Icy Clutches (7 page)

"No, come on in,” he said. “I'm just about finished."

Parker approached. Tibbett kept pace with him, remaining a gingerly half-step behind.

Gideon told them as much as he was relatively sure of. The mandible was from a male Caucasian of twenty-five, give or take three years, probably above average size. The femur and the foot were also both adult male, both above average size. No indicators of race, but no reason to think they weren't also Caucasian. That was it. His materializing questions about the mandible he kept to himself for the time being.

"Well—does that mean they're all from one person?” Tibbett asked.

Gideon spread his hands. “It could be one person, could be three. There isn't any duplication of parts, so there's no obvious proof that it's more than one, but that doesn't mean it isn't. And the appearance of the bones isn't different enough—or similar enough—to say for sure whether they all belong to the same person. And except for the bones in the boot, none of them are adjacent to each other in the living body, so we can't even put them together to see how well they fit or don't fit."

Tibbett's eyebrows went up.
"That's
the way you tell?"

Gideon smiled. Explaining skeletal analysis was like telling someone how you made a matchstick disappear or plucked a coin out of nowhere. A lot of otherwise intelligent people were disappointed when they found out there wasn't any magic involved.

"Well,” he said, looking soberly at the assistant superintendent, “I'm thinking of applying the Baker and Newman regression equations for determining bone association from relative weights in ostensibly commingled remains. If I can get an accurate scale."

"Ah,” Tibbett said, his sense of propriety restored. “We'll certainly see that you get an accurate scale."

"Well, it's not three people,” Parker said. “I can tell you that right now."

Gideon looked inquiringly at him.

"There were three people on that survey team,” Parker said, “but only two of them were men. The other was a woman, Jocelyn Yount. And since these bones are all from men, they can't be her, right? That leaves James Pratt and Steve Fisk."

"Why, that's right,” Tibbett said appreciatively.

"But we still don't know for a fact that these are from the survey,” Gideon said.

Parker shook his head. “Nah, those are the only missing people we've ever had in that section of the bay. Since they started keeping records, anyway. Arthur's right about that."

"Well, of course I am,” Tibbett agreed.

And he probably was. Certainly there was nothing about the bones that suggested that they hadn't been there for twenty-nine years. True, they still had a trace of the distinctive candle-wax odor that meant the fat in the marrow was somewhere beyond the rancid stage but short of the dried-up stage. Ordinarily this would mean the time of death had been anywhere from six months to four or five years earlier. But this too was wildly variable, depending on conditions, and cold could slow it down tremendously, as it retarded all degenerative changes in dead tissue. And with bones that had been in a glacier for two or three decades, you were going to get one hell of a slowdown.

"Owen,” Gideon said, “did you have a chance to talk to anyone about what these people looked like?"

"Sure did. Dr. Henckel and Professor Tremaine both."

"And? Did either of the men fit what we seem to have here? Caucasian, twenty-five or so, tall, probably well built?"

Parker laughed, dropped into a wheeled swivel chair, and pushed off a few inches, heels in the air. “They both did. Both big healthy guys, twenty-four, twenty-five years old."

Gideon hesitated. “Did they say either of them had anything wrong with his face?"

"His face?"

"A wired jaw, maybe; something like that?"

"No, why?"

"Yes, why?” Arthur asked. “What are you getting at?"

"No matter. Well, the bones could belong to either of them, or both. I'm afraid I can't do any better than that."

"Well, that's that, then.” Tibbett rubbed his hands briskly together. “All we can do is what we can do. Thanks so much for your help, Gideon. I'll initiate procedures to see that the remains—"

"Wait a minute, Arthur,” Gideon said, “I think you're jumping the gun. I haven't given those bones a decent going-over yet. Besides, you're going to want to go back to the Tirku area to see if there's anything else out there."

"I'm going to want to do no such thing.” Tibbett's voice ratcheted up a notch. “We've already searched.
I
found that horrible jawbone. It was the most macabre experience I've ever had in my life.” His eyes rolled up. “Alas, poor Yorick."

"I think Dr. Oliver's right,” Parker said.

"Why? What is there to be gained? What—"

But the ranger knew how to get his supervisor's attention. “We'll have to submit a recovery report on this. How will it look to Washington if we can't put down that we instituted a systematic search for remains?"

"I just told you—"

"With equipped, professional park-ranger personnel.” Tibbett sagged. “All right, all right. Let's get it done. What do you suggest?"

"Jesus Christ,” Parker said abruptly, looking at the empty Hostess box. “You ate one of those donuts?"

"I get hungry when I work,” Gideon said. “It wasn't that bad."

"Yeah, but still—"

"Owen, this is serious,” Tibbett snapped. “Now what do you suggest?"

Parker grunted good-naturedly. “Bill Bianco's taking the glacier rescue class up Tarr Inlet for tomorrow's field training. Why don't Russ, Frannie, and I hop a ride on the boat? They can drop us off at Tirku and pick us up on the way back. It'll give us a good three hours or so to look around."

"Fine,” Tibbett said, sighing. “You have my approval."

"You'll probably want to come too, Dr. Oliver,” Parker said.

"I sure do."

Tibbett made fluttery motions with his hands. “Just a minute. I don't know about that. We have to be careful here. Our insurance provisions wouldn't cover anybody who isn't on official government business."

"Well, what the hell would you call this?” Parker asked, then added, “sir."

"Well, I don't...Gideon, would you say it's
absolutely
necessary for you to be present?"

Gideon leaned forward. “Absolutely,” he said earnestly. “If they do find some more bones, it'd be extremely important for me to observe the contextual and relational conditions firsthand."

It would also beat hell out of spending the day moping through the rest of the
Alaska Geographics.

The resident manager of Glacier Bay Lodge had been doubtful about the wisdom of opening the Icebreaker Lounge from 5:00 to 6:00 P.M. each day with only two small groups staying at the hotel. Servicing a bar for a total of twenty hotel guests, Mr. Granle thought, was likely to be a losing proposition. As it turned out, he was wrong. The members of M. Audley Tremaine's group were on all-inclusive expense accounts and drank accordingly. The Park Service people were not on all-inclusive expense accounts, but they drank like it anyway. For the second evening in a row, there wasn't an empty table, and most people were on their second rounds, a few on their third.

M. Audley Tremaine himself was holding court at the bar, oozing urbane charm. In attendance were a tipsy, wisecracking Shirley Yount, who had obviously started her cocktail hour in her room, and half-a-dozen star-struck park rangers in jeans and sweaters. Anna Henckel, Walter Judd, and Gerald Pratt made an unlikely trio at a table by the big window looking west over the cove. Anna, reading from a sheet of paper, was grimly and methodically ticking off points. Judd, not overly responsive, chuckled and joshed. Pratt, between them, was leaning back out of the way in his chair, Seven and Seven in one hand, pipe in the other, equably gazing over their heads at the clouds obscuring the Fairweathers, and himself off somewhere in clouds of his own making. Elliott Fisk was nowhere to be seen.

Most of the other tables were taken up by park rangers in groups of two or three, and Julie and Gideon had been lucky to find a table of their own near the stone fireplace.

"You want my honest opinion?” Julie was saying.

"Of course I want your honest opinion."

"I think you're...well..."

"Inventing things?"

"No, not inventing. Reaching...exaggerating. It's natural. You're at loose ends, and you're bored, and I just wonder if your imagination isn't getting the better of you."

Gideon leaned back in the comfortable captain's chair, stretched out his legs, and crossed them at the ankles. He'd been wondering the same thing himself. “Maybe so, but I'm not exaggerating that break in the mandible."

"I don't mean that you're exaggerating the physical facts, I mean that you're exaggerating—inventing—well, the—"

"The cause of them?"

"No, not the cause. The—"

"Antecedents. Determinants."

She sighed and picked up her white wine. “How am I supposed to argue with you if you keep telling me what I mean?"

He smiled at her. “Are we arguing?"

"No, we're just—I guess we're just—"

"Speculating. Deliberating. Conferring."

Julie raised her eyes to the rough-beamed ceiling. “I'm going to kill him. All right, tell me what you found."

"I already told you. I spent fifteen minutes telling you."

"I was in the shower washing my hair. And you were yelling from the other room. I missed a word here and there. Tell me again."

"All right, I found—"

"It might help if you kept it to words that a simple, unsophisticated park ranger is capable of understanding this time."

"Such as yourself?"

"Such as myself."

"A park ranger who minored in anthropology."

"Nevertheless."

"Uh-huh.” Gideon took a few kernels of popcorn from the bowl on the table. “All right, I found that the mandible was broken off on the right side, a sharp, vertical break, and the broken margin was beveled, not jagged. And the fracture lines were what we call ‘stepped.’ That means, well...stepped. Like stairs. Okay?"

"Okay."

"I also found that the left M3 mesiolingual cusp had a menisciform fracture."

She eyed him over the rim of her wineglass.

"The left third molar had a sort of crescent-shaped crack,” he explained.

"That I can handle."

"And, finally, there were signs of pressure damage on the posterior surface of the left mandibular condyle, which is—"

"The little round thingy on the hack of the jawbone, that fits in that socket on the skull. Right?"

He sipped his Scotch and soda. “Not bad for a simple park ranger."

"Watch it, don't press your luck. And in your mind all this adds up to what? In a nutshell, please."

Gideon helped himself to a handful of popcorn while he put what it all added up to in a nutshell. “If that mandible had been found in a shallow grave near Green Lake, and I'd been asked for my opinion—my
expert
opinion, I modestly call to your attention—I would have said that this particular profile of indicators is consistent with an extremely forceful ante-mortem impact in the region of the protuberantia mentalis."

She nodded soberly. “Sounds like you, all right.” Gideon let it pass. “An extremely strong blow to the point of the chin. The living chin."

"All right, I'm with you so far. Where you lose me is when you say it wasn't caused by the avalanche."

"I'm not saying it wasn't, Julie. I'm just saying that every time I've ever run into that particular combination of injuries up to now, it was the result of one human being hitting another human being. Either with his fist, if he happened to have a fist like a gorilla's, or more likely with some heavy object, like a rock, or maybe a bat or a hammer. It just makes me wonder, that's all. Which is what they're paying me to do. Or would be, if they were paying me. Want another drink?"

"Nope.” She munched popcorn for a while. “Would a blow like that have killed him?"

"Impossible to say. The specific injuries to his jaw, no. But he was hit
hard.
There might easily have been associated injuries to his brain or his spine."

"So you're saying this may have been a murder."

He spread his hands. “I'm saying that just before he died, this guy—either James Pratt or Steven Fisk—was hit in the face with tremendous force."

"But how can you be so sure it was before? How do you know his jaw wasn't damaged long after he was killed, even years later, by pressures in the glacier itself?” She shook her head. “We sure have the damndest discussions."

"I know for several reasons. First, the collagen fibers in the bone tissue were intact at the time—which I know because the distortion of the trabeculae—"

She held up her hand. “I'm convinced. All right, then, why—dare I ask—was it ‘just’ before? Why not a week before, two weeks before? A separate accident, a separate fight?"

"Again, several reasons. No signs of healing. No signs of treatment—and that jaw would have needed wiring. Also, for what it's worth, Tremaine and Henckel don't remember either of the men having anything wrong with his jaw."

"What did Arthur say when you told him all this?"

"Are you serious? Just having the bones turn up is about all the poor guy can handle right now. I'm not telling him we might be dealing with a murder until I have more than this to go on."

She ate some more popcorn, kernel by kernel. “Look,” she said reasonably, “you've never examined anyone who died in an avalanche before, have you?"

"No."

"So you don't really know firsthand what avalanche injuries look like."

"Well, no, not firsthand."

"You said that getting hit on the chin with a rock could do this. There would have been rocks flying around in the avalanche, or at least big pieces of ice, right? Why couldn't one of those have done it?"

"Right smack on the point of the chin?"

"Why not?"

"No other signs of injury; no impact points but this one, flush on the jaw?"

"Why not?"

He finished his Scotch and considered. Why not, indeed. True, it would be odd for a piece of flying ice to duplicate this kind of injury so exactly, but he had run into things a lot more improbable than that.