LC 04 - Skeleton Crew (36 page)

"She was. I wish all of these hostilities would stop."

"They started it. If you want something to take your mind off it,
you can look at HSkR4 if you like."

"Thanks," Lindsay said. First, however, she took another look
at HSkR2, the Asian skeleton Lewis had found. The one who had
a good chance of being Valerian's servant, Jen.

She examined the specific points on the skeleton that Dr. Rosen
suggested would not be involved if the bone necrosis were from
deep-sea diving. The only bones that showed pathological remodeling were the proximal ends of the humerus and femur and their
respective sockets. The evidence was still suggestive of deep-sea
diving, but it was only suggestive. She took out her notebook
where she had stuck the list of diseases Rosen had given her. She
thought she would ask a graduate student to fax her photographs
of X-rays or other information on the diseases that might be contained in medical journals at the UGA library.

She started to put her notebook back when she noticed that the
post card she had borrowed from Boote was missing. She remem bered sticking it next to Rosen's list. She searched her desk and
around the floor. Nothing. Perhaps it was in the university's SUV.
She'd make a note to look. She hated losing something that she
said she would return.

Lindsay replaced the Asian bones and took out HSkR4, the
skeleton she thought might be Valerian. Odd if it were, with
Carolyn conserving his possessions and she analyzing his remains.
Unwilling to consign Valerian to an early death, Lindsay thought
of the remains simply as skeleton 4. He was about five-six and lefthanded. His left humerus and left tibia had been broken and
healed, but probably didn't give him much trouble. Other than the
breaks, his bones were healthy, as were his teeth, with the exception of one molar that had abscessed and healed after it was
pulled. It must have been painful. His muscle attachments suggested that he was muscular.

She was glad to be back working with bones and wished many
more would be found. But it would mean they went down with
the ship-a sad thought. Lindsay put the bones back in the tub.

"I have something for you." Korey came from the darkroom
waving some eight-by-tens in his hand.

"These are the photos from the warehouse?" Lindsay took them
out of his hand. "I appreciate this."

"Anything to help you find whoever did this," he said.

Lindsay put the photographs on her desk and examined them.
They showed what she had seen with her own eyes and nothing
else, no pattern or clue jumped out at her. The stain she thought
might be the toe print of a shoe still looked like one, but it would
be impossible to-she took out a magnifying glass and looked at
the mark. She went to Carolyn and asked to see the manicure set.

"It's metal. It will be all right won't it?" Lindsay asked.

"Will this somehow help you catch the bastard who did this?"

"Perhaps," Lindsay responded. Carolyn handed her the folding
set of grooming tools. "This is beautiful." Lindsay gently caressed
them with her fingertips.

"Silver often gets a nice patina like that."

Lindsay placed the silver artifact on the bone board, measured
it, and gave it back to Carolyn. Next she measured the same artifact in the picture and figured out the ratio of the two.

Korey looked over her shoulder. "You know, this is like working in a crime lab. I might put it on my resume."

Lindsay took a ruler and measured the toe print from the tip to
the side where it began a slight curve before disappearing into the
whole of the damp area. She multiplied her ratio by the measurement and looked at the stain under the glass again. It looked bulky
like a running shoe. She subtracted for the shoe and did the math
for the whole foot.

"Oh, I see what you're doing. That's clever." Korey bobbed his
head up and down in appreciation.

"Just standard stuff," Lindsay said.

"What?" said Carolyn, coming to look over her shoulder.

"She's finding out how big his feet are," Korey said.

"What size shoe do you wear?" Lindsay asked Korey, grinning
up at him.

"Who, me? Ten."

"I believe this is a guy because the feet are fairly large for a
female, and he wears a size eleven to twelve shoe. I'd say he is
probably between five-nine and six feet. But that is a very rough
estimation, so don't go around measuring people."

"What'd I tell you? Just like a crime lab."

"Lindsay." She looked up at Lewis, who had just walked into
the lab. "I wanted to say I appreciated your quick thinking this
morning. It short-circuited anything Easterall was thinking about
trying."

"I was thinking I behaved rather badly," she said.

"Badly? No, you were great."

Lindsay shrugged. "Can I talk to you?"

"Sure, shoot."

"Privately?"

"Let's go to my office."

The corner table was becoming too familiar, and evocative of
less than pleasant feelings. It was the place where all serious conversations were held.

"Can I get you anything to drink?" asked Lewis.

"If you have something cold, I'd like that."

He got the two of them cold Coca-Colas in bottles. Lindsay took
a long drink.

"While I'm in your good graces, I'd like to ask you some questions," she said.

"MAYBE I SHOULD have gotten us a stiffer drink," Lewis joked.

"I spoke with Tessa. From what she told me, it appears that Eva
Jones wanted copies of a few pages of the original diary to compare with the pages she obtained from Harper's translation."

"Indeed. Then she was trying to construct a key. She has something she's trying to translate, do you think?"

"Yes, I think so, but the stolen diary pages could serve as a key
to translating her pages only if whatever she has was written by
our diarist. Or-"

"Or what?" asked Lewis.

"Or she saw the articles in the paper that suggested that the
diary is written in a kind of code that Harper had to translate.
Perhaps to Eva Jones a code is a code is a code. If that's what she
thought, then she believed that the key to breaking our code
would also break her code."

"Then too bad she didn't get a copy of some original pages. The
futile attempt to find the code would have proved very frustrating
to her." Lewis stood up and walked over to his desk.

"You know, I quit smoking a year ago, but I'd sure like to have
a cigarette." Lewis let out a breath. "So, she must be looking for the
silver galleon. I had hoped she was simply in search of the antiquities from the Estrella. Did Eva Jones tell Tessa or Mike about the
silver galleon?"

"I don't think so. I think she is as anxious as we are to keep it a
secret." Lindsay hesitated a moment. "Who knows about the second ship?"

He turned to her. "What do you mean?"

"Whom did you tell?"

Lewis sat back down and took a long drink of his Coke. "The president of the university, the chancellor, and a couple of businessmen." Lindsay closed her eyes. "I impressed upon them the
importance of secrecy," he added.

"Why did you tell the businessmen?"

"I wanted funding."

Lindsay leaned forward."What do they hope to get out of it?"

"I told them that the contents of the ship are to remain intact.
That they are artifacts."

"But you were counting on them thinking about the dollar
value and forgetting about the prohibition."

"Of course."

"Whatever items may be found on the galleon, even bars of
gold, are artifacts."

"Lindsay, once it's found, the state, the U.S. governmenteveryone is going to want their cut." Lindsay laughed. Lewis
frowned at her. "What?"

"Cut. When the Spanish captains took the gold and silver ingots
to the House of Trade, the assayer would take a knife and cut a
slice off the bar to test for purity. They would keep the slice. That
was their 'cut."'

"Ah, interesting-and fitting."

"They're artifacts," Lindsay said again.

Lewis took another drink and looked at the bottle for a long
moment, then at Lindsay. "My father was a salesman. He sold a lot
of things throughout his career-vacuum cleaners, encyclopedias,
cookware, farm equipment. He liked it and was good at it. We had
a nice house, he bought me and my brothers all the sports uniforms and equipment we needed for school, we had piano lessons
and he sent my sister, me, and two brothers to college on the commissions he made from selling things. He had this maroon notebook in which he wrote down all his appointments, numbers, and
contacts. When he came home from a trip, or a day's calls, he'd
come in the kitchen and put his billfold, that notebook, his watch,
and comb in a tray he kept there for that purpose. Then he'd hang
his coat on the back of the kitchen chair and sit down at the table
with Mother and they would tell each other about their day.
Sometimes we kids would join them. He did this all the time I
knew him. I was in college when he died. He came home one day
and while he was talking with Mother, he had a stroke and died."

Lewis looked at a painting of an orchid hanging on the wall, his eyes out of focus, as if looking into the past. "I came home that day
and went into the kitchen. My aunt had put a linen napkin over the
tray. I lifted it to look at my father's things, and what struck me
was how most of those things went out of use with his death. His
billfold had his driver's licence, his social security card, his emergency information, and his maroon notebook had his appointments. No one could use them like they were. They could be
keepsakes, but that's all. But not the watch."

Lewis looked back at Lindsay. "Those items were like a
Mississippian ceramic bowl. It will never be used to hold corn or
acorns or whatever again. Its use died with the people who made
it, and now it's studied, or sits in a museum. That's what an artifact is." He held up a hand before Lindsay could protest. "'Any
object or observable phenomenon whose properties are the result
of human activity.' I know. But there is this quality about artifacts
that has to do with their functionality being stuck in the time from
whence they came. An ancient carved African face mask can never
be a ceremonial object again, but is a work of art to be looked at."

"And gold?"

Lewis took out his pocket watch. "This is my father's watch. I
can still use it to tell time. I can use it the same way he did. The
gold is the watch."

"You don't think you are rationalizing?"

"I'm sure I am. But I'm not sure I'm wrong to do so. I'm not
talking about taking the jewels out of the gold ornaments, I'm talking about the gold and silver ingots. Their use has not timed out."

"Lewis-I don't know what to say."

"Say you disagree. That's fine. But you can't stand against all
the officials who are going to want some of the gold for some purpose other than sitting in a museum. Besides, do you know what
kind of security would be required to keep a treasure like that
together? The university couldn't afford it."

"Nevertheless, I'll work to keep it together-provided we find
it-provided it's out there in the first place."

"Fair enough. I'm feeling very kindly toward you at the
moment. You gave me enough information to halt Easterall in his
tracks. Do you still need time on the supercomputer?"

"No. I got a friend to run my data at her university."

"See, more ammunition. It's not right that our faculty should
have to go to another university to analyze their data because Easterall is hogging all the time." Lindsay shook her head. She had
a sudden vision of Lewis and her fighting off invaders, him shooting and her reloading his pistols. "What were you doing just
before I came up?" he asked. "It looked interesting. It had Korey
and Carolyn excited."

"Oh, I found what looks like a toe print of a shoe in the photographs Korey took in the warehouse this morning. I think the
thief is a male about"-she shrugged-"five-seven to six feet tall
with a size eleven or twelve shoe."

"You're joking. You can do that?"

"There is a regularity of size in bones, that is why we can make
stature tables. But, before you get excited-the print may not be
from a shoe; small people can have big feet and big people can
have small feet. This is a guess, it may be a complete fantasy."

"Still-it's a possibility."

"Yes."

Lindsay showed him a photograph of the lab floor. "Look at
these marks here. I think the rectangular one may have been a
book. This one"-she pointed to a stain that appeared to be about
a foot long and a couple of inches wide-"could be a scroll of some
kind-a map maybe. I'm wondering if this is some attempt to-I
don't know-"

"Someone is still looking for information about the galleon, and
for some reason thought they would find it in this chest?"

"Far-fetched, I know."

"Not as far-fetched as everything else that's been going on
around here. You don't think Jones did this because she would
have taken the silver and other items of value, but could someone
have done it for her? Mike maybe, or Tessa, or one of the other
biologists?"

"Maybe. I didn't confront Tessa with this, but I imagine
Ramirez will."

"Do you think that Mike is the murderer?" Lewis asked.

"I don't know."

"Do you think Tessa sent you the warning message?"

"I confronted her, and her surprise seemed genuine. So I don't
know that, either," she said.

"I think Ramirez will be focusing on them. I'm glad we have a
rapport with him." Lindsay shook her head. "We don't?"

"Don't let his friendliness fool you. He's not our friend. He's
not our enemy, either. There's been a murder-two murders, and he has no idea who committed them. Murderers can be as charming as FBI agents. Ramirez is good at his job. He makes you feel
like confiding in him, telling him things."

Lewis looked as if his feelings had been hurt. Lindsay almost
laughed. "And people call me cynical," he said.