Aaron Elkins: Curses!

By three, the skeleton was three-quarters freed, lying on its left side facing the ascending staircase, still partially embedded in the debris. Under the left wrist, the snapped metal expansion band of a wristwatch could be seen sticking out of the rubble. One of the policemen had reached to pluck it out, only to be stopped by a tart reprimand from Marmolejo. Didn't they know better than to pull things from the dirt? Everything would remain until exposed by careful digging. It was of great importance to view and photograph all objects in their natural relation to one other.

Gideon smiled to himself. Marmolejo would have made a hell of an archaeologist.

At three-thirty Marmolejo told the two policemen who had been doing the digging to quit. They had started early and it had been a long day; the rest of the job could wait until morning. They stopped gratefully and went to the landing above, settling down against the wall with the tea jug.

"Dr. Oliver,” Marmolejo said, “I wonder if enough is visible for you to look it over?"

"Sure, if you want.” He had begun to wonder when-or if-Marmolejo was going to ask him. This time he'd known better than to offer his services unrequested. He rose and started up the steps. “I'll go and bring my tools from the work shed."

"Ah, how long do you suppose your examination might take?"

"It depends. Three or four hours."

Marmolejo looked pained. He had been in the stairwell since before 7:00 a.m. “In that case,” he said reluctantly, “I think we might better wait until morning. We can have it fully ready for you then."

"I could take a preliminary look now,” Gideon said. He didn't want to wait until morning any more than Marmolejo did. “At least see if I can confirm sex and race. Age, maybe. That kind of thing. Then tomorrow I can get my stuff and do a more thorough job."

Marmolejo brightened. "Por favor," he said, then expressed to the others, firmly but discreetly, his reservations about having the Tlaloc staff remain as an audience, inasmuch as sensitive police business was about to be discussed. Perhaps they might continue their work in other parts of the site, or return to the hotel if they pleased?

When Julie got up with them, he signaled to indicate that she could stay, but she seemed relieved to go. Julie had a healthy enough interest in skeletal analysis (what choice did she have, married to Gideon?) but this was the first time she'd been in on the grubby nuts and bolts of it, and she hadn't been looking altogether happy about sharing a confined space with a freshly unearthed skeleton.

Marmolejo waited until they left, then nodded briskly to Gideon.

Seen up close, the skeleton was battered but well preserved, still held tenuously together at many of the joints by onionskin-like shreds of ligament. There was a tangle of rust-colored hair under the skull, but that told little. With the leaching and staining that would have gone on in this limestone rubble, who could tell what color it had been originally? Cross-sectional analysis would probably have something to say about race, but that would have to be done in a laboratory, under a microscope.

There was little in the way of clothing; just leather sandals and a blood-stiffened pair of shorts that had nearly rotted away. Shorts and sandals-had that been what Avelino had been wearing? Probably; it was what most of the men there had been wearing. If there had been underwear on this body, it was now indistinguishably matted to the outer shorts. As always, clothes on a skeleton made it seem less real, like a Halloween prank, but there was nothing whimsical about this. The rib cage was crushed, with some of the costovertebral articulations torn apart; the right pelvis was cracked and twisted away from the left; the left clavicle was fractured; the mandible was broken and gaping crookedly, with some of the teeth shattered or knocked out; and the left side of the cranium was caved in.

At least it was dry.

There wasn't much else to say about it that was good. The poor bastard had been squashed flat in the cave-in, and Gideon said as much.

Marmolejo looked at him without expression. "De veras?" he inquired wryly, managing it without opening his mouth around his cigar stub.

Gideon smiled. Yes, really. But there were a few other things of interest he might be able to come up with too. Best to start with basics. He squatted next to the skeleton, elbows on his thighs, and looked at the ruined pelvis. Gingerly, with Marmolejo's permission, he used a trowel to lift some of the decayed remnants of the shorts. They stuck to the bone a moment, then popped off.

"Well, it's definitely a male,” he announced. That was simple enough. Everything about the pelvis shouted it: obtuse pubic angle, rounded ramus, rectangular sacrum, narrow sciatic notch. They should all be so easy.

Marmolejo nodded. So far so good.

Delicately, Gideon used the tip of the trowel to pick some cartilage from the pubic symphysis, the place where the right and left pelves join between the legs. Of all the surfaces on all the two hundred and six bones in the human body it is there, in that hidden and private place, that the signs of age and degeneration are most clearly and ineradicably engraved, decade by slow decade.

With the trowel held loosely in his hand he studied the narrow, rippled surface of the bone.

"Fifty years old,” he said after a few seconds. “Give or take five years."

"Ah,” Marmolejo said, pleased. “Avelino, he was forty-seven.” He darted a sidelong look at Gideon. “Did you happen to know that?"

No, Gideon hadn't known.

Then he got down to serious work. He examined the long bones, roughly measuring a femur and a humerus against the yardstick of his own hand and forearm. With Marmolejo's approval he used his fingers to pull out some of the dirt that had lodged in the jaws, the eye sockets, and the cranium itself. He scooped out most of the dirt beneath the skull, leaving it somewhat precariously supported on a rim of debris. Each small load of dirt was placed in a separate, precisely labeled envelope for sifting by the police forensic team.

He had one of the policemen move the lamps so that the light shone horizontally across the bones, highlighting the ridges and hollows and irregularities that could tell so much, if only you knew what to look for. And then, lying prone in the dirt, propped on his elbows, he studied them, fingering the surfaces, probing them, thinking, calculating, speaking only to ask for increasingly finicky readjustments of the lamps. Twenty minutes passed. Twenty-five.

"A preliminary look will be fine,” Marmolejo said.

After half an hour the inspector became openly restive, walking back and forth on one of the stairs; two small steps one way, pivot, two steps the other. Like a wolf in a cage. Marmolejo did not enjoy being an observer

Gideon, engrossed in a set of unusual protuberances on the mandible, hardly noticed him. There were two bumps on each side of the jaw, right on the mandibular condyles-the knobs that fit into hollows on the sides of the skull to form the hinges of the jaw. He'd found nothing similar on the rest of the skeleton, so he knew it wasn't some generalized bone condition. Just two sharp little tubercles on each condyle, one on the outside, one on the inside. Only one thing could conceivably cause them, and that was the forceful, habitual use of the external pterygoids, the inconspicuous little cheek muscles that had their insertion points right there.

Peculiar, but probably of no importance. Yet he knew those spiky little buttons would nag at him until he made sense of them. Hadn't he run across something similar before? The memory was there, but just out of reach. All right, then figure it out from scratch. What did the external pterygoids do? They were part of the chewing apparatus, of course; thick, triangular little fiber bundles that protruded the lower jaw and moved it from side to side in the complex and improbable process of human chewing. But a lifetime of ordinary chewing wouldn't produce these bumps. So what he needed to figure out was…no, wait a minute. It had been that Pittsburgh case…