Aaron Elkins - Dying on the Vine

“No, she was shot in the head.”

“She didn’t fall off the cliff?”

“No, she fell off the cliff.”

“So then what am I missing here?” He spread his hands. “What else is there to get wrong?”

“They’re starting to filter back in, Rocco. May as well wait till everybody’s here.”

• • •

GIDEONstood on one side of the table while the cops gathered in a standing half circle on the other side, a few feet back. “You did a fine job,” he began. “You only made one mistake, but it’s a zinger. A big one,” he emended, seeing from a number of frowns that zinger wasn’t in everybody’s vocabulary. “Now, you got the basics right: she was shot in the back of the head. The hole near the occipital protuberance is the entrance wound, and the defect in the forehead, that ‘reverse depressed fracture,’ is indeed a partial exit wound. By the way, Rocco, did you find the bullet? Was it still in her skull?’

“It was, just rattling around in there.”

“Okay, so we can consider it definitely established that, for whatever reason—maybe it was old, maybe it was the wrong caliber for the gun, maybe the charge had gotten damp or wasn’t big enough, maybe something else—whatever, the bullet didn’t have enough oomph to make it all the way through. But since it did make it to the inside of the front of the skull, we know that it had to have passed right through her brain, back to front. All the same, I think we can safely say that it didn’t kill her.”

A tentative hand went up; the formal, scholarly chief inspector from Gibraltar. “I certainly don’t mean to question your judgment, Professor Oliver, but I served as a paramedic in Afghanistan, so I know something about head wounds. And—no offense, sir—but a bullet that took this trajectory would necessarily destroy so much vital brain tissue that . . . well, in my belief, death would have been, well, certain . . . and instantaneous.”

“I agree with you, Clive. And remember, a bullet destroys a lot more than what lies directly in its trajectory, because the energy it generates hollows out a cavity much wider than the bullet’s actual diameter. And the brain is the softest organ in the body, more like jelly than any other human tissue, so it pulps very easily. And then don’t forget that the bullet carries pieces of bone and tissue along with it, and that messes up things too. So yes, that bullet would have killed her, all right. And almost certainly, it would have been instantly.”

“Hey, wait a minute, Doc,” John said. “Didn’t you just say—?”

“I didn’t say it wouldn’t have killed her, I said it didn’t kill her.” To himself Gideon somewhat shamefacedly admitted that he was having fun. The boggling of policemen’s minds was one of the innocent little vices of the forensic set.

“And there’s a difference?” someone finally asked.

“Ah, well, there we have—”

One of the two women, a polizeihauptkommissarin from Vienna, lifted her hand. “Professor, I regret to interrupt, but we run a bit late. Already it is four hours twenty, and there are five o’clock section meetings for some among us, so—”

“So we’d better wrap up right now. All right,” he said, “go ahead and get the remains back in the carton—carefully—and we’ll head back to Florence. We’ll finish this up tomorrow morning.”

Rocco was frowning hard. “Wait, wait, wait, at least tell us—”

Gideon shook his head. “Tomorrow.” He was a longtime believer in the Creed of the Artful Professor:

Always leave ’em wanting more.

SIX

ROCCO, John, and Gideon all drove back to Florence in different vehicles; the same ones they’d come in, but when the cars pulled into the Carabinieri parking lot alongside the Great Cloister, Rocco was waiting for him. He was still scowling. “Listen, Gid, I can’t figure out what to make of what you were telling us back there. If the shot didn’t kill her, what did?” This was the second time that Rocco had called him Gid, and Gideon resisted the impulse to ask him to knock it off. For whatever reason—he didn’t know himself—it annoyed him to be addressed by diminutives or nicknames—he liked his own full name—and he didn’t hesitate to say so. He had only one friend, none other than John Lau himself, who was granted the privilege. John had been calling him Doc since the day they’d met, and Gideon had had no choice but to go along with it. Gid was even worse than Doc, but somehow, coming out of Rocco’s mouth, it couldn’t have been more natural. It fitted with his brash, wise-guy manner in a way that the prissier Gideon wouldn’t have. So now there were two who were allowed to get away with it. He was mellowing with age.

“The fall is what killed her,” he said.

“The fall?” The scowl deepened. “The fall ?”

“The fall.”

“But . . . I don’t get it. The cop from Gibraltar, Clive, he said the bullet would have killed her then and there, and you agreed with him. I agree with him, for that matter.”

“I do agree with him. A .32, back to front, right smack through the middle of the head? It should have killed her, it would have killed her—well, it would have if she hadn’t already been dead.”

“What do you mean, already dead?” John had come up behind them. “Why shoot her if she was already dead? And how do you know that, anyway?”

Rocco was equally bewildered. “Gid, stop messing with us, will you? What exactly are you telling us here?”

“What I’m telling you, Rocco . . . John . . . is that the fall came first, then the bullet. She was already dead—from the fall—when he shot her.”

Rocco, hands spread, looked to one side, then the other, as if searching for someone to explain it to him, but no luck. “Gid, she fell sixty meters —that’d be, uh . . .”

“Almost two hundred feet.”

“Yeah, two hundred feet. That’s a lot of feet. So what the hell would be the point of shooting her after that?”

“Beats me, Rocco.”

“Take a guess,” John said.

“All right, all I can think of would be that he was taking out some insurance. He wasn’t positive that the fall had done it, so he came down and finished the job. Administered a coup de grace. That’s all I can think of, but I have to say I’m not real confident about it, considering that she fell off the equivalent of a twenty-story building onto a rocky surface and must have looked it. But it fits the facts. Sort of.”

Rocco was suddenly irritated. “Okay, tell me something, Mr. Expert—”

“That’s Doctor Expert to you, buddy.”

Rocco was unmollified. “How the hell do you know which came first? I mean, I swear to God . . . you ‘experts’ . . . that’s just the kind of thing . . .” He jerked his head, muttering to himself.

“Fun, isn’t it?” John said, grinning. “I always love when he does this.”

“Well, good for you. I don’t.”

“Rocco, what are you getting worked up about?” Gideon asked. “Does it really make any difference exactly when he shot her? Obviously, it doesn’t change the outcome.”

“Yeah, it makes a difference. It’s weird, it’s inconsistent, it’s . . . well, it’s a loose end, it doesn’t fit.”

Gideon laughed. “If you ever run into a murder case where everything’s consistent with everything else—no conflicting eyewitness testimony, no loose ends, no ambiguities, no unanswered questions—please let me know, will you? We’ll write it up for the journals.”

“You can say that again,” John agreed.

But Rocco stuck to his guns. “It doesn’t make sense to shoot someone if they already fell off a goddamn mountain. That alone throws the scenario our guys put together out of whack, and it worries me. If it’s true. It should worry me. What kind of a cop would I be if it didn’t?” Meaningful pause. “ If it’s true.”