margin was beveled, not jagged. And the fracture lines were what we call ‘stepped.’ That means, well…stepped. Like stairs. Okay?"
"Okay."
"I also found that the left M3 mesiolingual cusp had a menisciform fracture."
She eyed him over the rim of her wineglass.
"The left third molar had a sort of crescent-shaped crack,” he explained.
"That I can handle."
"And, finally, there were signs of pressure damage on the posterior surface of the left mandibular condyle, which is-"
"The little round thingy on the hack of the jawbone, that fits in that socket on the skull. Right?"
He sipped his Scotch and soda. “Not bad for a simple park ranger."
"Watch it, don't press your luck. And in your mind all this adds up to what? In a nutshell, please."
Gideon helped himself to a handful of popcorn while he put what it all added up to in a nutshell. “If that mandible had been found in a shallow grave near Green Lake, and I'd been asked for my opinion-my expert opinion, I modestly call to your attention-I would have said that this particular profile of indicators is consistent with an extremely forceful ante-mortem impact in the region of the protuberantia mentalis."
She nodded soberly. “Sounds like you, all right.” Gideon let it pass. “An extremely strong blow to the point of the chin. The living chin."
"All right, I'm with you so far. Where you lose me is when you say it wasn't caused by the avalanche."
"I'm not saying it wasn't, Julie. I'm just saying that every time I've ever run into that particular combination of injuries up to now, it was the result of one human being hitting another human being. Either with his fist, if he happened to have a fist like a gorilla's, or more likely with some heavy object, like a rock, or maybe a bat or a hammer. It just makes me wonder, that's all. Which is what they're paying me to do. Or would be, if they were paying me. Want another drink?"