Make No Bones (11 page)

“Well, then,” he said, completing his drawn-out lighting ritual, “the two of them had worked together and gotten to be friends, and Albert invited Chuck along to our get-together to meet some of the people in the field. But the unfortunate upshot of it was that he was killed in the bus crash too.” His eyebrows came up as he glanced keenly at them. “Or so I thought until today.”

“This is the ‘81 Santiam Pass crash you’re talking about?” Honeyman asked.

“That’s right. Gideon, you know what we’re referring to?”

“I think so. The bus accident you and the others all worked on. The one Jasper was killed on.”

Nellie nodded. “Albert and thirty-seven others. Maybe more—we had some
odds and ends of people
we never attributed for sure.”

Odds and ends of people, Gideon thought. Was there any other profession where this would pass for everyday conversation?

“It was on an early-morning run between Bend and the Portland Airport,” Nellie went on, “a service for people in the resorts around here.” His coffee was black and sugarless, but he stirred it anyway. “Well, what I assumed at the time—what we all assumed—was that some of those odds and ends were Chuck Salish. We had every reason to believe he was on that bus, and no reason, none at all, to think he wasn’t.”

That sounded a little indefinite to Gideon. “Are you saying you actually identified some of those fragments as Salish?” he asked.

“Gideon, when I say odds and ends I mean odds and ends. I’m not talking about dentition, facial skeletons, nice big chunks of long bone and innominate—I’m talking about burnt, crumbling scraps so mutilated and tiny that they couldn’t be positively attributed to anybody. Maybe they belonged with some of the people we’d identified for sure, maybe they didn’t. The whole thing was a horrific jumble, just terrible. We examined what we had, we talked it out; and, where we had to, we made the best guesses we could, that’s all.”

Honeyman lifted both hands pleadingly. “Wait, wait, wait. Hold it, hold it, hold it. Did I just hear you say that you just guessed he was on that bus, and that was that? An FBI agent? Tell me that’s not what you told me.”

“Well, it was a little more than a guess,” Nellie said with a bit of edge to his voice. “We knew those fragments were male, we knew they were Caucasian, we knew they were at least middle-aged, we knew—I forget what else we knew. It’s been ten years.”

“But thousands of people are male and middle-aged.
Millions
of people—”

“But millions of people hadn’t made reservations on that particular bus. Chuck had. It’s all in the files, Farrell, and I’ll defend our decision as sound, based on what we knew at the time.”

“But—” Honeyman clumsily poured mineral water into his glass and gulped it down. Gideon doubted that he was aware of doing it. “All right, but if you feel that way about it, why are you changing your mind now? What’s different now? Why are you doing this to me?”

“What’s different now is that we’ve turned up an unidentified body in an unmarked grave. That wasn’t a factor, or rather not a known factor, in 1981.”

“So? So? This person could be anybody, somebody we’ve never heard of. Why do you want to assume it’s Salish, for God’s sake?”

Nellie smiled. “You really don’t want it to be Salish, do you?”

“You have no idea,” Honeyman said unhappily. “ I have no
time
for this. A nice unidentified John Doe, one more poor old drifter from ten years ago, with no leads—that I could cope with. But a murdered FBI agent? You don’t know what you’re doing to me.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Farrell, truly, but I have two basic reasons for thinking that’s Chuck back there in the workroom. First”—like the old professor he was, he began ticking them off on his fingers—”according to what you’ve told us, this happened in 1981, and 1981 is when he happened to be with us at Whitebark Lodge.”

“Him and you and plenty of other people. It was a booming resort back then.”

“Yes, but how many of those people are unaccounted for?”

He let this sink in, then moved to the next finger. “From what you say, there are no open missing-person files or unsolved homicides from 1981. So, whoever this is, apparently no one is even aware he’s missing. Does it really take such a leap to wonder if it isn’t someone we all thought was on the bus?”

Honeyman wasn’t ready to give up yet. “But why Salish in particular?” he persisted. “What about some of the other remains? Didn’t you say there were other people you couldn’t identify for sure?”

Beneath Nellie’s eye a muscle jumped. “That’s true. In some cases we had to base identifications on a ring, a—a leg brace…”

“Well, then, that means other people could be ‘missing,’ too, without anybody knowing. Why couldn’t it be one of them?”

Good question, Gideon thought.

“I’m sorry, Farrell, but I don’t think so,” Nellie said. “The possible whereabouts of every person who could conceivably have been on that bus were tracked. Your own department worked on it. So did the state people. IBM lent us a couple of computers. And yes, a few possibles were never run down, at least not to everybody’s complete satisfaction—that’s hardly surprising in a case like this. But there were only two guests at Whitebark who weren’t accounted for, who were not demonstrably alive and kicking…Albert Jasper and Chuck Salish. Albert was identified beyond dispute. That leaves Chuck.”

Good answer, Gideon thought. “Nellie, what about Salish’s physical characteristics? What we have here is a male Caucasian, probably in his fifties, about five-nine, give or take an inch or so. Did Salish fit that?”

He thought for a moment, sucking on the pipe. “Oh, yes.”

“So would half the people in Deschutes County,” Honeyman said, but without conviction. However unwillingly, he had come around to Nellie’s point of view.

Gideon had too. “If it’s Salish,” he said, “it ought to be easy enough to prove. That skeleton’s almost whole, with a good set of dentition. A copy of Salish’s dental records ought to settle it.”

“That’s a fact,” Nellie said. “And unless I’m mistaken, we already have those. They’d be in the medical examiner’s file from 1981. I’m sure we got medical and dental records on everyone.”

He sucked on the pipe and blew out a turgid brown cloud. Two people who were in the act of sitting down at the next table wrinkled their noses, looked disbelievingly at each other, and quietly took their sundaes several tables farther away.

Honeyman was crunching ice between his teeth and looking depressed. “All right, let’s say it is Salish. I don’t suppose you’d have any idea who would want to kill him?” Gideon had the impression he was praying for a no.

Nellie blinked at him. “How on earth would I come to have any idea about that?”

Honeyman shrugged deferentially. “I only meant that you were there. He was one of your party. I just thought you might—”

“Farrell,” Nellie said, “if that question means what I think it means, you’re about twenty miles off base. Whoever murdered Chuck Salish, it wasn’t somebody from WAFA. We’re on your side, or have you forgotten?”

To his credit, Honeyman held his ground. “As far as you know, nobody in the group had any kind of grudge against him?”

“Nobody there even knew him before Albert showed up with him.” Nellie was staring hotly at Honeyman, his bearded chin thrust out. “Now listen, Farrell, this is a respected organization of certified forensic scientists, and I’m privileged to head the national organization. There isn’t a one of those people you’re asking me about who hasn’t had more experience working with law enforcement than you have, dammit, and I resent your implications.”

Honeyman shifted impassively into the stolid copspeak that policemen used at such times. “I’m sorry you feel that way, sir, but I’d still like an answer to my question. To your knowledge, did any person there have a grudge against Mr. Salish?”

Gideon winced. It was probably the first time in Nellie’s life that anyone had talked to him in that particular tone.

“No,” Nellie said angrily, “nobody had a grudge against anybody.”

“I see. Everything was sweetness and light,” Honeyman said, continuing to show more backbone than Gideon had given him credit for.

Nellie scowled at him for a moment, then bent his head while he used a paper clip to jab ferociously at some clotted tobacco in the bowl of his pipe. “Yes,” he muttered, “that’s right.”

Gideon stared at him. Nellie Hobert, ordinarily about as devious as a duck, was holding something back; he was almost sure of it. There was nobody whose forthrightness Gideon trusted more than Nellie’s, and yet—

“Hell,” Nellie mumbled as he got the pipe going again,

“I’m sorry, Farrell. I apologize. It’s been quite a day.” “Nothing to apologize for, sir,” Honeyman said, still stiff. Nellie’s face split into its familiar Muppet grin. “Then stop calling me ‘sir,’ all right? It makes me nervous.” Honeyman relaxed and smiled back at him. “Me too.” “It’s just that I thought you were barking up the wrong tree, that’s all.”

“I probably was.” He looked at his watch. “Five o’clock. Look, I better get a deposition from you. Would this be a good time to come on back to the office?”

“I don’t see why not. I don’t have anything pressing until eight. I’ve promised to report to the membership on the skeletal analysis.” He smiled wryly. “It appears I’m going to have some interesting things to tell them.” He glanced at Honeyman. “You have no objection to my telling them about Chuck Salish?”

Honeyman hesitated, then shook his head. “Go ahead, they may as well know. Christ, an FBI agent! Dr. Oliver, you’re welcome to come on over to the office too. You might be able to add something.”

“I can’t see what,” Gideon said. “Besides, I promised my wife I’d have a before-dinner drink with her. I’m already late.”

“You’ll be at the evening session?” Nellie asked him.

“I wouldn’t miss it,” Gideon said. He got up and made his good-byes, but his smile felt strained.

What was going on with Nellie?

   Boeuf Wellington, Whitebark Lodge’s dinner entree, sounded dangerously ambitious to Gideon and Julie (the previous two main courses having been Rhoda’s Meatloaf and Pineapple-Wiener Kabobs). It also failed to appeal to John, who was in the mood, as always, for a hamburger. Thus, with a little over an hour to spare before Nellie’s eight o’clock report, the three of them drove to Sisters for dinner.

“Place looks like Dodge City,” John observed as they pulled into a parking lot off Cascade Avenue.

He had a point. Ordinarily, when town fathers decide that their central area needs a face lift, they focus their resources on making it look bright and new. In Sisters they took a different approach; they made it look bright and old. Pokey tourist traffic and roaring logging trucks aside, driving down the main street of Sisters was like driving through a freshly painted Western movie set: wooden I880—style storefronts, overhanging balustered porches that made half the buildings look like bordellos, and plank boardwalks. All this in a town in which no building predated the twentieth century.

Surprisingly, it had worked. The town’s appearance, while undeniably cute, had managed to stay somewhere this side of cutesy. Perhaps it was the surrounding pine forests, perhaps the bare, lonely, upward sweep of the Three Sisters to the southeast. Or maybe it was the hard-to-miss presence of so many honest-to-God, red-suspendered, flannel-shirted, wire-whiskered loggers. On either side of the parking slot into which Gideon had pulled were battered pickup trucks with bumper stickers. The one of the left said: “Save a logger, eat an owl.” The one on the right announced: “I love spotted owl—fried.”

Whatever it was, the rugged Old West ambience clicked, and if the pre-1970 photographs in one of the shop windows were any guide, the new-old Sisters was a big improvement over the old-old Sisters.

John’s state of mind at dinner was greatly improved. Farrell Honeyman, pleading shortage of manpower, had formally requested his assistance on the case, calling Seattle while Nellie was still in his office. And Charlie Applewhite, John’s boss, had tentatively approved, at least until it was positively determined whether the murdered man was Special Agent Chuck Salish. If it was, and they had the killing of a federal agent on their hands, the FBI’s involvement would become much more than tentative.

“There’s one problem, though,” John told them. “Applewhite says that if it looks like it’s gonna take a lot of time, I better make my apologies on that lecture.”

Gideon studied him. “Gee,” he said, “I wonder if it’s going to take a lot of time.”

John peered gravely back. “Heaps,” he said, and all of them laughed.

They were in the Hotel Sisters Restaurant, located in a yellow frame building dating from almost as far back (1912) as it had been made to look. Getting into the spirit of things, they had passed up the dining room to eat in Bronco Billy’s Saloon, complete with a swinging-door entrance from the lobby, a dark, polished, authentically antique bar backed by a long mirror, and buffalo and deer heads mounted on the walls. The waitresses wore cowboy vests and bolo ties.

They had eaten lunch late and weren’t hungry enough for the dinner plates, so they asked for sandwich menus. All of the entries, in accordance with what seemed to be the custom in this part of Oregon, had Western appellations: the Lone Star, the Barnyard Bird, the Buckaroo. Even the hamburgers had names: the Brama Bull (“smothered in mushrooms and melted cheddar cheese”), the Bullrider (“smothered in barbecue sauce”).

John was having trouble finding what he wanted. “So what’s a plain hamburger?” he asked the waitress.

She pointed with her pencil at the bottom of the menu. “Right there, hon.”

“‘The Roper,’” John read aloud. “’Plain and simple, no bull. He looked up at her and laughed. “Okay, I’ll have a Roper. But with fries.”

“They all come with fries, honey.”

Gideon and Julie asked for Barnyard Birds—broiled chicken sandwiches with chili, jack cheese, and guacamole. The waitress jotted down their orders and brought back a plate of nachos and three mugs of the local Blue Heron beer.