Read Make No Bones for Free Online Page A

College Way they turned right to head uphill toward Central Oregon College, where the museum was located.
    “And?” Julie prompted.
    “And,” Gideon said, laughing as he remembered the long-ago scene, “Jasper motions him to bend down, feels his head all over, and gives him a reading, a five-minute one. The waiter was absolutely delighted.”
    Julie laughed too. “He sounds nice.”
    “Well…”
    “But definitely a character.”
    “That for sure.”
    Julie folded the letter, meditatively brushing it against her lips. “I suppose I’m not looking at this the right way, but doesn’t this thing tonight strike you as rather…well, macabre? I mean, there’s Jasper, identified after his death by his own friends and colleagues—”
    “Colleagues,” Gideon said. “I don’t know about friends. From all I’ve heard, he really was a hard guy to like.”
    “All the same, it’s pretty grisly. And then ten years later, what’s left of him ends up in a glass case right back where he got killed, with the—the exhibit being unveiled right in front of those same colleagues. Brr. That doesn’t seem downright gruesome to you?”
    Gideon thought it over while he turned into the parking lot beside the low, modern, stained-wood museum building.
    “No,” he said. “Creepy, yes. Gruesome, no.”
    For almost an hour the fifty-odd people had attentively followed a cheerful and outgoing Miranda Glass through the Lucie Kirman Burke wing of the Central Oregon Museum of Natural History, beneath murals of bears and cougars. They had trooped slowly by glass cases illustrating the principles, problems, and oddities of forensic anthropology: skulls punctured with bullet holes, or with axes or arrows still embedded in them; skeletons twisted by rickets or achondroplasia; trephinations, scalpings, beheadings; fractured bones, split bones, crushed bones, cannibalized bones; murder victims from two thousand years ago and from two years ago; pelves, mandibles, vertebrae, and long bones that demonstrated the criteria of aging, sexing, and racing skeletal material.
    It was all very well done; eye-catching and grisly enough to grab anyone’s attention, but thorough enough to teach something to those who had the patience to look and to read.
    But it was in front of one of the least spectacular cases that the group gathered for the longest time: a sparse, gray-black assemblage consisting of half a mandible, the base of a cranium, a few vertebral fragments, and three or four cracked, misshapen long-bone segments, all of them embedded in an irregular mud-colored mass, like a set of fossil relics from the La Brea tar pits. In this case, however, the mass was known to be the melted-down plastic cushioning material from Seat Number 34 of Bus Number 103 of Cascade Transport Lines.
    On the wall beside it was a placard coolly detailing the effects of heat on bone and explaining how anthropologists analyzed burnt skeletal material. In small upper-case letters at the bottom were the words, “Bequest of A. E. Jasper.”
    Gideon had wondered how he would react to the display. He hadn’t known Jasper very well, and their limited acquaintance hadn’t done much to make him like the older man. A top-notch scientist, certainly, and a legendary wit and iconoclast; but to Gideon the jokes had seemed contrived, the personality beneath them mean and self-centered. Gideon had seen him publicly cut a hapless student to shreds—wittily, to be sure, but the student hadn’t looked any happier for that.
    Still, how often did you look into a glass case in a museum and see someone you’d shared a pepperoni pizza with? To his great surprise, sudden laughter bubbled up in his throat. He covered his mouth and converted it—unconvincingly, he was sure—to a cough. At the sound, there was a sudden splatter of similarly unpersuasive snuffles and throat clearings. Was it tension relief, the same nervous reaction one saw at funerals? Or simply the freakishness of the