Aaron Elkins - Old Bones

"That’s right, Inspector." Well, more or less. Some of it was a little on the speculative side, but Joly’s air of amused superiority was getting under his skin a little, and he thought a show of strength was called for.

Joly lit a cigarette and sucked in a long pull, studying him all the while. "Perhaps we might go over it one point at a time?" he asked nasally, while ropes of blue smoke poured from his nostrils. "Stabbed, you say. The rib shows some sort of scratch?"

Gideon showed him the nick. Joly looked at it for a long time, using the magnifying lens. Unlike Gideon, he didn’t hunch over it, but stood rigidly erect, head lifted, and gazed down his nose at it as he did at all things. Then he went on to examine the rest of the rib and some of the other bones as well. The cigarette was a third of the way burned down before he said anything.

"I see many nicks and cuts…"

"Mice."

Joly looked up at him in that long, slow way Jack Benny used to eye Rochester or Phil Harris after they’d nailed him with a zinger. Only the inspector had more nose to stare down, which made it all the more effective. "All of them? Every single one but this one alone?"

"That’s right."

"But this one alone is from a knife and nothing else."

Gideon explained about the U-shaped incisors of rodents and the V-shaped cross-section of knives.

Joly nodded economically, listening with his head tilted to one side, and looked through the lens again. He touched the gouge with a cleanly manicured thumbnail. "Why not another animal? A dog that might have got at the bones, perhaps, or a cat? Or," he said with a smile, "do they too have scoop-shaped incisors?"

"No, cone-shaped. Or rather the canines are cone-shaped, and since carnivores bite with their canines, they leave a set of cone-shaped holes. Ragged ones, very recognizable. No, this is definitely from a knife. Look." He handed the bone to Joly. "Run your finger along the back of the cut-that is, the part on the inside of the rib. Feel the roughness?"

Joly did as instructed and nodded.

"When a knife-or an axe-cuts through bone," Gideon said, "it drives the compact bone before it so that there’s some chipping at the exit. It’s like sawing through a block of wood; you get a splintering at the back."

Joly fingered the cut again. "All right, let’s say that it was a knife or other sharp instrument-"

"A knife," Gideon said, then added: "I think." He was beginning to feel a little sorry for the inspector and a little over-pontifical.

Joly breathed in, then out. "And not an axe, for example? Didn’t you say a moment ago it would affect the bone the same way?"

"Sure, but there’s no way anything as gross as an axe could have chipped just the top of one rib; there’d be other damage."

Joly conceded. "Yes, you’re right," he said, and blew out smoke. He ran his long-fingered hand lightly across the few fine, short hairs on the top of his head. In his own way he was enjoying himself, Gideon realized, even if he hadn’t won a round so far. After a morning of evasive answers from reluctant interviewees, this string of direct and unconditional responses was probably refreshing.

"Your conclusions are quite helpful and interesting, Dr. Oliver," he said, not yet willing to throw in the towel, "but I should tell you that I still have a few reservations about them."

That makes two of us, Gideon thought, but he wasn’t quite ready to admit it yet.

Joly continued: "For example: I haven’t heard you suggest that there is anything that tells us exactly when the wound was caused."

"No, there’s no way to know, but why should that make any difference?"

"Because," Joly said mildly, "if it was made by the pick of one of the workmen who came upon it yesterday, there would be some question about its being the cause of death. No?"

"Oh, I see what you mean. Well, actually, we can say for sure-"

With a sigh the policeman interrupted him. "No, let me guess. No doubt, bones that have lain in the ground for some time become discolored, as these have done. And a cut that was made yesterday would show as fresh white against the brown. Am I correct?"

"You are," Gideon smiled, not unhappy to have Joly finally score a point, "and there’s something else too." He set the rib on the table directly in the path of the slanting light and found the little burr with his finger. Then he handed Joly the lens. "Look there."

Joly looked, his eyes narrowed against the cigarette smoke. "It appears to be an imperfection of some sort…a little curlicue…"

"A curlicue of bone; that’s just what it is. Live bone responds to a knife a lot like wood, as I said, so if you carve a thin slice off it, the slice will curl away, like a shaving."

"And dead bone is different?"

"Right. You couldn’t carve a curling slice off that rib now any more than you could off a piece of porcelain. What you’re looking at is a place where the blade scraped against the bone when it was living."

Joly straightened upand put down the lens. "But this is in a different place. What does it have to do with the other cut?"

"Oh, I think we can pretty safely assume it was also made at the time of death-there’s been no healing of either cut-and that it happened when the knife was pulled back out. The direction and angle of the slice suggest that the knife was probably twisted a little, and-"

"‘Probably’?" Joly pounced with dry elation on the word and leveled the two fingers in which he held his cigarette at Gideon. " ‘Suggest’?‘Safely assume’? Can you mean you actually admit to some uncertainty? Fallibility, even?"

Gideon laughed. "No, I just didn’t want to seem cocksure."

Joly looked at him, then emitted what was for him a full-throated laugh: a series of four staccato barks. He dropped his cigarette on the stone paving and ground it out with his heel. "There’s a restaurant you might enjoy in Dinan. What do you say to lunch?"

After the hours in the dingy cellar, Dinan was a welcome change, an old, pretty town surrounded by ancient stone walls almost hidden by gnarled ivy and bright green lichens, and dominated at one end by the handsome, brooding keep of its medieval castle. The town center was straight out of the fifteenth century, all cool, clean, gray-brown stone. The streets were cobbled with it, the ramparts and the crooked, cramped old houses made from big blocks of it. No wood, no stucco, no brick; only stone. But there were enough perky little trees in planters, enough minuscule gardens, enough tiny shops and restaurants to make it all cozy and appealing in a smaller-than-lifesize way, a Disney World rendering of MiddleAgesLand.

Joly parked the car outside the walls, along the Promenade des Petits-Fosses, and they walked through the old portal, then down twisting alleys, to the Grill-Room Duguesclin just off the Place du Champ-Clos.

"You’ll like it, I think," Joly said. "Traditional Breton cooking, though it’s run by a family of Iranians, strangely enough."

The sign outside said "Grillades sur Feu de Bois," and the grill turned out to be a huge, open fireplace of stone that was the centerpiece of the plain dining room, with a lively fire throwing out a campfire aroma that had Gideon salivating before the door closed behind him. On a wide, blackened grate set over the fire, portions of meat and fish sizzled under the teeth-flashing, showy supervision of two lean, brown young men. A radio on the counter behind them softly played Simon and Garfunkel.

"No," Gideon said, mostly to himself, as they sat at a pleasingly rough and heavy wooden table, "I don’t think so."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Not Iranians. They’re dolichocephalic, all right, but only moderately so, with pretty delicate cranial morphology. And the ossa nasalia are practically flat, which should settle it."