by Aaron Elkins
The bones were in two cardboard cartons and a large paper bag that had been laid on the table. Whoever had put them in had apparently used size as his sole criterion for sorting. The big bones—the cranium, pelvic bones, and arm and leg bones—were in a printer-paper box; the medium-sized bones—the mandible, ribs, vertebrae, scapulas, clavicles, and sternum—were in a canned mushroom carton; and the small ones—the wickedly irregular, tiny, exasperating-to-sort bones of the hands and feet, all one hundred six or so of them (more than half the body’s bones were in the hands and feet)—were in the bag, along with a few loose teeth. If the good Corporal Fasoli had really gone to the trouble of arranging them anatomically, it had all gone to waste.
But at least they were clean. “He did a good job, your Corporal Fasoli,” Gideon said, beginning to get them out onto the table. The bones showed the usual unappetizing stains of blood, mold, earth, and body fluids—it would have taken bleach to get them out, and there really wasn’t any good reason for doing that (Gideon’s aesthetic sensitivities weren’t good enough reasons)—but the clotted dirt and the dried remnants of ligaments, tendons, and who-knows-what were pretty much gone.
He squinted up at the ceiling lights, four long neon tubes behind pebbled, translucent sheets of plastic.
“Something wrong?” Caravale asked.
“The light’s awfully flat. I need something that will cast sharper shadows, bring out texture. A desk lamp would do if it’s bright enough. Maybe there’s a goose-necked one somewhere that I could use? Oh, and a good magnifying glass?”
“Goose-necked?” It was an unfamiliar term to him, but when Gideon demonstrated with his hands, he nodded and moved toward the open door. “Give me two minutes.”
“Okay, yeah,” Gideon said, already absorbed in gingerly removing the mortal remains of Domenico de Grazia from their containers. Ordinarily, the next task would have been to lay the bones out anatomically, every single one of them, including those tricky hand and foot bones, but this wasn’t an ordinary case, and he was eager to get to the crucial question: Was there anything here that could shed light on old Domenico’s death? What Gideon did, therefore, was to separate the bones he wanted to look at first, the ones most likely to hold clues to the cause of death: the skull, for obvious reasons; the ribs, for injuries that might indicate damage to internal organs; and the metacarpals and phalanges of the hands, for nicks or small fractures that might have come from clutching at a blade in self-defense or warding off a blow.
The skull was first. The shriveled husk of brain still lay within. For forensic purposes, it was useless. He lifted it out with two fingers and placed it in a clean sack, to eventually go back to the family with the bones.
A cursory examination of the cranium showed nothing. Unquestionably, the broken parietal and maxilla were recent damage. But sometimes new injuries could cover the signs of old ones, so he went over the broken areas with care. Still nothing. As for the loose teeth in the bag—an upper incisor and first molar—the sharp-edged, unbroken sockets from which they’d come showed that they’d fallen out long after death, a normal occurrence as the soft tissue holding them in place shrank and disappeared. There were four other teeth missing as well, but they had come out decades before death; their sockets barely existed now, the bone having been slowly reabsorbed over the years. There seemed to be nothing else, no signs of—
“Gideon?”
He jumped. Caravale was standing behind him with a goose-necked desk lamp in one hand and a rectangular magnifying lens with a built-in light in the other. “Will these do?”
“They’ll do fine, thanks.”
“It’s all right if I watch?”
“Sure, stay.” Why not, it wouldn’t kill him not to talk to himself for a while.
Gideon plugged in the lamp and set it up on the table, adjusting its neck so it cast a sidewise light that would emphasize textural irregularities—depressions, cracks, nicks, anything. Then, using the magnifying glass, but without flicking on its bulb (a direct light would only flatten everything out again), he began going over the skull one more time.
Meanwhile Caravale, whom Gideon hadn’t seen smoke before, opened a packet of Toscano cigars, pulled out one black, twisted stick, snipped it in two with a tiny pair of blunt-edged scissors he produced from somewhere, and put one of the evil-looking halves back in the packet.
“For later,” he said. “One a day, half in the morning, half in the afternoon.” He lit up—it smelled as bad as it looked—leaned against the grille, and watched; asking nothing, saying nothing.
Gideon worked steadily and silently, pulling over a stool when he got tired of bending over. There was nothing useful on the cranium, nothing on the mandible. The metacarpals and phalanges of the hands showed an old, healed fracture of the right fifth metacarpal and plenty of arthritis, but nothing else. After twenty intent, focused minutes he straightened up, stretched, and massaged the back of his neck. Caravale, who had left without his noticing, came back with a couple of cold bottles of Brio. Gideon accepted the quinine-flavored soft drink gratefully, taking a couple of long gulps and then turning to the ribs, examining them one at a time.
Ten minutes passed before he found anything. “Well, well,” he said, separating one rib from the rest and laying it aside.
Caravale came closer, leaned on the table. “What?”
Gideon motioned for him to wait another minute, which Caravale obediently did. Another ten minutes passed. “Ah, so,” Gideon said with satisfaction. A second rib was separated from the others.
He turned to Caravale, holding up a rib in each hand like a couple of batons. “Success. Got a cause of death for you.”
SIXTEEN
“THIS is the seventh rib, right side,” Gideon said. “And this is the vertebral end of it, the end in back, where it connects to the spinal column.”
“I never knew you could tell one rib from another. They all look the same to me.”
“If you have them all, it’s easy; you compare the relative lengths and the shapes of the arcs. But there are plenty of other differences too. See, here there are variations in the articular facets and tubercles of the first, second, tenth—”
With a raised palm, Caravale warded him off. “Please. I’ll take your word for it.”
“Well, you asked me.”
“And I deeply regret it, I assure you. Continue, please.”
Coming out of Caravale’s porky, beetle-browed face as it did, it made Gideon laugh. “Okay, I won’t try to educate you. Now take a look at the top side of the rib—this is the top side—near the back end. This is the back end. Do you see the—”
“This little sliver, coming out of the bone?”
“That’s right. That’s a knife cut.”
Caravale adjusted the lamp and bent interestedly over the rib. “It’s like a shaving, like what you get when you’re whittling a piece of wood.”
“That’s just what it is. When bone is green—when it’s alive—it’s soft, and if a knife slices into it at a shallow angle, a sliver of bone is likely to curl away from it. Like this. Once bone dries, it doesn’t happen. Try to cut it with a knife after it’s dry and the piece would just chip off.”
“Ah.” Caravale absently pulled out and lit the half-cigar he’d put away for the afternoon. “And this one small cut, this cut you can hardly see without the lens—this proves he was stabbed to death?” He was thinking ahead, to the presentation of evidence in a court of law, and he had his doubts.
“There’s more, Tullio.” He pulled the other rib into the circle of brightest light and pointed with a ballpoint pen. “This nick? That’s also a knife cut.”
“Is it?” He scrutinized it with the magnifying glass. “But it’s completely different. There’s no sliver. This is more like a, like a—”
“It’s more like a gouge. Which is what it is. It’s not a sharp slice, it’s a relatively blunt, V-shaped notch. If you use the glass again, you can see where the fibers at the edges have been mashed do
wn into it.”
Caravale shrugged. He was willing to take Gideon’s word for that too. Smoking, he studied the gouge, “It’s like what you’d expect from an axe, or from an extremely dull knife . . .”
“Yes.”
“But the other wound is from a sharp blade.”
“Yes.”
“So . . . two different weapons?” He looked confused, as well he might.
“No, no, no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to mislead you. See, this one—wait, it’d be easier to show you. Is there a kitchen in this place?”
“A—? Yes, just down the hall there.”
“Okay, don’t go away.”
In the kitchen he startled the cook by barging in, saying he needed to borrow something, and snatching an eight-inch chef’s knife from the knife block. The frightened cook was looking mutely around for help when Corporal Fasoli, who was having a cup of coffee and a pastry, called through the opening from the dining room: “It’s all right, he’s with the colonel. He’s harmless.”
The cook recovered himself as Gideon was on his way out. “Just make sure you bring it back,” he called after him, brandishing a spatula to show he meant it.
When he returned to the evidence room, Gideon laid the seventh rib on the table, right side up, so the curling slice-mark was on top. With care, he slipped the knife blade gently into the slice, under the shaving of bone. At an angle of about thirty degrees, the fit was perfect. The knife remained propped there without the need for additional support.
“Now, this other bone, that’s the sixth rib, the one right above, and the V-shaped gouge, as you see, is in the bottom of it, the underside. If I place it in position above the seventh and lower it . . .”
“The gouge was made by the back, the spine, of the knife!” Caravale exclaimed on seeing the snug fit. “A single weapon, a single thrust!”
“Exactly. It’s V-shaped, not square, you see, even though the spine of the knife is square, because it went in at an angle. See, a single sharp weapon can make a lot of different-shaped wounds depending on the way it goes in, or how far it penetrates, or whether it was twisted in a manner that—” He realized he was on the verge of lecturing again and caught himself. “Anyway, with the blade going in like that”—he gestured at the knife and the two ribs, locked together in a circle of light like some grisly museum exhibit—“the point couldn’t have missed penetrating the left atrium of the heart. Death inside of a minute, probably sooner. What? Is something bothering you?”
Caravale had been frowning, fingering his side, near the bottom of his rib cage, like a man whose ulcer was worrying him. “I don’t mean to question your expertise, but . . . well, a few years ago I fractured a rib in an automobile accident. Down here.”
“Yes?”
“The doctor said . . . Well, I’m fairly certain he said . . . that it was my seventh rib.”
“That looks about right,” Gideon agreed. “The seventh or eighth.”
“But the heart, isn’t it up here?” He put his other hand, with the cigar, on his sternum. At Gideon’s nod, he went on. “Well, then, how could a knife thrust here, at the seventh rib, go into the heart? That is, unless it was practically straight up—which our knife there isn’t. It would go into, into . . .”
“The left lobe of the liver, correct. Several inches below the heart.”
“So . . .?” Caravale shook his head, lost.
Gideon laughed. “What you’re forgetting is that the ribs don’t go straight around, they angle upward from front to back. Yes, that’s the seventh rib down there in front, but by the time it curves around and connects to the vertebral column in back, it’s way up here.” He reached around and with one finger tapped Caravale on the upper back, between the left scapula and the spine. “And that’s where the knife went in.”
“Ahh,” said Caravale with his brown-toothed grin. “I see. Straight into the heart.”
“Well, it would have had to get through a few muscle layers first, and the left lung, but yes. Straight into the heart.”
“Stabbed in the back.”
Gideon nodded. “Yup.”
They stood looking down at the bones. “So he put his arm up to ward off the blow—that’s how he got it broken—succeeded for a moment . . . ,” Caravale took a final drag on his cigar stub and ground it out in a metal ashtray. “. . . but must have fallen and gotten himself knifed in the back.”
“That’s pretty much it, but from the angle of the thrust, it doesn’t look to me as if he was on the ground when the blade went in. I think he probably just twisted around, maybe trying to get away, and got stabbed before he could make it. He was an old man, and he was lame.”
Gideon finished his Brio and tossed the bottle into a wastepaper basket under the table. It still surprised him how easy it was to talk about these hideous events as if they hadn’t really happened to a living human being, as if they hadn’t involved agony and terror and unspeakable, bloody horror.
“All right, so what do we know now that we didn’t know before?” he asked, musing, getting his mind back on the clean, comfortable present.
“Several things,” said Caravale. “We know the cause of death. We know for certain that he was murdered. Until now it was strictly circumstantial—he was buried, therefore, he must have been murdered. But now we know.”
“Yes, sure. But why did somebody try to steal the bones? Why was I attacked? What was that all about? Okay, so we know he was murdered with a kitchen knife or something like it. So what? Why kill me to keep that from coming out?”
Caravale pensively scratched his cheek. “It could be to make sure we didn’t identify the murder weapon and somehow connect it to the killer.”
“So throw away the knife. They’ve had ten years to do it. Wouldn’t that be a whole lot simpler?”
“And safer.” Nodding, Caravale plucked a dark fleck of tobacco from his lip. “There must be something else.”
“Maybe, but I sure can’t imagine what. I’ll go over every single bone, though. Give me an hour.”
With Caravale gone, Gideon worked bone by bone by bone, sliding each one into the light, turning it over in his fingers to see and to feel every angle and facet, scanning it with the magnifying glass, putting it aside into the “discard” pile, and moving smoothly on to the next one. He could work far more quickly than usual because there was no reason to measure them, apply height or race formulas, or do anything else to help in the identification process. All he had to do, basically, was look for anything unusual; in particular, trauma and pathologies.
There was nothing that amounted to anything. Some dental caries, a lot of expectable age-related arthritis, and various long-standing deformities of the lumbar vertebrae and of the knee, ankle, and foot joints, all of which were clearly related to the old man’s hip problem, but that was all. Nothing new, nothing that explained anything.
Still, it ended up taking quite a bit more than an hour, and when he found Caravale in his office to tell him the results, Caravale simply looked up with a grumpy expression and said: “Jesus, it’s about time. I’ve been sitting here listening to my stomach rumble for the last twenty minutes. Let’s go and have some lunch.”
CARAVALE preferred not to eat in Stresa, where so many people knew him. Instead, they drove a few miles up the lakeshore road, past graceful villas and Art Nouveau hotels, to the quieter town of Baveno, where they pulled into the parking lot of a rustic, homey restaurant called II Gabbiano, the seagull. The owner knew Caravale and his preferences, and without being asked he showed them to a wooden table more or less hidden in a niche beside an arched entryway separating the two small rooms that made up the place. The place smelled of oregano and baking bread. It was like sitting in somebody’s country kitchen.
As Gideon had surmised, Caravale took his eating seriously. After a brief but thorough scan of the menu, he rattled off an order for artichoke pie appetizer, risotto Milanese, veal pizzaiola, parsleyed potatoes, and sautéed fennel, with cheese, grapes, and coff
ee to follow. Mineral water to drink. This was a stupendous initial order (for a native) in a country in which doggie bags do not exist because one’s stomach is supposed to plan ahead, and people generally choose one course at a time, not an entire meal that they might not be able to finish. The restaurant owner was not surprised, however. Without writing it down, he grunted, then turned to Gideon and said, translating as he went: “The tròta, trout, is very fine, fresh this morning in the lago, the lake. Very good fritto, fried.”
Gideon went along with that, ordering a bowl of minestrone and some bread and mineral water to accompany it. Coffee afterward, but no dessert.
“That’s all you want?” Caravale seemed disappointed. “Your meal is courtesy of the Carabinieri di Piemonte e Valle d’Aosta. That doesn’t happen every day. You should make the most of it.”
“I didn’t realize that, but really, that’s all I want. And thank you.”
“A small expression of our gratitude.” He rubbed his hands together and looked over his shoulder. “So, let’s go and see what awaits on the antipasto table.”
With a platter of olives, sautéed peppers, salami, stuffed zucchini, and marinated shrimp and mussels between them, Gideon picked at a slice or two of salami, then raised something that had been at the back of his mind for a while.
“Tullio, I had a nasty thought. What you said before, about who could have attacked me, who could even have known that you’d found the bones . . .”
