Where There's a Will by Aaron Elkins Page A

going to do Gideon any good, so along with John, he sat down at the shady edge of the wooden platform-floor, with his bare feet in the cool, damp sand. He flicked the limpets from the bone with a fingernail and slowly turned it in his hands, running his fingers over the bumps, ridges, grooves, and hollows. After a while he gently set it upright on his knee so it was “facing” him and studied it for another minute. A single drop of sweat rolled from his forehead, down his nose, and onto the leg of his shorts.
    “Well, I can tell you who it isn’t,” he said at last. “It isn’t old Magnus.”
    “No, it’s female,” John said promptly.
    “Right. And the age, too. This came from a young-wait a minute, how’d you know it’s female?”
    John had once taken a three-day forensics course for law-enforcement personnel, at which Gideon had been the lecturer for the anthropology segment, and while he had been a willing student, it quickly became apparent that osteology was never going to be his strong suit. Thus, his quick, almost instant, determination of sex came as a surprise. The mandible in Gideon’s hand would have been a good one with which to challenge his graduate students’ abilities at sexing. The overall size and ruggedness suggested a male jaw, he said half-aloud. On the other hand, the sharpness of the anterior edges of the rami and the delicacy of the condyles were more typical of females. The symphyseal height and the gonial angle could probably have gone either way, although, without measuring instruments, it was impossible to say for certain…
    As Gideon droned on, detail after detail, John nodded sagely, perspiration dripping from his chin. “True, my good fellow, very true, indeed.”
    “So how’d you come up with female?”
    By now John was laughing out loud. For once Gideon responded with a frown. “What? What am I missing?”
    “How I came up with female,” John said, “was that I figured the odds were pretty damn high that the plane really did go down that night, and if it did, there were two people aboard-Magnus and the pilot, Claudia-and since I knew it wasn’t him, it had to be Claudia. And Claudia was a female. That’s how.”
    “But how’d you know it wasn’t Magnus?”
    “I knew because you just said it wasn’t, two minutes ago,” John said, breaking out laughing again, and this time Gideon went along. When he sobered, he went back to turning the mandible in his hands and running his fingers over it again.
    John, whose interest in forensic anthropology did not extend to sitting around watching Gideon stare at a bone and mumble to himself, stretched, stood up, and announced that he was going off to take another swim.
    “Okay, right,” said Gideon, absorbed in the examination.
    However he’d arrived at it, John was correct about the mandible being Claudia Albert’s. According to the Torkelssons, she had been a big, sturdily built woman (a lummox, Dagmar had called her) of twenty-five, troubled with bulimia. And the jawbone perched on his knee had almost certainly belonged to a big, sturdily built woman of twenty-five or so, afflicted with an eating disorder, most likely bulimia. Given the context and the circumstances, there wasn’t much room for doubt as to who she was.
    Despite some of the ambiguous criteria, determining the sex had been the easy part. (Determining the sex was always the easy part, given that you started with a fifty percent chance of getting it right if you simply flipped a coin.) But beyond that, the classic curvature of the chin (in anthrospeak, the convexity of the mental protuberance), as opposed to the two-cornered squareness (the bilobatedness) of the male chin, was so archetypically female that it overrode everything else, even the ruggedness and size. It was female; he was certain.
    But the ruggedness and size were useful in their own right, in that they were what had told him that the mandible’s owner had probably been large and strongly