Aaron Elkins - Unnatural Selection

Obviously, this means I will not receive the $50,000 stipend, and frankly, my dear, I don’t give a shit. Edgar Villarreal

“I’m beginning to see why he wasn’t the best-loved man in the world,” Clapper mused aloud, placing the fax on the table.

“He not such good fellow,” Kozlov agreed.

The body of the message was computer-printed, and the logo above it said “The Mail Cache, 3705 Arctic Boulevard, Anchorage, AK.” The time stamp at the top said “06/08/03, 14:47” and gave the shop’s fax number. That was everything. Clapper hadn’t expected much to come of it, and he’d been right. If Kozlov had come back saying that he was unable to find it, that it was inexplicably lost, well, that might have been something to think about; but here it was. And it proved nothing, disproved nothing. Gideon was perfectly right: anyone could have sent it.

“May I keep this?” Clapper asked.

“Of course.”

“Did you reply?”

Kozlov shrugged. “For why?”

“I understand. And you never heard from him again?”

A shake of the white, wild-haired head. “Never.”

Clapper sipped at his tea but found the cup empty. He removed the cozy from the pot, offered to serve Kozlov, who declined, and poured himself a fresh cup with milk.

“Well, then, Mr. Kozlov, let’s go on to something else. Another question or two and we’ll be done.” He pulled his notepad around to write on it. On the open page he’d already drawn a diagram of the guest room layout on the second floor. “I’d like to know who was staying in which room.”

“Sure.” He raised his eyes to the beamed ceiling and began to count off on his fingers. “In Sir Henry Vane Room is Lizzie. In John Biddle Room is Victor. In Duke of Hamilton Room is Julene and husband. In-”

Clapper crossed out the names he’d already written and put down his mechanical pencil. “No, those are the rooms they’re staying in this year. I meant two years ago. Where did they all stay then?”

“Oh, where they was staying then, ” Kozlov said. “Let me think.” He thought. He shrugged. “Who knows?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Nope.”

“What about you? Were you living on the floor above then, too?”

“Sure, this where I live.”

“But as for the attendees, you have no record of where they were?”

“For why I shall keep such records as this?”

“Mr. Moreton, would he know?”

“No. He was working for me since this year only.”

Clapper slipped the notepad and pencil into his pocket, already tasting the Gold Bond he’d be lighting up inside of two minutes, already feeling the cool, corky filter-end against his tongue.

“Well, not to worry,” he said, “we’ll ferret it out.”

“Ah, back, are you?” Merrill said brightly, glancing up from what had once been Joey Dillard but now looked like a gutted deer carcass. His scrubs bore the unappetizing effects of his work. (Gideon’s were as spotless as when he’d put them on.)

“Well, it’s pretty much as we thought,” the pathologist said, cheerfully wiping his hands on a towel provided by Rajiv. “Let me show you exactly what we found.”

Which he did. First, the shattered orbital roofs, now visible from above with the skullcap gone and the dura stripped from the base of Joey’s emptied cranium. “The result of contrecoup forces, no possible doubt about it.”

“Looks like it,” Gideon agreed. As they’d thought, it had been these fractures that had emptied blood into the orbital sockets and caused the massive black eyes.

Then, to a specimen jar on the nearby counter in which Joey’s brain was already suspended in formalin to solidify the tissue (the natural consistency of the human brain, as one of Gideon’s early anatomy professors had accurately but unfortunately pointed out, wasn’t all that different from that of Jell-O) so that it could later be sectioned.

“As you can plainly see,” Merrill said, “the frontal lobe shows the effects of those same forces. Massive trauma. Pulped right up to and beyond the anterior ascending rami of the lateral cerebral fissures. But in the back, we find that the direct impact of whatever caused the depressed fracture also resulted in severe, if less extensive, coup damage, the contused area involving the left superior parietal lobule and extending partway into the occipital lobe. So we have both contrecoup and coup injuries resulting from the same event. Not usual, but hardly unheard of. The result of brain ‘bounce-back, ’ generally speaking, but not, I believe, in this case.”

He cleared his throat, a long process heralding the coming of the windup. “My working conclusion is as follows: death from massive trauma to the brain resulting from a fall onto the back of the head, complicated by the intrusion of a relatively sharp object that had been lying on the paving-a wayward stone would be as good a guess as any. That’s all clear enough, isn’t it? Shall I take it out of the jar?”

Gideon’s answer was quick. “No, thank you, not necessary.”

Truth be told, he was having a hard time telling which end of the brain in the jar was the front and which was the back, let alone remembering what or where the anterior ascending ramus of the lateral cerebral fissure was. This, he thought, was a good lesson to him. All week he had been explaining away the ignorance of physicians in regard to bones, and although he had gone out of his way to be charitable, in his heart he’d been feeling mightily superior. Well, now he knew that what was true for them was true for him: even the most qualified experts knew only so much. They knew what they were familiar with, what interested them, what they worked with day to day. And to Gideon, who hadn’t held a human brain in his hands since graduate school, and who hoped never to do it again, that most definitely did not include the soft and squishy organs of the human interior.

But if Merrill said the brain injuries were thus and so, and covered such and such a surface area, he was certainly willing to accept it. What he was not willing to accept was the pathologist’s conclusion.

“I don’t think so, Wilson.”

Merrill scowled. “Don’t think what?”

“I don’t think that’s the way it happened.”

There were a few-a very few-forensic pathologists who enjoyed having their minds boggled, and their hypotheses overturned, and Wilson Merrill was one of them. Apparently, Gideon had lived up to expectations, and he was delighted. “I knew you’d say that! I was hoping you’d say that! Rajiv, didn’t I tell you he’d say that? All right, tell me, what have I gotten wrong?”

Gideon gestured at the skullcap, which he’d placed, still on its towel, exterior side up, on a corner of the instrument table. “There are two separate injuries here, not one.”

“Two?” Intrigued, Merrill peered down at it. “Good Lord, with all that disruption, how can you possibly tell? It all looks like one big mess to me.”

“No, if you look carefully, you can see two separate loci. There’s the depressed fracture, of course, here on the left parietal.”

“Yes, naturally. I see that.”

“And here, across the sagittal suture, on the right parietal, about three inches away, is another, separate point of impact with its own set of fracture lines. You see how the bone here broke up in a rough pattern of concentric circles: one, two, three rings”-he traced their shapes with his ballpoint-“in the center of which would be the impact point. And then there are all these linear fractures radiating every which way out of the rings, which is what complicates things.”

“By George, yes, I do see,” Merrill said. He mused, frowning. “ Two impact points. Two separate traumatic incidents. Well, then… well, then…” He looked up into the fluorescent lights for inspiration. “Might he not have somehow struck his head on that broken pipe on the way down-that would be the depressed fracture-and then struck it again when he hit the flat pavement below? Is that what happened, do you think?”