“Forget it. He’s not even as big as Josh!” Jeff sank reluctantly back into his seat, and the bus sped up again. “Maybe Kioki was going to meet someone,” Michael suggested. “Does he have a girlfriend?”
Jeff shook his head. “Never had one. He’s always real shy around girls.”
As the bus pulled into the parking lot, Michael and Jeff saw Rick Pieper waiting for them, his face ashen. A crowd of kids had gathered around him. Michael could see them whispering nervously among themselves.
“Shit,” Jeff said quietly. “Come on.” Rising from his seat, he wriggled past Michael and surged down the aisle, with Michael right behind him. “What happened?” he asked Rick as he stepped out of the bus.
Rick seemed dazed as he looked at Michael and Jeff. “His mom found him,” he said. He hesitated a moment, then spoke again, his voice breaking. “He’s dead.”
Michael and Jeff stared blankly at Rick.
Though neither of them spoke a word, both of them were experiencing exactly the same thing: an oddly sick feeling, which spread through them, numbing their bodies as well as their minds.
It wasn’t possible — they’d been with Kioki only a few hours ago, and he’d been fine.
And now he was dead?
Instinctively, Jeff, Rick, and Michael drew closer together as they began moving slowly toward the school. The whispering voices of their classmates swirled around them, and though nearly every person who whispered the news to someone else had an explanation for Kioki’s death, none of them knew the truth.
Michael walked to his locker as if in a trance, and stared stupidly at the lock, its combination having vanished from his head. Then, from behind him, he heard Josh Malani’s voice.
“We gotta talk,” Josh said. “All of us.”
Michael turned and gazed at his friend. “What happened?” he said. “What happened to Kioki?”
Josh Malani’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know,” he said. Then he quickly looked around, as if checking for anyone who might be listening. When he spoke again, his voice was barely more than a whisper. “But it’s got nothing to do with us,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
Michael stared at his friend for a long time, wishing he could believe him.
Deep down inside, though, he couldn’t.
CHAPTER 10
Katharine was genuinely annoyed with herself. The bones of the skeleton, fully exposed now, were laid out in precisely the position in which they’d been found. She’d had to move a few of them as she’d cleaned away the sediment that covered them, but in addition to the endless rolls of 35mm film she’d shot, there were dozens of Polaroids as well — a complete photographic record of the excavation and an essential aid to reconstructing the skeleton in situ. Now, as she stared down at the skeleton, her impatience with herself grew.
She should know what she was looking at.
In fact, she should have known what she was looking at yesterday, right after the skull and mandible had been fully excavated. But no matter what came to mind — chimpanzee, gorilla, gibbon, or any of a dozen other apes and primates — there was always something wrong: the skull not prognathic enough, or the mandible too wide, or the teeth showing the wrong configuration. The devil, she decided, was definitely in the details on this one, because it was the details that didn’t add up.
“So, have you decided what it is?” Rob Silver asked, emerging from the rain forest to stand next to her.
“Well, I’m absolutely certain it’s an anthropoid,” Katharine said, attempting to mask the crankiness she was feeling, but failing to fool Rob. “And I’m fairly certain it died from a blow to the head.”
Rob squatted down. “May I pick it up?”
“Be my guest,” Katharine said, crouching down next to him. “I have to tell you, right now I’m thinking you’re wasting a lot of Takeo Yoshihara’s money on me. Either that, or I’m missing something that’s staring me right in the face.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Rob told her. “If this was going to be an easy one, I wouldn’t have needed you at all, would I?” He held the skull up, rotated it, then stuck a finger through the hole that had been pierced in the left parietal bone. “What do you think caused this?”
That, at least, was something she felt confident about. “A spear. I’ve seen exactly the same kind of wound in hundreds of skulls in Africa. And you can see by the position of the skeleton that while this head wound appears to be the mortal blow, the body was moved.”
“You can see that,” Rob countered. “Explain, please?”
“For one thing, it’s lying on its back. If you assume someone threw the spear that killed it, it would have just collapsed.”
“So whoever threw the spear pulled it out.”
Katharine nodded. “But someone also laid the body out,” she went on. “See how the arms are? They’re not just lying at its sides.” With a forefinger, she traced along the right humerus, which lay parallel to the spine. But the arm bent at the elbow, with the radius and ulna angling inward toward the center of the pelvis. The bones of the left arm mirrored their counterparts on the right, and the small bones that had made up the hands and fingers were jumbled together, as if one hand had been placed on top of the other.
“Like it was laid out for burial,” Rob suggested.
“Exactly,” Katharine said.
“Sounds as if we have a murder mystery on our hands,” Rob said, laying the skull carefully back in the exact position in which it had been resting. “Someone killed this guy, and then his family brought him up here and buried him.”
Katharine shook her head. “Doesn’t add up,” she said. “First, he wasn’t buried. Everything I scraped away was natural debris, the kind of stuff that builds up in a hurry in rain forests. I don’t find any evidence of burial. Just laid out, and then left here. And the Hawaiians didn’t do that, did they?”
“Absolutely not. They have a great respect for their dead. The burial grounds are sacred, no matter how old they are. And bodies were always buried.”
“So what went on here?” Katharine asked.
“Whoever killed this guy laid him out, then walked away?”
“Maybe,” Katharine agreed, straightening up from her crouch, but keeping her eyes fixed on the skeleton. “But that’s not my biggest problem.” Rob looked up at her. “My biggest problem is that I can’t figure out what it is.”
“It’s human, isn’t it?” Rob asked.
“Not from what I know of humans,” Katharine replied. “It’s barely four feet long, which makes it awfully small for a full-grown Homo sapiens.”
“Maybe it’s a child.”
“The skull doesn’t look like a child’s skull. It seems to be fully developed.” Stooping again, she traced her finger along the seams between the parietal and occipital plates. “See? The bones are fully fused, which means the head is pretty much full size. Yet it’s no larger than your average six-year-old’s. Also, look at the forehead — way too sloped for Homo sapiens. The mandible’s all wrong, too.”
“So it’s some kind of primate,” Rob suggested.
Katharine fixed him with a withering look. “First, there are not now, and never were, any primates on these islands, except for the ones in the zoo in Honolulu. But more important than that, when a chimpanzee or a gorilla dies, you don’t lay it out as you do a human.”
Rob chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip. “If it was a pet—”
“Forget it,” Katharine interrupted, her annoyance toward herself now widening to include Rob. “Believe me, I’ve thought about that. This was no pet.”
“So what is it?” Rob asked, deciding to ignore her annoyance. “Come on, you’ve got to have some idea.”