"We’d appreciate your help, Doctor. Can you tell if it’s human?" Julian Minor was John’s assistant, a middle-aged black in a dark suit and tie, with rimless glasses, neat, grizzled hair, and a tidy, complacent chubbiness that gave him the air of a self-satisfied accountant.
Gideon nodded. "Yes, it’s a human pelvic girdle, but I can’t tell any more than that until we get the bones cleaned."
"You mean remove the soft tissue?" the agent said with a delicate scowl. "I don’t know if I’m authorized to let you do that."
Let’s hope not, Gideon thought.
"But I’ll call Seattle and inquire," Minor said.
He dialed, muttered a few secretive syllables into the telephone, nodded three times, said, "Very well then," and hung up. "Mr. Lau says go ahead, but you’re to save the soft tissue for the pathologist."
"Okay," Gideon said with a sigh. "We’ll need some chemicals, though." Which would, with any luck, turn out to be unavailable.
No luck. When he went to Julie with the list she called in a young, redheaded ranger who prepared exhibits of birds and animals for the Hoh Information Center and who had everything needed. The young man was patently aggrieved when Minor told him he could not sit in on the operation.
In twenty minutes Gideon and Minor were back in the workroom at the far end of the table from the grisly chunk of flesh. In front of Gideon were dissection tools, rubber gloves, and measuring cups and containers of various sizes. He prepared a solution of water, sodium carbonate, and bleaching powder in a large dented pot and set it aside. "That’s antiformin," he said. "We’ll boil the flesh off the bones with it." A slightly different mixture was poured into a stone jar.
"But what about saving the tissue?"
"I’ll cut away everything I can first, and we’ll preserve it. Now," he said grimly, "to the dirty work."
He chose a heavy-duty scalpel, a rugged pair of forceps, a probe, and a pair of scissors. Then he talced his hands, slipped on a new pair of rubber gloves, went to the shapeless thing at the other end of the table, and began to work.
After years of dealing with human remains, Gideon still maintained a remarkable squeamishness. Through long practice he had developed the trick of not quite focusing his eyes on what he was doing at such moments, at least no more than was necessary to keep his own fingers out of the way of the scalpel. He employed the technique now.
Minor sat primly at the other end of the table some ten feet distant, watching him cut away the dark shreds of flesh and put them in the jar.
"The fact that it’s only a pelvis…" Minor said. "Was mutilation involved?"
"No sign of it. The body’s been in the water a while. I think it was just pulled apart by the current and the rocks."
"I see," Minor said. "May we assume that the remains are those of an individual of the, ah, Negroid race?"
"Negroid?" said Gideon, puzzled. "No, why?"
"The color of the skin is quite dark. Or isn’t that the skin?"
"Some of it’s skin, some of it’s muscle, and other, tissue. Gluteus maximus, mostly, and some of the other flexors and extensors; a little fascia lata. The soft inside stuff and the external genitalia are gone, decomposed or eaten by the fishes."
Minor’s lips twitched downward. Gideon didn’t blame him. With the forceps he teased out a black ribbon of flesh. "This still has some skin on it," he said, "and you can see it’s black, but once decomposition has begun, the color isn’t any guide to race. Caucasian skin turns brown or black a lot of the time, and black skin is likely to turn whitish-gray."
"I see," said Minor, slightly whitish-gray himself.
"You’re welcome." With his own stomach churning. Gideon stripped off the greasy gloves and stood up. "Now comes your part," he said.
"My part?" Minor blinked, and his hand went reflexively to the knot of his tie. "I don’t take your meaning."
"The solution in the pot needs to be stirred every thirty minutes for about three hours. Then mix this into it." He held up a bottle of sodium hydroxide in fifteen percent solution. "Then, if I’m not back yet, put the pot on the burner, heat it to a low simmer, and put in the pelvis. Take it out in a hour-but I’ll be back before then."
"My understanding," Minor said, not at all pleased, "was that you would be responsible for all the technical details."
Gideon shrugged. "If you’d rather not do it, you can ask the kid with the beard. I’m sure he’d be delighted."
"I think I can manage," Minor said. "I take it this is some sort of caustic solution."
"Yes, using one’s finger to do the stirring is not recommended."
Minor did not seem to find this amusing. Neither did Gideon. He was anxious to get out of the workroom, into the open air. "In the meantime," he said, "I thought I’d run over to Amanda Park and see the man who has the bone spear points."
Minor brightened. "Old Mr. Pringle? That shouldn’t take you any three hours. Amanda Park is only a couple of miles away. His house is a bit off the beaten path, but I can give you directions. It’ll take you fifteen minutes to get there."
It took him two hours. "Off the beaten path" was an understatement, and Gideon got hopelessly lost on back roads more than once before he stumbled on the place. When he finally pulled up at the side of the road next to the worn, birdhouse-shaped mailbox, he was ready to admit that Julie had a point about his being a city person. He got out of the car and stood looking at the ramshackle old bungalow of dingy white with faded green trim. On a gray day, with no other houses around, and made tiny by the thick forest, it was a forlorn sight. Only after a few seconds did he become aware that a very old man was sitting hunched in a corner of the porch, deep in the gloomy shade of a corroded tin roof.
Sleeping, or perhaps senile, Gideon thought. He walked to the house with a smile but with a distinct sinking of the heart. For an anthropologist he was peculiarly loath-nearly obsessively so-to intrude on others’ privacy.
"Mr. Pringle?" he said quietly when he reached the porch.
The head came up and Gideon saw that the man wore a knit, dark blue watch cap pulled tightly down over a long, lean-fleshed head. He was even older than Gideon had thought, more than ninety, with waxed-paper skin stretched painfully over a large-boned skeletal face, and purplish-brown discolorations on his cheeks. Astigmatic and winking, he looked emptily about, everywhere but at Gideon.
Senile, Gideon thought, his heart sinking further. "Mr. Pringle?" He spoke gently. If the old man were frightened or failed to comprehend, he would go. "My name is Gideon Oliver…"
"Ah, there you are," said the man in a thin, cheerful voice, fixing a pair of astonishingly lucid blue eyes on him. "The old eyes are getting a bit queer these days. Not what they used to be."
Gideon saw, as if by the light of those luminous eyes, that he had a tiny white moustache, pencil-thin and meticulously trimmed, midway between his long nose and thin gray lips, with plenty of pale skin showing all around it. Cheered by the sight of that absurdly sprightly ornament on the ancient face, Gideon smiled. "Mr. Minor of the FBI told me about your collection. I wondered if you might show it to me."
The man’s eyes lit up even more. "With the greatest of pleasure," he said, and began to rise, gripping a cane with one hand and the shaky arm of his folding chair with the other. He was, Gideon realized, a very tall, rawboned man, and he had a lot of difficulty getting out of the chair. Taking his arm to help him to an unsteady balance, Gideon was struck by the freshly laundered smell of his woolen shirt. There was nothing slovenly about him.
The old man laughed. "Got going too fast. Wouldn’t have had any trouble if I’d gotten myself organized first."
The front door opened into the kitchen, and Pringle shuffled slowly onto the ancient linoleum, concentrating heavily on his balance, carefully predetermining each spot on which the thick rubber tip of his cane would come down.