by Aaron Elkins
“No, not necessarily blunt,” Gideon said. He was working his cramped neck muscles, tilting his head back and rolling it from side to side, watching the tree branches move against a bright blue sky. “It could have been a sharp instrument too; a knife, even.”
“A knife? You mean a knife could have cut through the bones like that? Both bones?”
“No. But remember, this was a fragile old guy, and the radius and ulna are thin bones to begin with. Say he threw up his arm to try to fend off a knife attack. His forearm could have been broken just from the force of the other guy’s arm.”
“Yes, all right.”
“But I’m hoping it wasn’t a knife. There are too many ways to kill someone with a knife without leaving a mark on the skeleton. I’m hoping he was killed with something cruder—an axe or a club.”
Caravale laughed softly. “A strange thing to hope for.”
“I only meant—” Gideon shook his head and drank from the can. It was too hard to explain. Anyway, Caravale knew what he meant: Not that he wished this man or anyone else to have been hacked to death with an axe or clubbed with a steel pipe, but only that—inasmuch as the deed was already done and he was dead anyway—it would be nice if the weapon was the kind that would leave some skeletal evidence, and maybe provide a clue or two.
All the same, Caravale had a point. It was a hell of a thing to be hoping for. But then, this kind of work had a way of altering your perspective on things.
“Is there anything else you can tell me at this point?” Caravale asked. “To help identify him?”
“Well, I’m pretty sure he limped,” Gideon said.
“Limped.” Caravale cocked his head and looked at him. “Is that so?”
“Yes, there’s aseptic necrosis over most of the right femoral head, probably avascular in origin—”
Caravale held up both palms and shook his head. His English, fluent as it was, had its limits, and Gideon didn’t have the ghost of an idea of how to say it in Italian. He put his Coke on the ground and stood up. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
ELEVEN
AT the exact moment that Gideon and Caravale rose from their chairs, some five miles to the south in Stresa, Leonora Fucini was setting out the swiveling postcard racks in front of her souvenir shop on Via Bolongaro. She was nervous, thinking about getting Davide from the tobacco shop next door to come over and do something about the unkempt youth who’d been looking at an umbrella display in her window when she had arrived twenty minutes ago, and who was still there. Staring at four plaid folding umbrellas on a shelf for twenty minutes. He was dirty—she’d caught a whiff of him when she’d first brushed by on her way in—and swaying slightly, forward and back. He was on drugs, no question about it, or maybe coming off a drunken spree the previous night. Either way, she didn’t want him out there. He was frightening away customers, and he was frightening her. She’d give him two more minutes, and then she’d call Davide.
But as soon as she went back into the shop, he stumbled in after her, a loose-lipped grin on his face. His eyes were frighteningly empty. She stiffened and backed against the counter, her hands raised in front of her.
He was wearing a shirt that said HOOTIE AND THE BLOWFISH. “Is this . . .” he said thickly, swaying so much he had to prop himself on a counter. His speech was slurred, his eyes only half-open. “Is this a police station?”
“WHAT we’re looking at is the femoral head,” Gideon told Caravale, indicating the globular top of the thigh bone, the “ball” that fit into the cuplike “socket” of the hip. He had lifted the right femur from its place in the gravel to show to Caravale. “And if you compare it to the other one, you can see that it’s got this unhealthy, shriveled, caved-in look. That’s because it was dead bone, not living; it wasn’t getting any blood supply. It would have been painful, and it would definitely have made him limp, maybe use a cane or even go around in a wheelchair. From the looks of it, it’s been this way for decades, maybe since he was a kid.”
“Childhood disease?”
“Possibly, but I doubt it. Most of the diseases that would do this would be bilateral; that is—”
“Two sides,” Caravale said. “Yes, yes, I know.”
“Sorry. Yes, two sides. But the left one is healthy. So I think it was an accident, a fall, probably, that broke the neck of the femur. That’s this part.” He tapped the diagonal, two-inch-long length of bone that connected the head to the femoral shaft. “It’s not an uncommon injury, especially in childhood, and if it’s a bad break, it can tear apart the blood vessels that run to the femoral head. And when that happens, this is what you get: aseptic necrosis of the femoral head.”
Caravale ran his finger down the neck of the femur. “I can’t tell where it was broken, exactly.”
“Neither can I. It’s repaired itself and I haven’t found any sign of the actual fracture yet. If it’s a really old break and was properly set, there may not be any sign. Or it could have been a stress fracture, in which case there might not be anything to see anymore. We’ll see later, when we get this scuzz cleaned off. But the neck’s a lot thicker and rougher than it ought to be, and that’s what injured bone tends to do when it heals itself. Look at the left one in comparison.”
Caravale did. “Gra-chee-lay,” he said after a moment.
“Exactly.”
Caravale now lost interest in the femur and knelt to peer into the empty mouth cavity of the skull, between the crushed maxilla and the mandible. He straightened up and brushed gravel dust from his knees, “It’s true, isn’t it, that it’s possible to identify a body—I’m talking about absolute certainty—from the dental work on its teeth?”
“Sure. So we’ll have your people take some close-up photos of the dentition and I’ll draw up a chart that can be sent around. This guy has had a number of teeth worked on, and any dentist should be able to recognize his own work.”
“Right. Good.” Caravale seemed barely to be listening. “Excellent.”
“I’m not sure you do see, Tullio. The identification itself is easy . . . once you find the right dentist. The trick is finding the right dentist. Where do you even start looking?”
“Colonel?”
Caravale turned. It was the uniformed sergeant. “Yes, Rocca?”
Rocca was bursting with excitement. “They’ve found him, the de Grazia boy.”
“Alive?”
“Yes, alive! He just walked into a shop in Stresa. He’s been drugged, he thought it was a police station. Apparently they let him out of a car nearby and he walked—”
“He’s not hurt?”
“I don’t think so. Just drugged. He—”
“Where is he now?”
“At the shop, Colonel. This happened only a minute ago. The call just came in.”
“All right.” Caravale was already walking rapidly toward his car. “I want him taken to the hospital to be looked at. I’ll be there in ten minutes myself. And I want his father called and informed. And—oh.” An afterthought. He looked back over his shoulder. “Gideon, is it all right if you go back to Stresa in the van later? With the bones?”
“With the bones is fine. I have a little more to do anyway. And hey—I’m glad the de Grazia boy’s all right,” he called, but Caravale was already in the car, leaning over the wheel and gunning the engine.
BY 11 A.M. the bones had been bagged, labeled, and boxed, ready for their trip to the morgue, which was in the hospital in Stresa, which turned out to be located on Via de Martini, only two blocks from the Hotel Primavera. Gideon, going along with them in the van, saw them safely delivered, took a break to clean up at the hotel and have lunch among the living and breathing at one of the hotel restaurants on the Corso Italia, shopped for the few forensic supplies that would be needed, and walked back to the hospital.
There he found Corporal Fasoli waiting for him. One of the youngest of the officers, he seemed genuinely interested in the bones and paid close attention as Gideon demonstrated, with some of the metaca
rpals, how it was to be done. Each bone was to be cleaned with nothing more than the fingers and the small paint brush or soft toothbrush that Gideon had provided, using water or acetone if necessary, to get the dried glop off. If any of the adhering tissue was stubborn, it was to be left for Gideon to deal with. The stains were not to be worried about. The most important thing, aside from taking care not to clean too vigorously, especially where there had been abrasion or breakage, was to be careful not to lose anything. If bones were washed in the sink, it was to be done over the screen-bottomed tray he’d brought. When the cleanup was finished, the bones were to be laid out on paper toweling on one of the autopsy tables to dry overnight, and in the morning Gideon would position them in anatomical order and get to work.
Fasoli, who had already rolled up his sleeves, nodded crisply, eager to begin. He understood perfectly. It was a privilege to assist the famous detective delle ossa. Would the professor like him to try to place the bones in the proper anatomical positions himself? He could surely find an anatomy book here at the hospital, and it was a task he would like to try.
In the face of Fasoli’s natural enthusiasm, Gideon felt no guilt whatever about leaving him to the cleanup, and at one-thirty in the afternoon he was sitting happily on the grass in the sunshine, eating mortadella and tomato-and-cheese panini with Phil and Julie (by his reckoning, having had no breakfast entitled him to two lunches) at Camping Costa Azzurra, a giant camping village on the lake near Fondotoce, between Stresa and Ghiffa. As scheduled, the Pedal and Paddle group had pulled in early to allow for a visit to the little stone Oratorio of Saint Giacomo, said to be from Roman times, and to take it easy for an afternoon before embarking on the two-day bicycling excursion to Lake Orta the next morning.
“Leave it to you,” Julie said in mock wonderment when he had finished telling them about the events of the last few hours. “Come to Italy for a vacation and wind up digging a skeleton out of a shallow grave in the woods. Amazing.”
“Just another knack, I guess,” Gideon said.
“But that’s really great news about Achille,” Phil said. “I was starting to get worried when he didn’t show up.”
“So was everybody else. Caravale looked as if someone just took a hundred-pound load off his shoulders when they told him.”
“Speak of the devil,” said Phil, pointing with his chin.
Gideon, following his gaze toward the parking area, was surprised to see Caravale himself climb out of his black Fiat and look around, shading his eyes with his hand, obviously searching for someone. As to who that might be, there wasn’t any doubt. Gideon had given him the group’s itinerary in case there was any reason to find him. “I’ll be damned,” he said and got up on one knee to wave. “Tullio—over here!”
Phil and Julie looked at him. “‘Tullio?’” Phil said. “My, my.”
Caravale, not seeing them, headed off toward the camp-ground office, creating a rolling wave of concerned looks from the campers who saw him. He had changed into his uniform, which didn’t surprise Gideon. At the excavation site, he’d had the impression that Caravale felt anything but at home in jeans and polo shirt. And with reason: A spiffy, well-tailored uniform—especially one with shoulder boards—did a lot for a pudding-shouldered, dumpy type like Caravale.
They caught up with him on the steps of the log cabin office, but a noisily idling diesel-powered tour bus a few yards away drove them back to the lawn to talk.
“How’s Achille doing?” Phil asked at once.
“About the way you’d expect. Shaken up, filthy, but that’s about all, except for the drugging. They treated him fairly well, apparently.”
“Was he able to tell you anything?”
“Not a great deal. He was in a tent the entire time; they never let him out.”
“A tent?” Julie asked. “You mean they kept him outside?”
“No, he’s sure it was indoors. A tent inside a building of some kind. But he has no idea where.”
“What about descriptions?” Gideon asked. “Did he get a look at them?”
Caravale shook his head. “One of the men didn’t have a mask on when they kidnapped him, but he was too terrified by all the shooting to have a clear memory of him. He was ‘big,’ that’s all he can remember. It doesn’t help much.”
“Who wouldn’t have been terrified?” Julie asked. “Poor kid.”
“What about later?” Gideon asked. “He never saw them?”
“Later, whenever they came in, they made him put a blindfold over his head first—some kind of elastic bandage. He thinks there were two of them, both men, but maybe three. I’m starting to wonder if he might not have been drugged—sedated, at any rate—for the whole time. He says he doesn’t think so, but I’m not so sure.”
“So you don’t have much to go on, do you?”
“Much?” Caravale laughed. “You must be seeing something I missed. I didn’t think I had anything to go on.”
“Well, the main thing is, he’s out and he’s all right,” Phil said, as usual pointing out the bright side. “Is he home now?”
“Oh, sure, with his papa and his loving family. They’re all making a fuss over him, he’s very happy. All is well on Isola de Grazia.” He rocked back and forth on his feet, his thumbs hooked in the waistband of his Sam Browne belt.
Something’s funny here, Gideon thought. Caravale was looking too pleased with himself. No doubt he was relieved that Achille had come out of it alive, but at the same time he was now a cop with a big, unclosed case on his hands and nowhere to go with it; not a lead in sight. In Gideon’s experience, that usually made cops cranky.
“Is there something else on your mind, Tullio?” Gideon asked.
“Something else?” He pretended to think. “Oh, yes, that’s right, I almost forgot. Those remains you were kind enough to help out with this morning? We have a positive ID on them.”
Gideon was astounded. “But . . . I left Fasoli with them not even two hours ago. They can’t even be clean yet. How did you—”
“Why, I did what you told me. I got a dental identification.”
“But how, how did you—”
“We found his dentist and asked him.”
“I understand, but how could you possibly—I never made any charts, we didn’t—”
He stopped in mid-sentence. Caravale was grinning at him, revealing a surprisingly perfect row of small, square, brown teeth. It was the first full smile that Gideon had seen on his face, and it made him look like a wicked Cupid. Obviously, he wasn’t above taking pleasure in a little mind-boggling of his own.
Fair enough, a little tit for tat. “Okay, I give up,” he said. “I’m completely mystified. How about letting me in on how you managed that?”
“It wasn’t so hard. I decided not to wait for your charts. I simply had our digital photography person photograph the jawbone from a lot of different angles and e-mailed them to the dentist—his office is in Milan—and a little later he called back with a hundred-percent positive ID. Nothing to it. The whole thing took . . . oh, twenty minutes.”
“But—”
“But how did we manage to find the right dentist? That was no problem. You see, I was already ninety percent sure I knew who those bones came from.”
He looked from one to the other of them, saving the last, longest look for Phil. His expression composed itself, flipping from self-satisfied to grave. “They are the remains of Domenico de Grazia.”
Phil’s mouth opened, shut, and opened again. “Domenico de—”
“Your uncle. The old padrone. The father of Vincenzo de Grazia. I’m sorry.”
TWELVE
THEY got powdery, lukewarm coffee from a vending machine on the porch of the office building—an expansive Caravale paid for them all—and took it to a shaded picnic table beside a tiny corral in which a pot-bellied, sad-eyed donkey stood in a corner and quietly snuffled its dinner from a nose bag.
It was the limp that had been the final clue, Caravale explained. That, a
nd the age of sixty or more, and the “small, gracile” description, and the ten-year length of time it had lain in the gravel. Put together, it all pointed to Domenico.
Phil was shaking his head. “I don’t get it. This is nuts. Sure, Zio Domenico had a limp and all that, but he drowned in a boating accident on the lake. I came for the memorial service. Are you saying he didn’t drown?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Caravale said gently. “I was with the force then, but I was only a lieutenant. I wasn’t the investigating officer, but I remember the case. Your uncle liked sailing. We used to see his boat on the lake sometimes, but he was never out for very long. The day he disappeared he’d left early, and when he didn’t come back by late afternoon, everybody began to worry. It wasn’t a good day for sailing; the wind was rough, the water had a chop to it. So they started a search for him. The boat was found the next day, overturned in shallow water, across the lake, off Porto Valtravaglia. The conclusion seemed reasonable enough: an unfortunate accident. But Domenico, he was never found. So it was never completely settled.”
Phil’s eyes were on the paper cup that he was turning round and round in his fingers. “So if this is true, somebody actually killed him. I’m sorry, but this is really hard to believe.” He looked up, almost challengingly. “Everybody loved the guy. Everybody.”
“That’s what I would have said,” Caravale agreed.
“Not quite everybody, I guess,” Julie said.
Gideon was beginning to wonder what Caravale was doing there. This was an unexpected development, yes, but there was no reason for him to have jumped in his car and driven right out to tell them about it. It could have waited until morning. It could have waited longer than that.
“Uh, Tullio, is there something I can do for you?” he asked.
“Well, yes, maybe, now that you ask. Naturally, I told Vincenzo about it,” Caravale said. “He asked me to come out to the island again to talk with the family—another goddamned council, I’m afraid. The boat will take me up at three.”
