Aaron Elkins - Skull Duggery

He trailed off, thinking. “You know, there’s another possibility, Javier,” he said after a moment. “It’s probably more likely, now that I think of it-and that is that it’s the age he was mistaken about. Determining age is a lot harder than figuring out the sex.”

“Of course. With sex one has two possible choices. With age, there are many.”

“Yes, that’s part of it, but it’s also that the criteria are more complex. You have to know a lot more about skeletal development to read those epiphyseal unions than you do to evaluate the sex indicators.”

“So now you are suggesting that we may be dealing with a female after all, but an adult female?”

“Right. If she were an adult there wouldn’t have been much problem in properly determining the sex. Of course, if that’s true, then the police would still have gone off entirely in the wrong direction. They would have been investigating the murder of a child, when in reality it had been an adult.”

Marmolejo sighed, but he did it with a smile. “Gideon, I already begin to regret bringing you into it. Before, we were faced with trying to identify a female child. Now that you have looked into it, it seems we may be trying to identify a female child or a male child or a female adult. How is it,” he mused, probably thinking about the Yucatan case he had earlier been involved in with Gideon, “that the more information your expertise provides, the less information we seem to have?”

“Interestingly enough,” Gideon said, laughing, “you’re not the first person to make that observation. Well, look at it this way: at least I’ve eliminated the one remaining age-sex possibility. Assuming that Orihuela had any idea of what he was doing, which seems likely, you can forget about the category of adult male. You won’t have to waste any time exploring that particular avenue.”

“No,” Marmolejo said dryly. “Merely the other three.”

“What can I say?” Gideon said. “I sure wish I could have seen those bones myself.”

Marmolejo emitted a mild, interested “Ah?”

It seemed to Gideon that the colonel had something up his sleeve. “There wouldn’t be any photos in the file, would there?” he asked hopefully. “I might be able to tell something from them.”

“Unfortunately, there are none.”

Gideon spread his hands. “Well, then, I don’t know what else-”

“No, no photos were taken, alas. All we have are the bones themselves.”

Gideon blinked. “You still have them?”

“According to this file, we do.” He tapped a page in it. “Until this moment I was unaware of it myself.”

“And I could see them?”

Marmolejo smiled. “I suspect I can arrange it. When would you like to do it?”

“How about now? Who knows, I might be able to come up with something else as well.” He was three-quarters out of his chair.

“No, my friend, not so fast. They’re not here. According to this, they’re in a government warehouse in Xochimilco, north of the city. I can have them brought here on tomorrow’s morning run, which generally arrives in the early afternoon. Would you be free then? Say two o’clock, to be on the safe side? I have no doubt you will continue to astound and confound me with more of the wonderful osteological rabbits that you pull from your hat with such seeming ease.”

“I don’t know about the osteological rabbits,” Gideon said with a smile, “but yes, tomorrow afternoon is fine. Javier, why was the case closed after only a month? That’s pretty short for giving up on a murder investigation, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would.” He clapped his small, clean hands together soundlessly. “Let’s find out, shall we?”

He went to the door and opened it. “Alejandro, will you ask Sergeant Nava and Chief Sandoval if they would be kind enough to join us? Tell them I would like to talk about the young girl’s skeleton that was discovered last year near Teotitlan. Oh, and coffee for all, if you please. Espresso, I think.” To Gideon he said, “You will forgive me if I speak spanish. Nava has no English.”

“I’m sure I’ll be able to follow most of it.”

When the two entered a few moments later it was hard to tell who was more scared, Nava or Sandoval. Both seemed surprised when they were motioned to the armchair area and not the visitor’s chairs at the desk. Nava no longer had a gun stuck in his belt. Sandoval wouldn’t sit down until he was specifically asked to, and when the coffee arrived, he couldn’t quite make himself believe it was meant for him until Marmolejo personally poured it and slid a demitasse cup and saucer toward him.

“Chief Sandoval,” a smiling Marmolejo said, as Sandoval tremblingly lifted the cup to his lips, “I’ve been looking at the file concerning the case you were involved in last year. Perhaps you can tell us a little more about the circumstances under which the girl’s remains were found. You would know more about that than anyone else.”

With a visible effort, Sandoval managed to set the cup back on its saucer with only a minimum of clatter. “Well, there’s not much to tell, Sir. They were discovered when a Canadian tourist fell into an old mine in the hills about three kilometers east of my village.”

“And what type of mine was it? Copper? Silver? Gold?”

“It was an old silver mine, Colonel. They say it’s a thousand years old.” He paused. “La Mina de los Muertos.”

“The Mine of the Dead?” Marmolejo repeated in Spanish. “And why was it called that, do you happen to know?” Gideon could see that he was trying to set Sandoval at ease, asking questions he thought the man could answer.

“Oh, that’s not its real name,” said Sandoval, who did indeed seem to be growing more confident with this line of questioning. “I don’t think it has a name. People started calling it that maybe ten years ago, when someone found an old skeleton in it, in another passage.”

Marmolejo’s eyebrows drew together. “Do you mean another human skeleton?”

“Oh yes, but one of the Ancients, an Old One, you know? A thousand years old, maybe more.”

“Ah,” Marmolejo said with a sober little smile. “And now we find ourselves dealing with a New One, eh? A Young One. Well thank you, Chief. Now, Sergeant Nava, please tell me how it was it that you were made aware of these remains?”

The two men gradually relaxed further as Marmolejo asked his innocuous questions, gently and with no intimation of fault-finding or accusation, at least until he came to the crucial question.

“Sergeant Nava, can you enlighten me as to why the case was closed after a single month?”

Even before this, Nava’s huge, thick-fingered hand had been having trouble manipulating the tiny cup and saucer; watching him was like watching a trained bear trying to do some delicate trick that was too minuscule for his paw. Now he carefully, clumsily put them, clattering, down on the table. “It wasn’t closed, colonel,” he said, looking nervous again. “It was suspended.”

“Ah, suspended. I see. And can you tell me why it was suspended after a single month?”

“There was no place to go with it, sir. We couldn’t find out who the victim was. We looked through the records of three years ago, five years ago, eight years ago, to try to find a girl of that age who was missing. In all of Oaxaca we found no one it could possibly have been. And there were no clues-the murderer, the motive-nothing. And the case, it was so old-” Marmolejo made the smallest of gestures with his hand, only the faint shadow of a shushing gesture, but it was enough to stop Nava at once.

“What if it had been a boy, not a girl?” the colonel asked. “Would that have made a difference?”

“If it had been a-” A sweaty sheen had popped out on Nava’s forehead. “But the forensic report, it said-”