Unnatural Selection

by Aaron Elkins

  One did, however, occasionally find them in falls directly onto edged or pointed objects.

  Which is what Merrill concluded had happened. “His head must have struck something when he fell—something in addition to the paving, I mean. Would there have been any relatively small objects lying on the ground that his head might have hit? Rubble, rocks… ?”

  “I never did see the body in place, so I don’t know exactly where it landed,” Gideon said, “but yes, there was a lot of stuff lying around in the passageway: tools, construction material, pottery shards—”

  “Well, there it is, then. It might have been anything: a rock, or…” He paused, seeing Gideon’s scrutiny growing more intense. “I say! You can probably tell what it was from the shape of the wound, can’t you?” he asked eagerly. Merrill was something of a fan of Gideon’s, and had been from the first, having earlier read several of his papers in the Journal of Forensic Sciences and some of the more sensational articles in the general media about his work with skeletal remains. And so he tended to expect more than Gideon could always deliver.

  “Well, sure, sometimes you can,” Gideon said, shaking his head, “but this one? I don’t know, it’s not a very well-defined imprint. Doesn’t look like anything to me at this point. No, I wasn’t looking at the depressed part, I was looking at the fracture pattern around it, trying to make out…”

  His voice faded away, as it frequently did when he was studying bones or thinking about them. And there was something about this one that intrigued him. Sometimes the impacting force of whatever had caused the depressed fracture stressed the surrounding bone enough to create a network of radiating cracks around the depression, and that was what had apparently happened with Joey. The depressed fracture itself was an irregular disk of bone, no more than an inch across, and driven only a couple of millimeters below the rest of the skull, but it lay in aspiderweb of cracks that ran jaggedly off in every direction, over much of the skullcap; the calvarium, as it was known. But unless he was mistaken…

  Merrill had waited politely for a minute while Gideon stood unmoving, then for a second minute, and then exchanged a what-in-the-world-is-the-man-doing look with Rajiv, who shrugged.

  Merrill coughed gently. “I say, Gideon, I’d certainly like to see what the situation is inside the braincase. I have to remove the calvarium anyway. Why don’t I just separate it and give it to you to examine at your leisure while I scoop out the brain, don’t you know?”

  Pathologists, Gideon had noticed, were often in a hurry to get through the skeletal architecture, feeling that the “real” information was going to come from the internal organs and structures. Anthropologists, naturally enough, saw it the other way around.

  In any case, Merrill’s offer suited Gideon just fine, and he was quick to agree. “You’ll make sure you don’t cut through any of the fracture lines, though?”

  Merrill sighed and looked at him.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Gideon mumbled.

  Merrill held out his hand, into which Rajiv plunked most pathologists’ instrument of choice for skullcap removal: the Stryker saw, a vibrating saw with a small, semicircular blade that oscillated in a narrow arc of about twenty degrees. This limited action ensured that the blade would not cut through to any soft tissue, “such as,” Merrill had laughingly told him last time, “the pathologist’s hand.”

  Gideon stepped back again, keeping well clear of the mist of bone tissue that the saw threw up as it circled the outside of the brain case, deeply scoring it. Once that was done, the saw was replaced by a small hammer and a narrow chisel, and then by a miniature pry bar, with which the top part of the skull was delicately pried away from the bottom. For the first time, Gideon closed his eyes, preferring not to watch. If he could have gotten away with it, he would have stuck his fingers in his ears as well, to avoid the sucking sound that came when the top of a skull was pulled off.

  When he opened them, the rounded calvarium was on the table near Joey’s head, interior side down, and a concerned Merrill was frowning at him.

  “Is anything wrong?”

  “Uh, wrong? No, I just had something in my eye. It’s okay now.”

  “Good. Would you like me to scrape the dura off, so you can have a look at the underside as well?”

  The dura—the dura mater—was the outermost layer of the brain coverings—the meninges—and when the brain was removed it remained behind, stuck to the inside of the skull, making it impossible to see the skull’s interior surface.

  “No, don’t,” Gideon said. “The calvarium’s really fragmented. I’m afraid the dura is all that’s holding it together. Anyway, it’s the outside I’m interested in.”

  “Yes,” said Merrill, “mm, ha, look at that. Well, now. My word.” He was now as absorbed by Joey’s naked, glistening brain as Gideon had been by the skull, and why not, Gideon thought. Who was he to shake his head in amazement at someone who got enthusiastic about prodding with a finger—an ungloved finger—into a bloody brain? There were plenty of people who had a hard time seeing what it was about bones that so fascinated him.

  “Wilson?” Gideon said. “Would there be someplace I could go with this?”

  The question was met with raised eyebrows. “You don’t want to stay on for the rest of the autopsy? But we’ve hardly begun.”

  “Oh, well, yes of course I do, I’d love to, but I only have a limited time, unfortunately. I do need to get back, so I’d better get on with looking over these fractures. And, really, I’m afraid I’ll be underfoot here. You don’t have that much room. And it would be better if I could examine it someplace quiet, maybe sitting down somewhere.”

  It was overkill for a simple request, and Gideon feared that Merrill might read it for what it was—a lame attempt to get the hell out of the autopsy room—but all he could make out on the pathologist’s face were disappointment and surprise, both of which were manfully overcome.

  “Certainly,” he said. “Rajiv, take Dr. Oliver to the specimen room. He can use the table there.”

  Placing the calvarium on a towel, Rajiv led Gideon a couple of doors down the hall to a tiny room that stank even more of formaldehyde, and with good reason. The shelves that ran around three of the walls were loaded with specimen jars filled with various organs in cloudy formalin, some floating, some sunk to the bottom, some hanging on strings. But specimens in jars, well-separated as they were from their owners’ bodies, didn’t bother Gideon, and he had no trouble concentrating on the cracked, ivory-colored dome in front of him.

  Without a word, Rajiv smilingly handed him a set of gloves, and Gideon smiled his gratitude in return.

  “Well, Joey,” he said softly, as Rajiv pulled the door shut behind him, “let’s see what you have to tell me.”

  At that, he smiled. Maybe Julie was right. Maybe he did talk to bones.

  In a way, it was worse than that, because this particular one was talking back to him.

  TWENTY

  CLAPPER yawned and stretched. It had been a long afternoon and little had come of it. He was feeling grungy and depleted. Grumpy, too; not wanting to violate Kozlov’s no-smoking policy, he’d had but one fag since noon, when he’d run outside for a quick break; half a fag, actually. He reassured himself by touching his breast pocket to make certain they were still there. He was on his last interview of the day; in twenty minutes he’d be leaving and lighting up in the fresh air.

  “Mrs. Bewley,” he called into the kitchen, “if we could have a fresh pot of tea, love, that would be grand.”

  This being the third pot he’d requested, she was ready for him, and in she bustled with the pot, several cups, and the associated paraphernalia. She set them down on the table as quickly as she could, cleared the earlier service away, and hurried back to the kitchen as if worried that the sergeant might clap the cuffs on her if she stood still long enough to give him the chance.

  Clapper poured himself a cup, added milk, sipped the fortifying liquid gratefully, and closed his eyes. With the con
sortium proceeding upstairs in the Victorian lounge, he was conducting his second day of interviews in the Star Castle dining room, a big, irregularly shaped (everything in this old place was irregularly shaped) space walled with the unplastered, unpainted, rough-cut granite blocks that made up the castle’s exterior. He was sitting at a linen-covered table before an ancient, soot-blackened stone fireplace, with a cavalier sword and a musket leaning against it on either side, and a rusty old saber hanging from the mantel. Above the table was a medieval-style chandelier made from a hammered ring of black metal and fitted with candle-shaped bulbs, and on the walls were metal sconces, also with bulbs shaped like candles. He had been told that the room had been the original sixteenth-century officers’ mess, and he had no trouble believing it. If not for the electric bulbs, he thought, he might have been back in the fifteen hundreds right now.

  Not his cup of tea, Clapper thought—he had little interest in the past—but certainly highly atmospheric. A good place for deeds sinister and foul.

  At the sound of footsteps he opened his eyes to see Vasily Kozlov, who had left the table a few minutes ago, come bouncing back in, fresh and sprightly in his sandals, shorts, and crisp, bright T-shirt, and brandishing a sheet of paper.

  “Got it right here!” he declared, sitting back down. “Ah, tea!” He dropped four sugar cubes into a cup, poured hot tea over them, stirred, and swallowed half a cupful.

  “You found the fax, then,” Clapper observed.

  “Sure, right in file.” Kozlov slid it over to him. Clapper aligned the sheet and read:

  To: Vasily Kozlov

  Fax: 1720 422343

  Sender: Edgar Villarreal

  Vasily:

  It will come as no surprise to you that my stay in St. Mary’s was not the most pleasant or enlightening time I have ever had. I have no intention of wasting another week of my life two years from now, so I hereby withdraw from the seminar (or consortium, or Three Stooges convention, or whatever the hell you call it).

  Obviously, this means I will not receive the $50,000 stipend, and frankly, my dear, I don’t give a shit. Edgar Villarreal

  “I’m beginning to see why he wasn’t the best-loved man in the world,” Clapper mused aloud, placing the fax on the table.

  “He not such good fellow,” Kozlov agreed.

  The body of the message was computer-printed, and the logo above it said “The Mail Cache, 3705 Arctic Boulevard, Anchorage, AK.” The time stamp at the top said “06/08/03, 14:47” and gave the shop’s fax number. That was everything. Clapper hadn’t expected much to come of it, and he’d been right. If Kozlov had come back saying that he was unable to find it, that it was inexplicably lost, well, that might have been something to think about; but here it was. And it proved nothing, disproved nothing. Gideon was perfectly right: anyone could have sent it.

  “May I keep this?” Clapper asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Did you reply?”

  Kozlov shrugged. “For why?”

  “I understand. And you never heard from him again?”

  A shake of the white, wild-haired head. “Never.”

  Clapper sipped at his tea but found the cup empty. He removed the cozy from the pot, offered to serve Kozlov, who declined, and poured himself a fresh cup with milk.

  “Well, then, Mr. Kozlov, let’s go on to something else. Another question or two and we’ll be done.” He pulled his notepad around to write on it. On the open page he’d already drawn a diagram of the guest room layout on the second floor. “I’d like to know who was staying in which room.”

  “Sure.” He raised his eyes to the beamed ceiling and began to count off on his fingers. “In Sir Henry Vane Room is Lizzie. In John Biddle Room is Victor. In Duke of Hamilton Room is Julene and husband. In—”

  Clapper crossed out the names he’d already written and put down his mechanical pencil. “No, those are the rooms they’re staying in this year. I meant two years ago. Where did they all stay then?”

  “Oh, where they was staying then,”“ Kozlov said. ”Let me think.“ He thought. He shrugged. ”Who knows?“

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Nope.”

  “What about you? Were you living on the floor above then, too?”

  “Sure, this where I live.”

  “But as for the attendees, you have no record of where they were?”

  “For why I shall keep such records as this?”

  “Mr. Moreton, would he know?”

  “No. He was working for me since this year only.”

  Clapper slipped the notepad and pencil into his pocket, already tasting the Gold Bond he’d be lighting up inside of two minutes, already feeling the cool, corky filter-end against his tongue.

  “Well, not to worry,” he said, “we’ll ferret it out.”

  “AH, back, are you?” Merrill said brightly, glancing up from what had once been Joey Dillard but now looked like a gutted deer carcass. His scrubs bore the unappetizing effects of his work. (Gideon’s were as spotless as when he’d put them on.)

  “Well, it’s pretty much as we thought,” the pathologist said, cheerfully wiping his hands on a towel provided by Rajiv. “Let me show you exactly what we found.”

  Which he did. First, the shattered orbital roofs, now visible from above with the skullcap gone and the dura stripped from the base of Joey’s emptied cranium. “The result of contrecoup forces, no possible doubt about it.”

  “Looks like it,” Gideon agreed. As they’d thought, it had been these fractures that had emptied blood into the orbital sockets and caused the massive black eyes.

  Then, to a specimen jar on the nearby counter in which Joey’s brain was already suspended in formalin to solidify the tissue (the natural consistency of the human brain, as one of Gideon’s early anatomy professors had accurately but unfortunately pointed out, wasn’t all that different from that of Jell-O) so that it could later be sectioned.

  “As you can plainly see,” Merrill said, “the frontal lobe shows the effects of those same forces. Massive trauma. Pulped right up to and beyond the anterior ascending rami of the lateral cerebral fissures. But in the back, we find that the direct impact of whatever caused the depressed fracture also resulted in severe, if less extensive, coup damage, the contused area involving the left superior parietal lobule and extending partway into the occipital lobe. So we have both contrecoup and coup injuries resulting from the same event. Not usual, but hardly unheard of. The result of brain ‘bounce-back,” generally speaking, but not, I believe, in this case.“

  He cleared his throat, a long process heralding the coming of the windup. “My working conclusion is as follows: death from massive trauma to the brain resulting from a fall onto the back of the head, complicated by the intrusion of a relatively sharp object that had been lying on the paving—a wayward stone would be as good a guess as any. That’s all clear enough, isn’t it? Shall I take it out of the jar?”

  Gideon’s answer was quick. “No, thank you, not necessary.”

  Truth be told, he was having a hard time telling which end of the brain in the jar was the front and which was the back, let alone remembering what or where the anterior ascending ramus of the lateral cerebral fissure was. This, he thought, was a good lesson to him. All week he had been explaining away the ignorance of physicians in regard to bones, and although he had gone out of his way to be charitable, in his heart he’d been feeling mightily superior. Well, now he knew that what was true for them was true for him: even the most qualified experts knew only so much. They knew what they were familiar with, what interested them, what they worked with day to day. And to Gideon, who hadn’t held a human brain in his hands since graduate school, and who hoped never to do it again, that most definitely did not include the soft and squishy organs of the human interior.

  But if Merrill said the brain injuries were thus and so, and covered such and such a surface area, he was certainly willing to accept it. What he was not willing to accept was the pathologist
’s conclusion.

  “I don’t think so, Wilson.”

  Merrill scowled. “Don’t think what?”

  “I don’t think that’s the way it happened.”

  There were a few—a very few—forensic pathologists who enjoyed having their minds boggled, and their hypotheses overturned, and Wilson Merrill was one of them. Apparently, Gideon had lived up to expectations, and he was delighted. “I knew you’d say that! I was hoping you’d say that! Rajiv, didn’t I tell you he’d say that? All right, tell me, what have I gotten wrong?”

  Gideon gestured at the skullcap, which he’d placed, still on its towel, exterior side up, on a corner of the instrument table. “There are two separate injuries here, not one.”

  “Two?” Intrigued, Merrill peered down at it. “Good Lord, with all that disruption, how can you possibly tell? It all looks like one big mess to me.”

  “No, if you look carefully, you can see two separate loci. There’s the depressed fracture, of course, here on the left parietal.”

  “Yes, naturally. I see that.”

  “And here, across the sagittal suture, on the right parietal, about three inches away, is another, separate point of impact with its own set of fracture lines. You see how the bone here broke up in a rough pattern of concentric circles: one, two, three rings”—he traced their shapes with his ballpoint—“in the center of which would be the impact point. And then there are all these linear fractures radiating every which way out of the rings, which is what complicates things.”