Aaron Elkins - Murder In The Queen's armes

"No, there are quite a few indicators visible right here." Gideon said, and delivered a little lecture of his own. The skullcap, he pointed out, was dolichocephalic, quite a bit longer from front to back than from side to side. This was both a Negroid and Caucasoid trait; Mongoloids, on the other hand, tended to be round-headed. Moreover, the malars, or cheekbones, sloped sharply back. In a Mongoloid skull, the cheekbones would be broad planes that projected out to the sides, producing the wide, flat face of the Oriental or the American Indian. Thus, the body was almost certainly not Mongoloid, and it only remained to determine if it was that of a white man or a black man. That distinction, Gideon explained, was not difficult on this particular cranium.

Gideon ticked them off: The brow ridges were undulating, as opposed to the mesa-like ridges more characteristic of Negroid skulls; the nasal sill-the bottom of the nasal opening-was marked by a sharp border, and not the "scooped out" margin of the Negroid skull; the nasal bones themselves were "towered," giving the appearance of having been pinched together; the shape of the eye sockets tended toward the triangular, not the rectangular…

Merrill listened, entranced. "Oh, I say, that’s marvelous! I had no idea…! I must say, you’re certainly living up to your reputation."

"Actually, there’s more," Gideon said, not above flattery. "The arch of the palate, for example. You can look at it from underneath easily enough on this one, what with the throat muscles and the tongue gone." He tipped the head back on its neck rest. "The Caucasoid palate is very narrow; that’s why we suffer more from crowding of the teeth. The Negroid palatine arch, on the other hand-" He stopped suddenly, staring through the brown tatters of muscle to the bone and cartilage underneath.

"Ah, you’ve noticed, have you?" Merrill cried. "I was sure you would!"

With a probe, Gideon picked at a small U-shaped bone that lay above the larynx at the junction of jawline and throat. "It’s murder, isn’t it?" he said. "The hyoid’s fractured. He’s been strangled."

"Indeed he has. Manually strangulated. And not only the hyoid bone, but the thyroid cartilage as well." With his finger Merrill pushed at the stiff cartilage that formed the prominence of the Adam’s apple. "The left horn’s cracked. I’ve been a forensic pathologist for nineteen years and I’ve yet to see a thyroid broken this way-a single horn fractured-that wasn’t caused by manual strangulation. It’s the thumbs that do it, you know." Ever ready to demonstrate, he raised his hands, thumbs up. "They press in and…pop! Good-bye, thyroid."

The hands came down and he was abruptly grave. "So we have a male Caucasian, strangled from in front- otherwise the thumbs wouldn’t have cracked the thyroid horn-killed four weeks ago, perhaps a little less. What else can we infer?"

"Well, we can see he was a big guy, pretty powerfully built."

"I’ve estimated six feet two, living height; two hundred twenty pounds living weight. Why so thoughtful, Professor?"

"He was strangled from in front," Gideon said, "but how easy would it be to stand in front of a man that big-and presumably strong-and strangle him? I was just wondering if he might not already have been unconscious."

"We do think alike. That’s precisely my guess. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to try it with him awake. I’ve checked the head, thorax, and abdomen for any sign of a blow or wound that might have knocked him out, but I found nothing. Of course, he might have been drugged, but considering the condition of the internal organs…" He waved vaguely at the corpse and shrugged. "Still, the laboratories may find something suggestive."

Gideon nodded. "Well, let’s see what we can tell about his age."

"Good." Merrill leaned forward, full of interest. "I’ve cleaned the skullcap for you so you can look at the sutures."

"I won’t need to," Gideon said. "The pubic symphysis is a lot more reliable. That’s what I’ll want to see."

Merrill threw back his head and laughed. Puzzled, Gideon stared at him.

"No offense, Professor," Merrill said, "but you know what they say: The odontologists go for the mouth, the anthropologists go for the pubis."

No, Gideon didn’t know, but he smiled. It was hard not to loosen up with a man who enjoyed his work as much as Merrill did. "Do you mind if I carve up the pelvis a little? If I can use your saw, I’d like to have a look at the symphyseal surface."

Merrill promptly brought out a small battery-operated saw. "I’ll do it for you."

"No, that’s all right-"

"Wouldn’t hear of it." The pathologist elbowed an unprotesting Gideon out of the way, hacked briefly at the soft tissue of the groin with a knife, and set briskly to work on the left pubis with the buzzing saw. "I can see you’re not too keen on rooting about in the pelvic cavity, and I don’t mind in the least."

Gideon was surprised. He hadn’t known it showed. "No, really, I don’t mind-"

"Quite all right," Merrill said, now using a scalpel to hack through the tough cartilaginous disk that held the two halves of the pelvis together in front. "You’re a dry-bone man, aren’t you, and this sort of thing can be pretty revolt ing if you’re not used to it. What? Takes a queer bird like me not to mind it. Ah, here we are, here we are."

He had freed the small section of bone from the body. He scraped it clean with the dull end of the scalpel and rinsed it off at a stainless-steel sink in the corner. "One left pubic symphysis, clean as a whistle."

Gideon tookthe inch-long, flat-faced piece of bone. The os pubis was that part of the pelvis located exactly at the midline, just above the genitals. For reasons of which anthropologists are unsure, its symphyseal surface-the part that fits against its opposite member-is the skeleton’s surest guide to age, growing more fine-grained and pitted, in identifiable stages, from adolescence to late middle age.

Gideon studied it, explaining to an attentive Merrill as he went along. Finally he said, "I’d say he was about thirty-five."

"Marvelous," Merrill said. "Oh, good morning, Inspector."

Gideon looked up to see a big man in shirtsleeves more or less billow to the table, moving in slow, surging strides, like a diver walking on the ocean floor. He was very large, as tall as Gideon and a great deal wider.

"Hullo there, Dr. Merrill," he said. "And this must be the famous Professor Oliver, then." He spoke as he moved, rumbling along with an unhurried, stately rhythm, and he gave the impression of occupying a lot of space, even more than the considerable amount he actually did.

"Dr. Oliver," Merrill said, "this is Detective Inspector Bagshawe of the CID."

"Hello, Inspector."

"A pleasure, I’m sure, sir. You’ll forgive me if we don’t shake hands?"

Gideon forgave him. His own gloved hands were uninviting in the extreme, and Bagshawe’s crisply folded-back white shirtsleeves were scrupulously clean.

"Well," Bagshawe said, affable and placid. "Well, well. Imagine, Professor Gideon Oliver right here in Dorset. Well, now. And how have we been progressing? Does this unfortunate gentleman"-a flick of his head toward the cadaver- "appear to be Mr. Randall Alexander, or does he not?"

Gideon smiled. "That’s expecting a lot, Inspector."

"What?" The tufted eyebrows rose in patient incredulity. "Has the skeleton detective finally met his match? Surely not."

"Not at all, Inspector," Merrill interrupted. "We’ve made some real progress. Professor Oliver’s positively identified him as a Caucasian."

"Have you now?" Bagshawe looked at Gideon with something like a sparkle in his eye. "Why then, we’ve ruled out half the world already, haven’t we?"

"Three-quarters," Gideon said.