Aaron Elkins - Old Bones

Joly pushed the plate towards him. "Help yourself, please. I’m not hungry. Now, is there anyone else you can think of who might have wanted to kill Claude?"

Jules crammed the first of the cookies into his mouth and got his damp fingers securely around the second before answering with a smirk. "Is there anyone who didn’t?"

Twenty feet below Joly and Jules, in the ancient cellar, Gideon was working tranquilly in the warmth of the portable heater, using the ten-power magnifying lens he’d neglected to bring with him the day before. He had pulled the goose-necked lamp down to three or four inches above the tabletop and twisted the head so that the light shone horizontally across the bones, highlighting texture and irregularities. Hunched over them, the lens against his cheek and his face only a few inches from them, he slid each segment by, millimeter by careful millimeter. Claude Fougeray and Lucien Joly faded peacefully from his mind.

After an hour he finished his meticulous scrutiny of the vertebrae and straightened up with a grunt and a grimace as his own vertebral column creaked back into the unlikely S-shape that was its normal and precarious human condition-the penalty, as he told his students, for going recklessly around on your hind legs when you have a cantilevered spine begging for support at each end.

So far he’d found nothing. No skeletal oddities to make identification easier, no signs of cause of death. Only the tiny, scoop-shaped gouges of rodent incisors that had been chewing away for most of the forty-odd years the bones had been there. He stretched, groaned luxuriously, rubbed the back of his neck, and walked over to the work crew.

"Finding anything?" he asked Sergeant Denis.

Denis shook his head with disgust. "But if there’s anything here we’ll find it." His eyes flashed with determination.

Gideon accepted him at his word. Denis was obviously a man who took his work seriously. He had been down there all morning, closely overseeing the three-man work crew-who proceeded nonetheless at their own leisurely pace, ignoring with tolerant good humor the younger man’s exhortations towards speed and care. So far, moving outward from the original trench, they had taken up the big paving stones from about a third of the cellar floor and were now digging through the compacted, sour-smelling earth to a depth of about three feet. He watched them for a few minutes, long enough for the crick in his neck to smooth out, and went back to the table to get on with his own work.

His slow, tedious examination of the hand and foot bones produced nothing but more mouse nibbles. The same for the sternum, clavicles, and scapulas. He was almost finished with the ribs, and had about given up hope, when he finally found something. It was on the fifth rib of the left side, midway along its length; a crease across the narrow top of the bone, about an eighth of an inch deep. It wasn’t a normal indentation, and it wasn’t an anomaly either, like a sternal foramen.

And it sure as hell hadn’t been made by a mouse. Not scoop-shaped, this time, and not one of a parallel row of two or three. Just a single notch that didn’t belong there, all by itself, with a distinctive V-shaped cross-section and edges of telltale sharpness and clarity.

A knife wound. And from the broad, wedge-like shape of the notch it had been a large knife with a blade that thickened markedly as it neared the haft. Single-edged too; otherwise it would have nicked the underside of the rib above it as well. Most likely a big kitchen utility knife or a chef’s knife. Or maybe a wartime bayonet, given the time. And of course the breadth of the V made it clear that it had been no mere prick, but a deep, murderous thrust between the ribs.

Without doubt, it would have punctured the left lung, and then…He chewed thoughtfully on his cheek. Now exactly where the hell would a knife slipped in over the middle of the fifth rib go? It was hard to visualize; not as obvious as it seemed. The middle of a rib is not in the middle of the chest, but far around to the side; closer in fact to the back of the body than the front.

With the fingers of his right hand Gideon found the angle of Louis, the easily palpable bump on the upper segment of the sternum. That was where the second rib attached, and from there he counted downward to the fifth. Then he worked his way slowly along it, probing with some difficulty through the thick pectoralis muscle that covered it.

In the far corner-the very far corner, as far from the moldering remains on the table as they could get-the workmen were sitting on the floor, leaning comfortably against the wall and watching him. Freed from the eagle-eye of young Sergeant Denis, who had gone off to lunch, they had produced a meal of their own: tumblers of red wine from a plastic, screw-top liter-bottle, an aromatic, crumbly goat cheese, and hunks of bread torn from a couple of baguettes. For the moment, however, they had suspended conversation and even swallowing to watch with rapt gazes as the American fingered his way so engrossedly across his own chest.

Gideon nodded at them and groped onward. The middle of the rib was higher than he’d remembered-it was easy to forget how sharply the ribs curved upward, front to back-and directly under the arm. Deep in the armpit, in fact. Seemingly a hard place to reach with a knife, but not, he had learned in these last few years, an uncommon site for a stab wound. The victim throws up his hand to ward off a thrust or a blow, the delicate, vulnerable axilla is left unprotected, and the knife strikes home. There was almost no other way to open the armpit to attack. That meant, of course, that there had been a struggle involved here, or at least that the victim had tried to fend off his attacker.

He folded a piece of paper and inserted the sharply creased edge into the cut in the bone. Judging from the downward, slightly forward angle, the blade would have entered at the tangle of nerves and veins that made up the brachial plexus and then sliced through the thin, ineffective barriers of the serratus anterior and intercostal muscles, nicking the rib on the way. Then into the left lung and through the tough pericardium.

And finally, inescapably, deep into the pulsing, muscular sac that drove the entire circulatory system: the left ventricle of the heart. Death, certain and immediate.

He turned again to the brown rib on the table and grazed his thumb delicately along it. Three inches farther forward, on the same surface, there was something else: a tiny burr, so inconspicuous he’d missed it before. Once more he leaned over the bone with the magnifying glass.

"So? Is it as fascinating as all that?"

Gideon started. Absorbed, he had forgotten that lunchtime had come and gone, forgotten to be repulsed by the grisly scenario he was constructing, forgotten pretty much where he was, and he hadn’t noticed Joly come downstairs, walk across the room, and stand for some time observing him. Looking up, he was startled to see that Denis had returned too, and the workmen were busy digging again.

Joly’s head was tilted slightly back as usual, the better to stare down his nose.

"Well, I’ve been able to come up with a little," Gideon said.

"Ah?" Joly’s raised eyebrow was a terse expression of skepticism. Restrained, polite, even tolerant, but skepticism all the same.

"He was murdered-"

The smallest of smiles from Joly. "Ah," he said again, and took off his glasses to polish them with a crisply folded handkerchief.

"Stabbed to death," Gideon said. "By a right-handed assailant. During a struggle." He hesitated, then finished up: "With a kitchen knife," he said confidently. In for a dime, in for a dollar.

Joly slowly refolded his handkerchief, as if it were very important that it be done along the original crease, and put it back in his pocket. "All this from a single rib?"