Aaron Elkins - Skull Duggery

“Chief, could you possibly get me a flashlight of some kind?”

“But I want to know-”

“Please.”

Sandoval, having little choice, gave up ungracefully. “They got some work lamps in the other room,” he said grudgingly.

“No, I want something small, something I can move around inside the torso. The smaller the better. And if you can find a magnifying glass, that’d be helpful too.”

“Okay, okay,” he snapped. He turned on his heel, stomped into the equipment room next door, and returned in a few seconds. “Is this small enough?”

“Perfect,” said Gideon. It was a tiny but piercingly bright single-cell Maglite flashlight, the kind that was made to carry on a key ring. “Couldn’t have picked a better one myself.” Sandoval had brought a magnifying glass as well, an old-fashioned round one with a metal frame and a wooden handle.

He flicked the light on, rotated the knurled head to focus the output into a narrow beam, picked up the magnifying glass, and went to work.

“Ah,” he murmured. “Mm. Sonofagun.”

“What? What is it?” pleaded Sandoval.

But Gideon in the midst of a skeletal examination was not easy to reach. “Oho,” he said. “So.” And looked up at the ceiling, cogitating.

At which point Chief Sandoval came to the end of his tether. “What is it?” he cried in a strangled voice. “What have you found? Was he murdered or was he not?”

“Let me just see if-”

“Por favor, senor-si o no?”

Gideon sighed. From Sandoval’s point of view, that was of course the critical question. It was naturally enough a question that he got asked a lot by cops, and it was one that he couldn’t, in all truth, answer definitively; then, or now, or ever. He was a physical anthropologist. What he knew was bones. Sure, he was often able to say with confidence that a skeletal wound was made (or wasn’t made) by bullet, knife, or club, but the absence of such wounds on the skeleton was hardly evidence of non murder. The rib cage is made more of air than of bone. There is plenty of room between the ribs for blades or bullets to find their way to the vital organs.

On the other side of the coin, no skeletal wound that he did find was unconditional proof of murder. In themselves, broken bones don’t kill people. Sure, a bullet-shattered skull was a pretty good clue that you had a homicide on your hands, but even then it wasn’t the damage to the skull, but to the brain, that was the immediate cause of death-or, as forensic pathologists had it in one of their more charming locutions, was “incompatible with life.” Broken bones, even if you break all two hundred and six of them, are not a good thing to have, but they are not “incompatible with life.” Not strictly.

But there was no point in going into all this with Sandoval. He answered as truthfully and simply as he could: “I think so. Yes.”

The air went out of Sandoval. “I see,” he said wretchedly. Then, as an apathetic afterthought: “How then was he killed?”

“I need to do a little more work on the body,” Gideon said instead of answering. “Do you think you could find me a screwdriver next door?”

Sandoval stared at him. “A what?”

“A…” Gideon groped for the Spanish word. “Un… un desarmador,” he said, amazing himself by plucking it out of whatever dim neural recess it had been hiding in, patiently waiting to be summoned, probably for the first time since he’d learned it decades ago. A wonderful thing, the human mind.

“Un DESARMADOR?” Sandoval bleated, no less bewildered.

After a couple of frustrated seconds, Gideon realized that this time it wasn’t a question of Sandoval’s not understanding, it was a question of not believing what he was hearing. First a pair of shears, now a screwdriver; what next, a hammer and nails?

Gideon couldn’t help smiling. “Right, can you get me one? Not the flat-bladed kind, the Phillips head. Feeyeeps,” he amended, giving the spelling his best Spanish pronunciation.

“Feeyeeps,” Sandoval echoed robotically. “Si. Un desarmador de cruz.” He turned toward the door.

“And a piece of wood.”

“And a piece of wood,” Sandoval said, beyond astonishment now. “Sure. What kind of wood? How big?”

“It doesn’t matter. Any old piece of scrap lumber. A board.”

His actions, when Sandoval came back and handed the items to him, proved that Sandoval was not beyond astonishment after all. The screwdriver and the board, a foot-long piece of whatever the metric equivalent of a two-by-four was, were taken to the sink, where the board was placed on the sturdy counter beside the basin. Gideon picked up the screwdriver, raised it over his head, and drove it hard into the board. A second time. A third. Sandoval watched, openmouthed.

Gideon held the board up to examine it. “Mm,” he said inscrutably. “Let’s go back to the body now.”

He stood gazing down once more at Manuel Garcia. He had already satisfied himself that there were no other visible perforations in the hide; just the wound in the chest. But the left arm, extending rigidly down and slightly forward along the left side, partially blocked his view of the axilla-the armpit-and the area just below it, and this was a region Gideon particularly wanted to see now. Placing one hand on Garcia’s left shoulder joint to steady the body, he used the other to grasp the left arm just above the elbow and began to pull gingerly.

Nothing happened. Barely any give at all. Cowhide-stiffened cowhide-was in fact very much what the body felt like. He took his stance again, set his feet, grasped the arm more firmly Sandoval flinched and paled. “I think I need to go to the police station for a few minutes now,” he murmured, hurrying the words. “There are things that must be attended to. Would that be all right?” He was already making for the door. “I’ll only be a couple minutes,” he yelled over his shoulder and was gone.

“Take your time,” Gideon said, envying him. He wouldn’t have minded leaving for this part too. The bones in mummified remains had been known to snap when you tried to move the limbs, and he was all set to flinch himself-he was already flinching mentally-if that were to happen. He took in a breath, held it, and pulled harder, steadily and slowly bearing down on the shoulder joint. Something-not bone, thank God-gave, and the arm moved an inch, two inches. Enough. It remained in the position to which he’d pulled it. The humerus hadn’t broken or popped out of its socket.

He let out his breath, wiped off the sheen of sweat that had beaded on his forehead, and bent to see under the arm. The skin there had folded over itself in the process of loosening and mummifying, and it took him a good ten minutes to pry the fold apart with his fingers so that he could see what might be hidden within. He was just straightening up when he heard Sandoval’s car pull up outside the building. The chief, who’d been gone about twenty minutes, came in, preceded by a wintergreen gust of Pepto-Bismol. He had brought two cardboard cups of still-steaming cappuccino, one of which he handed to Gideon, who gratefully gulped half of it down. The Sacred Bean Cafe was the logo on the side.

“Pretty good, huh?” Sandoval said with a reasonable semblance of cheer.

“It sure is. Thanks.”

“See, didn’t I tell you?” The break and the Pepto-Bismol had done him good. While hardly happy with the way things were going, he did seem reconciled to his fate.

For a while they stood beside the table, companionably drinking their coffees.

“So, profesor, he was murdered? That’s it?”

Again, Gideon gave him the short answer. “I believe so. Someone did their best, that’s for sure. But not with a gun.”

“But how? If not by bullet, then by what? Show me.”