Aaron Elkins - Twenty blue devils

Bone, ligament, and cartilage were all the same color: an ivory-brown, somewhat lighter than the surrounding soil, but with the same reddish tinge.

"Here's where we get the trowels out,” Gideon said. “We want to more or less scrape the dirt away layer by layer-carefully, a few millimeters at a time. You work up from the knee. I'll work down from the head region."

John studied the bone from several different angles. “Which way's up?"

"Behind you.” Gideon tossed him a few wooden tongue depressors from the sack. “When you're anywhere near the body, use these or your fingers. And we just want to uncover it; don't try to dig it out."

Gideon quickly troweled down to the level at which he thought the skull would be, then laid the metal tool aside and worked through the soil with his fingers. Within seconds he touched a hard, curving surface.

"Skull,” he said.

John troweled for a few seconds longer, then silently put down the tool and watched.

It took only another few minutes, working with fingers, tongue depressor, and a two-inch-wide paintbrush, to expose the area from the crown of the head to the throat.

"Jeez,” said John when he got a good look.

Jeez is right, thought Gideon. The head, not as skeletonized as the knee, was horror-movie stuff, with greasy rags and scraps of red-brown tissue clinging to the bone. A few clumps of hair, still blond in places but already fading to a dingy reddish brown, adhered to the sides of the skull. Where the nose and eyes had been were black holes with dried larval casings in them. The throat musculature had congealed into an unrecognizable, Iiver-colored mass, the mandible gaping and disarticulated from the skull.

John stared at it, obviously shaken. Below his eyes, under the natural bronze of his skin there was a muddy pallor that Gideon had never seen before. “God,” he murmured.

They had looked at more than one decomposing body together before, and if anybody was going to get queasy it could always be counted on to be Gideon; by now it was a running joke between them. But John had never before had to look at someone he'd known closely-one of the family-in this condition. Gideon had, and he remembered what it felt like.

"Listen,” he said gently, “why don't I just finish up here myself? The hard work's done anyway; you'll just get in the way from here on. Take a walk and come back, oh, in half an hour, and I'll tell you if-"

But John, still staring at the skeleton-face, was shaking his head. “It's my fault for getting us into this. I'll stick around. I owe you that much."

"Oh, hell,” Gideon said, “don't start making me feel guilty. If I didn't think it was the right thing to do, all I had to say was no."

"You did say no."

"Well, all I had to do was say it two or three times, then. And I didn't. Because it is the right thing to do."

"Thanks, Doc.” John smiled wanly.

"He was blond, wasn't he?” Gideon asked after a moment. John nodded.

"What about the diastema? Does that look right?"

"Diastema, what the hell is a diastema?"

Gideon gestured at the skull. “That space between his front teeth."

"Yeah, he did have a space between his-oh, I see what you mean. Look at that.” He rubbed his hand back and forth over his eyes. “Look, on second thought maybe I'll go sit under a tree and cool off for a couple of minutes. It's just so…I mean, to see him like this…you know, he was so…"

"Go, already,” Gideon said gruffly. “Here, take some water."

He went back to work. There had been no bonding; the cool soil came away easily in his fingers. And, thank God, there was little stench, no more than an earthy, tomblike odor with only a vague, intermittent edge of rankness. Just your basic, everyday grave smell.

In fifteen minutes John strode back looking his old steadfast self, picked up his tools without a word, and got to work on the lower half of the body. Twenty minutes after that the two of them sat back on their heels to catch their breath and use their wadded shirts to swab perspiration from neck, back, and forehead. The entire upper surface of the body was now exposed, and Gideon took his first long, considered look at it.

Brian was dressed in the T-shirt and shorts that Gideon remembered from the morgue photos. Either he'd been put back into the clothes he'd been wearing when he'd died or he had never been undressed at all. The shirt, stiff with dried blood to begin with, was now black with mold as well, the shorts speckled with blotches of gray-green fungus. Most of the body's soft tissue, as he'd expected, was gone. What was left was rotted to tatters in some places, gummy and shriveled in others. Still, getting down to clean bone for even a cursory examination wasn't the sort of thing that could be accomplished in a few minutes or even a few hours, especially under that roasting pan of a roof. Other things aside, they'd have heat prostration before they were halfway finished.

John heard his sigh. “Doc? What's the matter?"

Gideon jerked his head. “Nothing.” All he could do was what he could do. “Let's get down to business. I'm going to start checking him out.” He opened and laid out a worn leather packet of dissecting tools that they had stopped to pick up from his cottage: Gideon had had it ever since his student days at the University of Arizona. “May as well start with the right hand. If those really were defense wounds, there's a good chance there'll be some corresponding nicks in the bones. If not…"

"If something's there you'll find it,” John said with his appealing but slightly irritating confidence.

The hand lay in a natural position at the body's side, still largely articulated, palm uppermost. That is to say, where the palm had been was uppermost. Stuck to the metacarpals was a mass of tarry, unidentifiable tissue, which Gideon examined with care, hoping to find unambiguous signs of the wound, but without success. It would have to be cleaned off, and he used a tongue depressor to rub away at it, a slow, necessarily painstaking process. Both men kneeled over it, absorbed.

"ARRETEZ-VOUS, S'IL VOUS PLAIT!"

The thunk that followed immediately upon this was the sound of Gideon's and John's near-simultaneous cracking of their skulls against the underside of the metal roof. Clutching their heads, they spun around to see a large, bearded, patently displeased Tahitian policeman looming over them, blocking the sun, his hands on his hips.

It is no easy thing to look intimidating in short blue pants and sky-blue knee socks, but this particular cop, about the size and shape of a UPS delivery van, brought it off with no difficulty.

And standing beside him, not as physically impressive, but no less formidable and every bit as displeased, was the small, globular form of the commandant of the Gendarmerie Nationale de Polynesie-Francaise, Colonel Leopold Guillaume Bertaud.

"Now why is it,” wondered the colonel with his hands clasped behind him, “that I fail to be amazed?” He sounded cheerful, even happy.

"We can explain,” John said. His arms and hands were filthy, his face streaked with sweat and dirt.

Bertaud, crisp and dapper, looked down on him from what seemed to be a very great height.

"No doubt,” he said.

"Give us one more minute,” John said. “One lousy minute, that's all we ask."

"And what will happen in one more minute?"

"Doc'Il prove to you we're right."

Gideon winced. Thanks, John.

"By all means, then,” Bertaud said, “continue."

It took five minutes, not one, of painstaking scraping and probing, but at the end of that time Gideon picked a last bit of tissue off with his fingernails and looked up from his knees with a sense of satisfaction.

"Now then,” he said, shifting instinctively into professorial gear. Bertaud moved in closer and leaned over Gideon and John, his hands on his knees. The big Tahitian cop, on the other hand, appeared to be happier keeping his distance.