Aaron Elkins: Skeleton dance

"But we don't," Joly said. "There are no records of missing persons, of males at any rate, from this or the neighboring communes that could possibly fit the time of which we're speaking."

"Mm. So he's probably from out of the area."

"It would seem so." Joly lit up another cigarette and sat watching as Gideon continued examining the remains. "And what else?"

"Well, he's got a couple of old, healed fractures. A broken rib and a crushed calcaneus-that's the heel bone, in case you missed that part of the session too. The second might be a help in identifying him because he may have walked with a limp."

"Yes?" said Joly, writing in his notebook with a slim, silver ballpoint pen.

"Or then again, he may not. No way to tell."

"Ah," said Joly with a sigh. He closed the notebook, retrieved his cigarette from the small foil ashtray he'd brought with him, and continued to smoke. "And what else?" he said again after a while.

"Hm?" Gideon said, prodding a vertebra. "What makes you think there's anything else?"

"Because I know you, my friend. You like to save the best morsels for last, the better to dazzle the brain of the poor, plodding policeman."

Gideon laughed. It wasn't the first time he'd been called a hot dog by a cop, and he was willing to admit to it. As engrossing as it could be, there weren't many aspects of forensic anthropology that could properly be called "fun," but pulling unexpected rabbits out of hats to the bogglement of various police sergeants, lieutenants, and inspectors was surely one of them.

"Well, I'm sorry, I don't know what else there is that I can tell you," he said, "…or would you be interested in things like… oh, cause of death, bullet holes, that kind of thing?"

Joly mutely rolled his eyes, stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray, and came and hunkered down beside Gideon, first carefully (and characteristically) pulling up his trouser legs to preserve the creases. "Can you really establish a probable cause of death, then?"

"I can do better than that," Gideon said. "I can establish a definite cause of death. Unless, of course, you want to assume he survived being shot through the heart."

"Shot through the heart?" Joly's eyes moved rapidly over what was left of the skeleton's thorax. "But there's no-"

"Look at the body of the eighth thoracic vertebra."

"Gideon, your excellent instruction notwithstanding, I wouldn't know a thoracic vertebra from a left toe bone, let alone how many of them there are or which one is the eighth, or where the 'body' is to be found."

"Sorry. Here, let me free it; it'll be easier to see." He gently worked it out of the soil with his fingers, laid it on a square of butcher paper, and pointed at the vertebral body, the thick, cylindrical center of the vertebra, where a rough, irregular gutter had been gouged out along the upper left edge. He tapped it with a chopstick. "Gunshot wound."

Joly scowled at it, and then at Gideon. "Am I not correct in thinking that a bullet hole in bone is generally round, at least at its point of entry?"

"Yes, you're correct."

"But this-this isn't round at all. It might just as well have been made by an axe, a knife, even a hammer. I find myself wondering how you can state with such confidence that it was made by a bullet and nothing else but a bullet."

Gideon had learned over the years that policemen were about evenly divided between those who regarded him as a snake-oil salesman and those who expected miracles. (Once, an Idaho county sheriff had handed him a murder victim's tibia, confidently waiting for him to determine height, weight, nationality, and hair color from it, on the grounds that he'd seen it done on Quincy, so he knew it was possible.) Inspector Joly, who had started out in the snake-oil camp, had soon converted, if not to the expectation of wonders, then at least to a solid respect for what could be gleaned by a professional from a few old bones; this despite a certain reserve and an ironic manner that was more a matter of constitution than of criticism.

"Actually, you're right and you're not right," Gideon said. "Entry holes in the skull mostly look like bullet holes, yes-they're usually round; not always, by any means, but usually-but when you're talking about the long bones, or the ribs-or especially the vertebrae-they can shatter or crumble in a hundred different ways. You never know what you're going to get. A lot of times you can't make any determination of cause from them."

"But in this case you can?"

"From the broken edges themselves, no, but look at this." He bent the battery-operated gooseneck lamp, also provided by the police, down to six inches from the vertebra, flooding the pitted surface with white light. "Now. Look here where I'm pointing: the rim of the broken part… right here. Use the magnifying glass. See anything?"

Joly examined the area silently, then leaned closer. "Do you mean this bit of grayish discoloration?"

"That's what I mean. That's a deposit left by the bullet."

Joly put down the lens and looked doubtfully at him. "On the bone ? Are you sure? In my experience, bullet wipe is found only on the skin or on the outer clothing-whatever the bullet first strikes wipes it clean, isn't that so?"

"Yes, but this isn't bullet wipe. Bullet wipe is from the dirt and lubricant that the slug picks up on its way out of the gun barrel."

"I'm aware of that. And this?"

"This is different, or at least I think it is. I think this is from the body of the bullet itself. It's lead that gets scraped off when the bullet breaks through something hard, like bone. And since you find it at the point of entry into the bone-when you do find it, that is, which isn't always-it tells you what direction the shot came from; in this case, from almost straight in front of him, or rather just a shade to the left of center, because the sternum wasn't perforated first, which it would have been if the bullet had come through the middle of his chest. As you can see, the left transverse process on the vertebra has been broken off too, which goes along with that scenario. So I'd say it entered his body an inch or two to the left of the sternum, probably through the fourth intercostal space."

"And a bullet entering through the fourth intercostal space on the left side, and penetrating the eighth thoracic vertebra in this manner would necessarily have passed through the heart?"

"Smack through the middle of the left ventricle, no possible way of avoiding it. Death within seconds."

"Yes?" Joly once again scrutinized the thin, gray edging, no more a quarter of an inch long and a sixteenth-of-an-inch wide. "It's not very much to look at, to provide such extensive information," he said doubtfully. A faint residue of the old snake-oil look gleamed in his eyes. "I don't look forward to having to convince a judge."

"Well, I could be wrong," Gideon said agreeably. "But all you have to do is have your lab check it with a dissection microscope. I'm betting they'll find it's made up of tiny flakes of lead."

"I shall," Joly said. "We'll see."

Gideon got to his feet, knowing from the resistance of his knees to straightening that he'd been at it too long. "Lucien, I'm bushed. I'm ready for some fresh air, and I think we've done about all we can here. How about getting this stuff bagged and sent over to the lab? We're supposed to be meeting Julie at six."

With the help one of the two officiers de paix that Joly had brought with him, the fragile bones were individually wrapped in newspaper to prevent their grinding against each other and then placed in evidence bags-simple brown paper bags stamped with the case number, 99-4-Dordogne's fourth homicide of the year. That was nice, Gideon thought. In Seattle, they got to their fourth murder a long time before September.

Working alphabetically down the body, each bag was also individually labeled, a simple system that Gideon had been using since his graduate school days; the broken mandible in Bag A, the one remaining clavicle and scapula in Bag B, the vertebrae -except for the eighth thoracic, which Joly was taking back to Perigueux with him-in Bag C, and so on. The result was a group of sacks that fit comfortably into a cardboard carton originally used to pack four dozen cans of macaroni au fromage.