Kenneth Worriner was a tall, thin man of eighty-five; elegant and fragile, with skin like rice paper and hair as glossy and white as lamb's wool. With his courtly bearing, his prow of a nose, and his sunken cheeks he reminded Gideon of the pictures of Ramses II; or, more accurately, of the pictures of Ramses’ mummy. His clothes were more up-to-date than the Nineteenth Dynasty, but not by that much: a full, droopy bow tie, white flannel trousers and vest (with chain), and a dark-blue flannel blazer with a carefully folded handkerchief in the breast pocket.
Here in the land of tractor caps and red suspenders, he seemed like an alien from another planet. In fact, as he had explained to Gideon, he was a Beacon Hill Bostonian who'd been educated at Harvard. He'd been in his twenty-eighth year of teaching at Wellesley-he was a teacher, he said emphatically, not a researcher-when a two-year appointment had opened up at the University of Alaska. Worriner, then sixty, had taken it for a change of scene and he had been the man on the spot in 1964 when Tirku had disgorged its first load of bones. He had also fallen in love with Alaska, and it was in this rugged country he'd settled when he retired from teaching.
But in his own living room-jacketed, cravated, delicately poised at a marquetry table-he might have been pouring coffee at his old eighteenth-century bay window overlooking Louisburg Square.
"That's fine, thanks,” Gideon said when his cup was half full. Decaffeinated or not, Worriner liked his coffee strong to the point of bitterness. “That mandible fragment, Kenneth-which side was it, right or left?"
"The right. Just about the entire ascending ramus, and as far forward as the second bicuspid."
"Was the condyle broken off?"
"No, it was in good condition."
Gideon smacked his hands together. “Ah, great, we're finally going to find out a few things."
What they were going to find out was who had been murdered on Tirku Glacier in June 1960. The right ramus of the mandible was the right rear segment, the part that rises from the back corner of the jaw to the underside of the skull. It was precisely the part missing from the newly found mandible, the absence of which made it impossible to say whether the jaw and skull fragment came from the same person.
But now, with this ramus having been identified as Steven's, they would be able to say that and more. They would start by seeing whether the condyle on Worriner's piece fit positively into the mandibular fossa on the telltale skull fragment that Gideon had brought with him. Then they would match the broken front edge of Worriner's piece against the broken rear edge of the mutilated jaw fragment Gideon had also brought along.
If they got a fit at both ends-if all three pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle-then the man who'd had an ice ax driven into his head was Steven Fisk. With absolutely no possibility of doubt.
And if they didn't, then just as surely that man was not Steven Fisk, which meant he was James Pratt. Period.
He explained all this with growing excitement as Worrier led the way back to his study. The ex-professor left his aluminum walker in the living room and moved slowly, stoop-shouldered but straight-backed, pushing against the walls of the narrow hallway for support.
"Well, yes, your logic is reasonable enough,” he said, but he sounded oddly subdued. “Go ahead and put your material on the table."
The old man's study was like any other academic's study: nondescript, mismatched file cabinets, some wooden, some metal; book-filled shelves wherever there was wall space; a couple of dusty, elderly typewriters; books and papers everywhere, even on the chair seats. And even, on a table of its own, the essential late-twentieth-century touch: a covered Compaq computer. Over everything hung the fusty, scholarly, stimulating smell of the printed page.
Gideon put his case on the scarred library table that had probably been cleared especially for his visit. He took out two irregularly shaped packages, thickly wrapped in newspaper, and used a pair of Worriner's scissors to cut the tape around them.
As he snipped he kept talking. There was the possibility that Worriner's ramus would fit the jaw but not the skull, or vice versa. That would be an interesting twist, because it would mean that the man with the broken jaw and the man with the broken head were two different people. Still, they would know who was who, which was a long way ahead of where they were now.
When he'd gotten the package open he laid out the two pieces of bone, brown and shiny with their new coats of preservative. “All right,” he said enthusiastically, “let's have a look at that ramus of yours."
Worriner cleared his throat. “Well, er, Gideon…I'm afraid I don't exactly have it."
"You don't…” This time he couldn't quite hide his disappointment. “But you said-"
"Yes, “I know. “I do have the bones…All but that one."
He explained. Because the ramus had been positively identified, it had been sent to the next of kin: Steven Fisk's brother in Idaho. Surely Gideon saw the propriety of this? (The best Gideon could do was grunt, which Worriner accepted as affirmation.) But the rest of the remains, impossible to attribute definitely to either Pratt or Fisk, had been kept. Things being what they were in Alaska at the time, they had wound up in the physical anthropology laboratory collection and had been kindly delivered to Worriner's house that morning.
"I do have some pictures of the ramus,” Worriner ventured timorously. “I think they're rather good."
They were. Ten clear black-and-white photographs taken from all the conventional angles and then some. The two men got down to work. What would have taken thirty seconds with the ramus itself took thirty minutes of measurement, comparison, and discussion, but when they were finished they had their answer. The ramus in the photographs, the perforated skull fragment, and the broken mandible all came from the same person. Steven Fisk. The jealous boyfriend was victim, not murderer.
Gideon sat back with a feeling of completion. With Worriner's considerable help he had done all that could reasonably be expected of an anthropologist. He had identified the remains. The rest was up to John Lau and the FBI. As John frequently and succinctly told him.
Still, he was naturally interested in seeing the other fragments that had come from the glacier in 1964, and Worriner was interested in showing him. Worriner opened a set of numbered, clasped envelopes and laid the pieces out in a row on the table.
There was a beaten-up piece of a right scapula that Worriner had identified as male, age twenty to twenty-five.
"That's just what I would have said,” Gideon told him. “Really?” Worriner said. “Well.” He was unreservedly pleased.
Next was an almost complete left humerus, broken off just above the epicondyles so that only the elbow process was missing. Worriner had identified it as coming from a male, in the same age range, with medium to medium-heavy musculature. “A mesomorph,” he said, using the archaic terminology.
Gideon nodded. Clear enough.
Next to this was a columnar segment about five inches long; a piece of another left humerus, from the middle of the shaft.
"As you remarked, this was quite crucial to the analysis,” Worriner told him, “because it meant that there were at least two individuals represented, and both of them were adult males. As you see.” He rolled the bone over, showing a well-defined, lumpy crest that ran almost the length of the piece.
Again Gideon nodded. The crest was the deltoid tuberosity, so named because it was the insertion point of the deltoid, the big muscle that formed the beefy mass of the shoulder. As with any other tendon-bone connection, the larger and more powerful the muscle, the rougher and more pronounced the bony insertion point. And the rougher and more pronounced the insertion point, the greater the likelihood that it was male.