Fellowship of Fear by Aaron Elkins Page A

been left-handed. Now—
    "Uh, Doc," John said, "do you mind if I watch?"
    "Of course not," said Gideon.
    "Could you explain to me as you go along? That is, if I could understand it?" He was a little shy; Gideon was touched.
    "Sure," he said. "It’s not complicated, really. What I’m going to do is estimate the height."
    "You can tell how tall the guy was from
these?
"
    "I can make a rough guess."
    "So can I, but that doesn’t make it right." John said it aggressively, provocatively, but Gideon was beginning to understand his style. In a second he would burst into laughter.
    He did, and Gideon laughed too. "Well, that’s the difference between a professor and a cop," Gideon said. Look, it
is
pretty iffy, but it’s a place to start. This is the tibia, the proximal part of it, anyway. That’s your leg bone, from the knee down. It’s the only one of all these pieces we can use to estimate height. You can only do it from the long bones. The idea’s simple enough; people with long tibias usually have long femurs—thigh bones—and if they have long thigh bones they probably have long vertebral columns, and so on. The same relationships hold true for short people. So if you can get a measurement on
one
of the long bones, you can project the others, and total height too.
    "But not all tall people have long legs." John was sounding genuinely interested, like one of Gideon’s own anthropology students.
    "Right, only
most
do. If I had a hundred tibias here, I’d feel confident in estimating the average total height. The few tall ones with short legs would balance out the few short ones with long legs. But with only one, how do I know I don’t have one of the oddballs? I don’t, but the odds are on my side."
    "Fair enough."
    "Okay. We can shortcut the calculations a little. If I remember correctly, we can get the approximate total height from the tibia by multiplying tibial length by ten, dividing in half, and subtracting about five percent. The taller a person is, the less reliable that becomes, but I think this guy’s short. Anyway, let’s measure it."
    John sat, childlike in his concentration on the fragment in Gideon’s hand. When Gideon didn’t do anything for a long time, he finally asked, "What’s the matter?"
    "You’ve got the ruler."
    John chuckled delightedly and handed it over. Gideon realized he was beginning to like John Lau very much.
    The tibial fragment was 113 millimeters long. "All right," Gideon said, "time for a major leap of faith. I’ll guess that we’ve got about a third of the total bone here— you can tell from the popliteal line, this ridge on the back. That would make the total length… 339 millimeters, say 340."
    He jotted a few numbers on a piece of paper. "Total height, 1615 millimeters," he said. More jotting. "About five-four."
    "All you have to do is know the formula? That’s all there is to it?"
    "That’s what Watson was always saying to Holmes… after the fact."
    "Except that Sherlock Holmes was always right." The enthralled student was giving way to the skeptical cop. "No offense, Doc, but you sure made a lot of unverifiable assumptions there. Maybe they’re okay when you’re measuring ten-thousand-year-old Neanderthals. Who could prove you were right or wrong? But this stuff would never hold up in court."
    John was quite right, Gideon knew. He’d often had similar thoughts about prehistoric finds. But he also knew somehow that his estimate was accurate. "I may be an inch or two off, but no more. You can count on it." Pettishly he added, "And the Neanderthalers are a lot closer to fifty thousand years old than to ten."
    "Okay, Doc, you’re the expert. Only I’m still not convinced. But what are you suggesting? That it’s the little one, Marco?"
    "Marco?" Gideon had forgotten that John wasn’t aware of the rest of his findings. "No, it’s not Marco. Marco was about twenty. This one was nearly forty. And Japanese. And built like a wrestler, say 145 pounds."
    All this was