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situation? Some of these people had known Jasper a lot better than he had. Some of them, as Julie had said, had actually handled and pored over these remains immediately after the bus crash.
    Miranda Glass was one of them. He looked up and accidentally caught her eye. She stared fixedly back at him, eyes very wide and on the edge of fluttering, mouth pursed, soft chin tucked in, while her hand went to the nape of her neck to wrap a strand of hair around her index finger.
You bastard, don’t make me laugh.
She couldn’t have said it more clearly if she’d spoken.
    An entertainingly freewheeling woman about fifteen years older than Gideon, with a round, deceptively cherubic face, she’d been a student of Jasper’s once, but had never finished her doctorate and never gone on to teach. Instead, she’d drifted into museum work, where she’d established a solid and well-deserved reputation. Although she still served the local police as a forensic consultant, her paramount interest was the museum, and all but the simplest and most unambiguous cases were forwarded to the state medical examiner in Portland for analysis.
    An unsettling tendency to say whatever came into her head made some people uncomfortable in her presence. Others, Gideon among them, found Miranda a bracing change of pace; something like being slapped in the face with a paImful of Aqua Velva.
    She had successfully fought down her own urge to laugh and was now soberly finishing her reading of the official letter of transmittal from Nellie Hobert. “‘…given his very bones to continue in the service of education, to which he so selflessly devoted his life. Surely Albert Evan Jasper would be pleased.’”
    There was a spatter of polite applause, after which Miranda added some comments of her own.
    “As most of us know. Dr. Jasper was also quite a showman; some might say an exhibitionist.” She paused, pushing oversized octagonal glasses up on her nose and managing to look droll doing it. “If you ask me, the man would have died for an opportunity like this.”
    Those who didn’t know Miranda glanced around them for cues on how to respond. Those who knew her laughed, or groaned, or shook their heads.
    “In conclusion, folks, you have to admit that this is a pretty appropriate windup for a teacher of anthropology. So, when you get back home, remember us in your wills. There’ll always be a place for you in the Central Oregon Museum of Natural History.”
    The laughter now was more general. “Don’t get any ideas,” Julie said to Gideon. “I’m not about to be the widow of a museum case, no matter how beautifully laid out.”
    “Ali, but there are advantages,” said the spare, fiftyish man on Julie’s other side. “I had a woman once—I speak figuratively, you understand—who donated her husband’s skeleton—he’d died under somewhat ambiguous circumstances—to our lab on the condition that she be allowed to visit him monthly. She did, too. We’d pull out the drawer for her and she’d sit down and look at him for a while. We always made sure he was quite attractively displayed. After half an hour she’d leave, always with a sad, thoughtful smile.”
    Julie’s mouth curled downward just a little.
    “Personally,” the man went on, “I’ve always been convinced she poisoned him. I suppose she needed the periodic reassurance that he was really dead.”
    “That’s really touching, Leland,” Gideon said. “That’s a wonderful story.”
    “But seriously now,” the man said, wide-eyed behind heavy, plastic-rimmed glasses. “Surely you wouldn’t deny the world the bones of America’s Skeleton Detective, the ‘Quincy’ of the bone labs, the darling of the media?”
    Gideon laughed. Leland was Leland. It was the way he was made, and you couldn’t take what he said personally.
    The pale-eyed, amber-mustached Leland Vernon Roach was another of Jasper’s students. Unlike Miranda he’d managed to complete his doctorate, but like her