Aaron Elkins - Make No Bones

“He leans over at me with that smirk they get. ‘No one in the entire world is as good as you are?’

Not…even…close,’ I tell him, “Well, the prosecuting attorney asks for a recess and gets me aside. ‘Nellie,’ he says, ‘how could you say those things? You know that kind of thing puts the jury’s back up.’

“So I said-you want to know what I said?”

“Do I have a choice?” Gideon answered, but he was already smiling. Here it came.

“I said: ‘Well, hell, man, I was UNDER OATH!”

Nellie banged his hand on the nearest table, rolled back his head, and shouted laughter at the acoustic-tile ceiling. He stuck his pipe back in his mouth. “Did I have you going there, or didn’t I?”

“Not for a second,” Gideon said, laughing along with him. “Now: What was it you wanted my help on?”

The older man sobered. He turned back toward the skeleton. “Tell me what you see.”

“Well, as you said, it’s male, Caucasian-”

“Yes, yes, of course. We’ve done all that. Caucasian male, average build, estimated stature of 69.3 inches, plus or minus 1.18-”

“You used the Trotter and Gleser equations?”

“For femur plus tibia-And Suchey-Brooks for aging from the pubic symphysis: It’s a textbook Phase 5, completely rimmed, which gives us a range of say, thirty to seventy, and most likely forty-five to sixty-five. Throw in the vertebral lipping, the atrophic spots on the scapula-”

Gideon picked up the right scapula and held it up against the light from the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. There were milky patches of translucence where the bone had thinned in its normal, unstoppable progression toward disintegration.

“-the sternal rib changes,” Nellie continued, “the general bone density and so on and so forth, and you get an age of around-”

“Fifty-five or so,” Gideon said, putting down the scapula. Say fifty to sixty.”

“On the money, my boy. As for possible features of individuation, we have a healed fracture of the left ulna, probably from childhood, and an extracted first molar, also old. A few fillings. And some arthritis in the metatarsophalangeal joints, but nothing worse than any other old geezer. And that’s it. Nothing much to go on. For that matter, nothing very interesting. But…” He paused weightily. “…in cause of death I think we have something else entirely.”

“Cause of death?” Scanning the bones, Gideon had seen nothing to suggest what it was.

“Yes. How was the dastardly deed done? That’s what I want your opinion on. I think that we have something unusual here; a-well, I better not give you any hints. Wouldn’t want to bias you. Go ahead, tell me what you think.” He bestowed a split-faced grin on Gideon and used the stubby pipe to make a gesture at the skeleton: It’s all yours.

Intrigued, Gideon picked up the skull, most likely of all bony elements to tell a story of death by violence. Until now, he had seen only the front and the left side, which showed no fractures, no entrance or exit wounds. He turned it over and there on the rear, just to the right of center, was an inch-and-a-half-long horizontal crack just above the lambdoidal suture. Gideon ran his finger along it.

“Oho,” Nellie said quietly, chewing on his unlit pipe.

Gideon looked at him, puzzled. The crack was an uncomplicated linear fracture of the right parietal. No depression of the bone, no radiating fracture lines. Textbooks described this kind of injury as the probable result of an “accelerated head impacting on a fixed surface”-and not the other way around, which would have had more sinister implications. In other words, a simple fall; hardly proof of dastardly deeds.

“Nellie,” Gideon said cautiously, “I’ll grant you that this could have caused death-maybe a contre-coup brain contusion, subdural hemorrhage-”

“Yes, yes.” Nellie gestured impatiently. “Could. But didn’t.”

“Well, then-”

“Keep looking. You haven’t found it yet.”

Gideon turned the skull, millimeter by millimeter. He shook his head. “I don’t see anything else on the skull.” “Not on the skull.”

“Below the skull?”

Nellie cocked his head. “Is there another way to go from the skull?”

Gideon smiled. “Okay, below the skull.” He lifted the sternum.

Nellie shook his head. “Higher.”

Gideon put down the sternum and picked up the first cervical vertebra, the atlas, so named because the globe of the skull rested on it.

“Lower,” Nellie said.

Gideon put it down. “I’m sure glad you’re not giving me any hints.” He moved to the second cervical vertebra.

Nellie shook his head. “Nope, but you’re getting warmer.”

Gideon sighed. “Nellie, how about just-all!”

Inconspicuous as it was, it seemed to leap out and catch his eye. On the sixth cervical vertebra, located just below the level of the Adam’s apple-a minuscule break zigzagging its way across the front of the right transverse process, one of two small, winglike spurs jutting out from the body of the vertebra.

Gideon leaned closer, nudged the bone with a forefinger. The crack was perhaps a quarter of an inch long. “Hinge fracture,” he said, using the conventional term for a break that went only partway through the bone, something like what happened when you snapped a fresh twig.

“Exactly,” Nellie said with enthusiasm. “Precisely. And you’ll also notice, on the posterior root-”

“Another fracture,” Gideon said. “Hairline. And as for the adjacent vertebrae…” One by one he lifted them and carefully examined the convoluted surfaces.

Nellie nodded vigorously, urging him along.

“…nothing,” Gideon said. “No sign of trauma.” Another crisp nod from Nellie. He paused in lighting his pipe. “So? What’s your conclusion, doctor?”

Gideon leaned against a lab stool. There wasn’t much room for doubt. Injuries like these, in these particular places, meant that enormous squeezing force had been applied to the neck. One saw them in hangings, or even in manual strangulations if the killer happened to be built along the lines of King Kong. But in such cases, the wholesale wrenching of the neck muscles generally produced injuries to more than one vertebra, often to four or five. To have only a single vertebra cracked, and that one in two places, meant that the constriction had been extraordinarily localized.

It wasn’t something one came across often; in Gideon’s experience only twice. And each time it had been caused by the same thing.

“Garrote,” he said.

“Aye, mate,” Nellie said with satisfaction as he got his pipe going. “The old Spanish windlass.”

The technique dated back at least to the time of Christ. In its basic version a cord-in ancient times it had been made of animal sinew-was looped twice around the neck, and a stick or other firm object inserted between the loops. Rotating the stick would then twist the cord, much like a tourniquet, and create terrific pressure, first closing the windpipe and then, with a few more twists, snapping the spinal column; thus combining the virtues, so to speak, of strangling and hanging. When applied at the level of the sixth cervical vertebra, it would also compress the carotid sheath, thereby shutting off blood flow to and from the brain. Just for good measure.

The Spanish Inquisitors, who used the method as a merciful alternative to the stake, claimed that it was painless, but there was a lack of definitive data on this point. What it demonstrably was, however, was simple, efficient, and silent. And, if the cord was knotted at close intervals, bloodless.

Gideon touched the crack in the skull. “You think he was knocked out by a fall, then garroted?”

“Let’s hope so,” Nellie said, “for his sake.”