Lau had thought it might be a mistake to mention Gideon Oliver, and it was. Fenster snorted, bringing his glasses down over his nose again. He pushed them back up. "Oh, God, spare me, will you? I know you think his reports on the Schuster case and that kidnapping in New Mexico were God’s gift to the world, but I’m a pathologist and I know. They were fantasy, garbage, crap. He was lucky. Maybe he knows his anthropometric theory- maybe, I say-but his conclusions are…speculative." He rolled his mobile lips around the word as if it might befoul them.

"Still," Lau said, knowing it was pointless, "he might-"

"Good Lord, the man’s an academic!" Clearly, that closed the case. Lau nodded resignedly. It would have been nice to have the pathologist recommend asking Oliver’s help, but it wasn’t required.

The telephone on the untidy desk against the wall buzzed, and Lau turned in his swivel chair to reach it, glad for the diversion.

"Lau," he said; then almost immediately, "Where?" He sat up straight and rummaged through the desk with both hands, twisting his neck to hold the telephone between ear and shoulder. "How many?" he said, writing on a yellow notepad. For a while he listened erectly and wrote, then fell suddenly against the back of the chair. "Oh, God," he said, "that’s all we need."

He hung up and turned toward Fenster, slapping the pad on the worktable in front of him. "Five more bodies found."

"Bodies or skeletons?"

"Skeletons. Mostly just a few bone fragments, not in good shape. Some are just four or five fragments in a basket."

"Come again?"

"Some of them were buried in baskets."

Fenster pursed his tiny red mouth like a child holding his breath and burst out suddenly: "This is ridiculous! I’m not going to spend any more time poking around a bunch of bones in baskets. They’re probably just old Indian burials anyway."