Aaron Elkins - Uneasy Relations

“On dead body, you mean? Because peoples, especially so many kids, always coming in-”

“On a dead body, yes,” Gideon said. “An autopsy.”

“Well… yes, this is true, but thermal injuries, they are covered in forensic course they send me to in London. But if I miss something, or if you have tip for me, I am standing all ears.”

Probably not the best metaphor in the world for you, Gideon thought with the slightest of smiles, but he had already taken a liking to this chatty, earnest, slightly goofy young Pole. At least he had the right attitude for a forensic pathologist. In Gideon’s experience, medical examiners and pathologists, unlike their police and prosecutorial brethren (to say nothing of the defense side), had little sense of turf, little desire to protect their jurisdictions. This wasn’t the first autopsy he’d horned in on, and almost always he’d been warmly welcomed. They were scientists, not advocates, that was the difference. Nothing to support, or justify, or protect. They were more interested in teaching – and learning – than in proving or vindicating.

“Well, I don’t know how many tips I can give you,” he said. “I’ve never actually performed an autopsy myself, you know.” (And with luck I never will, he added silently.) “I generally work with skeletal remains.”

“Sure, you bet, the Bone Doctor.”

Twice was too much for the irascible Fausto. “ Skeleton Detective. For Christ’s sake, Kaz.”

“Skeleton Detective, Skeleton Detective,” Kaz repeated, slapping himself on the side of the head to drive it in.

Continuing to bat himself on the temple – “Skeleton Detective, Skeleton Detective” – he led them out of the pleasant, fabric-walled anteroom, through a small, plain room lined with metal file cabinets, and with a large scale that took up most of the room implanted in the linoleum-covered floor; here, gurneys with bodies on them would be weighed and measured before being autopsied. A door on the far wall led into the tile-walled autopsy room itself – “Welcome to my world” said Figlewski – and the moment it opened Gideon was reminded of why he hated fire fatalities so much; maybe even more than decomps (although it was a close call).

The thing was, badly charred bodies smelled wonderful – walking into an autopsy room with one of them on the table was like walking into a weirdly sterile-looking steakhouse. And then you got up to the table and had to face the thing that lay on it. For Gideon, the war between the appetizing smell and his notoriously hair-trigger gag reflex made for a queasy and unsettling time of it.

“I told you,” said Fausto, referring to the paucity of remains lying on the slanting, zinc-topped table.

Gideon nodded, trying to quiet the churning in his midsection. Once he got down to work, it would pass, but for the moment, what was left of Ivan Gunderson was pretty off-putting. As Fausto had said, the body, lying on its back, looked more like a charred chunk of wood – a piece of driftwood that had been used more than once as part of a campfire on the beach – than what had once been a human being. That was the bad part. It was also the good part, in that there was nothing at all in this blackened, desiccated hulk to make him think of Ivan. It might have been anybody. It might almost have been anything.

As Fausto had told him, there was nothing that anyone could call a face. Only the back parts of the palate and mandible were left, with a few heat-shattered molars. This was a common result in fires. The human face and cranial vault are “protected” only by some of the thinnest muscles in the entire body. Lower down, along the sides of the head and in back, where the heavier musculature of the jaw and the neck do afford some protection, both soft and skeletal tissue generally fare somewhat better. And this was the case here. The base of the cranium, thick to begin with, and shielded by dense muscles as well, was still present, but only as an empty, bowl-shaped basin with some blackened soft tissue – not soft anymore – still left on the outside. If there had been any brain tissue left inside, which was unlikely, Kaz had removed it during the autopsy.

As for the rest of the body, Fausto had been right about that too. There wasn’t much to see. One of his more lyrical anthropologist friends, Stan Rhine, had likened the appearance of a body as badly burned as this one to a derelict old sailing ship, dismasted and cast up on a beach somewhere, its curved, broken old ribs jutting up from the sands. The image had stuck with Gideon, and in Ivan’s case, it was particularly apt. “The body was burned beyond recognition” would have been putting it mildly.

“Well,” Gideon said, steeling himself. He stood a couple of feet from the table, looking down at it.

Kaz was on the other side of it, watching expectantly. Fausto was leaning back against a stainless steel sink four or five feet away, his arms folded. Gideon doubted that this tough little cop was worried about his stomach. More likely, he didn’t want to chance getting anything nasty on his pale blue, nubby linen suit or the soft, immaculate French cuffs of his buff-colored silk shirt. Gideon wished he could work from five feet away too.

“Tell me what you know so far, Kaz,” Gideon said.

“Well, we establish already that he is alive at time of fire-”

“How do you know that?”

“Elevated carbon monoxide level in blood. He is still breathing when fire started, for sure.”

Gideon looked down at the dried, crusted remains. “You were able to get blood?”

“Blood, yes, even urine. There was congealed mass of soft tissue in pelvic cavity – liver, colon…”

“And you already have the results?”

Fausto answered for him. “Told you, there isn’t too much going on here. Getting lab results in a hurry isn’t a problem.”

“What was the level?” Gideon asked.

“Fifty-five percent,” said Kaz.

“Enough to kill a man his age,” Gideon said.

“Oh, yes, for sure.”

“So is that your best guess? He died of smoke inhalation?”

“Oh, yes. For sure.”

“Okay, what else?” Gideon edged a step closer to the table. He liked to approach these things in stages, working his way up to the corpse. For him, it made it easier to take, like getting into cold water a few inches at a time, getting used to the shock, and then going in deeper.

“Else?” Kaz scratched his head. “Not so much, really. Uh, he was lying on back, in bed, during fire – I find pieces of melted, what do you call it, springs from bed, buried in soft tissue on back of hips and shoulders. And, well…”

“How sure are you that it’s him – Gunderson?” Gideon asked, looking down at the body, his hands still in back of him. It wasn’t that unusual for unrecognizable remains to turn out to belong to other people than were first assumed. While the fact that he had been found in Gunderson’s bed made it likely that he was indeed Ivan Gunderson, it wasn’t exactly proof. And nobody had identified this body by looking at it, that was for sure.

“One hundred percent,” Fausto answered for Kaz. “That’s one thing we’re sure about.”

“Was his teeth,” Kaz said. “Mostly broken or gone, yes, but two back ones, upper molar threes, are still okay, and we bring his dentist here first thing this morning to see them. A positive identification.”

Gideon shook his head admiringly. “You guys do work fast,” he said. Another step closer to the table.

“Wasn’t that hard,” Fausto said. “Total of twenty-four dentists in Gib. Took about fifteen minutes to find Gunderson’s. And he wasn’t doing anything else this morning.”

“So where you go from here?” Kaz asked. “You can do something with