Aaron Elkins - Uneasy Relations

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… with this small remains?”

“It doesn’t look good, does it?” Gideon said with a sigh. “Is this it, then, Kaz? They didn’t come up with any more pieces of him?”

“No more pieces, but I got some of his liver and other organs” – another gesture of invitation toward the refrigerator – “if you want-”

Gideon fended him off with upraised hands. “ No! I mean, I wouldn’t know what to do with them. I meant bones. Especially pieces of the skull.”

Kaz shook his head. “I’m sorry, they find only this.”

“The cottage was a mess,” Fausto said. “Hardly anything standing. Roof collapsed, debris everywhere, all as burned up as he is, tons of water sloshed all over everything. Take you a year to try to find any bone at all, let alone from his skull. This is it, I’m afraid.”

Gideon nodded. He had made it all the way up to the table now. “Well, let’s see what we can see,” he said, not very hopefully.

“You would like lab coat?” Kaz asked. “Pair gloves?”

“I would love a pair of gloves, Kaz.”

Kaz gave him two pairs – since the advent of AIDS, wearing two sets instead of one had become common – which Gideon slipped on, not that the remains of Ivan Gunderson would be likely to pose any threat in that regard. Beside the table was a steel tray in which Kaz’s simple autopsy tools lay on a cloth: probes, scalpels, and the ubiquitous, wicked-looking, foot-long knife known familiarly as the “bread knife.” All the classic old instruments. Scissors, favored by most young pathologists nowadays, were not present. Gideon selected a dental pick, spatula-shaped at one end, hooked and pointed at the other, and bent over the ruins of the skull. Fausto stayed where he was, back a few feet, leaning against the sink. Kaz, anticipating edification, leaned keenly over the table from the other side. Gideon, for his part, would have been happy to edify, but the pickings looked slim; he might well be wasting everyone’s time.

He turned his attention to what was left of the skull, gently probing with the pick end of the probe. “So what we’ve got here is the base of the cranium from about the superior nuchal line on down,” he mused aloud, “with some of the heavy musculature – sternocleidomastoideus, masseter, trapezius – still adhering to the lower portions…”

Gingerly, he touched the gray-white, exposed bone with the tip of the probe. Bits of it crumbled away. “Upper parts are deeply burned, heavily calcined in places, graduating inferiorly to singed, buff-colored bone, and then to-” With the spatula end of the probe he prodded the surface of the burned musculature. The crusty top layer flaked off at the first touch, exposing a deeper stratum of red meat, much like – he couldn’t help thinking it – the middle of a rare, charcoal-broiled steak. When a bit of that too was picked and prodded away, fresh, ivory-colored, unharmed bone showed through. “-to muscle-protected, unburned bony tissue from about the zygomatic process and the supramastoid crest on down. The burned, exposed bone shows marked deformation at its upper margins, and there are two roughly parallel, roughly vertical linear fractures about three inches apart in the squamous portion of the temporal bone, both originating at the upper, burned, broken edge of the vault. The anterior one runs down in the general direction of the external auditory meatus, and the posterior one toward the occipito-temporal suture-” He poked a little more with the probe. “-or maybe the posterior portion of the mastoid process. It’s hard to see; the inferior portions of both fractures are hidden by the neck and jaw musculature.”

He was speaking basically for his own benefit. He worked better when he talked to himself. But Kaz was understandably under the impression that they were having a conversation.

“This cracking and warping,” he said sagely, colleague to colleague, “are, of course, what we would expect in thermal destruction of such magnitude, both from heat itself, and also from falling debris. ”

“Well, yes, sure,” Gideon said, his eye caught by something about the anterior fracture, the one that ran down in the direction of the auditory meatus – the opening for the ear. “But, you know, there are cracks… and there are cracks…”

“Ah, yes?” Kaz looked at him with a puzzled scowl. “Cracks and cracks?”

“Mmm.” Gideon fingered the crack in question. “You notice anything different about this one?”

“You mean compared to other one?”

Gideon nodded.

The young man stared painfully hard at it, working to come up with something. “Is a little wider than other?” he tried at last. “Almost like silver is missing from.”

Gideon frowned. “Pardon?”

“Almost like silver is missing,” Kaz repeated patiently and very slowly. He was used to his accent causing problems. “Silver. Of. Bone.” Silwer. Awv. Bawn.

“Silver of…?” a befuddled Gideon began.

“ Sliver, for Christ’s sake,” Fausto intervened. “What’s the matter, you don’t understand English?” Drawn by curiosity, he had come up to the table for a look too, although he kept his hands in his pockets to protect those taintless French cuffs.

“Silver, silver,” Kaz agreed. “Of bone.”

“Oh, yes, sliver,” Gideon said. “It does look like that, Kaz, as if a sliver, a splinter, has popped out. But that’s not why the crack is wider. It’s wider because-”

“Because the sides of it are all eaten away,” Fausto said, peering at it. “The other crack, it’s got these clean edges. You could fit the two sides right back together. But this one, you couldn’t. The sides are all, like, eroded.”

“Exactly,” Gideon said.

“Which means?”

“Well, let’s look at a little more of it before I go out on a limb. I want to see the whole length of the cracks. Kaz, would you mind removing the soft tissue around the base of the skull?” he asked brightly. “I’d do it myself, but I’m sure you’d be better at it.”

A snort from Fausto, and a contemptuous “Yeah, right.” Meanwhile, he himself had now returned to his spot a good five feet away.

“And be really careful with it, will you, Kaz? We don’t want to damage it any more than it already is.”

Kaz’s mobile features pulled together and darkened. “I will try my best,” he mumbled, believing his professional competence had been called into question.

“Sorry, Kaz,” Gideon said quickly. “I didn’t mean you had damaged it. I can see what a good job you’ve done with it so far. I know you’ll be careful. I don’t know what made me say that.”

He knew what had made him say it, all right. He knew that pathologists, with their natural focus on organs and soft tissue, could be downright careless about bone. Many a nick or scratch on a skeleton that had first been taken to be a sign of foul play had turned out in the end to be nothing more than the slip of a pathologist’s knife during the autopsy. And many a genuine sign of antemortem trauma had been obliterated or made unusable as evidence in the same way.

But Kaz was a meticulous dissector, his long, deft fingers slicing, tugging, and delicately scraping away with skill and control. In a few minutes the lower right-hand side of the skull was as clean as a scalpel could get it.

“Nicely done,” Gideon said truthfully, which mollified Kaz, assuming that his re-reddening ears could be taken as an indication.

Gideon leaned over the broken skull, breathing as shallowly as he could. Kaz’s scalpel had released a fresh puff of barbecue-grill aroma. But one quick look made him forget all about the odor. He’d come up with something, something crucial. A familiar and irrepressible feeling of satisfaction, almost of triumph, ran through him.

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