Here she might have a point. Gideon knew little about basketry. "You could be right," he said, not sorry about the opportunity to agree with her.

Julie put the basket back on the table. "Besides that, there aren’t any Indians who live in the rain forest itself, and there never were, not on a steady enough basis to have graveyards."

"Doc," John said impatiently, "is this point well made? I mean, was it carved by someone who knew what he was doing?"

Gideon took the fragment in both hands, running his fingers along the facets. "It’s crude," he said, "but whoever made it had plenty of experience. Why? Were you thinking someone might have been trying to make it look like an Indian killing?"

"Yeah," John said.

"Then why bury the corpse? It was just by luck you found it at all."

John nodded soberly. "I know. I’m just trying to cover all the angles." He looked down at the desk, suddenly uncomfortable. "Look," he said, "I’ve gone out of my way not to tell you about the Bigfoot tracks they found near the body-"

"Bigfoot!" Gideon said, raising his eyes to the ceiling. "Come on, John, you’ve got a perfectly solvable crime here with a rational explanation. I’m not even going to discuss a creature for which there isn’t a sliver of physical evidence-no live specimens, no skeletal material, no fossils, no carcasses, not even a reliable photograph. The very notion that a giant anthropoid could exist unseen…" He looked suddenly at John. "What do you mean, you’ve gone out of your way not to tell me?"

John’s eyes twinkled, but his mouth kept its serious line. "I thought you might give me a lecture if I mentioned it."

Gideon laughed. "See? That confirms your good sense. So no more talk of Bigfoot." But then he said, "There were tracks?"

"Yes," John said, "but definitely made yesterday, after we found the first skeleton, so there’s no direct connection. The local Sasquatch Society got all excited and made casts, and our people made some to send to headquarters. Fenster wouldn’t have anything to do with them. Said they were pranks."