Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 09 - Twenty Blue Devils

by Twenty Blue Devils

  He shifted the lamp to the ribs and bent it so that the light was only a few inches from the tabletop, shining laterally across the bones. When you were looking for tiny nicks or clefts, or even thinly shaved bone, it helped to have shadows to highlight any roughness or smoothness that didn't belong there.

  Nothing on the fronts of the ribs or the sternum, nothing on the backs. This was unsurprising because Brian's T-shirt had had no telltale knife slits in it. Still, Gideon had thought that a knife might have gone in above the scooped-out neck or below the hem on the bottom. But no such luck (so to speak). Except for that broken left clavicle there was no damage to ribs, sternum, collarbones, or scapulae. That didn't mean that Brian hadn't been stabbed in the chest or back, of course, it only meant that there was no evidence of it. Once Gideon had examined the skeleton of a man whose shirt had knife holes from thirteen deep stab wounds in it. (He knew they were deep because they had found the knife, and the size of the holes matched the width of the blade just under the haft and almost six inches from the point.) But only one of the thirteen thrusts had nicked any bone. There was a lot of room between the ribs.

  On to the region of the throat, then. If there was going to be anything to find, here is where it would be.

  And it was. On the front surface of the sixth cervical vertebra was a single, V-shaped, clean-edged, horizontal notch, not a puncture wound but a cut, shallower than the ones on the metacarpals and no more than half an inch long, easy to miss if you weren't looking for it or didn't know what you were looking for, but no less lethal for that. It struck him again how innocent-looking the signs of violence on bones could be, how removed they were from pain and struggle. If he'd found a tiny nick like this on a plastic model of a vertebra that he'd just received from a biological supply house, he would have shrugged it off and said no problem, no real damage done.

  Ah, but on a living body! To make that seemingly inconsequential little mark a knife blade would have had to cut through two and a half inches of flesh and gristle: the ventral muscles of the throat, the thyroid and cricoid cartilages, the pharynx, the larynx, the vagus nerve, the phrenic nerve, the jugular vein. And of course one or both of the great common carotid arteries.

  And with the carotid arteries severed one's life's blood poured out and was gone in a few seconds. No wonder Brian hadn't done much struggling.

  So that was that. Brian Scott's throat had been cut.

  Gideon went back to the autopsy room for more coffee (luckily, Dr. Viennot was deep in the pelvic cavity and never saw him come in), then returned to the conference room, sat in one of the comfortable swivel chairs with the bones before him, and pondered. Cut throats were nothing extraordinary in this line of work, but they were usually found in either of two sets of circumstances: first, in suicides (which this wasn't, unless Brian had gotten that defense wound fending himself off), and second, in connection with killings of manic violence, where a cut throat was just one of many wounds from stabbing, cutting, hacking, and whatever else you could do with a knife (which this wasn't either).

  The thing was, it wasn't easy to cut someone's throat without a struggle. Vulnerable as it was, the front of the throat made a small, difficult, mobile target, was naturally shielded by the chin, and was easy to protect, at least temporarily, with the hands and arms. You didn't just walk up to someone and do it. Thus, when you found someone murdered in this manner, with very little other violence apparent, you concluded that it was more than likely that the victim was either immobilized at the time (which Brian wasn't, or there wouldn't have been any defense wounds at all), or was surprised from behind, or was already unconscious when attacked.

  And of those, the best was that he was already unconscious. As in sleeping.

  At ten he called Bertaud to make a preliminary report. “Colonel,” he said when he had finished and Bertaud had politely but coolly complimented him, “I was wondering about his sleeping bag. Did anyone have a look at it?"

  "Sleeping bag?” Bertaud repeated. “I don't believe such a thing was found."

  "Wasn't his gear at his campsite up above?"

  Papers shuffled at Bertaud's end. “Cooking tools, yes, clothing, food...I think there was no sleeping bag."

  "But—that seems odd, doesn't it?"

  "I suppose it does, but there was no reason at the time—” Abruptly he saw where Gideon was heading. “You think the murderer came upon him in his sleep? That the bag was bloodied and therefore disposed of somewhere to hide it?"

  Gideon was glad that Bertaud had come up with it on his own. “It's possible, don't you think? God knows there'd have been plenty of blood."

  "God knows. I'll have the area more thoroughly searched, Dr. Oliver. You'll have a written report for me later?"

  "This afternoon. You're taking this on as a full-scale investigation, then?"

  "Personally,” said Bertaud at his most resolute. “And if you will ask Mr. Lau to come and see me and tell me again about these American mobsters of his, you can say to him I will pay closer attention this time “

  The rest of Gideon's examination produced nothing of significance, but there were two areas that particularly caught his interest. He spent some time over the old repairs to the skull simply because he was so impressed. The original damage had been even more devastating than had been visible the night before, involving not only the forehead but the delicate bony orbits of the eyes and the zygomatic bones alongside them. They too had been wired back together in several places, and the surgeon had done an amazing job of restoration the sort of miracle operation that orthopedic surgeons modestly and routinely referred to as “bone carpentry.” The fact that Brian had come out of it looking normal, had even been a “good-looking guy,” according to John, was astounding.

  The other thing that he came back to, had already come back to again and again, was a phenomenon that had him intrigued and frankly puzzled. For at least the fifth time he picked up the fibulas and studied them, running his finger over the unusually roughened surfaces near their upper ends. On the face of it, they weren't anything very startling. The fibula was one of the two long bones of the lower leg—the thin one, not the thick, sturdy tibia that formed the shinbone—and the rough, pitted area at its top was merely the attachment site for one of the leg muscles. Nothing extraordinary in that. The exaggerated roughness simply meant that the muscle attached to it had seen heavy use; habitual, strenuous activity put stress on muscles, as everyone knew, and built them up. And where these built-up, heavily used muscles tugged on the bone—as forensic anthropologists and hardly anybody else knew—they too created stress and eventually built up and roughened the bony surfaces.

  Given a knowing eye, these stressed and roughened skeletal surfaces could sometimes be read like a job description. Occupational indicators, they were sometimes called. There were “seamstress's fingers,” “waiter's humerus,” “shotputter's ulna,” “shoemaker's sternoclavicular joint"; even “executive's foot"— the result of years of sitting at a desk in a tipped-back swivel chair with the heels off the floor and the weight pressing on the toes.

  But if there was any common name in the trade for an overdeveloped posterior aspect of the capitulum fibulae, Gideon had yet to run into it. The problem was, the muscle that attached to it, the soleus, didn't do anything in the usual sense. Well, that wasn't quite true. Its function, according to the anatomy books, was to provide some help to the gastrocnemius—the big muscle that formed the calf—in plantar-flexing the foot; that is, in pushing the toes powerfully downward, an essential part of the human gait. But the fact was that the considerably larger gastrocnemius was more than strong enough to do that by itself, and that it already had the help of several other muscles anyway.

  So what did the soleus do, why did we have the things at all? The answer seemed to be that they were muscles of balance. They helped keep the ankles, and thus the body as a whole, firm and steady while walking. While standing still, for that matter. An important function, certainly, but not one tha
t generally made great demands on the muscle fibers or the bone they attached to. Yet in Brian's case, not only was the attachment area heavily developed, but the pull of the muscles had been so powerful that the tops of both his fibulas had actually been tugged out of shape, bowing backward in their last couple of inches.

  And this was something Gideon had not seen before. Brian Scott, whose bones in general showed that he was no more heavily muscled than the average man, had had the most extraordinarily developed soleus muscles he had ever run across. Why? How did you even get such things? If Gideon were asked what sort of exercises to do to develop them he wouldn't have known what to answer. Stand on the edge of a two-by-four an hour a day? Walk a tightrope every evening after dinner for an hour or two?

  While he stood there pondering, he heard John speaking to Viennot in the autopsy room.

  "I'm in here, John,” he called. “Next door.” He still had one of the fibulas in his hand when John came in with two cups of coffee.

  "Fibula,” John proclaimed, setting one of the cups down for Gideon. Some years before, he had attended a seminar that Gideon had put on for law enforcement people.

  "That's easy enough,” Gideon said. “But which one, right or left?"

  "Hey, don't push your luck.” He looked down at the bones with a meditative air. “So this is Brian.” But he was clearly less disturbed by the idea than he'd been the day before. Cleaned skeletons can be fascinating, informative, evocative, puzzling—but they're not horrifying or pitiful, once you're used to them, and when you come down to it, they all look pretty much the same. See one and you've seen them all. It's hard to feel much in the way of emotion for any particular skeleton, or even to connect it in a visceral way with any particular person.

  "So how's it going?” John asked.

  Gideon pointed out the nicked cervical vertebra. “Cut throat, no question about it."

  John looked at it, even ran his finger over the cut. “That's an awful little ding to kill somebody. Is Bertaud going to buy it?"

  "It's not the ding, it's what happened on the way to the ding. And yes, Bertaud's already bought it. I talked to him a few minutes ago."

  "Good, maybe we'll finally get some action."

  "I think so. He wants you to come in and tell him about the Mob connections by the way."

  "I already told him once."

  "He says he'll listen this time. How'd you do with Nick?"

  "Hard to say. I think basically he just wanted to talk about it. I'll tell you one thing, I'm starting to believe him about Therese. I think maybe he did call it off because she was so shook up. And now he's worried about the memorial service and how that's going to affect her. He'd like to have Brian back in the ground by then; you know, so it's over and done. I told him I didn't think there was much chance."

  "I don't think so either.” Gideon sipped the coffee; stale but welcome. “Tell me, what did he say about the facial surgery? Did he know about it?"

  "Not a thing. Brian never mentioned it. I'm not sure Nick believes you."

  Gideon sank into a chair and eased his shoulders back; he was still a little stiff from leaning over the bones. “Doesn't that strike you as peculiar, John? Here's some kind of absolutely devastating accident—it had to have been a major event in Brian's life—why would he make a secret of it?"

  "Well, I don't know that he made a secret of it; maybe he just didn't like to talk about it. If it was that bad, you can't blame him."

  "Yes, but he's been part of the family for what, five years? People would have heard about it by now. At least he must have mentioned it to Therese, and she'd be bound to talk about it some time or other—unless he made it clear that he didn't want anybody to know. And why would he do that?"

  "I don't know. Why?” John sat down opposite him and tilted his chair back against the wall.

  "I don't know either. Let me ask you something else.” He showed him the fibulas and explained about the muscle attachment sites. “I've been trying to think of how he developed those. Any idea?"

  John slowly shook his head. “Not a clue."

  "He didn't do anything on the farm that required a lot of balancing?"

  "Not that I can think of. Bouncing around in a jeep over those roads, maybe, trying to keep from falling out?"

  "Uh-uh. You'd need to be standing, not sitting.” He thought for a few seconds. “Did he have a sailboat?"

  "You could get those from sailing?"

  "To tell the truth, I don't know. You'd have to do a lot of sailing. But it seems logical, doesn't it? With the deck tilting and shifting and all?"

  "You're asking me? How would I know? But I never heard about him being any kind of sailor."

  "Well, then, my guess is, this is a result of something he used to do, before Tahiti; something he did for a long time. What did he do before he came out here?"

  "He was a, what do you call it, a teaching assistant, at Bennington. That's where Therese met him."

  "He was already around thirty, then, wasn't he? What about before that?"

  "Who knows? He was a student, I guess."

  "Do you know if he—"

  "Doc, what's the big deal, anyway? I mean, the bone stuff is interesting, but what does it have to do with anything?"

  What it had to do with, Gideon said, was the fact that there seemed to be an awful lot about Brian Scott that wasn't general knowledge. How had he sustained that awful damage to his skull, and what had his life been like during the many months it must have taken to repair it? How had he developed muscles that were the fibular equivalents of a champion weightlifter's huge triceps? In a family as talkative and open as John's, wasn't it remarkable that nobody seemed to know?

  "I guess so,” John admitted, “but, you know, Brian always was a pretty quiet kind of guy, not like the rest of us, didn't blow his own horn. And it wasn't like he grew up out here with everybody else. There are probably a lot of things about him we don't know."

  "That's my point. What else is there? He was murdered, that we know for sure. But why are we so sure that it had anything to do with his life in Tahiti? He'd only been here a few years. Maybe this was something from his past catching up with him."

  John stood up and took a few steps around the table with his cup, thinking about it. “Like that old business with his wife back in the States, you mean?"

  "Like anything."

  John put down his coffee and chewed his lip. “Doc, what do you say we go have a talk with Therese? She ought to be able to fill in some of these holes. I've been wanting to talk to her anyway."

  "Shouldn't we just mention this to Bertaud and let him—"

  John waved this aside. “Am I getting in Bertaud's way? Am I interfering with him? There are just some things I'd like to know for myself. How about going to see her after you finish here?"

  "John, I hate to keep being a wet blanket, but that part of it is your affair. The bones I'm willing to deal with, but I barely know Therese; I'd be an intruder."

  "Well, what the hell am I supposed to do, ask her how he got hyperdeveloped fibular musculature? And then figure out if what she says makes sense?"

  After a moment, Gideon laughed. “Tell you what. Let me finish up here—I need to write up a report—and meanwhile you can go over to the gendarmerie and tell Bertaud whatever he wants to know. It should take me a couple of hours at most. I can meet you there when I take the report over. Say one o'clock? Then Therese, how's that?"

  "Lunch first,” John said.

  "That,” said Gideon, “goes without saying."

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  Chapter 23

  * * * *

  "I don't know what you mean,” Therese said, her upper lip beginning to tremble.

  "I mean,” John said gently, “we have to clear up these things. Brian was murdered, Therese. Don't you want us to find out who did it?"

  Her lovely eyes brimmed instantly. “I don't see how you can say...how you can know that he was...from just a few little b...a few little
b...” Tears flowed down silken cheeks. She bowed her head.

  John, in obvious discomfort, appealed to Gideon. “It's the truth, isn't it, Doc?"

  "It's true, Therese,” Gideon said, not very comfortable himself. The interview with John's cousin had been painful from the start. Since Brian's death she had been living at her parents’ house in Papara, and they had found her there, down at the beach, in a yellow sundress, sitting in a thatch-roofed pergola with a simple word-puzzle book open in front of her. The twins, happily unencumbered by frocks, or by any clothing at all other than little straw hats, played companionably in the sun a few yards away. She had received the two men warmly—there was no mistaking the affection between her and John—but every question about Brian had been met with lowered eyes, hesitant mumbles, shrugs, and sentence fragments.

  Did she know how Brian had suffered the injury to his face? “His...I didn't...I don't...” Shrug. Mumble.

  Could she account for the extreme development of his leg muscles? “I don't...I didn't...Do you...” Shrug. Mumble.

  What were the details of Brian's breakup with his wife in the United States? “Well, his wife was never...she lived in...they didn't really...” Shrug. Mumble. Blush.

  John had been remarkably patient, considering that he was John, but Gideon could sense the exasperation quietly building up. “Therese, listen. I want to ask you something else, and I want you to answer me honestly. How did you and Brian meet?"

  "Well...Claudine, don't do that, honey,” she called over his shoulder. “You wouldn't like it if Claudette put sand in your ear. Oh, I'm sorry, John, what did you say?"

  "How did you and Brian meet?"

  "But you already know that. He was a teaching assistant at Bennington when I was there. And then a few years later, when he was here on vacation from his job, he remembered me and gave me a call, and we...we got together.” Shrug. Mumble. But at least she'd managed a string of complete sentences.