Aaron Elkins - Skull Duggery

Gideon guessed that there was little genuine interest behind the request, that Sandoval was merely playing the role that he thought was expected of him as police chief. But then Gideon wasn’t a man who needed a lot of coaxing when it came to providing skeletal edification. To ask was to receive.

“Sure, I’ll show you. Take a look at this.” He grasped the rear segment of the seventh rib and pulled it slightly forward. “What do you see?”

Sandoval studied it. “A hole,” he replied sensibly.

“But not all the way through.”

“No, not all the way through.”

“But almost through.” Gideon turned on the Maglite and held it behind the rib. “See? Look into the hole. You can see that some light comes through.”

“Ye-es,” Sandoval said slowly, peering hard. Perhaps, thought Gideon, he really has gotten interested, or at any rate curious. “I can see a little point of light, where the bone is just barely broken all the way through.”

“It’s not just a pinpoint, Chief. Use the magnifying glass.” Gideon kept the flashlight steady behind the rib. “What’s it shaped like?”

Sandoval peered through the glass. His eyes widened. “Ah, I see. It’s… I don’t know… it’s like a, like a tiny star… no, like a little equis.”

Equis. The Spanish word for the letter X.

“Yes, that’s one way to describe it,” Gideon said. “Or you could call it a cross?”

“I suppose so, yes.”

“And when I asked you for a Phillips-head screwdriver a little while ago, you called it un desarmador de…?”

“De cruz.” Sandoval’s eyes widened. He straightened up. “Cross! A cross-shaped screwdriver!” He bent to stare through the lens again. “Then a screwdriver made this hole?”

For an answer Gideon held up the board for him to see the indentations the screwdriver had made. Each thrust had left a neat little X -shaped dent in the wood, all identical to one another and almost exactly like the one in the rib. The conclusion was inescapable. Garcia had been stabbed, at least once, with a Phillips-head screwdriver, which had penetrated the front of the rib, its tip breaking through the back just enough to leave its X -shaped perforation. The initial X -shaped perforation in front had, of course, been obliterated by the round shaft as the thrust continued.

Sandoval straightened up, his forehead wrinkling. “Stabbed to death by a screwdriver…” He scowled. “But wait-there is no wound in the skin, no entrance wound. How can-?”

“Ah, but there is an entrance wound,” Gideon said. “Three of them, in fact.”

He showed Sandoval what he had found under the arm: a cluster of three tiny black holes in the armpit.

“They’re so small,” Sandoval said.

“They were small enough to start with, so they were able to contract and close up a little afterward,” said Gideon. Whichever one made the hole in the rib would probably have gone through the lungs and the heart and thus killed him. Even if it hadn’t, he could very well have bled to death.

Sandoval still looked puzzled. “But to be stabbed in the, the…” He sought the English word and failed. “En el sobaco.” He indicated his own armpit. “ Three times! Why would… how would…”

“It’s not that uncommon,” Gideon said. “Someone tries to stab you, you throw up your arm to protect yourself-” He demonstrated. “And, ouch, that’s where you wind up getting it.”

“I see. Yes, it’s all very interesting.” He thought for a moment. “Profesor-”

“Please, call me Gideon.”

Sandoval responded with a cautious smile. “Flaviano.” Self-consciously, very formally, they shook hands. “You know… Gideon… I must file a report on this. What you told me-the ribs, entry wounds, exit wounds-I don’t know if I can explain-”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ll write it all up for you to include with your report. It’ll have to be in English, though. My Spanish isn’t good enough for material like this.”

“Thank you. When do you think you could do this?”

“I can do it right now, if you like.”

“Ah, good. The policia ministerial, they won’t be happy if I wait too long.” He sighed softly.

Mention of the policia ministerial put an end to his relative good humor, which had been ebbing anyway over the last few minutes.

“Well, look at the bright side,” Gideon said, taking a page from Julie’s playbook.

“Yes? What is the bright side?”

“You have the satisfaction of knowing Dr. Bustamente’s findings are dead wrong.”

That earned a twinkle of the eye and a furtive little grin. “Well,” Sandoval said, cheered at least a little, “let’s go back to the police station now. You can use the computer there. But first, lunch.”

There were only two restaurants in the village, both on the main street, Avenida Juarez, and Sandoval took Gideon to the Restaurante el Descanso, the smaller and simpler of the two, a clean, plain place-in the United States, it might have been called a deli-bakery-where Sandoval had a hamburger and Gideon got a bowl of creamy Oaxacan-style gazpacho, made with eggs and sour cream, and garnished with jicama and cumin-coated tortilla chips. When asked, he said, truthfully enough, that it was delicious. Sandoval made a show of insisting on picking up the tab, but if any money changed hands, Gideon never saw it.

From there, they walked the two blocks to the Palacio del Gobierno, a stuccoed one-story building where police headquarters, consisting of two currently empty jail cells, a hallway with two desks jammed side-to-side against the wall, and the chief’s “private” office (doorless), were housed. One of the hallway desks had a fairly new Dell computer on it, and Gideon was seated there to write up his report. A baby-faced police officer offered him a cup of coffee from the countertop coffeemaker, but Sandoval, standing behind him, made head-shaking, throat-cutting motions warning him otherwise, and he politely declined and got to work. AN hour later, Gideon was done. Most of the time had been wasted in trying to put together something close to his usual forensic report, covering all the typical bases: age, sex, condition of the body, old broken leg, and so on, but all of this wound up being deleted. In the first place, he hadn’t been asked to do, and hadn’t done, anything approaching a thorough examination. In the second, the state police, the policia ministerial, were sure to pursue this more thoroughly on their own, with their own experts. Third, and most important, they hadn’t asked for his help and weren’t anticipating it. Gideon, sensitive from long experience to issues of turf, decided it would be less than tactful to unexpectedly dump a formal, jargon-loaded case report, written by a prying, meddlesome Yanqui, into their laps. Sandoval would surely take the heat for it, and Sandoval was worried enough already.

With reason, Gideon thought. From what he’d heard and read about them, the Oaxacan state police were, or were alleged to be, a belligerent, thuggish bunch with a reputation for being easy to irritate and quick to anger. In the end, he boiled it down to a single unvarnished paragraph with a minimum of inferences:

On December 14, 2008, I was requested by Flaviano Sandoval, chief of police, Teotitlan del Valle, to examine a mummified body found in the nearby countryside. This brief examination was made after an earlier partial autopsy by Dr. Ignacio Bustamente, medico legista, Tlacolula District. It is my opinion that the deceased was stabbed at least three times with a Phillips-head screwdriver (un desarmador de cruz), the entry wounds clustered in the left axilla. One of these thrusts left a diagnostic, X-shaped perforation in the vertebral portion of the left seventh rib. The deceased also suffered massive trauma to the thorax in the form of severe compression of the rib cage, resulting in numerous injuries, one of which was a compound fracture that punctured the chest wall below and medial to the left nipple.