Skull Duggery

by Aaron Elkins

  “You have the satisfaction of knowing Dr. Bustamente’s findings are dead wrong.”

  That earned a twinkle of the eye and a furtive little grin. “Well,” Sandoval said, cheered at least a little, “let’s go back to the police station now. You can use the computer there. But first, lunch.”

  SEVEN

  THERE were only two restaurants in the village, both on the main street, Avenida Juárez, and Sandoval took Gideon to the Restaurante el Descanso, the smaller and simpler of the two, a clean, plain place—in the United States, it might have been called a deli-bakery—where Sandoval had a hamburger and Gideon got a bowl of creamy Oaxacan-style gazpacho, made with eggs and sour cream, and garnished with jicama and cumin-coated tortilla chips. When asked, he said, truthfully enough, that it was delicious. Sandoval made a show of insisting on picking up the tab, but if any money changed hands, Gideon never saw it.

  From there, they walked the two blocks to the Palacio del Gobierno, a stuccoed one-story building where police headquarters, consisting of two currently empty jail cells, a hallway with two desks jammed side-to-side against the wall, and the chief’s “private” office (doorless), were housed. One of the hallway desks had a fairly new Dell computer on it, and Gideon was seated there to write up his report. A baby-faced police officer offered him a cup of coffee from the countertop coffeemaker, but Sandoval, standing behind him, made head-shaking, throat-cutting motions warning him otherwise, and he politely declined and got to work.

  AN hour later, Gideon was done. Most of the time had been wasted in trying to put together something close to his usual forensic report, covering all the typical bases: age, sex, condition of the body, old broken leg, and so on, but all of this wound up being deleted. In the first place, he hadn’t been asked to do, and hadn’t done, anything approaching a thorough examination. In the second, the state police, the policía ministerial, were sure to pursue this more thoroughly on their own, with their own experts. Third, and most important, they hadn’t asked for his help and weren’t anticipating it. Gideon, sensitive from long experience to issues of turf, decided it would be less than tactful to unexpectedly dump a formal, jargon-loaded case report, written by a prying, meddlesome Yanqui, into their laps. Sandoval would surely take the heat for it, and Sandoval was worried enough already.

  With reason, Gideon thought. From what he’d heard and read about them, the Oaxacan state police were, or were alleged to be, a belligerent, thuggish bunch with a reputation for being easy to irritate and quick to anger. In the end, he boiled it down to a single unvarnished paragraph with a minimum of inferences:

  On December 14, 2008, I was requested by Flaviano Sandoval, chief of police, Teotitlán del Valle, to examine a mummified body found in the nearby countryside. This brief examination was made after an earlier partial autopsy by Dr. Ignacio Bustamente, médico legista, Tlacolula District. It is my opinion that the deceased was stabbed at least three times with a Phillips-head screwdriver (un desarmador de cruz), the entry wounds clustered in the left axilla. One of these thrusts left a diagnostic, X-shaped perforation in the vertebral portion of the left seventh rib. The deceased also suffered massive trauma to the thorax in the form of severe compression of the rib cage, resulting in numerous injuries, one of which was a compound fracture that punctured the chest wall below and medial to the left nipple.

  Respectfully submitted,

  Gideon Oliver, Professor

  Department of Anthropology

  University of Washington

  If I can be of further assistance, please feel free to contact me through Chief Sandoval. I will be staying at Teotitlán for the next several days.

  He leaned back in his chair, read it over, considered deleting those last two sentences—if they wanted his help they could find him, so why push it?—but finally decided to let them stand, and hit the print button.

  ANNIE threw back her head and laughed. “You asked him where the guy’s cómoda was and he didn’t know what you were talking about?”

  “That’s right,” a still-puzzled Gideon said. “Doesn’t it mean ‘chest’?”

  “Yeah, it means “chest”—only like in ‘chest of drawers.’ You know, cómoda . . . commode?”

  “Is that right?” Gideon said, also laughing. “So what’s my kind of chest? I mean—”

  “ ‘Pecho,’ ” Carl supplied with a smile.

  “Ah, pecho,” said Gideon with his usual ineffective snap of the fingers. “Of course. Like ‘pectoral.’ ”

  With Julie, they were having predinner drinks in the dining room, at the table in the rear that was kept for the Gallagher clan, separated from the others by a waist-level bookcase. It was a beautiful late afternoon and Gideon had initially wanted to have drinks out on the terrace, but two of the four close-together terrace tables were occupied by the feminist professors’ group, which was in the midst of extremely heated discourse, from which Gideon thought it wise to keep a safe distance. He was brave about many things, but he was not brave about this, and he had thought it was a good idea to take the prudent course and go inside. Carl had seconded the motion after hearing some of what they were saying. “Sounds like fightin’ words to me,” he’d said.

  Over tongue-stinging but wonderfully refreshing micheladas—bottles of Tecate beer spiced with lime and chile sauce—Gideon had been telling them about the day’s events and they had been listening with interest.

  Annie had just begun to ask a question when her telephone played the opening bars of “La Cucaracha.” She took it from her bag, flipped it open. “Hello?” She broke into a smile. “Are you, really? . . . Both of you? . . . Well, that’s great, everybody’ll be pleased. . . . Yes, they got here yesterday . . . No, I won’t be here, but I should be back in a few days. . . . Sure, you too.” She flipped the phone closed.

  “Guess what? Tony’s driving down early. He’ll be here tomorrow.”

  “Hallelujah,” said Carl with absolutely no expression. Not exactly a shout of joy, Gideon thought. Wonder what that’s about.

  Julie was considerably more animated. “Really?” she said, grinning. “Oh, it’ll be great to see him. I was afraid we might miss him.”

  “And I have better news for you than that,” Annie told her. “Jamie’s coming down with him. The knee’s doing better than expected, so he’s flying down to Mexico City in the morning and he’ll drive down with Tony. He’s raring to get back to work.”

  At this news Julie really lit up. “Jamie’ll be here tomorrow? I can leave the bookkeeping to him? I don’t have to do that horrible stack of accounts payable, and bank reconciliations, and God knows what else? I’ve been scared to death to touch them, I don’t know anything about QuickBooks or—”

  “Fear no longer,” said Annie. “You’re off the hook. Leave all that stuff for the man. Jamie thrives on it. Hey, look who’s here. Greetings, jefe.”

  Chief Sandoval, who had just entered, was approaching them somewhat tentatively. After a round of greetings and an introduction to Julie, he stood there looking undecided.

  “Have a seat,” Carl said, pulling out a chair for him. “Gideon was just telling us about your mummy.”

  Sandoval remained standing, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. “Well, that’s what I came about. I e-mailed my report—also your report, Gideon—to the police in Oaxaca, and they want me to come in to speak with them.” A despairing sigh. “I have to go tomorrow morning to the offices of the—I don’t know how to say it in English—the Procuraduría de Justicia—”

  “It’s like the state attorney general,” Annie contributed, and to Gideon: “The police here report to them.”

  “Yes, attorney general,” said Sandoval. I am to meet with Sergeant Nava. I remember him from before, from the little girl. Not such an easy man to get along with.” He turned a pleading, apologetic look on Gideon. “I was wondering if . . . I was wondering . . .” He paused encouragingly, as if wanting Gideon to finish the sentence for him. “Wondering if . . .”

 
“Yes?” Gideon was at a total loss. “Wondering if?”

  “Wondering if . . .”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Annie burst out, “he’s wondering if you would go with him.”

  “To talk to the police?”

  “Yes.” Sandoval launched into an excited flood of words: “I’m afraid if he asks me things, how will I answer? I know about traffic accidents, about people who drink too much mezcal and get in fights. What do I know of bones, of wounds? What if they want to know more? What if they want to know how—”

  “Sure,” Gideon said, “I’ll go with you.”

  “Thank you!” Sandoval, practically going limp with relief, sagged into the chair that Carl had pulled out for him.

  “Have yourself a michelada, Chief,” Annie said. “You look like you could use one. Stay for dinner, why don’t you?”

  “But already I come here three times this week. I don’t like—”

  “Oh, break a rule for once, it’ll do you good. Come on, we’d like to have you.”

  Sandoval grinned and relaxed a little more. “Well, okay, maybe this one time.” After a swallow, he looked curiously at Julie and wagged his finger at her. “Hey, wait a minute, I know you. Didn’t I used to see you . . .”

  Julie smiled. “You have a good memory, Chief. You used to see me right here. I was Julie Tendler then, Carl’s niece, just a teenager helping out for the summer.”

  “Oh, yeah, I remember.” He smiled fondly at her. “And I was Memo Sandoval, Dorotea’s dumb big brother, still thinking I had to be a weaver, only I stunk at it.”

  “Well, I’m sure you’re a good police chief.”

  “From what I’ve seen, he is,” said Gideon gallantly.

  Sandoval responded with a modest shrug and changed the subject. On his way in, he had passed the women’s group on the terrace. “You know, maybe it would be better for me to join your guests outside?”

  “Well, now, I don’t know that I’d—” began Carl.

  But Sandoval was already heading for the terrace. “Tonio, he likes that I do this. The ladies especially, always they are impressed to know the chief of police. To meet me,” he said complacently, “makes them feel protected. I answer the questions.”

  “You wouldn’t think so to look at him,” Annie said, watching him go, “but our timid little chief has quite an eye for the ladies. He does seem to get along with them too.”

  “I don’t know about these particular ladies, though,” Julie said, seeing the women turn as one toward the lone, innocently approaching male. “Hm, I wonder why the phrase ‘lamb to the lions’ leaps to mind.”

  Gideon concurred. “They’ll eat him alive.”

  Twenty minutes later, as they were starting on their dinners, the chief was back, shell-shocked and staring.

  “Madre de Dios,” he mumbled as he sat down with his tray. “Those ladies.”

  Mercifully, the others refrained from pursuing the subject.

  EIGHT

  THE offices of the Procuraduría General de Justicia were located well south of downtown Oaxaca, out near the airport, in a once-palatial nineteenth-century building that had gone sadly to seed. There were still touches of elegance to be seen on the outside—ornate grillwork on the upper-story windows, the remnants of fine stucco-work here and there, panels of veined marble, a pair of fountains flanking the grand stone entrance stairway, a row of elaborately wrought metal benches—but all was run-down and tatty. The stucco was flaking, the rusted fountains no longer flowed, and the benches had been painted so many times, and were so in need of yet another coat, that they were a mottled black and white, impossible to tell whether the black had chipped away to reveal the white or vice-versa. In some places—the arms, or the ornamental rosette that topped their backs, the successive layers of paint were worn all the way down to bare, gray metal. On one rosette Gideon was able to make out a single brave word in bold relief: Libertad.

  The building itself, coated in two equally repellent shades of green, was also seriously in need of a new paint job (in different colors, one would hope). Only the neat line of flowering shrubs along the foundation showed signs of loving, or at least painstaking, care.

  All this Gideon had to take in on the fly as he and the heavily perspiring Sandoval walked rapidly—trotted, in the smaller Sandoval’s case—over the brick-paved front plaza and up the two flights of wide, curving stone steps to the entrance. From Sandoval’s point of view, the day had gotten off to a disastrous start. He had allowed what he thought was more than ample time for the drive from Teotitlán, but he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and had had a terrible time finding the place. Thus, instead of being fifteen minutes early for his two o’clock appointment, they were ten minutes late. They would have been only five minutes late had matters not been made worse when, having no convincing credentials to produce, he had been denied entrance to the official-business parking lot and had had to park on a side street two blocks away. As a result, Chief Sandoval, who had been a nervous wreck to begin with, was practically a moving puddle by the time they got there.

  Once through the entrance they found themselves in a plain lobby that smelled of disinfectant, unadorned except for much-thumbed sheaves of official-looking documents hanging on cords from the walls. People moved in and out of corridors radiating from the lobby, the bureaucrats and civil servants (confident, decisive, focused) easily distinguishable from the ordinary citizens (apprehensive, uncertain, demoralized).

  On one wall was a building directory, from which Gideon read aloud: “ ‘Director de la Policía Ministerial, planta sótano.’ Basement.”

  “Dungeon,” Sandoval amended in a strained voice.

  At the bottom of the stairwell they were blocked by a hulking giant with an imposing black mustache. He was at least a couple of inches taller than Gideon’s six-two, and a whole lot wider, dressed in black military fatigues and combat boots, with the blunt, squarish black handle of what appeared to be a 9-mm Beretta sticking out of his belt.

  He looked them offensively up and down. “You’re in the wrong place,” he said dismissively in Spanish. “This is police headquarters.” With a jerk of his chin he gestured for them to get the hell back upstairs.

  Sandoval instantly began babbling away with a stammering, apologetic explanation for their presence that got nowhere until Gideon interrupted.

  “We have an appointment with Sergeant Nava,” he said in Spanish.

  Until now, the cop had fixed his attention mostly on Sandoval. Now he turned it on Gideon and came a step closer; two steps. Whatever he’d had for breakfast, it had been heavily doused with cumin and garlic. “You’re not Mexican.”

  “No. American.”

  “American.” Disdainful, skeptical. “What’s your business here in Oaxaca?”

  Gideon was quickly learning why the Oaxaca police, and to a lesser extent the police of Mexico, had the reputation they did. And it wasn’t simply the man’s size and attitude that intimidated, it was that gun stuffed so thuggishly into his belt. Was that meant to be intimidating (which it was)? What, could they not afford holsters?

  “I’ve already told you why we’re here,” he said sharply, answering discourtesy with discourtesy. “Now where can we find Sergeant Nava, please?”

  The cop narrowed his eyes, glared at him and opened his mouth to speak, at which point Sandoval started in again, grinning and wheedling and talking twice as fast as before. “Officer . . . sir . . . I’m the, the chief of police, you see—from, from Teotitlán del Valle? I have . . . there was . . . Sergeant Nava, he said to . . . he knows me, he told me—”

  He was cut off by a weary bellow from down the hall. “Donardo, for Christ’s sake, will you put an end to that goddamn racket and bring them back here?” Gideon’s Spanish wasn’t up to getting every word, but following the gist was easy enough.

  “Yes, Sergeant,” Donardo muttered with a roll of his eyes. Giving them a silent look that made it clear they had made no friend of him and would be wise not to c
ross his path again, he turned and led them down a linoleum-floored corridor bordered by a string of ramshackle office cubicles constructed from shoulder-high, building-grade plywood partitions that had been nailed together and covered over in watered-down white paint, the many knotholes, patches, and joints still plainly visible.

  Sergeant Nava’s cubicle was no different from the ones they had glimpsed on their way: a cramped enclosure with an old metal desk and chair, a computer, a file cabinet, two unmatched metal chairs for visitors, and papers and files scattered over every available surface. There was nothing in it that wasn’t utilitarian in the extreme; not a photograph, not a coffee cup, not an ashtray. The Sergeant himself was cut in the Donardo mode, thickly built, blackly mustached, wearing black fatigues with the gun tucked into his belt. He was, however, marginally more polite than his subordinate—not polite enough to smile or say hello or get out of his chair, but enough to indicate with a wave of his fingers that they should take chairs as well, into which they squeezed, Gideon with some difficulty. With the back of the chair shoved right up against the wall to make some Space, his knees were still pressed against the desk.

  Wordlessly, Nava watched them sandwich themselves in. Then, with a tired sigh, he leaned back—he had more room than they did—and addressed Sandoval.

  “So. You again. This time a mummy.”

  Sandoval giggled. “Yes, Sergeant, I’m afraid it’s me again. I’m sorry to bother you with this, but I knew that the proper action, in a matter such as this, was to inform you at once, so after Dr. Bustamente kindly—”

  “This happy little village of yours—it’s getting to be quite a dangerous place, isn’t it? As bad as Mexico City.”

  “Well, this didn’t happen in the village, Sergeant. Neither did the other one, the little girl. They were both found—”