Aaron Elkins - Unnatural Selection

Merrill coughed gently. “I say, Gideon, I’d certainly like to see what the situation is inside the braincase. I have to remove the calvarium anyway. Why don’t I just separate it and give it to you to examine at your leisure while I scoop out the brain, don’t you know?”

Pathologists, Gideon had noticed, were often in a hurry to get through the skeletal architecture, feeling that the “real” information was going to come from the internal organs and structures. Anthropologists, naturally enough, saw it the other way around.

In any case, Merrill’s offer suited Gideon just fine, and he was quick to agree. “You’ll make sure you don’t cut through any of the fracture lines, though?”

Merrill sighed and looked at him.

“Sorry, sorry,” Gideon mumbled.

Merrill held out his hand, into which Rajiv plunked most pathologists’ instrument of choice for skullcap removal: the Stryker saw, a vibrating saw with a small, semicircular blade that oscillated in a narrow arc of about twenty degrees. This limited action ensured that the blade would not cut through to any soft tissue, “such as,” Merrill had laughingly told him last time, “the pathologist’s hand.”

Gideon stepped back again, keeping well clear of the mist of bone tissue that the saw threw up as it circled the outside of the brain case, deeply scoring it. Once that was done, the saw was replaced by a small hammer and a narrow chisel, and then by a miniature pry bar, with which the top part of the skull was delicately pried away from the bottom. For the first time, Gideon closed his eyes, preferring not to watch. If he could have gotten away with it, he would have stuck his fingers in his ears as well, to avoid the sucking sound that came when the top of a skull was pulled off.

When he opened them, the rounded calvarium was on the table near Joey’s head, interior side down, and a concerned Merrill was frowning at him.

“Is anything wrong?”

“Uh, wrong? No, I just had something in my eye. It’s okay now.”

“Good. Would you like me to scrape the dura off, so you can have a look at the underside as well?”

The dura-the dura mater-was the outermost layer of the brain coverings-the meninges-and when the brain was removed it remained behind, stuck to the inside of the skull, making it impossible to see the skull’s interior surface.

“No, don’t,” Gideon said. “The calvarium’s really fragmented. I’m afraid the dura is all that’s holding it together. Anyway, it’s the outside I’m interested in.”

“Yes,” said Merrill, “mm, ha, look at that. Well, now. My word.” He was now as absorbed by Joey’s naked, glistening brain as Gideon had been by the skull, and why not, Gideon thought. Who was he to shake his head in amazement at someone who got enthusiastic about prodding with a finger-an ungloved finger-into a bloody brain? There were plenty of people who had a hard time seeing what it was about bones that so fascinated him.

“Wilson?” Gideon said. “Would there be someplace I could go with this?”

The question was met with raised eyebrows. “You don’t want to stay on for the rest of the autopsy? But we’ve hardly begun.”

“Oh, well, yes of course I do, I’d love to, but I only have a limited time, unfortunately. I do need to get back, so I’d better get on with looking over these fractures. And, really, I’m afraid I’ll be underfoot here. You don’t have that much room. And it would be better if I could examine it someplace quiet, maybe sitting down somewhere.”

It was overkill for a simple request, and Gideon feared that Merrill might read it for what it was-a lame attempt to get the hell out of the autopsy room-but all he could make out on the pathologist’s face were disappointment and surprise, both of which were manfully overcome.

“Certainly,” he said. “Rajiv, take Dr. Oliver to the specimen room. He can use the table there.”

Placing the calvarium on a towel, Rajiv led Gideon a couple of doors down the hall to a tiny room that stank even more of formaldehyde, and with good reason. The shelves that ran around three of the walls were loaded with specimen jars filled with various organs in cloudy formalin, some floating, some sunk to the bottom, some hanging on strings. But specimens in jars, well-separated as they were from their owners’ bodies, didn’t bother Gideon, and he had no trouble concentrating on the cracked, ivory-colored dome in front of him.

Without a word, Rajiv smilingly handed him a set of gloves, and Gideon smiled his gratitude in return.

“Well, Joey,” he said softly, as Rajiv pulled the door shut behind him, “let’s see what you have to tell me.”

At that, he smiled. Maybe Julie was right. Maybe he did talk to bones.

In a way, it was worse than that, because this particular one was talking back to him.

Clapper yawned and stretched. It had been a long afternoon and little had come of it. He was feeling grungy and depleted. Grumpy, too; not wanting to violate Kozlov’s no-smoking policy, he’d had but one fag since noon, when he’d run outside for a quick break; half a fag, actually. He reassured himself by touching his breast pocket to make certain they were still there. He was on his last interview of the day; in twenty minutes he’d be leaving and lighting up in the fresh air.

“Mrs. Bewley,” he called into the kitchen, “if we could have a fresh pot of tea, love, that would be grand.”

This being the third pot he’d requested, she was ready for him, and in she bustled with the pot, several cups, and the associated paraphernalia. She set them down on the table as quickly as she could, cleared the earlier service away, and hurried back to the kitchen as if worried that the sergeant might clap the cuffs on her if she stood still long enough to give him the chance.

Clapper poured himself a cup, added milk, sipped the fortifying liquid gratefully, and closed his eyes. With the consortium proceeding upstairs in the Victorian lounge, he was conducting his second day of interviews in the Star Castle dining room, a big, irregularly shaped (everything in this old place was irregularly shaped) space walled with the unplastered, unpainted, rough-cut granite blocks that made up the castle’s exterior. He was sitting at a linen-covered table before an ancient, soot-blackened stone fireplace, with a cavalier sword and a musket leaning against it on either side, and a rusty old saber hanging from the mantel. Above the table was a medieval-style chandelier made from a hammered ring of black metal and fitted with candle-shaped bulbs, and on the walls were metal sconces, also with bulbs shaped like candles. He had been told that the room had been the original sixteenth-century officers’ mess, and he had no trouble believing it. If not for the electric bulbs, he thought, he might have been back in the fifteen hundreds right now.

Not his cup of tea, Clapper thought-he had little interest in the past-but certainly highly atmospheric. A good place for deeds sinister and foul.

At the sound of footsteps he opened his eyes to see Vasily Kozlov, who had left the table a few minutes ago, come bouncing back in, fresh and sprightly in his sandals, shorts, and crisp, bright T-shirt, and brandishing a sheet of paper.

“Got it right here!” he declared, sitting back down. “Ah, tea!” He dropped four sugar cubes into a cup, poured hot tea over them, stirred, and swallowed half a cupful.

“You found the fax, then,” Clapper observed.

“Sure, right in file.” Kozlov slid it over to him.

Clapper aligned the sheet and read:

To: Vasily Kozlov

Fax: 1720 422343

Sender: Edgar Villarreal

Vasily:

It will come as no surprise to you that my stay in St. Mary’s was not the most pleasant or enlightening time I have ever had. I have no intention of wasting another week of my life two years from now, so I hereby withdraw from the seminar (or consortium, or Three Stooges convention, or whatever the hell you call it).