Aaron Elkins - Dying on the Vine

“Yes, and this makes him a lot more interesting, doesn’t it? We’ve got a hell of a motive now. What do you think the chances are that it was him?”

“The chances of him killing them? Not too good. Yeah, he tried to put us off about the accounts, but in the end he let us have them, didn’t he? What did it take, five minutes? If he thought there was something there that could help us finger him as a murderer, he’d have used every lawyer’s trick he knew to keep us from ever getting them. No, I think he just didn’t want it to come out that he was diddling the wife of his old friend and employer.” He shivered. “Whoo. Now there’s an image I’d like to get out of my mind.”

“Hold it,” Martignetti said when the switchboard buzzed him. “Let me see if this is anything.” He listened a minute, then said “I’ll take it,” and replaced the receiver. “It’s the guy who used to be Pietro’s doctor—another possible lead from the account statement. There was a bill from him for a follow-up visit with the old man last August, a month before he went up to the mountains. I figured there might be something there.”

“Right, go ahead and take it.” Rocco stood up to leave.

Martignetti put his hand back on the phone but waited before picking it up. “Rocco, on this Severo thing . . . if it’s all right with you, I’ll go ahead and dig into it a little, see if there’s anything there, but you’re probably right; chances are this is a whole separate thing, no connection.”

“No, I never said there wasn’t any connection.”

“You didn’t?”

“No, I didn’t.” He smiled. “Tonino, did you ever hear of the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business?”

TWENTY-THREE

GIDEONspent the rest of the day working on the four-hundred-page dissertation but failing to make it all the way through. By the next morning, he was only three-quarters through, and it had been a teeth-grinding slog the entire way. Full professor of physical anthropology he might be, but physical anthropology had a great many subdisciplines these days, in some of which he was as much at sea as the rawest grad student. And one of those subdisciplines was the subject of Angela Stark’s dissertation: Assessing the Extent of Genetic Admixture Between Modern Populations of Tatars, Kazakhs, and Karakalpaks in Northern Uzbekistan by Means of the Analysis of mtDNA, Y-chromosome STRs, and Autosomal STR Markers .

“Angela,” he’d told her when she’d asked him to be on her advisory committee a year earlier, “I’d love to, but I really don’t think this one is for me. If I can’t understand what the title means, how am I going to understand the rest of it?”

“Professor Oliver,” she’d said, “I already have Dr. Sherman and Dr. Spatz on my committee, and they know the technical side forward and backward. What I’m really asking from you is to keep me honest on the overall rationale, the big picture. The scientific method. Do my conclusions follow from the data? That kind of thing. I mean, the two of them are great, just great, don’t get me wrong; but . . . well, they’re kind of, you know, not exactly ‘with it,’ if you know what I mean. Not that I’m criticizing . . .”

He’d known it was his duty to defend his colleagues, but she was right. “Oh, the guy’s got a full six-pack, all right,” he’d overheard a student say about one of them—he didn’t remember which, but it fitted them both—“he’s just missing that plastic thingy that ties them together.” So he’d limited himself to a mild “Well, I wouldn’t say that.” And then a few minutes later he’d given in and taken her on. It was nice to have a student so concerned with proper scientific method. But now, sitting on the terrace with the thing on his laptop, he rued the day, as he’d known he would.

It wasn’t that he thought the application of DNA research to anthropology wasn’t a tremendous breakthrough—he knew it was—or even simply that he was a bit shaky on the technology, or that he had to take frequent breaks from reading the dissertation because his eyes glazed over every few paragraphs. More than that, the stuff made him feel like a fossil himself. Although he was on the young side for a full prof, he was an old-school, low-tech scientist. His field, as he saw it, comprised human variability, population movements and relationships, growth and aging, evolution, locomotion . . . it was, in other words, what the word anthropology literally meant: the science of people . But over the last decade or two, as in so much of science, there had been a reductionist revolution. The new bright lights of the field didn’t seem to him to be people-studiers so much as chemists, physicists, geneticists, statisticians, mathematicians, and computer modelers, all more grounded and interested in these dry (to him) subjects than in human beings as such.

Or maybe the whole idea of DNA depressed him because he knew that it portended the end of the usefulness of the forensic anthropology that had become so central a part of his life. What he’d been doing with Rocco was out of the ordinary. What forensic anthropologists did, by and large, was to assist the police in the identification of skeletal remains. But who needed someone to tell them that a particular set of bones had belonged to a white female of twenty-five to thirty- five, right-handed, five feet three to five feet six in height, who had suffered a broken ulna in childhood, and who had gone through at least one period of malnutrition during adolescence, when all they had to do to find out who she was was to take a DNA sample and enter it into the vast data banks of DNA that would someday—someday soon—be as ubiquitous as fingerprint records?

It came as a relief when this gloomy line of thought was cut off a little before noon by the noisy return of Luca’s group, back from their culinary travels. It had been the last event of the class, so there were hugs and good-byes and e-mail address exchanges all around. Gideon gratefully shut down the laptop and went out and found Julie and the Laus, who were talking longingly about taking a break from serious food and wine and finding someplace—a bar, maybe—where they could have a non-Italian lunch. Not that there was anything wrong with ambitious Italian food, of course, but enough was enough. They needed a little time off.

“Good luck finding someplace non-Italian around here,” John said, then brightened. “But there’s this great pizzeria—”

“Ah, but there is a place,” Gideon said, breaking in. “I was taking a walk this morning”—on one of his frequent breaks from Assessing the Extent of Genetic Admixture —“and I went right by what claims to be an English-style pub and looked like one to me. Says they serve lunch, English beer—”

“Ploughman’s lunch!” Marti cried, grabbing his arm and shaking it. “Take me there! At once, do you hear? At once, I say!”

“I could sure stand a shepherd’s pie,” Julie said dreamily. “And an English ale.”

“They have hamburgers in pubs, don’t they?” John asked.

• • •

ANDso they headed off to the Gate House Pub on Piazza Serristori, a small square that fronted the Teatro Garibaldi, the town’s nineteenth-century opera house. From the outside, it did indeed look vaguely like an English pub, and once through the door it smelled like one too: a cozy, comforting mix of old pipe and cigarette smoke, floor polish, and decades of spilled ale that permeated the splintery wooden floors and probably the chairs and tables as well. There was another aroma they couldn’t place and didn’t associate with pubs, but it was appetizing enough, and in they went.

Behind the bar were a broad-backed woman in a black, spaghetti-strap dress and a burly man with a black T-shirt and a dense but neatly trimmed black beard, both of them busy serving up beer. The burly guy looked up from pulling on one of a dozen pump handles, quickly marked them as Americans, and waved them in with a grin. “Hello, Yanks, what I can do for you?”