When he came out of the cafe and turned toward the station he noticed that the fog had abated a bit. Not thinned, but shredded here and there, like torn curtains, so that there were sporadic glimpses of the sound and even the outer islands between thick pillars of whitish-gray. It was like the occasional, shadowed sight of earth you got looking down from an airliner through heavy, broken clouds. He found that being able to see more than a few feet, even intermittently, raised his spirits, so that when he opened the door of the station he was whistling.
Clapper, sitting in Robb’s office, cradling a mug of coffee in one hand and holding a cigarette in the other, was looking happy, too, and much restored. “Constable, you made a damned mockery of the majesty and stateliness of Force!” he was bellowing at Robb, but he was laughing. Robb looked cheerfully mock-sheepish.
Clapper waved Gideon in cordially. “Ah, Gideon, a pleasure to see you. Now what do you suppose this fellow has done to so arouse my ire?” he asked, jerking a thumb at Robb. “Tell him, Constable.”
“I’m not really sure, sir,” Robb said to Gideon. “Near as I can tell, the sergeant is upset because I donned contaminant-restrictive headgear at the crime scene, as I was taught to do at-”
“Contaminant-restrictive headgear!” Clapper howled. “I’m sitting there minding my own business, interviewing Mrs. Bewley, and I turn around and glance out a window, and there in the passageway, I see a ’orrible sight-Constable Robb, this very Constable Robb, prowling about with a shower cap, a plastic bloody shower cap, on his head! Next thing, I expected to see him in a tatty bathrobe and bedroom slippers.”
“Sarge, they told us at school-”
“And he had the effrontery to offer one to me as well!”
“Sarge, the reason-”
Clapper shushed him affably. “I know, lad, I know. I’m just having you on. You go ahead and do it if that’s what they taught you. But please, not in my presence. Gideon, get yourself some coffee and come join us, why don’t you? I met Mrs. Oliver yesterday. Delightful woman.”
“She told me,” Gideon said from the other cubicle, pouring coffee into the same mug he’d used the day before and wishing he’d remembered to rinse it. “She thought you were delightful, too. ‘He was a lamb’ were her exact words.”
“A lamb,” Robb said to the ceiling, “I bet that’s a first.”
“Au contraire, mon ami,” Clapper said, leaning expansively back in his chair, one thick, hairy forearm hooked over it, then switching to an atrocious French accent: “Eet ees zat I hear zis constantlee.” For a guy with two death investigations on his plate-Joey Dillard’s and Edgar Villarreal’s-and a professional staff of exactly one, he was looking very much at his ease.
“I have something for you,” he said as Gideon returned with his coffee. He waved a few sheets of paper. “Yesterday I put in a call to my fellow copper in Talkeetna, Alaska, and asked if he’d be kind enough to send over what they had on the death of Edgar Villarreal, the gentleman supposedly eaten, and subsequently deposited, by a bear a couple of years ago. Here it is. Not very much of a case file. Police report, police surgeon’s report-both quite brief-and a photograph of the remains, none too clear. They scanned them into the computer and e-mailed them, and there they were, waiting for us this morning.”
“Ah.” Gideon dropped into the empty chair, put his mug on the desk, and took the printouts with considerable interest. The police report covered the same ground as the story in the International Herald Tribune: remains discovered in a bear den, identified as human by one Dr. Leslie Roach, consulting police surgeon, and assumed to be those of Edgar Villarreal, missing from his nearby base camp for the previous two years. The surgeon’s report added little: “Forty bone fragments were recovered, the largest measuring approximately four centimeters and most less than five millimeters. A virtually complete second phalanx of a human thumb, measuring three centimeters, was found, as was a five-centimeter rib fragment. Other fragments were too small and splintered to be conclusively identified.”
Gideon turned to the color photograph of the remains, which had been spread out on a table, first having apparently been cleaned. The picture was either fuzzy to begin with, or had been much degraded in the scanning process. But it was clear enough for his purposes. He placed his finger on one of the bones in the photo, the only complete one. “This thumb phalanx?” he said.
“Yes?” Clapper and Robb responded.
“It’s from a sheep, maybe a goat.”
“Goats have thumbs?” Robb asked.
Gideon couldn’t help laughing. The thing was, Robb was so earnest. “No, but they have breast bones-sternums-and this is the manubrium, the top segment of a sternum. And this…” He indicated another bone in the picture. “And this would be the rib fragment he talked about. He’s right enough about that, but it’s way too flattened to be a human rib. It’s from a quadruped too; probably the selfsame unfortunate sheep, would be my guess.” With a gesture, he took in the entire photograph. “There’s nothing else I can be sure of. This one might be part of a tail vertebra, but that’s about it. Definitely nothing to suggest anything other than a quadruped, a bovid. Well, maybe a couple of little mole or gopher bones, or something like that, mixed in there too. Ferret, maybe. More than one meal here, I’d say. No reason to think any of it’s human.”
Clapper was expelling smoke from a cigarette and shaking his head. “You’d think a police surgeon would know the difference between a goat and a man.”
“Well, you know,” Gideon said, finding himself again defending the medical profession, “once he’s out of school a physician never sees a bone all by itself, out of context- which I do all the time. And there are no courses in medical school that teach comparative skeletal anatomy. Why would they?”
The same was true for dentists, Gideon knew. His own dentist, in whom he had complete confidence when it came to his own teeth, had once telephoned him in some distress to say he thought he’d found a human infant’s mandible in a roadside ditch. It had turned out to be the mandible of a young dog. And when it came to police cases, another factor was at work as well. When the cops walk into your office all excited about the suspicious bone or tooth they’ve brought with them, there is always a subtle but substantial pressure on you, mostly self-induced, to tell them what they’ve told you they think it is.
“Anyway, I don’t really think you can blame the guy,” he finished.
Clapper didn’t agree. “The Alaska State Police ought to get themselves another police surgeon, that’s all I have to say. Or at least hire on a physical anthropologist when the occasion arises.”
“No argument there.” Gideon put down the photograph and picked up his mug. “How’s the Dillard investigation going?”
Clapper responded with a concise summary. The work at the scene was done, as were the initial interrogations, but they knew little more than they’d known yesterday. Quite a lot of evidence had been collected and bagged at the scene and was awaiting a change in the weather that would permit it to be sent to the lab in Exeter. But whether or not they were dealing with a homicide they were having a hard time determining.
The matter was complicated, as Gideon would understand, by a number of factors. First, Joey had been in the habit of enjoying a late-evening smoke out on the catwalk, and all agreed that he had had more Pimm’s Cup than was good for him at dinner (they expected a more exact finding on that from Dr. Gillie shortly). Was it possible that the deceased, his coordination muddled by drink, had accidentally fallen over the railing, which was, indeed, dangerously low? The possibility had to be allowed for. Moreover, the only injury Dr. Gillie had found in his on-the-scene examination, aside from some contusions and lacerations, had been the massive damage to Joey’s head, and the problem with that kind of complex trauma, according to the doctor, was that it was next to impossible to determine whether it was entirely the result of a simple fall or might involve something more sinister, such as a blow or blows. It was hoped that the autopsy would shed some light on the cause of death, but-