Uneasy Relations

by Aaron Elkins

  Continuing to bat himself on the temple—“Skeleton Detective, Skeleton Detective”—he led them out of the pleasant, fabric-walled anteroom, through a small, plain room lined with metal file cabinets, and with a large scale that took up most of the room implanted in the linoleum-covered floor; here, gurneys with bodies on them would be weighed and measured before being autopsied. A door on the far wall led into the tile-walled autopsy room itself—“Welcome to my world” said Figlewski—and the moment it opened Gideon was reminded of why he hated fire fatalities so much; maybe even more than decomps (although it was a close call).

  The thing was, badly charred bodies smelled wonderful—walking into an autopsy room with one of them on the table was like walking into a weirdly sterile-looking steakhouse. And then you got up to the table and had to face the thing that lay on it. For Gideon, the war between the appetizing smell and his notoriously hair-trigger gag reflex made for a queasy and unsettling time of it.

  “I told you,” said Fausto, referring to the paucity of remains lying on the slanting, zinc-topped table.

  Gideon nodded, trying to quiet the churning in his midsection. Once he got down to work, it would pass, but for the moment, what was left of Ivan Gunderson was pretty off-putting. As Fausto had said, the body, lying on its back, looked more like a charred chunk of wood—a piece of driftwood that had been used more than once as part of a campfire on the beach—than what had once been a human being. That was the bad part. It was also the good part, in that there was nothing at all in this blackened, desiccated hulk to make him think of Ivan. It might have been anybody. It might almost have been anything.

  As Fausto had told him, there was nothing that anyone could call a face. Only the back parts of the palate and mandible were left, with a few heat-shattered molars. This was a common result in fires. The human face and cranial vault are “protected” only by some of the thinnest muscles in the entire body. Lower down, along the sides of the head and in back, where the heavier musculature of the jaw and the neck do afford some protection, both soft and skeletal tissue generally fare somewhat better. And this was the case here. The base of the cranium, thick to begin with, and shielded by dense muscles as well, was still present, but only as an empty, bowl-shaped basin with some blackened soft tissue—not soft anymore—still left on the outside. If there had been any brain tissue left inside, which was unlikely, Kaz had removed it during the autopsy.

  As for the rest of the body, Fausto had been right about that too. There wasn’t much to see. One of his more lyrical anthropologist friends, Stan Rhine, had likened the appearance of a body as badly burned as this one to a derelict old sailing ship, dismasted and cast up on a beach somewhere, its curved, broken old ribs jutting up from the sands. The image had stuck with Gideon, and in Ivan’s case, it was particularly apt. “The body was burned beyond recognition” would have been putting it mildly.

  “Well,” Gideon said, steeling himself. He stood a couple of feet from the table, looking down at it.

  Kaz was on the other side of it, watching expectantly. Fausto was leaning back against a stainless steel sink four or five feet away, his arms folded. Gideon doubted that this tough little cop was worried about his stomach. More likely, he didn’t want to chance getting anything nasty on his pale blue, nubby linen suit or the soft, immaculate French cuffs of his buff-colored silk shirt. Gideon wished he could work from five feet away too.

  “Tell me what you know so far, Kaz,” Gideon said.

  "Well, we establish already that he is alive at time of fire—”

  "How do you know that?”

  “Elevated carbon monoxide level in blood. He is still breathing when fire started, for sure.”

  Gideon looked down at the dried, crusted remains. “You were able to get blood?”

  “Blood, yes, even urine. There was congealed mass of soft tissue in pelvic cavity—liver, colon . . .”

  “And you already have the results?”

  Fausto answered for him. “Told you, there isn’t too much going on here. Getting lab results in a hurry isn’t a problem.”

  “What was the level?” Gideon asked.

  “Fifty-five percent,” said Kaz.

  “Enough to kill a man his age,” Gideon said.

  “Oh, yes, for sure.”

  “So is that your best guess? He died of smoke inhalation?”

  “Oh, yes. For sure.”

  “Okay, what else?” Gideon edged a step closer to the table. He liked to approach these things in stages, working his way up to the corpse. For him, it made it easier to take, like getting into cold water a few inches at a time, getting used to the shock, and then going in deeper.

  “Else?” Kaz scratched his head. “Not so much, really. Uh, he was lying on back, in bed, during fire—I find pieces of melted, what do you call it, springs from bed, buried in soft tissue on back of hips and shoulders. And, well . . .”

  “How sure are you that it’s him—Gunderson?” Gideon asked, looking down at the body, his hands still in back of him. It wasn’t that unusual for unrecognizable remains to turn out to belong to other people than were first assumed. While the fact that he had been found in Gunderson’s bed made it likely that he was indeed Ivan Gunderson, it wasn’t exactly proof. And nobody had identified this body by looking at it, that was for sure.

  “One hundred percent,” Fausto answered for Kaz. “That’s one thing we’re sure about.”

  “Was his teeth,” Kaz said. “Mostly broken or gone, yes, but two back ones, upper molar threes, are still okay, and we bring his dentist here first thing this morning to see them. A positive identification.”

  Gideon shook his head admiringly. “You guys do work fast,” he said. Another step closer to the table.

  “Wasn’t that hard,” Fausto said. “Total of twenty-four dentists in Gib. Took about fifteen minutes to find Gunderson’s. And he wasn’t doing anything else this morning.”

  “So where you go from here?” Kaz asked. “You can do something with . . . with this small remains?”

  “It doesn’t look good, does it?” Gideon said with a sigh. “Is this it, then, Kaz? They didn’t come up with any more pieces of him?”

  “No more pieces, but I got some of his liver and other organs”— another gesture of invitation toward the refrigerator—“if you want—”

  Gideon fended him off with upraised hands. “No! I mean, I wouldn’t know what to do with them. I meant bones. Especially pieces of the skull.”

  Kaz shook his head. “I’m sorry, they find only this.”

  “The cottage was a mess,” Fausto said. “Hardly anything standing. Roof collapsed, debris everywhere, all as burned up as he is, tons of water sloshed all over everything. Take you a year to try to find any bone at all, let alone from his skull. This is it, I’m afraid.”

  Gideon nodded. He had made it all the way up to the table now. “Well, let’s see what we can see,” he said, not very hopefully.

  “You would like lab coat?” Kaz asked. “Pair gloves?”

  “I would love a pair of gloves, Kaz.”

  Kaz gave him two pairs—since the advent of AIDS, wearing two sets instead of one had become common—which Gideon slipped on, not that the remains of Ivan Gunderson would be likely to pose any threat in that regard. Beside the table was a steel tray in which Kaz’s simple autopsy tools lay on a cloth: probes, scalpels, and the ubiquitous, wicked-looking, foot-long knife known familiarly as the “bread knife.” All the classic old instruments. Scissors, favored by most young pathologists nowadays, were not present. Gideon selected a dental pick, spatula-shaped at one end, hooked and pointed at the other, and bent over the ruins of the skull. Fausto stayed where he was, back a few feet, leaning against the sink. Kaz, anticipating edification, leaned keenly over the table from the other side. Gideon, for his part, would have been happy to edify, but the pickings looked slim; he might well be wasting everyone’s time.

  He turned his attention to what was left of the skull, gently probing with the
pick end of the probe. “So what we’ve got here is the base of the cranium from about the superior nuchal line on down,” he mused aloud, “with some of the heavy musculature—sternocleidomastoideus, masseter, trapezius—still adhering to the lower portions. . . .”

  Gingerly, he touched the gray-white, exposed bone with the tip of the probe. Bits of it crumbled away. “Upper parts are deeply burned, heavily calcined in places, graduating inferiorly to singed, buff-colored bone, and then to—” With the spatula end of the probe he prodded the surface of the burned musculature. The crusty top layer flaked off at the first touch, exposing a deeper stratum of red meat, much like— he couldn’t help thinking it—the middle of a rare, charcoal-broiled steak. When a bit of that too was picked and prodded away, fresh, ivory-colored, unharmed bone showed through. “—to muscle-protected, unburned bony tissue from about the zygomatic process and the supramastoid crest on down. The burned, exposed bone shows marked deformation at its upper margins, and there are two roughly parallel, roughly vertical linear fractures about three inches apart in the squamous portion of the temporal bone, both originating at the upper, burned, broken edge of the vault. The anterior one runs down in the general direction of the external auditory meatus, and the posterior one toward the occipito-temporal suture—” He poked a little more with the probe. “—or maybe the posterior portion of the mastoid process. It’s hard to see; the inferior portions of both fractures are hidden by the neck and jaw musculature.”

  He was speaking basically for his own benefit. He worked better when he talked to himself. But Kaz was understandably under the impression that they were having a conversation.

  “This cracking and warping,” he said sagely, colleague to colleague, “are, of course, what we would expect in thermal destruction of such magnitude, both from heat itself, and also from falling debris. ”

  “Well, yes, sure,” Gideon said, his eye caught by something about the anterior fracture, the one that ran down in the direction of the auditory meatus—the opening for the ear. “But, you know, there are cracks . . . and there are cracks . . .”

  “Ah, yes?” Kaz looked at him with a puzzled scowl. “Cracks and cracks?”

  “Mmm.” Gideon fingered the crack in question. “You notice anything different about this one?”

  “You mean compared to other one?”

  Gideon nodded.

  The young man stared painfully hard at it, working to come up with something. “Is a little wider than other?” he tried at last. “Almost like silver is missing from.”

  Gideon frowned. “Pardon?”

  “Almost like silver is missing,” Kaz repeated patiently and very slowly. He was used to his accent causing problems. “Silver. Of. Bone.” Silwer. Awv. Bawn.

  “Silver of . . . ?” a befuddled Gideon began.

  “Sliver, for Christ’s sake,” Fausto intervened. “What’s the matter, you don’t understand English?” Drawn by curiosity, he had come up to the table for a look too, although he kept his hands in his pockets to protect those taintless French cuffs.

  “Silver, silver,” Kaz agreed. “Of bone.”

  “Oh, yes, sliver,” Gideon said. “It does look like that, Kaz, as if a sliver, a splinter, has popped out. But that’s not why the crack is wider. It’s wider because—”

  “Because the sides of it are all eaten away,” Fausto said, peering at it. “The other crack, it’s got these clean edges. You could fit the two sides right back together. But this one, you couldn’t. The sides are all, like, eroded.”

  “Exactly,” Gideon said.

  “Which means?”

  “Well, let’s look at a little more of it before I go out on a limb. I want to see the whole length of the cracks. Kaz, would you mind removing the soft tissue around the base of the skull?” he asked brightly. “I’d do it myself, but I’m sure you’d be better at it.”

  A snort from Fausto, and a contemptuous “Yeah, right.” Meanwhile, he himself had now returned to his spot a good five feet away.

  “And be really careful with it, will you, Kaz? We don’t want to damage it any more than it already is.”

  Kaz’s mobile features pulled together and darkened. “I will try my best,” he mumbled, believing his professional competence had been called into question.

  “Sorry, Kaz,” Gideon said quickly. “I didn’t mean you had damaged it. I can see what a good job you’ve done with it so far. I know you’ll be careful. I don’t know what made me say that.”

  He knew what had made him say it, all right. He knew that pathologists, with their natural focus on organs and soft tissue, could be downright careless about bone. Many a nick or scratch on a skeleton that had first been taken to be a sign of foul play had turned out in the end to be nothing more than the slip of a pathologist’s knife during the autopsy. And many a genuine sign of antemortem trauma had been obliterated or made unusable as evidence in the same way.

  But Kaz was a meticulous dissector, his long, deft fingers slicing, tugging, and delicately scraping away with skill and control. In a few minutes the lower right-hand side of the skull was as clean as a scalpel could get it.

  “Nicely done,” Gideon said truthfully, which mollified Kaz, assuming that his re-reddening ears could be taken as an indication.

  Gideon leaned over the broken skull, breathing as shallowly as he could. Kaz’s scalpel had released a fresh puff of barbecue-grill aroma. But one quick look made him forget all about the odor. He’d come up with something, something crucial. A familiar and irrepressible feeling of satisfaction, almost of triumph, ran through him.

  “All right, men, we’ve got something here. Look at the fracture, the one we’ve been talking about, where it runs into the unburned bone, where the muscle was covering it before you cut it away, Kaz.”

  “Okay, we’re looking,” Fausto said, growing impatient. “Come on, my attention span isn’t that great. Why don’t you just tell us what we’re supposed to see?”

  “Because I’m a professor. This is what I do. Come on, look at the crack. What happens to it?”

  Fausto sighed. “Nothing happens to it. The damn thing goes down into the, what do you call it, the ear-hole thing.”

  “The auditory meatus.”

  “Whatever. And it disappears in there.”

  “Very good. Now compare it to the other fracture, where it runs into the unburned bone that was under the muscle.”

  Kaz’s brows knit. “I don’t—”

  “There’s nothing to compare, dammit,” Fausto said through clenched teeth. “The other crack doesn’t run down that far.”

  Gideon straightened, stripped off his gloves, and tossed them on the tray. “Bingo,” he said.

  FIFTEEN

  FOR almost two hundred years the Alameda Botanical Gardens have been a peaceful, restorative haven where the people of Gibraltar could go to get away from the congestion, dust, and bustle of the city. Lovers—moony teenagers and shuffling old married folk—still stroll hand in hand among its lush plantings, stately civic memorials, and nineteenth-century cannons, planning their futures and recalling their pasts.

  Strolling there hand in hand, Gideon told Julie about the burned body in the morgue.

  “So he was murdered,” she said thoughtfully.

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “And does Fausto go along with you?”

  “Oh, yes. He was setting up some interviews when I left him. Rowley’s at the top of the list.”

  “He suspects Rowley?”

  “No, but Rowley drove Ivan home that night. He’s probably the last one who saw him alive before the killer. He probably knows Ivan better than anyone else too.”

  “Does Fausto have anybody he suspects? Do you?”

  “No. Do you?”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m trying to imagine a reason any of these people would want to kill him, and I can’t come up with one.”

  “I know. I would have thought he didn’t have an enemy in the world. I’m sorry you didn’t know hi
m before; he was impossible to dislike. But then, we know next to nothing about his outside life. There’s more to him than archaeology. Family, acquaintances, old enemies, maybe . . .”

  “I know. But if you add in the attacks on you, and Sheila Chan’s ‘accident,’ it just has to have something to do with Gibraltar Boy and all that—which means something to do with these people—your friends.”

  “Julie, we have no compelling reason to think what happened to Sheila wasn’t an accident, and as for the supposed attacks on me, the jury’s still out, right? There’s no hard evidence anyone really attacked me.”

  “Yeah, right,” Julie said, which, in reality, pretty much summed up Gideon’s sentiments too.

  They walked a few more steps. “You could really tell he was murdered by comparing the cracks in his skull?” Julie asked.

  “More or less.”

  “That’s remarkable. Every time I think I know all your tricks you come up with another one.”

  “But unlike most magicians, I always tell how I did it.”

  “Whether I want to know or not.” She dug him in the ribs with her elbow. “You know I’m kidding. Tell me.”

  “What do you say we sit down?”

  They chose a lichened stone bench in a grove of small but ancient oaks, poplars, and spiky palms, with the clean, white façade of the Rock Hotel, and the immense Rock itself, looming above them through the foliage.

  “There were two keys,” he said. The first had been the form of the fractures. One was narrow, with sharp, clean-cut margins. As Fausto had said, if there hadn’t been any warping of the surrounding temporal bone, the edges would have fit together perfectly. That was fairly typical of thermally induced fracturing.

  “The skull just splits open from the heat?” Julie said.

  “No, not exactly. It happens primarily because the organic content of the bone is destroyed, which delaminates it—the external table separates from the diploe and shrinks and cracks. Continue the heat, and the same thing happens to the internal table, so then you get a fracture all the way through.”