Aaron Elkins: Skull Duggery

But then he’d never meant to become a forensic anthropologist, had he? A quiet, scholarly career as a professor of physical anthropology was more what he’d had in mind. His doctoral dissertation had been on early Plestocene hominid locomotion, and he had assumed his subsequent teaching and research would keep him immersed in the femurs, pelves, and tibias of that period, a comfortable million or so years back. Indeed, his academic life had done just that. But physical anthropology professors were necessarily expert “bone readers,” and like others in the field, he had been called on to put this expertise to more contemporary uses. And in truth, it had proven fascinating, if sometimes stomach-churning, this scientific detective work. Nowadays, to his own surprise, he felt himself a little at loose ends if he wasn’t involved in some forensic case or another.

And, as Julie suggested, it was never very long before one came and found him. Even in Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico.

Sandoval, a small, soft, nervous, harried sort of man who reminded Gideon strongly of someone-he couldn’t put his finger on whom-had filled him in on the finding of the body and on Dr. Bustamente’s conclusions concerning it. Now, gloved hands behind his back-a pair of disposable gloves had been provided for him-Gideon stood looking at it from three or four feet away, the chief fidgeting away at his side. The earthly remains of Manuel Garcia, if that was really his name, were lying mostly on their right side on the chipped, enameled tabletop-a type of embalming table that had been up-to-the-minute a hundred years ago. One knee was drawn up, the other extended. The left arm, twisted so that the palm faced up, was stiffly stretched along the left side and down toward the drawn-up knee, the right arm hidden beneath the body.

Below the waist, the left side-the uppermost side-had rotted away here and there, allowing glimpses of the skeletal underpinnings-the sharp rim of the innominate, the knobby, yellow, lateral condyles of the femur and tibia. A couple of inches above the knee, the bone had once suffered a break, possibly when he’d been a child. It had healed a long time ago, but it had been badly set, or more likely not set at all, so that there was a kink in the bone, an angle that didn’t belong there.

“Healed transverse fracture, distal third of the right femoral shaft,” he murmured automatically, making mental notes for his report. “Fully remodeled but poorly set, with medial and cranialward displacement of the distal segment.”

“What?” Sandoval said, alarmed.

“It’s nothing to do with his death,” Gideon said. “I was just thinking out loud.”

The right side appeared to be intact. The face too was intact but much shriveled, so that the mustache looked outlandishly big-a Mario Brothers mustache, a Groucho Marx mustache-and the strong, crooked, brown teeth were bared in what looked like a snarl. The eye sockets, of course, were empty. stiff whitish hairs bristled around the mouth. The feet were nothing but bones and ligaments, with no skin on them at all.

He moved a little closer, hands still behind his back (he had learned that he did better when he approached this kind of thing gradually). The musty smell became more noticeable, mostly, he thought, because the interior of the thorax was open to the air. Dr. Bustamente had not used the Y-incision typical of autopsies, in which the arms of the Y begin at the lateral ends of the collar bones and come together at the sternum, and the tail runs from there down the center of the abdomen, all the way to the pubis, usually with a neat little jig to spare the navel. The resulting flaps can then be peeled back to expose the insides. Instead, Bustamente had simply hacked a rough oval all the way around the perimeter of the chest and the upper part of the abdomen, and pulled off the entire front wall of the body. He had used a pair of shears, a still-shaken Sandoval had told him. Shears! As if he were cutting up a hunk of cowhide for a saddle!

But with mummified remains, Gideon knew, such a procedure wasn’t unusual. On a body like Garcia’s, the hide was thick and hard enough to take the edge off a scalpel after one swipe, and the flaps were almost impossible to bend and peel back away from the sternum. Using a sturdy pair of shears to remove the entire chest wall in one piece was the simplest route, and Bustamente had taken it.

He took the final step necessary to reach the table and leaned over the remains. There were no identifiable internal organs to be seen; no heart, no lungs, no liver, no adrenals, no kidneys, only some dry, blackened, anonymous lumps of tissue sticking to the ribs and inner wall of the hide here and there. It was a picture-book stage C4 of the Galloway categorization of mummified remains: “Mummification of tissues with internal organs lost through autolysis or insect activity.”

The rib cage seemed to be complete, although it had suffered many fractures. Most of the ribs had snapped, some at multiple points. It took an enormous amount of force to do this much damage, Gideon knew. The rib cage was the most flexible bony assemblage in the body (if it weren’t, breathing would be a bit tricky). With much of it made of highly elastic cartilage, it gave before it bent, and it bent before it cracked, and it cracked before it snapped.

“The cliff he was found at the base of; how high was it?”

Sandoval shrugged. “Not so very high, perhaps fifteen meters.”

Fifteen meters. Five stories, more or less. That was more than enough to do this kind of damage. Bustamente had probably been correct about his having fallen from the top, or at any rate from some considerable height. Either that, or, like the unlucky guy in the saturday morning cartoons, he’d been walking under that upper-story window just when the safe fell out of it.

“He was found on his left side, I take it?” Gideon said.

The question startled the jittery, preoccupied Sandoval, made him jump. “Let me think… yes, on his left side. How did you know?”

“Well, because that side didn’t get as mummified; it’s more eaten away. That’s because the bugs that do the work were more protected from the sun’s dehydration.”

“I see. Yes.”

Gideon still hadn’t moved. “What was he wearing, Chief?”

“Wearing?” Sandoval was impatient. It was help he wanted from Gideon, not more questions. “I don’t know… clothes… What difference does it make?”

“It’d be nice to see if there are any bullet holes in them, even blood, perhaps. The policia ministerial will want them too. Do you still have them?”

Sandoval’s stricken look was answer enough. “Dr. Bustamente, he didn’t say… So I just… I just… Really, there wasn’t much left, only a few shreds…”

“What was he wearing on his feet, do you remember?”

“On his feet? I don’t know, sandals, like anybody else. It was warm.”

“Are you sure? Not shoes? Boots, maybe?”

“No, I’m not sure,” Sandoval said querulously. “What difference does that make? Who cares…” His brow furrowed, then smoothed. “Yeah, you’re right. Boots-leather boots, up to his ankles. I helped Dr. Bustamente take them off. But how do you know that?”

“Same reasoning, nothing mysterious. The feet are almost completely skeletonized. See, the heavy leather acts as a kind of umbrella against the sun. The tissues stay moist, and the maggots and beetles can work away on them at leisure. Bodies that are heavily clothed don’t mummify. On the other hand, of course, you’re pretty unlikely to find heavily clothed bodies in environments that are conducive to mummification in the first place, so-”

But he had lost Sandoval, who was getting squirmier by the moment and making the kinds of faces that go along with a growing stomachache. Clearly the chief was anxious for him to stop talking and get on with it.