Free Old Bones by Aaron Elkins Page A

the brown on the wrapping is blood or earth. The lab will find out." Absently, he fingered a piece of decayed twine that crumbled into powder under the pressure, then scanned the bones.
    "Well, Professor, there isn’t much here. None of the criterion-bones, as I believe you called them: no skull, no pelvis, no long bones."
    "No." Gideon pulled a portable heater a little closer and studied the earth-stained bones without touching them. A ribcage, including the vertebral column and both scapulas, on its back, with the ribs now collapsed one upon the other like parallel rows of dominoes and shreds of dried brown cartilage holding some of the joints together; most of a right hand underneath it, also still tenuously articulated by withered cartilage; a scattering of additional hand and foot bones. They had been there a while, all right; there was no trace left of the distinctive candle-wax odor—the smell of the fat in the marrow—that exuded from bones for many years after the soft tissue had rotted away. And the bones had coarsened and begun to crack with the temperature changes of many summers and winters. So it had been there twenty years at least, and possibly more.
    Definitely more. There, in the fragile scapulas and clavicles, small pockets of calcium phosphate had been leached out by the acid soil. Make it thirty years at least …no, forty, and maybe more yet.
    But not too much more. There was none of the mineralization—the "petrifaction"—that fifty or a hundred years in this soil would almost certainly produce. So: more than thirty, less than fifty. Joly’s guess of wartime murder was probably right.
    "You’re right about it being old," he said. "I’d say it’s been here forty to fifty years. And you’re sure right about it being a funny kind of collection. There’s only about a third of a body here, assuming it’s all part of one body, but the bones aren’t even contiguous. Hands, feet, and torso."
    "So where’s the rest of it?" John murmured. He tapped the stone floor with one foot and answered himself. "Under here, too, you think? In another neat little package all tied up with twine?"
    Joly shook his head, frowning. "If you’re going to bury a body under the cellar floor, why bother to carve it up? Dismembering a corpse is a messy, cumbersome business."
    "So I’ve heard," John said mildly.
    Joly continued to frown. "Torso, hands, feet. It’s hard to understand the purpose."
    "It doesn’t seem so hard," John said. "They could have chopped the body up in little pieces, maybe to move it from upstairs to down here without anybody knowing— you know, a few pieces at a time—and then just wrapped the chunks into packages that’d fit under individual stones. You know; randomly."
    "Perhaps," Joly said without conviction.
    "Well, you’re going to have the rest of the floor dug up, aren’t you?"
    "Very likely."
    "
Likely?
I mean, Christ, you’ve got a third of a corpse here—"
    "I shall want," Joly said stiffly, "to talk first to some of the people upstairs. We’ll see where that leads." He turned to Gideon, who’d been poring over the bones. "And what can you tell us, Professor?"
    "Hard to say much just yet," Gideon said. "As you said, the most useful bones aren’t here. But it’s definitely an adult. The epiphyses are all closed, and ossification’s complete. Not elderly, though; no obvious bone buildup in the synovial joints, and not much burnishing of the articular surfaces either."
    "An adult," Joly said. "Someone from twenty to sixty, say?"
    "Twenty to fifty."
    "I see." He waited for Gideon to continue, but Gideon had nothing to add. "And that’s all it’s possible to tell?"
    Joly asked. This, his cool gaze said, was hardly the bravura performance he had been led to expect from the Skeleton Detective of America. "Are there no clues as to race? Sex, height, identifying characteristics? Cause of death…?"
    "Sorry," Gideon said with a touch of irritation. Policemen, he had learned, fell