Free Make No Bones by Aaron Elkins

interest. He poked the rest of the donut into his mouth and leaned over from the waist, hands on bare, hairy knees. “Well, well.” After a moment he slapped his thighs and straightened up, eyes bright. “By cracky, look what we have here.”
    “What is it?” Harlow asked, hanging back. “Soil-compaction site.”
    “Soil-compaction site?” Harlow was one of the more narrowly trained people at the meeting. Although a de-greed physical anthropologist, he had made odontology his specialty long ago, as a graduate student. Now he was one of the best when it came to teeth, but he had little familiarity with burial sites or crime scenes. His specimens came to him, he didn’t go to them.
    “There’s a body under there,” Nellie said happily. “A body?”
    “A homicide,” Gideon said. “You can bet on it.” Harlow looked from one of them to the other. “A
homicide?”
    “Yes, a homicide,” Nellie said through square brown teeth. “For Christ’s sakes, Harlow!”
    “A homicide,” Harlow repeated dimly. “You mean a human body?”
    Nellie let his breath out. Like many good teachers, he was endlessly patient with his students, but testy with others whose minds didn’t move quickly enough to meet his standards. “The last I heard,” he said dryly, “human bodies were the only kind you could commit homicide on.”
    “But that’s—no, I don’t—why would—”
    Gideon gently intervened, explaining about soil-compaction sites. Not that he expected it to do much good. Explaining something to Harlow could be like talking to a tree. He listened quietly but it was hard to say how much got through.
    “All right then,” he said, “it very well might be a burial…”
    But,
thought Gideon.
    “—but why in the world would you want to say it’s human? Anyone could have buried a dog here, or a goat…”
    “A
goat!”
Nellie exclaimed, his cheeks reddening. “What kind of a damn fool—”
    “True, Harlow, it could be anything,” Miranda Glass said kindly. With eight or nine others she had drifted over. “It’ll have to be dug up to know for sure. But I will bet you dollars to dumplings that by tonight there’s going to be a set of Homo sapiens choppers for you to do your stuff on.”
    Harlow shook his head emphatically. “Not me. I have to catch a three o’clock plane; Callie and I both. We have to go back to Carson City. The biological sciences curriculum committee meets tomorrow morning.”
    “You’re leaving early?” Miranda said with a groan. “What about your odontology round table Thursday? Christ, Harlow, if I have to revise the whole schedule I’ll kill myself.”
    “No, no, we’ll be back early Thursday morning. I’ll do the session, all right.” Harlow seemed tense and distracted, the way he got when his stomach acted up. “Didn’t I say I would?”
    Nellie cleared his throat, impatient with the diversion.
    “Now then,” he said, very much in authority despite his T-shirt and lumpy knees, “the police have to be notified. Miranda—”
    “The police—!” Harlow exclaimed.
    “Miranda,” Nellie continued, “I assume they know you around here, so you’re probably the best one to call them.”
    “Right,” Miranda said, starting for the main building. After a few steps she stopped and turned back with one of her rosy smiles. “This is going to be a switch.
They
usually call
us
about mysterious bodies in shallow graves.”
     
     
     

CHAPTER 6
     
     
       Twenty minutes later, a white, brown-striped Chevrolet with a Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office emblem on the door pulled into the main parking area. By this time, there were fifty people milling about the burial site, the attendees having decided with the briefest consideration that being in on the start of an actual exhumation beat all hell out of the scheduled morning session on bilateral nonmetric cranial variation.
    Deputy Debbie Chavez, skinny and weather-bitten, walked with a cop’s confident lope and seemed