Skeleton Dance

by Aaron Elkins

  "Well now, wait a second," Gideon said. "I can still pick up some candle wax odor."

  "Candle wax? I don't understand."

  Gideon looked up. "I thought I talked about bone smells at the seminar. Where were you?"

  "Very possibly you did," Joly said. "I may have disregarded it as being irrelevant to any activity in which I might conceivably find myself engaged in the future."

  Completely understandable, Gideon thought, smiling. He couldn't picture the refined and elegant Joly sniffing bones either. "Well, the smell is the odor of the fat in the bone marrow. After it passes through the rancid stage—and you don't have to hold it anywhere near your nose to recognize that—it develops this characteristic waxy smell that lasts for a few years. At a guess, I'd say these have been here a minimum of two or three years, but fewer than ten. Less than I thought at first."

  He sniffed at the tibia again. "Let's say between two and five years, right around there. The skeletonization is a little more advanced than you might expect for that amount of time, but that's probably because it's such a shallow burial and the soil was already disturbed by these trenches, which made it easy for bugs and things to get in. Two to five that's my guess."

  Joly looked pleased. "Excellent. I've had our chemist analyze the what-is-it-called, the level of acidity—"

  "The pH level?"

  "Yes, the pH level of some of the soil that was adhering to the bones. His conclusion was that it was consistent with a time since death of three to six years. Putting the two estimates together we arrive at a range of three to five years. "

  "Approximately," Gideon warned. "I don't know about your chemist, but speaking for myself, I'm not talking high science here. This stuff is variable as hell—the composition of the soil, the amount of moisture, the temperature—all kinds of things. If you have any unsolved missing-person cases from anywhere around that time, I wouldn't rule them out. We're probably looking at one of them."

  "But we don't," Joly said. "There are no records of missing persons, of males at any rate, from this or the neighboring communes that could possibly fit the time of which we're speaking."

  "Mm. So he's probably from out of the area."

  "It would seem so." Joly lit up another cigarette and sat watching as Gideon continued examining the remains. "And what else?"

  "Well, he's got a couple of old, healed fractures. A broken rib and a crushed calcaneus—that's the heel bone, in case you missed that part of the session too. The second might be a help in identifying him because he may have walked with a limp."

  "Yes?" said Joly, writing in his notebook with a slim, silver ballpoint pen.

  "Or then again, he may not. No way to tell."

  "Ah," said Joly with a sigh. He closed the notebook , retrieved his cigarette from the small foil ashtray he'd brought with him, and continued to smoke. "And what else?" he said again after a while.

  "Hm?" Gideon said, prodding a vertebra. "What makes you think there's anything else?"

  "Because I know you, my friend. You like to save the best morsels for last, the better to dazzle the brain of the poor, plodding policeman."

  Gideon laughed. It wasn't the first time he'd been called a hot dog by a cop, and he was willing to admit to it. As engrossing as it could be, there weren't many aspects of forensic anthropology that could properly be called "fun," but pulling unexpected rabbits out of hats to the bogglement of various police sergeants, lieutenants, and inspectors was surely one of them.

  "Well, I'm sorry, I don't know what else there is that I can tell you," he said, "…or would you be interested in things like… oh, cause of death, bullet holes, that kind of thing?"

  Joly mutely rolled his eyes, stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray, and came and hunkered down beside Gideon, first carefully (and characteristically) pulling up his trouser legs to preserve the creases. "Can you really establish a probable cause of death, then?"

  "I can do better than that," Gideon said. "I can establish a definite cause of death. Unless, of course, you want to assume he survived being shot through the heart."

  "Shot through the heart?" Joly's eyes moved rapidly over what was left of the skeleton's thorax. "But there's no—"

  "Look at the body of the eighth thoracic vertebra."

  "Gideon, your excellent instruction notwithstanding, I wouldn't know a thoracic vertebra from a left toe bone, let alone how many of them there are or which one is the eighth, or where the 'body' is to be found."

  "Sorry. Here, let me free it; it'll be easier to see." He gently worked it out of the soil with his fingers, laid it on a square of butcher paper, and pointed at the vertebral body, the thick, cylindrical center of the vertebra, where a rough, irregular gutter had been gouged out along the upper left edge. He tapped it with a chopstick. "Gunshot wound."

  Joly scowled at it, and then at Gideon. "Am I not correct in thinking that a bullet hole in bone is generally round, at least at its point of entry?"

  "Yes, you're correct."

  "But this—this isn't round at all. It might just as well have been made by an axe, a knife, even a hammer. I find myself wondering how you can state with such confidence that it was made by a bullet and nothing else but a bullet."

  Gideon had learned over the years that policemen were about evenly divided between those who regarded him as a snake-oil salesman and those who expected miracles. (Once, an Idaho county sheriff had handed him a murder victim's tibia, confidently waiting for him to determine height, weight, nationality, and hair color from it, on the grounds that he'd seen it done on Quincy, so he knew it was possible.) Inspector Joly, who had started out in the snake-oil camp, had soon converted, if not to the expectation of wonders, then at least to a solid respect for what could be gleaned by a professional from a few old bones; this despite a certain reserve and an ironic manner that was more a matter of constitution than of criticism.

  "Actually, you're right and you're not right," Gideon said. "Entry holes in the skull mostly look like bullet holes, yes—they're usually round; not always, by any means, but usually—but when you're talking about the long bones, or the ribs—or especially the vertebrae—they can shatter or crumble in a hundred different ways. You never know what you're going to get. A lot of times you can't make any determination of cause from them."

  "But in this case you can?"

  "From the broken edges themselves, no, but look at this." He bent the battery-operated gooseneck lamp, also provided by the police, down to six inches from the vertebra, flooding the pitted surface with white light. "Now. Look here where I'm pointing: the rim of the broken part… right here. Use the magnifying glass. See anything?"

  Joly examined the area silently, then leaned closer. "Do you mean this bit of grayish discoloration?"

  "That's what I mean. That's a deposit left by the bullet."

  Joly put down the lens and looked doubtfully at him. "On the bone? Are you sure? In my experience, bullet wipe is found only on the skin or on the outer clothing—whatever the bullet first strikes wipes it clean, isn't that so?"

  "Yes, but this isn't bullet wipe. Bullet wipe is from the dirt and lubricant that the slug picks up on its way out of the gun barrel."

  "I'm aware of that. And this?"

  "This is different, or at least I think it is. I think this is from the body of the bullet itself. It's lead that gets scraped off when the bullet breaks through something hard, like bone. And since you find it at the point of entry into the bone—when you do find it, that is, which isn't always—it tells you what direction the shot came from; in this case, from almost straight in front of him, or rather just a shade to the left of center, because the sternum wasn't perforated first, which it would have been if the bullet had come through the middle of his chest. As you can see, the left transverse process on the vertebra has been broken off too, which goes along with that scenario. So I'd say it entered his body an inch or two to the left of the sternum, probably through the fourth intercostal space."

  "And a bullet
entering through the fourth intercostal space on the left side, and penetrating the eighth thoracic vertebra in this manner would necessarily have passed through the heart?"

  "Smack through the middle of the left ventricle, no possible way of avoiding it. Death within seconds."

  "Yes?" Joly once again scrutinized the thin, gray edging, no more a quarter of an inch long and a sixteenth-of-an-inch wide. "It's not very much to look at, to provide such extensive information," he said doubtfully. A faint residue of the old snake-oil look gleamed in his eyes. "I don't look forward to having to convince a judge."

  "Well, I could be wrong," Gideon said agreeably. "But all you have to do is have your lab check it with a dissection microscope. I'm betting they'll find it's made up of tiny flakes of lead."

  "I shall," Joly said. "We'll see."

  Gideon got to his feet, knowing from the resistance of his knees to straightening that he'd been at it too long. "Lucien, I'm bushed. I'm ready for some fresh air, and I think we've done about all we can here. How about getting this stuff bagged and sent over to the lab? We're supposed to be meeting Julie at six."

  With the help one of the two officiers de paix that Joly had brought with him, the fragile bones were individually wrapped in newspaper to prevent their grinding against each other and then placed in evidence bags—simple brown paper bags stamped with the case number, 99-4—Dordogne's fourth homicide of the year. That was nice, Gideon thought. In Seattle, they got to their fourth murder a long time before September.

  Working alphabetically down the body, each bag was also individually labeled, a simple system that Gideon had been using since his graduate school days; the broken mandible in Bag A, the one remaining clavicle and scapula in Bag B, the vertebrae —except for the eighth thoracic, which Joly was taking back to Périgueux with him—in Bag C, and so on. The result was a group of sacks that fit comfortably into a cardboard carton originally used to pack four dozen cans of macaroni au fromage.

  Gideon shook his head as he gently fitted in the last of the sacks. Macaroni and cheese. Now there was a hell of a way to end up.

  While Gideon worked, Joly had gone back to sit on his boulder, jotting down notes and thinking aloud. "No clothing, no personal possessions whatever—you wouldn't say that there was any possibility of their having completely rotted away, would you?"

  "No, not a chance. Someone took them; to keep him from being identified, I suppose."

  "Mm. I don't imagine there's any way to tell if he was killed here on the spot or carried here from somewhere else after he was murdered?"

  Gideon shook his head. "You're right, there isn't. I can tell you about half of him has been carried out of the cave since he's been here, but that's about all. Either carried out or chomped down right here."

  "And are you able to tell me anything about his appearance? His height, for example?"

  "There I can help. I'll give you a stature estimate later, when I run some measurements, but it looks as if he'll turn out to be around average: not real tall, not real short. For France, I mean—say about five-eight, give or take an inch or two."

  Joly, who was extraordinarily tall for a Frenchman, topping Gideon's 6'1" by an inch, wrote it down. "And what about weight?"

  "If you mean was he fat or thin, there's no way to tell that from the bones, but his body type—his build—was probably average too—not particularly muscular, not particularly slight. Your average Frenchman, in other words."

  "Average, average, and average," Joly said, sighing as he wrote. "I grow discouraged."

  "I can't give you what isn't there, Lucien. I wish I could tell you he was seven-feet-one and weighed a hundred and thirty pounds and had six fingers on his left hand."

  "Yes, that would help narrow things down," Joly agreed.

  "But, unfortunately, I haven't come across a single thing that could conceivably be used for individual identification. No useful dental abnormalities, other than that crown you spotted and a filling in one of the bicuspids.… wait a second, come to think of it…"

  He opened Bag A again and took out the broken mandible—it was the right side, from the first bicuspid back—to re-examine the teeth. Four of the five were still present; the third molar having fallen out (after death, judging from the sharp, deep, well-defined socket). He held the bone on a level with his eyes and ran his finger over the teeth. "Yes, I should have realized it before. Something else for you to jot down: I think he might have been missing one of his upper right molars."

  Joly looked up from his notebook with a sympathetic smile. "I think you mean one of his lower right molars. I've been working you too hard. You are getting tired."

  "No, I mean upper."

  "But there are no—"

  "Look at this tooth, the first molar. See how it sticks out beyond the other teeth?"

  Joly squinted at it. "Ah… no."

  "Well, it does, or at least I think it does. And see how there's less wear on it than on the others?"

  "Not really, no."

  "Well, there is—or at least I think there is—and that's what happens to a tooth when its opposite member—the tooth it abuts—isn't there to keep it in place and wear it down. Teeth have a way of floating around unless they're held down. And the tooth that the lower first molar abuts is the upper first molar. So my conclusion is that it's missing, and in fact that it'd been missing for a while before he died, because it takes some time before it gets noticeable."

  Joly scratched something out with his pen and slipped the notebook into his pocket. "And to think I doubted you."

  "Well, I'm not positive, you understand. I'm a little out on a limb here, so if it doesn't turn out that way don't be too—"

  "Inspecteur?" said the second of the two officers, who had been combing through the dirt directly under where the skeleton had been buried. He pointed to a dull, misshapen, nugget in the red soil. "Une balle de fusil." A bullet.

  With Joly, Gideon hurried over for a closer look. What he saw was a small, squat cylinder of what looked like lead with a bluntly pointed conical head, something like a .22-caliber slug from a cheap Saturday Night Special, of which Gideon had seen more than he wished. But this one was different, with a hollowed-out base and an oddly constricted middle—as if a wire had been wound around it and pulled tight—so that the whole thing was shaped like a squat hourglass. And that was something he couldn't remember having run into before.

  "What kind of bullet is that, Lucien?"

  "It's not a bullet," Joly said, bending over to peer at it, his hands on his knees. "I believe it's an air-rifle pellet."

  "An air gun pellet?" Gideon said incredulously. "I've never heard of anyone killed by an air gun." Actually, he had; a teenager accidentally shot through the eye so that the pellet had lodged in his brain, but in this case they were dealing with penetration of skin, of muscle, of bone. "I didn't think it was possible."

  "No, no, not an air gun, an air rifle. This is not from one of your—what is it, your toys that shoot, what are they called…"

  "BB's."

  "Yes, BB's. No, my friend, an air rifle is a different matter—a weapon, not a toy. Equipped, for example, with a sophisticated gas-compression system and the proper ammunition, it can be quite powerful, quite accurate; as a hunting weapon, for example."

  "I didn't know that," Gideon said, happy to give Joly a chance to do some showing off of his own.

  The pellet having been duly photographed in situ, Joly stooped, picked it up, and placed it on his palm. "I believe this is what is called a magnum, probably a 6.35-mm. pellet, or perhaps only 5 mm. Larger and heavier than most, but of course quite light compared to your average firearm bullet." He closed his eyes while he hefted it. "I doubt if it weighs even fifty grains," he said with a significant look at Gideon.

  "Oh?" Gideon said, completely out of his element by now.

  "That would suggest," Joly explained, "that he was shot from close range, certainly less than twenty meters and probably a great deal less, considering that
bone was penetrated. Such a light projectile would lose energy very quickly, regardless of the initial muzzle velocity, you see."

  "I see," Gideon said. "That would also explain why it didn't make it all the way through."

  Joly nodded his agreement. "Very good, Durand," he said with satisfaction, giving the strange pellet to the officer to bag.

  He brushed invisible dirt from spotless hands and smiled, pleased with the day's efforts. "Come, shall we go and meet your Julie?"

  Chapter 6

  "Julie, this is my old friend and valued colleague, Inspector Joly. Lucien, allow me to present my wife."

  Joly bowed, straight-backed and stiff. "A great pleasure, madame."

  "Please, call me Julie."

  "Yes? Thank you, and please call me…"

  Ahum, thought Gideon.

  "…ahum, Lucien."

  The soft gurgle of the nearby river floated through the open French windows of the restaurant Au Vieux Moulin, set, as its name implied, in an ancient stone mill at the entrance to the village of Les Eyzies. At the table nearest the window the second course, risotto aux truffes, had been cleared away, the silverware removed and replaced for the third time, and the ravioles de langoustine aux jus de crustaces announced and presented in a ceramic tureen from which the waiter deftly whipped the cover with a practiced flourish.

  The conversation, easy and pleasantly unfocused to this point, flagged as they worked their way attentively through the ravioli, and the plates and silver had been removed once again before Joly spoke, introducing a new subject. "Gideon, I would like to know a little more about this notorious scandal that has so plagued the Institut de Préhistoire—the Old Gentleman of Tayac. Tayac—that is the name of an abri, I presume?"

  "Yes, a Neanderthal abri just north of here, probably no more than a quarter-of-a-mile from the one we were working in today. The institute ran a summer dig there for a few seasons in the early nineties. The habitation level was carbon-dated at around 35,000 years B.P."