Aaron Elkins: Twenty blue devils

"Let me get dressed and I'll ride in with you. Nelson wants to talk to me about something and I told him I'd come by the Papeete office. And I can swing by the police station first and let Bertaud know about all this new stuff. Want to come with me? Should be exciting when he hears."

"I can't. I promised to sit in on Tari's autopsy."

"Hey, lucky you,” John said, heading for the door.

Quickened interest notwithstanding, Gideon's spirits were flagging as he took the stairway down to the basement of the Centre Hospitalier Territorial. He had witnessed the efficient and enthusiastic Dr. Viennot in action before and he was not looking forward to seeing the progress he had been making on Tari's corpulent remains.

He needn't have worried. While he was still in the corridor Viennot called out to him, not from the autopsy room, but from the little conference room next door, where Gideon had worked on the bones two days earlier.

"In here, sir!"

The physician, an intense, ruddy, clear-eyed man in his forties, sat at the table, smoking one of his crooked black cigars.

In front of him, on a few layers of brown butcher paper, was a gleaming object about the size, shape, and color of a soccer ball cut in half: It was the sawed-off top of a human skull, but the Stryker saw had been applied lower than was usual in autopsies, sawing through the bone just above the orbits, running backward and slightly downward through the squamosal and lambdoid sutures, across the triangular apex of the occipital bone, and back around the other side. The result was that everything above the eyes was included; in effect, the entire braincase, scrupulously cleansed of soft tissue.

Gideon's initial glance told him it was a male, and a big male at that. There was a neat, round hole-a bullet's entrance hole-in the sphenoidal angle of the right parietal, just behind the coronal suture-in other words, through the temple. Toward the rear of this large, plate-like bone and a little higher, where the curvature of the skull was most marked, was a small depressed fracture-that is, a cracked, irregular, sunken island of bone, about an inch long and half an inch wide, with more cracks radiating out from it over the adjacent bone; precisely the kind of wound to be expected if a person were to fall backward and strike his head on a hard, straight, sharp-edged object-the corner of a raised fireplace hearth, for example.

"Tari?” Gideon asked unnecessarily.

Viennot nodded. “Indeed. I thought I would bring the segment here for you, inasmuch as you preferred not to be in the autopsy room."

Gideon looked at him, surprised. “When did I say-"

"Some things, one doesn't have to say.” He laughed. “Of course, if you would prefer that we go to the-"

"This'll do fine, thanks. Now, what in particular did you want me to look at?"

"This. What do you make of it?"

He turned the skullcap so that Gideon could see the other side, the left side. At the top rear corner of the parietal, an inch left of the sagittal suture-on a living head it would have been just behind the crown and a little to the left of center-there was a more unusual wound; another island of bone, much like the one on the right side in that it was cracked and irregular, with rough, crumbled margins. But this one was more nearly round and several times larger, about the size of a silver dollar. And most striking, unlike the other it was raised, not sunken; a sort of depressed fracture in reverse, indicating that the bone had been thrust out from inside and not the other way around.

"An elevated fracture,” Gideon said, running his fingers around the margin. With a little pressure applied from the inside he could easily have popped the chunk of bone altogether out. “It's the bullet's exit wound-in this case, an incomplete exit wound."

Viennot was pleased. “Yes?"

"The bullet didn't make it all the way out. You should find it still inside him."

"As we did.” Viennot produced a misshapen slug. “Wedged between the dura mater and the cranial vault, a few centimeters anterior to the exit fracture."

He handed it to Gideon, who politely examined it and put it back on the table.

"Now then,” Viennot said. His cigar had gone out. He paused while he got it lit with a wooden match from a pocket pack. “You understand, we do not see many lethal gunshot wounds here in our pacific little community, and this"-he gestured with the cigar- “this ‘incomplete exit wound’ is new to my experience. To what would you ascribe the cause of such a wound?"

It was a question Gideon had heard before, from other physicians lucky enough to lack a big-city medical examiner's day-in-day-out familiarity with death by firearms. “Well, it's not really all that infrequent. The bullet sometimes just doesn't have sufficient impetus to make it all the way out of the skull, so-"

"Of course, of course,” Viennot interrupted, “but consider: here we have a case of a point-blank shooting-this was confirmed by the existence of powder marks around the entrance wound in the scalp-with a powerful weapon, and ammunition that Colonel Bertaud assures us was in good working order despite its age. The projectile, once fired, cleanly pierces a thin plate of bone-the right parietal-and subsequently passes through the soft mass of the brain for a total of one hundred and forty-two millimeters before arriving at the opposite side of the skull, yes? Neither a very great distance nor a very arduous path for a bullet, you will agree. Why then should it lack sufficient energy to fully penetrate the parietal bone on the other side?"

"Well, sometimes it can tumble on the way in, especially if it's an old weapon or old ammunition. Or it can be deflected by the bone, so that it glances off the surfaces and ricochets around inside the skull before-"

"My dear man,” Viennot said, laughing, “I may no longer be practicing in Lyons, but give me some credit. The brain has been partially dissected. The path of the bullet is perfectly straight, perfectly true."

"Then the most likely reason is that that side of Tari's head was against some solid object or surface when the gun was fired-"

Viennot's lively eyes lit up. “Ha, exactly as I surmised. I thought as much!"

"-and that it was hard enough and firm enough to keep the slug from completely shattering the bone and exploding out."

'Viennot raised a finger as if he himself had made a telling point. “Ah,” he said quietly and cocked an eyebrow, “but exactly what was it, this object or surface?"

"Oh, well, you know, it could easily have been…’ He stopped. “Son of a gun,” he murmured. “I see what you mean.” Here he'd been airily treating Viennot to a chowder-head version of Forensic Anthro 101, and Viennot had been three steps ahead of him the whole time. It was only now, thanks to Viennot's persistence, that it struck Gideon that there was a serious inconsistency in Rudy's version of events. Rudy had said that he had grabbed Tari's arm while Tari had been rummaging in a drawer for the gun, and that the gun had gone off instantly.

So how could Tari's head have been leaning against anything?

"Rudy was pretty excited,” Gideon said, thinking out loud. “He'd been stunned a moment before. He might have wrestled Tari against the wall without knowing it. The whole thing was over in a second. In the shock of the moment it would have been easy to forget exactly what happened."

Viennot shook his head. “I think not. Once shot in this manner, the man would have dropped like a stone-as he did, striking his head upon the hearth. His feet, in such circumstances, would naturally have remained in approximately the location that they'd been in when he was shot. But in this case, they were over a meter from the nearest wall."