"Was he muscular, five-ten or six feet, a hundred and ninety pounds?" Gideon asked.

John scrambled through the file. "Height five-eleven," he said with something uncharacteristically like awe in his voice, "weight one eighty-five. I didn’t think even you could tell that from a single bone, let alone a shoulder blade."

Gideon shrugged offhandedly but glanced at Julie. She seemed, he was gratified to see, as impressed as John. "Just educated guesses," he said. "We can apply some height formulas to the vertebrae and see if we come up with the same thing." He picked up a vertebra. "There’s a shadow of osteophytosis here; bears out the age estimate of around thirty. What the heck is this?" he said, fingering the strange protuberance.

"Fenster wasn’t sure. He thought maybe"-John flipped through his notes-"some sort of bone disease…exostosis…"

"I don’t think so," Gideon said, excitement rising in his voice. He held the bone in his hand and leaned over it, the magnifying glass practically touching it, his eye an inch behind the glass.

"You look like Sherlock Holmes," Julie said.

"Hmm," Gideon said after a while. "Definitely."

"You sound like Sherlock Holmes," she said. "I’m dying of suspense. What is it?"

"It’s not a growth," Gideon said, handing the bone to her. "I think it’s an arrow point that penetrated the vertebra and broke off, so the tip is still embedded, and that rough projection is the surface of the broken part."

"An arrow point?" John cried, rocking forward in his chair and extending his hand for the vertebra. He picked gently at the projection with his fingertips. "It sure looks like bone to me."

"It is bone," Gideon said. "Eckert-if that’s who it was-was shot by a bone arrow."

"But people haven’t used bone arrows for centuries," Julie said. "Even the most primitive groups in the world use metal points now."