Skull Duggery

by Aaron Elkins

  Gideon laughed along with him, pleased for Sandoval’s sake. It had been the form of the wound that had gotten the gears of his mind going: Somewhere between round and oval, but with a little tail hooking out of it. “Comma shaped” was the way he had described it to himself, and the term had rung a bell with him. “Comma shaped” was also the shorthand term he used in describing to his students the shape of the thoracic ribs in cross-section. Comma-shaped hole, comma-shaped shaft of bone . . . Could it be . . . ? he had wondered.

  It could, and it was.

  “He must have hit on his left side,” he said now. “So that when the broken rib punched through, that side was flush up against a rock, or against the ground, which would have resulted in the abrasion ring.”

  “Then there is no reason to believe he was murdered?” Sandoval said joyously. He had the result he’d wanted but had hardly dared hope for. “A simple fall, no more!” Then, deciding the situation required more decorum, he gravely added: “A terrible, unfortunate, fatal fall, the poor man.”

  “Oh, it would have been fatal, all right, enough to kill him twice over.” He had pulled the chest slab off the rib and laid it aside while they’d been talking, and was again peering into the chest cavity, with the body still on its side.

  “What are you looking for now?” Sandoval asked a little nervously.

  “Nothing in particular,” Gideon said truthfully. “But I’ve hardly looked at him. As long as I’m here, I ought to see what else I might be able to come up with. You never know.”

  “Oh, I don’t think there’s anything else that’s necessary, do you? Perhaps you would permit me to buy you a cup of coffee now? We have an excellent coffeehouse here, yes, right here in Teotitlán, the American tourists kept asking for it, you see, and now I myself have developed a taste for cappuccinos, ha-ha . . . .” On he nattered, arching his body backward, trying to manifest enough psychic force to draw Gideon away from the table. He didn’t like the idea of Gideon continuing to poke around and coming up with God knows what.

  Sandoval’s psychic force had no effect on Gideon whatever. “Well . . .” He was probing gently with his fingers at the cervical vertebrae, or rather at the dried ligaments and intervertebral fibrocartilage that held them together. “Most of the time, people killed in falls—falls from heights—die because they fracture their spines up here in the neck, which tears apart their aortas, so I just wanted to see if . . . ah, indeed, that’s what we have here. The first cervical vertebra—the atlas—has been completely separated from the second one, the axis. The ligaments and fibrocartilage are torn clear through. In the absence of anything else, that’s a pretty good cause of death right there.”

  “So, that’s that, then,” Sandoval said joyously. “A job well done! Muchísimas gracias, profesor, I am so grateful—”

  “Hold on, now,” Gideon murmured, mostly to himself. “What have we here?”

  Something had caught his eye, toward the back of the rib cage; he rubbed away a bit of dried, tarry black matter, impossible to identify (crud was the technical term usually employed), that was stuck to the interior surface of one of the ribs, and bent to take a closer look. “I’m afraid we might have something worth looking into after all,” he said softly.

  Sandoval’s shoulders sagged. The faintest, saddest of sighs escaped his lips. He’d known it was too good to be true. “What?” he asked in a grim monotone, a voice of doom.

  “Well, I’m not really sure,” Gideon said. “It looks like . . . it almost looks like . . .”

  What it almost looked like—what it very much looked like—was a bullet hole. In the ventral surface—the inside surface—of the seventh rib on the right side. Like many of the other ribs, this one had snapped about halfway back, the front piece still connected via the costal cartilages to the sternum, the rearward piece still attached by ligaments to the vertebral column. The hole was in the rearward segment, about three inches from the vertebral column, so that it faced diagonally forward. Much smaller than the wound in Garcia’s chest, almost perfectly round even when seen from a few inches away, and penetrating only partway through the body of the rib, it might have served as a textbook illustration of the not-uncommon situation in which a bullet, having expended almost the last of its energy in getting most of the way through the body, had just enough oomph left to penetrate the surface of the rib but not enough to make it all the way through.

  Now it was Gideon who was perplexed. If this was a bullet hole, then where was the original entrance wound? There was only one possibility: the chest wound that Gideon had so confidently, so magisterially, declared to be an exit wound and not even a ballistic exit wound at that. Could a bullet have entered there, under the left nipple, on a trajectory that took it diagonally through the thorax, transpiercing the left lung, the heart, and the right lung before plowing into the ventral surface of the seventh rib on the other side?

  short answer: yes, it could. Had he been wrong, then, about the broken rib breaking through the chest wall to leave the comma-shaped wound? Given the fit of rib to wound, that seemed virtually impossible. Well, highly—extremely highly—improbable. But if he was right about that, about there not being an entrance wound, then where had this bullet hole in the seventh rib come from? How had the bullet entered the body?

  Again, if.

  “It almost looks like what?” Sandoval pressed. “Tell me.”

  “Look, I may have already jumped the gun once today. If it’s okay with you, let me look him over a little more thoroughly before I do it again.”

  What he wanted now was a good, clear look at that seventh rib, but the room was ill lit for a skeletal examination; windowless and with only a pair of discolored fluorescent tubes on the ceiling that threw a flat, undiscriminating light on the body. He needed a slanting light, something that would throw into sharp relief the bumps and crevices and indentations that were the essence of his work.

  “Chief, could you possibly get me a flashlight of some kind?”

  “But I want to know—”

  “Please.”

  Sandoval, having little choice, gave up ungracefully. “They got some work lamps in the other room,” he said grudgingly.

  “No, I want something small, something I can move around inside the torso. The smaller the better. And if you can find a magnifying glass, that’d be helpful too.”

  “Okay, okay,” he snapped. He turned on his heel, stomped into the equipment room next door, and returned in a few seconds. “Is this small enough?”

  “Perfect,” said Gideon. It was a tiny but piercingly bright single-cell Maglite flashlight, the kind that was made to carry on a key ring. “Couldn’t have picked a better one myself.” Sandoval had brought a magnifying glass as well, an old-fashioned round one with a metal frame and a wooden handle.

  He flicked the light on, rotated the knurled head to focus the output into a narrow beam, picked up the magnifying glass, and went to work.

  “Ah,” he murmured. “Mm. Sonofagun.”

  “What? What is it?” pleaded Sandoval.

  But Gideon in the midst of a skeletal examination was not easy to reach. “Oho,” he said. “So.” And looked up at the ceiling, cogitating.

  At which point Chief Sandoval came to the end of his tether. “What is it?” he cried in a strangled voice. “What have you found? Was he murdered or was he not?”

  “Let me just see if—”

  “Por favor, señor—sí o no?”

  Gideon sighed. From Sandoval’s point of view, that was of course the critical question. It was naturally enough a question that he got asked a lot by cops, and it was one that he couldn’t, in all truth, answer definitively; then, or now, or ever. He was a physical anthropologist. What he knew was bones. Sure, he was often able to say with confidence that a skeletal wound was made (or wasn’t made) by bullet, knife, or club, but the absence of such wounds on the skeleton was hardly evidence of nonmurder. The rib cage is made more of air than of bone. There is plenty of room between t
he ribs for blades or bullets to find their way to the vital organs.

  On the other side of the coin, no skeletal wound that he did find was unconditional proof of murder. In themselves, broken bones don’t kill people. Sure, a bullet-shattered skull was a pretty good clue that you had a homicide on your hands, but even then it wasn’t the damage to the skull, but to the brain, that was the immediate cause of death—or, as forensic pathologists had it in one of their more charming locutions, was “incompatible with life.” Broken bones, even if you break all two hundred and six of them, are not a good thing to have, but they are not “incompatible with life.” Not strictly.

  But there was no point in going into all this with Sandoval. He answered as truthfully and simply as he could: “I think so. Yes.”

  The air went out of Sandoval. “I see,” he said wretchedly. Then, as an apathetic afterthought: “How then was he killed?”

  “I need to do a little more work on the body,” Gideon said instead of answering. “Do you think you could find me a screwdriver next door?”

  Sandoval stared at him. “A what?”

  “A . . .” Gideon groped for the Spanish word. “Un . . . un desarmador,” he said, amazing himself by plucking it out of whatever dim neural recess it had been hiding in, patiently waiting to be summoned, probably for the first time since he’d learned it decades ago. A wonderful thing, the human mind.

  “Un DESARMADOR?” Sandoval bleated, no less bewildered.

  After a couple of frustrated seconds, Gideon realized that this time it wasn’t a question of Sandoval’s not understanding, it was a question of not believing what he was hearing. First a pair of shears, now a screwdriver; what next, a hammer and nails?

  Gideon couldn’t help smiling. “Right, can you get me one? Not the flat-bladed kind, the Phillips head. Feeyeeps,” he amended, giving the spelling his best Spanish pronunciation.

  “Feeyeeps,” Sandoval echoed robotically. “Sí. Un desarmador de cruz.” He turned toward the door.

  “And a piece of wood.”

  “And a piece of wood,” Sandoval said, beyond astonishment now. “Sure. What kind of wood? How big?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Any old piece of scrap lumber. A board.”

  His actions, when Sandoval came back and handed the items to him, proved that Sandoval was not beyond astonishment after all. The screwdriver and the board, a foot-long piece of whatever the metric equivalent of a two-by-four was, were taken to the sink, where the board was placed on the sturdy counter beside the basin. Gideon picked up the screwdriver, raised it over his head, and drove it hard into the board. A second time. A third. Sandoval watched, openmouthed.

  Gideon held the board up to examine it. “Mm,” he said inscrutably. “Let’s go back to the body now.”

  He stood gazing down once more at Manuel Garcia. He had already satisfied himself that there were no other visible perforations in the hide; just the wound in the chest. But the left arm, extending rigidly down and slightly forward along the left side, partially blocked his view of the axilla—the armpit—and the area just below it, and this was a region Gideon particularly wanted to see now. Placing one hand on Garcia’s left shoulder joint to steady the body, he used the other to grasp the left arm just above the elbow and began to pull gingerly.

  Nothing happened. Barely any give at all. Cowhide—stiffened cowhide—was in fact very much what the body felt like. He took his stance again, set his feet, grasped the arm more firmly—

  Sandoval flinched and paled. “I think I need to go to the police station for a few minutes now,” he murmured, hurrying the words. “There are things that must be attended to. Would that be all right?” He was already making for the door. “I’ll only be a couple minutes,” he yelled over his shoulder and was gone.

  “Take your time,” Gideon said, envying him. He wouldn’t have minded leaving for this part too. The bones in mummified remains had been known to snap when you tried to move the limbs, and he was all set to flinch himself—he was already flinching mentally—if that were to happen. He took in a breath, held it, and pulled harder, steadily and slowly bearing down on the shoulder joint. Something—not bone, thank God—gave, and the arm moved an inch, two inches. Enough. It remained in the position to which he’d pulled it. The humerus hadn’t broken or popped out of its socket.

  He let out his breath, wiped off the sheen of sweat that had beaded on his forehead, and bent to see under the arm. The skin there had folded over itself in the process of loosening and mummifying, and it took him a good ten minutes to pry the fold apart with his fingers so that he could see what might be hidden within. He was just straightening up when he heard Sandoval’s car pull up outside the building. The chief, who’d been gone about twenty minutes, came in, preceded by a wintergreen gust of Pepto-Bismol. He had brought two cardboard cups of still-steaming cappuccino, one of which he handed to Gideon, who gratefully gulped half of it down. The Sacred Bean Café was the logo on the side.

  “Pretty good, huh?” Sandoval said with a reasonable semblance of cheer.

  “It sure is. Thanks.”

  “See, didn’t I tell you?” The break and the Pepto-Bismol had done him good. While hardly happy with the way things were going, he did seem reconciled to his fate.

  For a while they stood beside the table, companionably drinking their coffees.

  “So, profesor, he was murdered? That’s it?”

  Again, Gideon gave him the short answer. “I believe so. Someone did their best, that’s for sure. But not with a gun.”

  “But how? If not by bullet, then by what? Show me.”

  Gideon guessed that there was little genuine interest behind the request, that Sandoval was merely playing the role that he thought was expected of him as police chief. But then Gideon wasn’t a man who needed a lot of coaxing when it came to providing skeletal edification. To ask was to receive.

  “Sure, I’ll show you. Take a look at this.” He grasped the rear segment of the seventh rib and pulled it slightly forward. “What do you see?”

  Sandoval studied it. “A hole,” he replied sensibly.

  “But not all the way through.”

  “No, not all the way through.”

  “But almost through.” Gideon turned on the Maglite and held it behind the rib. “See? Look into the hole. You can see that some light comes through.”

  “Ye-es,” Sandoval said slowly, peering hard. Perhaps, thought Gideon, he really has gotten interested, or at any rate curious. “I can see a little point of light, where the bone is just barely broken all the way through.”

  “It’s not just a pinpoint, Chief. Use the magnifying glass.” Gideon kept the flashlight steady behind the rib. “What’s it shaped like?”

  Sandoval peered through the glass. His eyes widened. “Ah, I see. It’s . . . I don’t know . . . it’s like a, like a tiny star . . . no, like a little equis.”

  Equis. The Spanish word for the letter X.

  “Yes, that’s one way to describe it,” Gideon said. “Or you could call it a cross?”

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  “And when I asked you for a Phillips-head screwdriver a little while ago, you called it un desarmador de . . . ?”

  “De cruz.” Sandoval’s eyes widened. He straightened up. “Cross! A cross-shaped screwdriver!” He bent to stare through the lens again. “Then a screwdriver made this hole?”

  For an answer Gideon held up the board for him to see the indentations the screwdriver had made. Each thrust had left a neat little X-shaped dent in the wood, all identical to one another and almost exactly like the one in the rib. The conclusion was inescapable. Garcia had been stabbed, at least once, with a Phillips-head screwdriver, which had penetrated the front of the rib, its tip breaking through the back just enough to leave its X-shaped perforation. The initial X-shaped perforation in front had, of course, been obliterated by the round shaft as the thrust continued.

  Sandoval straightened up, his forehead wrinkling. “Stabbed to death by a s
crewdriver . . .” He scowled. “But wait—there is no wound in the skin, no entrance wound. How can—?”

  “Ah, but there is an entrance wound,” Gideon said. “Three of them, in fact.”

  He showed Sandoval what he had found under the arm: a cluster of three tiny black holes in the armpit.

  “They’re so small,” Sandoval said.

  “They were small enough to start with, so they were able to contract and close up a little afterward,” said Gideon. Whichever one made the hole in the rib would probably have gone through the lungs and the heart and thus killed him. Even if it hadn’t, he could very well have bled to death.

  Sandoval still looked puzzled. “But to be stabbed in the, the . . .” He sought the English word and failed. “En el sobaco.” He indicated his own armpit. “Three times! Why would . . . how would . . .”

  “It’s not that uncommon,” Gideon said. “Someone tries to stab you, you throw up your arm to protect yourself—” He demonstrated. “And, ouch, that’s where you wind up getting it.”

  “I see. Yes, it’s all very interesting.” He thought for a moment. “Profesor—”

  “Please, call me Gideon.”

  Sandoval responded with a cautious smile. “Flaviano.” Self-consciously, very formally, they shook hands. “You know . . . Gideon . . . I must file a report on this. What you told me—the ribs, entry wounds, exit wounds—I don’t know if I can explain—”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ll write it all up for you to include with your report. It’ll have to be in English, though. My Spanish isn’t good enough for material like this.”

  “Thank you. When do you think you could do this?”

  “I can do it right now, if you like.”

  “Ah, good. The policía ministerial, they won’t be happy if I wait too long.” He sighed softly.

  Mention of the policía ministerial put an end to his relative good humor, which had been ebbing anyway over the last few minutes.

  “Well, look at the bright side,” Gideon said, taking a page from Julie’s playbook.

  “Yes? What is the bright side?”