Skull Duggery

by Aaron Elkins

  The deciduous teeth had all been shed, and all of the permanent teeth (those that hadn’t been knocked out), except for the third molars, had come up. That was another nod in the direction of a minimum age of fifteen, because fifteen was generally accepted as the age at which the second molars were fully erupted. As for the state of development of the third molars, the upper jaw could tell him nothing because the back parts of it were gone. Not so in the mandible, however, and there he found that, while the third molars were not fully in place, they had broken through the bone and were a good third of the way up.

  Predicting the age that wisdom teeth will erupt is risky business, since they are the most unpredictable of all the teeth, often not coming in at all. But a range of seventeen to twenty-one is a pretty safe bet. If these cranial fragments and teeth had been all that he’d had to work with, that would have been his guess: Seventeen to twenty-one—which would have fit nicely with the advanced sexual maturation. But in this case he also had the long bones, and they suggested fifteen to sixteen.

  Taking everything together, which was what you did when you had data that didn’t fully match up (which is what you usually had), he was inclined to stick with his fifteen-to-sixteen estimate. The process of epiphyseal fusion was more reliable by far than the eruption of the wisdom teeth. As for the accelerated sexual maturation, that was just one of those things that you ran into from time to time, and, he supposed, maybe not all that that surprising if the girl was sixteen.

  And that, he thought, hoisting himself off the stool for another stretching break, was probably all he was going to be able to . . . He hesitated, frowning. Wait a minute, wasn’t there something about . . .

  He sat back down and picked up the mandible again, then the lower fragment of the maxilla, the one with the palate and the teeth. Of course. Four of the premolar teeth were missing. Normally, people have eight premolars or bicuspids, sets of two, left and right, upper and lower, between the canines and the molars. But this girl had only one in each place; none of her second premolars had come in. They hadn’t been knocked out or been lost on account of disease; they’d never developed in the first place.

  Naturally, he’d noticed it earlier, but with his attention, emotional and intellectual, riveted on the horrible maiming of the face, he hadn’t really registered it until now. The condition was called hypodontia, and it was of forensic interest, both because it was rare—the incidence of one or more congenitally missing teeth ran at about 5 percent in most populations, but the probability of all four second molars being missing was—well, he didn’t know what the incidence was, but it was surely under 1 percent. And it was of interest because it was genetically linked; it ran in families. This, he thought with satisfaction, could well be the most important thing he’d turned up in terms of coming up with who the girl was. With some legwork and a little luck, she might yet end up with a better resting place than a cardboard box in a government warehouse in—

  “Gideon—”

  This time Marmolejo’s unexpected presence behind him made him jump. “Jeez! Javier, you have to stop sneaking up on me like that,” he said irritably. “Get some leather heels or cough or something.”

  “You have my abject apology,” Marmolejo said unconvincingly. “I came to tell you that four o’clock won’t be possible. I’m on my way to a meeting in the office of the procurador general himself. The subject is the promotion of cooperation and teamwork between our various state and federal police agencies. This assures that it will be an extremely contentious meeting, and probably lengthy as well, so I may not be available for some time; perhaps as late as five. Or if that doesn’t work—”

  “Five is fine. I’m running a little slow anyway.”

  Marmolejo came a step closer and peered with interest at the bones. “Have you found anything more?”

  “Actually, yes.”

  He explained about the missing teeth. Marmolejo was gratifyingly impressed. “You see? I knew you would find something. Congenital hypodontia, that is new to me.”

  “And on the age, move my ‘pretty confident’ up to ‘very confident. ’ ”

  “But still short of ‘Oh, no question’?”

  “If you mean, would I bet my life on it? No, but it’s the best you’re going to get out of me. The epiphyses don’t lie. She was fifteen or sixteen years old, or if you want to play it completely safe, make it fourteen to seventeen. I’ll see you at five.”

  When Marmolejo left, Gideon stood up and stretched again, walked up and down the corridor a few times, turned down an offer of more coffee from Corporal Vela—it was getting to the time of day where a highball or a glass of wine would be more welcome—and returned to the cubicle to finish up.

  There was nothing left but the bones of the feet, which he had not yet laid out properly. For whatever reason, in forensic analysis, these bones figure less than any of the others. There is less interest in them, less known about them, and less research done on them. Gideon wasn’t sure why, but he thought it might simply be that feet just aren’t that exciting, at least not to most people. Still, they had to be examined; as he had told Marmolejo, you never know what you’re going to find.

  The tarsus, composed of the four largest ankle bones, was missing, but everything else in the foot was there: the three smaller cuneiforms, the five metatarsals, and the fourteen phalanges that made up the toes, even the four tiny ones at the ends. That was unusual, and he assumed that the foot, like the foot of the mummy, had been encased in a shoe.

  Almost the moment he began to lay them out anatomically for a proper examination—no easy task; they are confoundingly similar—he ran into a shock. He found himself holding what he thought was a left first metatarsal in his right hand, and what he was sure was another left first metatarsal in his right hand. This was not as it should have been. The first metatarsal is the bone in the sole of the foot that leads to the first toe—the big toe—and like the toe itself, it is by far the strongest, bulkiest of its fellows, twice the thickness of any of the others, and therefore the easiest to recognize. Most important, we are entitled to only one apiece, not two. Two first metatarsals indicate two separate individuals just as surely as two jawbones do.

  All alone in the cubicle, with no one to see him, Gideon Oliver blushed. He had just committed the simplest, most sophomoric error of omission that a forensic anthropologist can make. The very first thing to be established—how often had he drummed this into his students?—when faced with a pile of bones, is how many people one is dealing with. Well, strictly speaking, the first thing to be established is whether or not the remains are human, but figuring out whether you have one person or more than one is every bit as elementary. The fact that he’d been assured by the police that the carton contained a single individual was no excuse and he knew it. Cops weren’t anthropologists. Doctors weren’t anthropologists.

  Everything he’d come up with, everything he’d told Marmolejo, was now in doubt. Were the legs and skull from one person or two (or more)? To which one did the clavicle belong? Or was that a third person? Why wouldn’t the skeletal maturation and the sexual differentiation be out of joint if he were dealing with two or more people? How could he have been so careless, so cavalier . . . ?

  In the midst of all this self-recrimination, he became aware that his own left thumb was trying to send him a message. Something didn’t feel right about the metatarsal. Why was its head so smooth? Why couldn’t he feel the grooves for the sesamoids? He took a closer look. The other end of the bone was peculiar too. Where was the prominence for the Peroneus longus tendon? What were those facets for the cuneiforms doing there? They should have been . . . they should have been . . .

  It took him longer than he’d have liked to admit to realize what the problem was, or rather what it wasn’t. He’d made a mistake, all right, but not the inexcusable one he thought he’d made. The thing was, the bone he was holding in his left hand wasn’t another first metatarsal at all, it was the second, but greatly thickened, so th
at its bulk gave it the initial appearance of a first metatarsal.

  Whew. One person, after all, and not two.

  All the same, he finished laying out the foot bones now, as he should have done to begin with, just to be sure. And, happily, there they all were, with not a spare in the bunch. Other than the four missing ones from the tarsus, there were precisely enough to make one human foot; no more, no less.

  One foot with a peculiar, grossly enlarged second metatarsal. Again, he picked it up, turned it round and round, fingered it, studied every ridge and fossa. Aside from its size, it was perfectly normal. The bulkiness wasn’t the result of disease or trauma; it had been caused by muscular stress . . . and he was fairly sure he understood exactly what kind of stress it had been, although he needed to check a few sources to be certain.

  He was also fairly sure that the age estimate he’d given Marmolejo was going to suffer a significant revision.

  He couldn’t help smiling. Marmolejo was going to love this.

  TWELVE

  WHEN the colonel got back to his office a little after five, he found Gideon getting up from Corporal Vela’s computer. The colonel raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

  “Just looking up a few things on the Internet,” Gideon explained cheerfully.

  The eyebrows settled down and morphed into one of Marmolejo’s familiar, foxy expressions. “I know that look,” he said, leveling a finger at Gideon. “You’ve come up with a rabbit, after all.”

  Gideon grinned. “I think I just might have,” he agreed.

  GIDEON, having been breathing bone dust for several hours, wanted some fresh air, so they went outside and sat on one of the peeling metal Libertad benches that lined the brick plaza out front. It was late afternoon now, with a drowsy sun on its way down, and the people going in and out of the Procuraduría, or just hanging around the vicinity, seemed mellower than they had earlier. Several pairs of people, mostly men, sat chatting and laughing on the other benches, or on the rims of the rusting fountains, and others were wolfing down tacos and Cokes in the clusters of plastic chairs that had been set up around umbrellaed food carts at the edges of the brickwork. Near the benches, three or four shoeshine stands—green-awninged metal chairs on wheels—had been set up. All had waiting customers.

  It was all a little exotic and unfamiliar to Gideon, of course, but tinged with an everyday, life-goes-on normalcy that he found welcome. As always, it was restorative, even slightly surprising, to come out into the daylight after a session with the pitiful remains of a murder victim and find the sun shining and the world going along as usual.

  “So, then,” said Marmolejo. “Tell me.” He sat peering at Gideon, very upright as usual, with a hand on each knee, and the toes of his tiny, perfectly buffed shoes barely touching the bricks, more than ever like a wise old monkey. Or perhaps better yet, a meerkat, erect, alert, attentive, intelligent.

  “Umm . . .”

  Marmolejo frowned. “Why do you hesitate?”

  “I’m hesitating,” Gideon said, “because I don’t know which would be more fun: stringing you along bit by bit, or boggling your mind by giving it to you all at once.”

  “All at once, I think.”

  “Good enough. I was wrong about the age, and Orihuela was even more wrong about the age. She wasn’t a girl, she was a grown woman—”

  Marmolejo was not a man whose surprise plastered itself across his face, but this time it couldn’t be missed. “A grown woman—”

  “—who happened to be—”

  “One moment please. Kindly wait until my mind stops boggling. All right, go ahead.”

  “—who happened to be a ballet dancer.”

  Marmolejo stared at him. “Do you mean to say you know who she was?”

  “No, only what she was. You’ll have to figure out the who.”

  “When you say ballet dancer, do you mean a professional ballet dancer?”

  “Professional? That I don’t know. Maybe. Serious? Yes.”

  “A grown woman, a ballet dancer,” Marmolejo repeated. Hm.” He continued to sit there inscrutably, meerkat-like, unmoving and silent, his chin slightly uplifted as if he were sniffing for the scent of outsiders on the wind.

  “Uh . . . Javier, would you care to hear the brilliant manner in which I reached this new and startling conclusion, or aren’t you interested?”

  “Of course I’m interested. I said nothing because I knew I had no choice in the matter in any case. Go ahead, please. Tell me.”

  Gideon smiled and stood up. “No, I’ll show you. Come on, let’s go back to the bones.”

  “IT wasn’t really so brilliant,” Gideon said. “In fact, I was pretty slow to put things together. It was this bone here.” He laid his finger on that enlarged second metatarsal, which had been put back in its place relative to the other foot bones, so that they were looking at an entire skeletal foot. “As you see, it’s the longest of the metatarsals, which is normal, but ordinarily it’d be about the same thickness as these other three that lead to the smallest three toes, and only half as thick as this first one that goes to the big toe. But this one is huge, just about as thick as the first one.”

  “I see. And from this you infer?”

  “That she engaged often, and over many years, in some kind of activity that put continuing heavy stress on this particular bone, which reacted to it, as bones do, by thickening up to better withstand it.”

  “And this activity you mention, this would be ballet dancing?”

  “Right.”

  “Ballet dancing and only ballet dancing? Nothing else could account for it?”

  “As far as I know, no. Nothing else stresses the second metatarsal and only the second metatarsal; or rather, I should say, nothing that anybody has found so far. That’s what I was checking on the computer to make sure when you saw me there.”

  “I see.” He scratched delicately and thoughtfully at his cheek. “From dancing en pointe, I presume.”

  “So you’d think—so I thought—but as a matter of fact, no, that isn’t what does it. If it was, only female dancers would be affected, because they’re the only ones who go around on tippy-toe, but male and female dancers get this equally. No, it’s from dancing on what they call half- and three-quarter point, which is what they’re all on most of the time. In that position the metatarsals act like an extension of the leg, and since the second metatarsal is the longest one, it takes most of the punishment. As I’ve just learned, something like sixty percent of professional dancers have second metatarsals like this one.”

  “All right, she was a dancer. But why have you changed your mind about her age? What happened to your previous certainty?” He sat himself on the one chair in the cubicle and turned his eyes up toward the stained acoustic-tile ceiling. “Let me see . . . ‘The epiphyses do not lie,’ ” he said, deepening his voice in imitation of Gideon’s. “Isn’t that the way you put it?”

  “Did I say that? Well, then maybe I overstated it a bit,” Gideon admitted. “It’s not that they lie, but sometimes they do hoodwink you a little, and this was one of those times. Young female ballet dancers—gymnasts too, by the way—are notable for having delayed skeletal maturation. Apparently, there’s something about that kind of training that slows it down, or it might be that having slower skeletal maturation gives you an edge of some sort; nobody’s really sure about the cause, but everybody agrees that it’s a fact. According to the study I was reading when you came back, the average delay is about three years. So—”

  “So,” said Marmolejo, “your previous estimate of fifteen to sixteen now becomes eighteen to nineteen?”

  “That’s it. The emerging wisdom teeth lend some support to that too, by the way.”

  Marmolejo stood up and came again to the desk to look down on the bones. “Let me see if I can summarize. What we now believe we have before us is a woman eighteen or nineteen years of age—”

  “Give or take a year either way to play it safe.”

  “—who had underg
one serious ballet training, and whose dentition displays a condition known as congenital . . . ?”

  “Congenital hypodontia involving the second premolars. I’ll write it all up for you, Javier. You’ll want to see if you can get some DNA samples from the bones too. If so, you’ll be a long way toward identifying her.”

  Marmolejo nodded and looked quizzically up at Gideon. “This is quite a different story from the one you told me with so much certainty not much more than an hour ago. I mean no offense, my friend, but you were quite confident of your ‘facts’ then. How confident are you now?”

  Gideon grinned. “Pretty confident,” he said.

  Marmolejo just rolled his eyes.

  THIRTEEN

  BY the time Gideon got back to the Hacienda at a little after seven P.M., dinner was problematic. Tony and Preciosa had gone to a concert in Oaxaca, so there was no obligatory family meal in the Casa del Mayordomo. And, at the request of the women professors, some of whom were also going into the city, Dorotea had served dinner at five thirty and started cleaning up with her nieces at six forty-five.

  When Gideon and Julie peeked into the kitchen to see what the situation was, Dorotea, up to her roughened elbows in suds and dirty dishes, glared challengingly up at them. Words were not necessary; the look spoke for itself: Just you dare and ask me to cook up something especially for you.

  “What now?” Gideon asked once they had backed apologetically out.

  “Well, there are two sit-down restaurants in the village, but they wouldn’t be seating anybody as late as this; they’re mostly there for day-trippers. But Jamie told me about a new place—well not a place, exactly; they set up a bunch of tables on the sidewalk in front of the village market, across from the church. The food’s supposed to be great.”