Aaron Elkins - The Dark Place

"He’s the other guy who disappeared."

"I thought that was a girl. Claire Hornick."

"No, I mean six years ago, the same time as Eckert. Hornick disappeared last week. She’s still disappeared."

"What makes you think it’s not another Indian burial, an old one?"

"Well, we’ve tentatively identified it through dental records, but I’d sure appreciate it if you’d have a look anyway."

"Okay," Gideon said, "okay. I’ll see you about nine. Uh, John?…I’ve been talking the case over with an old professor of mine…"

John listened quietly for ten minutes while Gideon told him about the discussion with Abe, interrupting only to ask for an explanation of atlatls. After Gideon had finished, the line remained silent.

"John? Are you there?"

"I’m here. I’m just in shock."

"Well, after all," Gideon said magnanimously, "you were the one who first suggested Indians-"

"I know. That’s what I’m in shock about. I never won an argument with you before. You’re actually telling me I was right and you were wrong? I can’t believe it!"

"Come on, John," Gideon said, laughing, "I’m not that unreasonable. Sometimes even you make sense-to a certain degree, of course, and in your own way."

"Thanks a lot. I wish I could say I deserved such fantastic compliments. But," he said, his voice dropping to a lower, grimmer register, "I’m afraid this new body doesn’t do much for your theory."

"What theory?"

"That wild Indians are running around bumping off people with Stone Age spears. Doc, this guy was shot."

"Shot? With a gun?"

There was a pause, and Gideon knew John was nodding soberly. "Yeah, with a gun. He’s got a neat little round hole drilled clean through the side of his skull."

"Hmm," Gideon said, almost as soon as he had sat down and looked at the ivory-colored skull on the worktable. "Huh."

John had his chair tipped back against the wall, and his hands were clasped lazily at his belt line. "I don’t like that ‘hmm, huh’ stuff," he said. "It always means you’re about to screw up my case. Not that I have a case."

"He wasn’t shot, John," Gideon said quietly.

The front legs of John’s chair came down on the linoleum tile. "Not shot…!" He gestured expressively at the circular hole in the left side of the skull.

"Not shot. In the first place, look at the placement. High up on the coronal suture, almost at bregma. Isn’t it pretty unusual for someone to be shot so high up on the head?"

"No, as a matter of fact."

"Really?"

"Sure," John said, obviously relishing the unaccustomed role of instructor. "It’s a fairly common placement in suicides."

"And what would he have used to leave a hole that big? An elephant gun?"

"Doc," John said easily, "no offense, but aren’t you a little out of your league with this forensic pathology stuff? Little bullets can make big holes."

"Maybe," Gideon said, "but when they make big holes they make big sloppy holes, not neat round ones like that. And consider this: To drill a hole that cleanly, a bullet would have to be traveling at a heck of a velocity, wouldn’t it?"

"So? That’s what bullets do. Say fifteen hundred feet a second-three thousand if you assume it was a rifle. Muzzle velocity, of course." John was still teaching and enjoying it.

"Then where’s the exit hole?"

John chewed the inside of his cheek. He was beginning to waver. "Lodged in the brain, probably, then fell out later."

"A projectile that big, going that fast? It would have plowed through the brain like so much vanilla pudding and exploded the forward right side of the skull on the way out-here at the temporal or the sphenoid; both very fragile, thin bones."

"Unless," John said, "it had a soft tip. Then it could have stayed inside."

"But-"

"I know. It wouldn’t have made such a neat hole." John leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, looking glum. "Okay, Doc, I give up. You’re right. Let’s hear your theory, but try to keep it to words I can understand, okay?"

"This was a trephining, not a shooting."

"Oh, one of those."

"It’s also called trepanning. The cutting out of a disc of bone from the vault of the skull. A lot of primitive peoples have practiced it, including American Indians. For that matter, it’s still a common surgical technique."

John took the skull carefully in both hands and peered at the hole. "And that’s what this is? Trephining?"

Gideon nodded. "See those annular grooves encircling the aperture?"

John shook his head in exasperation. "These scratches around the hole?"

"Yes, they scraped round and round with something sharp until they got to the inner table and the disc of bone separated."

"Ugh." He looked suddenly at Gideon. "Did they do it when he was alive or dead?"

"Could be either. Sometimes it was done as a treatment for headaches or insanity, sometimes to get a piece of a dead enemy to wear as an amulet. There’s a twentieth-century group in New Ireland that did it just for fashion. They-"

"For Christ’s sake, Doc, I mean this guy."

"I don’t know." He took the skull from John and moved his fingertips slowly over the area surrounding the clean-rimmed hole. "Or maybe I do know. The differential healing of this fracture and the absence of septic osteitis suggest-"

"Wait a minute," John said and sighed, rising and going to the coffeepot at the back of the room. "If you’re going to give a lecture, I’m going to need some fortification. You want some coffee?"

"I’ll have some coffee," Gideon said, "but I’m not going to give a lecture. I’m simply going to demonstrate the art of scientific detection in a simple manner-simple enough," he said, looking loftily at John, "for even the most unformed of minds to comprehend."

"Oh, brother," John said, "I better have two sugars." He returned to the table with two mugs cupped easily in one big hand, placed one of the mugs in front of Gideon, and sat down.

"In the first place," Gideon said, "do you see this crack coming out of the upper part of the hole?"

"This squiggly line?"

"No, that’s the coronal suture, the division between the frontal and parietal bones. No…this thin crack here, that runs up to the top, just behind the suture."

"Yeah," John said, fingering the almost-invisible fissure. "I noticed that before. I figured either it cracked when the hole was made, or after it was in the ground. Pressure from the earth or something. That happens, doesn’t it?"

"All the time, but I don’t think it did in this case. In fact, I know it didn’t." He sipped his coffee, choosing his words. "Now: That barely visible fracture is more significant than this big round hole. There are three things to be learned from it. First, that it-and the blow that caused it-occurred not after he was dead, but while he was still alive. Second, that the blow didn’t kill him outright, and possibly not at all, but that he lived a week or so afterward. And third, that the fracture definitely preceded the trephining-and the trephining probably did cause his death."

He paused, well launched in his best professorial style. In response, John’s mild truculence had evaporated, as it usually did, into a respectful, only slightly skeptical attentiveness.

"Run your finger over the crack, from side to side, near the edge of the round hole," Gideon said.

John did so and frowned. "The bone feels kind of concave-dented. How can you dent bone?"

"Easily. Living bone is relatively soft. It bends, splits, dents. But dead bone quickly loses its elasticity and becomes brittle. Therefore-"

"He probably got cracked on the head when he was alive."

"Right." Gideon said. "By something heavy enough to cause the fracture and blunt enough to cause the concavity. The exact locus of the blow was undoubtedly a little lower down, at the site of the trephining."