They found an unoccupied table on the slate terrace, a long way from the buffet tables, but out in the fresh morning breeze and within hearing of the gentle, purling waves of the lagoon. Neither of them had eaten dinner the previous night, and they made their way through their heaped trays for some minutes before getting down to serious conversation.
"Find anything else after I left?” John asked around a mouthful of scrambled eggs and hard roll.
Gideon shook his head as he finished his own eggs and bacon. “No, the bones were still soaking in the detergent when I left. By now, the orderlies should have given them a final bath in the bleach, dried them, and delivered them back to the autopsy room."
"The bleach disinfects them?"
"Yes, but it's not that so much; it just cleans them up, gets rid of the grease, makes them pleasanter to work with."
John chewed and thoughtfully watched the waves for a while. “So Brian is now just a pile of bleached bones,” he said.
"So will we all be, eventually."
John smiled crookedly. “Yeah, but not literally.” He sipped his coffee. “So what happens now, Doc?"
"Now we go back to the hospital, we set the bones out on a table, and we see what there is to find. It's going to be pretty slow, so if you'd rather do something else for a few hours, feel free."
"Well, as a matter of fact, I was thinking of going over to Nick's place. Bertaud stopped in to see him last night to tell him what was going on, that they were starting a full-scale investigation and everything, and Nick called me this morning."
"Mad?"
"Nick? No, I wouldn't say mad. He sounded kind of-I don't know, mixed up. But the thing is, he wants to talk to me about it. And I sure want to talk to him."
"Watch out you don't tread on Bertaud's toes, John."
"Who, me? Anyway, he's on our side now, remember?"
"That's right, I forgot. Look, when you talk to Nick, ask him if he knows how Brian got his face smashed up, will you?"
"Why, is it important?"
"I don't know. I just-"
A callused hand clapped him on the shoulder. “Mornin', gents,” Dean Parks said. “Listen, if you don't have anything planned, I hope I can talk you into some of the day's activities. These good folks'd just love to have you along."
"Actually-” Gideon said.
"Snorkeling at ten, beach picnic at twelve, glass-bottomed boats at one-"
"Thanks, Dean, but-” John said.
"-and then we take the Leaky Tiki -that's our genuine giant Polynesian outrigger motor canoe-down to Marae-that's a genuine old-fashioned Tahitian village-where two of these fine, fun-lovin’ couples'll be married, Tahitian style, body tattoos and everything-"
"Body tattoos?” Gideon said. Fun-loving was right.
Parks lowered his voice. “Well, just cockamamies, really. They wash right off, but still, it's something to see. After that, we've got ourselves a beautiful sunset cruise…or, say, do you boys have your own entertainment planned?"
"I'm afraid we do,” Gideon said.
Parks leered engagingly. “Well, then, don't let me stand in your way. Maybe tomorrow."
"Come on, Doc,” John said, draining his coffee. “Let's go get entertained. I'll drop you off at the morgue."
Chapter 22
As expected, the bones were waiting for him on a gurney in the autopsy room. The room, however, was already in use.
"Ah, bonjour!" Dr. Viennot called merrily when Gideon entered. He had a cigar in his mouth, smoked down to a stub but unlit at the moment. “I hope you don't mind sharing the facility."
The police physician, rubber-gloved and white-coated, was at one of the two tables, working on a fresh body with the help of a sober, elderly assistant. The body, its lower half covered by a sheet, was that of an obese, middle-aged Tahitian woman. Viennot and the assistant had obviously been at work for a while. The standard Y-shaped incision of the torso had been made, the skin flaps laid back, and the sternum and central portions of the ribs cut away and removed, along with a few overlying bits of lung, to a pan on the counter. The two men, Gideon saw, were checking for air embolism, an unlovely procedure involving the filling of the pericardial sac with water and the capturing of escaping gases. The exhaust fan over the table was humming, but even so, you didn't need your eyes to tell you that there was a newly opened human body in the room with you.
"Oh, good morning, doctor,” Gideon said. “I guess I'd better find someplace else."
"Nonsense,” Viennot said, his slender, gloved hands wrist-deep in chest cavity. “Glad to have you. You won't bother us a bit."
But that wasn't the issue, not by a long shot. Autopsy rooms made Gideon skittish even when they were corpseless. The tiled walls, the dully gleaming zinc-topped tables, the sinks, the drains, the basins underneath to collect fluids-all were enough to unsteady his stomach and give him the willies. The fact that a perfectly respectable and even moderately distinguished career as an evolutionary theorist had led to his seemingly always popping in and out of these dismal places was one of the continuing mysteries of his existence.
"No, no,” Gideon sang out, “that's all right, I wouldn't want to get in the way."
And over Viennot's well-meant protests ("At least have a cup of coffee-it's over there, by the lung.") he escaped, wheeling the gurney out of the room and into the hallway. He was fortunate in finding an unused conference room just one door down, and there he spread a double layer of newspapers, a three-week-old copy of La Depeche de Tahiti, on the wooden table that took up most of the room, and laid out the bones.
The successive baths bad done their work as well as could be expected in a single night. The bones were not quite white but a sort of glaucous ivory, darker near the tips and still just a little greasy to the touch. But for all intents and purposes, they were bare, and that was what was important. As always, his first job was to lay them out in anatomical position, or as close to anatomical position as they could get. For a change, he had a complete skeleton to work with, including every last one of the 106 bones of the hand and foot. (In the adult human, more than half the bones in the body are in the hands and feet, to the great annoyance of forensic anthropologists, many of whom- Gideon among them-had a hard time keeping all the tarsals, the carpals, and the phalanges straight, particularly when it came to telling right from left.) To get them all arranged took him almost an hour, but it was work he didn't mind; it was the first step of phase two, the beginning of the hunt. And there was nothing gooey, or squelchy, or otherwise repellent about it, at least not to him. No embolisms, no lungs sitting in pans. Just nice, clean bones. Bleached bones.
When the skeleton was laid out, he changed his mind and went back to the autopsy room to bring back some coffee (Viennot was delighted to see him: “Come look at this, colleague! Did you ever see such a thrombus!"). Then he sat on a corner of the table, sipping from the cardboard cup and looking down at the neatly ordered remains of Brian Scott.
That it was Brian he no longer doubted. There was the diastema, for one thing, the blond hair for another, and now, as he could plainly see, healed fractures of the right ulna and radius, which corresponded to the right arm, broken in two places, that Brian had suffered when the jeep went off the road. Spaces between the teeth, blond hair, and healed fractures were hardly distinctive enough to serve as positive identifiers on their own, but put them all together, with everything else, and they added up to Brian-a conclusion that no one else but Gideon had questioned anyway. Besides, if it wasn't Brian, who would it be? And where was Brian? All the same, bowing to habit-and to be on the safe side-he ran through a quick evaluation of race, sex, age, and height, always the forensic anthropologist's starting points.