Aaron Elkins - Skeleton dance

"Okay," Gideon said. "If you fired right now, what path would the pellet take?"

"It's somewhat hard to tell from this position," said Roussillot, "but, frankly, I have no reason to think it would be any different from-"

"No, you're wrong," Joly said excitedly. "I can see. It would enter on a downward path, not an upward one! By heaven, Gideon!"

"Downward?" exclaimed a flabbergasted Roussillot. "But how can that be? The butt rests on the floor, the barrel inclines upward-"

"Yes, yes," Joly said, "but you incline forward and your body is hunched, curved, crouched over the weapon. The path through your body would be slightly downward, I assure you." He looked at Gideon, his piercing eyes alight. "This changes everything. It means-"

"May I straighten up now?" asked Roussillot, his voice a little choked from hunching over.

Gideon put a hand on his shoulder. "Hold it just a second longer if you can, doctor. I want you to see something else. You notice that to reach the trigger you had to rotate-"

"I see!" Joly said, too impatient to let him finish. "By reaching with his right arm he turns his body counterclockwise a few degrees, so that when he pulls the trigger the muzzle is pointing not straight back through his chest at his spine, but slightly right-to-left-which is therefore the path that the projectile would necessarily follow."

"Why, yes, you're right," Roussillot said with dawning appreciation. "I can see that now; it's quite obvious, really. And in the case of a left-handed man it would be reversed. The projectile would travel from left to right.

" But in Bousquet's case," said Joly, "it did neither; it flew straight back." He had forgotten about Roussillot's no-smoking rule and lighted up. Roussillot, engrossed with trajectories, failed to notice.

"That's right," Gideon said. "Add that to the facts that it was angled up, not down, and that the muzzle-stamp was wrong-way-around. Three separate things, and they all point away from suicide."

"And toward homicide," Joly said.

"And so one more lovely theory falls victim to squalid fact," said Roussillot, laughing with satisfaction as he straightened up and propped the rifle back in its corner. "Remarkably done, Professor Oliver."

"Oh, it's not that remarkable, really," said Gideon honestly. "It's just that I happened to be part of a case that was a lot like this a few months ago. The King County medical examiner walked me through it just the way I did with you."

"How wonderful it must be to live in America," Roussillot said. "So many murders, so much to be learnt."

Gideon laughed. "That's one way to look at it."

"And now," said Roussillot, slipping on a pair of plastic gloves and picking up a scalpel, "I think we'd better get started, don't you?"

"Good heavens, look at the time," Joly exclaimed, looking at his watch. "Much to be done, much to be done. Well, I'll leave the two of you to it, then," he said, making for the door. "A policeman's time is not his own."

Chuckling, Roussillot watched him go. "Amazing, isn't it, how chicken-livered they can be when it comes to opening someone up?"

"Amazing," Gideon agreed, looking enviously after the departing Joly.

Roussillot returned to the autopsy table, adjusted the microphone, folded the sheet back down, and flicked on the spotlight above the head of the table. Bousquet's greasy, yellow-gray torso and ruined head jumped into brilliant focus.

"Colleague, would you care to make the first incision?" Roussillot asked with a sweet smile, offering the knife.

"Uh, no, thanks. If it's all the same to you, I'll just watch," Gideon said. "From back here."

"But you said his fingerprints were on the rifle," Julie said, starting up the car.

"They were. But that doesn't mean he was alive at the time."

"It doesn't? Can you do that? Put a dead person's fingerprints on something? And get away with it, I mean?"

"There's no way to tell he was dead, as far as I know, as long as the fingertips have some oil or perspiration on them. Or grease, or blood, or anything else that'll leave a mark, for that matter. This was a set-up, Julie, arranged to look like a suicide. I'm sure of it."

"Wow," she said softly. "But doesn't that mean-" She paused and threw a worried glance at him. Gideon was sprawled in his seat, his head tipped back against the headrest and his legs extended to the extent that the Peugeot would allow. "Gideon, you look utterly washed-out."

"I don't like autopsies. I'm not too keen on dead bodies, in general."

"You're sure in a funny line of work, then."

"I sure am. You think maybe Uncle Bert was right? That I'd have been better off in cost-accounting?"

"No, I don't. Look, why don't you put back the seat and take a nap for a while? Just relax, it'll do you good. You think you're all recovered from the other day, but you're not, trust me. Give those neuroaxons a rest. I'll wake you up when we get to Les Eyzies."

"You know, I just might do that." He adjusted the back of the seat to as close to horizontal as it would go and settled back. The clouds had closed in again and with them had come the rain, a cooler, thinner rain, pattering on the car's roof and running down the windshield in irregular rivulets. He watched them for a while, then closed his eyes to the steady, lulling whish-whish of the wipers.

"Doesn't that mean what?" he said, putting up the seat half-an hour later and finding that they were on the outskirts of Les Eyzies, just crossing the little bridge over the Vezere.

"Feeling better?"

"A lot better," he said truthfully, the sights, smells, and sounds of the autopsy having receded. "You started to ask me something before: 'Doesn't that mean…?'"

It took her a moment to remember. "Oh, yes, I was thinking that if the suicide was a set-up, then how do we know that the business with the ring wasn't a set-up too?"

"That's exactly what I believe it was. I don't think it came off during a struggle, I think it was planted there. I don't think Bousquet killed Jacques at all. I don't think he killed anyone."

"But how would they have gotten hold of his ring?"

"Easy. They just took it off his cold, dead finger. You see, I think Bousquet was probably killed before Jacques was-which, may I point out, would have made it particularly hard for him to murder him.

"

"Come again? I thought you said Bousquet had only been dead a couple of days. And Jacques was killed Thursday-one, two, three days ago."

"No, I said Roussillot finally came to the conclusion that he's been dead a couple of days. I came to a different one. I think it's been a good three days-more likely four or five."

"But Roussillot's a professional pathologist."

"That's true enough. And I'm just a lousy skeleton detective."

"No, you know what I mean. I'm not surprised that you'd know more about bullet trajectories and so on, but wouldn't he know more about the time-of-death aspect-decomposition, bodily changes-than you do?" She glanced at him. "Or don't you think he's competent?"

"No, he's competent enough."

"So how can you be that far apart? A two-or-three-day difference of opinion wouldn't be a lot if you were talking about a corpse that'd been out there for a month, but this is a fresh one. The indicators should still be pretty definitive."

She clapped her hand over her mouth. "Oh, my God, listen to me, I'm actually learning this stuff."

"And you're absolutely right," Gideon said. "The indicators ought to be more definitive. They usually are. But this is just one of those cases where they're all over the map. He's looking at one set, I'm looking at another one."

"I don't understand."

"Well, what we found… are you sure you want to hear this?"

"Yes, I do," she said staunchly. "I want to know what's going on too, and if you can stand watching an autopsy, I guess I can stand hearing about one. And better before dinner than during." She pulled the car to the curb near the center of the village, shut off the ignition, and turned attentively toward him, her elbow on the steering wheel. "Proceed. Only no gratuitous repulsiveness, please."