Aaron Elkins - Skull Duggery

“Oh, I’ve given up cigar smoking. At my age, one has to care for one’s health.”

Gideon couldn’t help laughing. “You mean cigar holding,” he said. The Marmolejo he remembered had always had a cigar around, all right, but it was strictly a prop cigar. Gideon couldn’t remember ever seeing him light it.

Happily chuckling, Marmolejo took him by the arm to a grouping of handsome leather armchairs and a low table in a corner of the room near the windows. “My old friend, I was amazed-thrilled, as you can imagine, but amazed-to see your name on the report. What in the world brings you to Oaxaca?”

“I’m here on vacation, Javier. Julie is filling in for her cousin at a resort in Teotitlan, and I’m along for the ride. But I still don’t-”

Marmolejo laughed and held up Gideon’s report. “And this is how you spend your vacation? Performing forensic analyses on corpses? Well, I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“Well… this just came along. I mean, I just happened to be… Hey, never mind about me. What are you doing here? The last time I saw you…”

The last time he’d seen him had been in Merida, on the Yucatan Peninsula, where he had been an inspector in the Yucatecan State Judicial Police. Gideon had met a lot of interesting and unusual policemen in his life, but Javier Alfonso Marmolejo took the cake, a real one of a kind. Half Mayan Indian, born in his Mayan mother’s village of Tzakol, a huddle of dilapidated shacks near the Quintana Roo border (Gideon had been there once; what he chiefly remembered were the pigs sunning themselves in the middle of the single, muddy street), Marmolejo had not learned Spanish until he was seven, when his father moved the family to Merida. At ten, he was one of the army of rascally, going-nowhere kids selling takeaway snacks of sliced coconuts and grapefruit and orange slices from homemade carts around the main market square. Against all odds, he had gotten himself through school and saved enough to buy his way into the then graft-riddled Yucatecan police department. A drastic cleanup a few years later had resulted in throwing out half the police force, but Marmolejo’s integrity and abilities had been recognized and he’d been kept on. A few years later he’d graduated from the national police academy in Mexico City-one of the few provincial cops to do so, and probably the first Mayan Indian-and, in his forties, had gone on to a master’s degree in public administration from the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan. He’d studied English and German, he’d become an educated man, and now, in his mid-fifties, here he was a full-fledged “…full-fledged colonel!” Gideon said. “In Oaxaca, five hundred miles from Merida. How did that happen?”

“A thousand, actually,” Marmolejo said. “And although I am indeed a full-fledged colonel, as you are generous enough to point out, I am not a colonel in the Oaxacan police force but in the PFP, the Federal Preventive Police, to which I applied three years ago and to which I was subsequently admitted. My assignment to Oaxaca is a temporary one.” He eyed Gideon, his head cocked. “Why are you smiling?”

Gideon was smiling because he was remembering a comment a mutual friend had once made about the striking incongruity between Marmolejo’s furtive, cunning appearance and his often elegant English: “You look at the man and you expect ‘I don’ got to show you no steenkin’ bedge.’ Instead, you get Ricardo Montalban.” And he was smiling because he was still thinking about the absent cigar, remembering Marmolejo’s uncanny ability to have an unlighted one wedged in his mouth on and off throughout the day without making a gummy, oozy mess out of it. Unlike most unlit-cigar fanciers, he didn’t chew on the things any more than he actually smoked them. There had been a running joke about it in Yucatan: Do you think he really has more than one cigar, or is that the same one he brings with him every day?

“I’m smiling because I’m just so damn glad to see you again,” Gideon said, which was also true enough on its own. “But go ahead. If you’re with the federales, what are you doing behind a desk in Oaxaca?”

His responsibilities with the PFP, Marmolejo explained, involved straightening out local police forces with less than stellar reputations, an assemblage in which the Oaxacan policia ministerial was-or at any rate, had been-a prime member. The initial impetus for sending him here had come in 2006, when federal police more or less had to take over the city during a string of violent antipolice protests with which the local police couldn’t cope. In the aftermath, the feds had concluded that a general housecleaning was in order and Marmolejo had been one of three experienced federal cops temporarily assigned to high-level line positions in Oaxaca. He functioned as the titular head of homicide investigations, but his primary responsibility was to mount a thorough review of past cases. The Oaxaca police, beset by graft, negligence, and plain old bungling, had a sorry history of dubious case closures and unresolved investigations, and it was Marmolejo’s job to dig out the worst of them and rectify what could be rectified. Not only could he reopen old investigations; he’d been given full authority to demote, indict, or summarily boot out dishonest, obstructive, and incompetent cops. He had in fact, done exactly that with his predecessor in this fine office, the notorious, corrupt, and roundly hated Colonel Salvador Archuleta, at that time the second most powerful cop in Oaxaca.

No wonder Sergeant Nava wanted to keep on his good side.

“Interestingly enough,” Marmolejo told him, “one of these ‘cold cases,’ as you call them, and a relatively recent one at that, involves this same village of Teotitlan and this same Chief Sandoval of yours. I was looking at it only this morning.”

“Yes, he was telling me about it.” Gideon hesitated. “I can’t say he was too happy with the way the police ran things then. He’s petrified at the idea of going through it again.”

Marmolejo nodded. “I’ve been going over it, and I can’t say that I’m too happy with it either. And as you might guess, it is a case that disturbs me deeply.”

“It does? Why?”

Marmolejo scowled. The question surprised him. “Why? A young girl, an innocent barely into her teenage years, murdered after God knows what was done to her, her body callously thrown down a mine shaft and left for the worms? An investigation ended after a single month, with the child never identified, with no one charged, no credible suspects named? How can I not be disturbed?”

“I see. I didn’t know she was so young.”

“Yes, only thirteen or fourteen. Or so the forensic report concluded. The remains had been there for some time, you see. They were skeletonized.”

“It was a skeleton?” Again Gideon hesitated, not wanting to give offense. But being Gideon, he was interested. “Um, are you sure it was a girl? I mean, when you’re dealing with someone as young as that, determining sex from the skeleton can be tricky.”

“Can it?” Marmolejo asked. “I didn’t realize.”

“More than tricky, really. You see, if the secondary sexual characteristics-the ones on the outside-haven’t fully developed yet, the skeletal indicators aren’t all that reliable either. In fact, until you get to eighteen or so, you’re on pretty thin ice when it comes to sex. I mean, a competent anthropologist might be maybe sixty or seventy percent confident, but that’s not good enough to be much use in an investigation, and it’s sure not good enough to go into court with.”

“You don’t think so? If all my leads had a sixty or seventy percent chance of proving accurate, I would be a happy man. And a far more successful policeman.”

“Not when it comes to sexing a skeleton. Look at it this way. sixty percent right means forty percent wrong. But there are only two sexes to begin with, so you can do damn near as well flipping a coin, and it’s a whole lot less work.”