Dying on the Vine

FIFTEEN

“TO start with,” he said, “take a look at the bones of the torso and the arms as a whole. Anything strike you?”

Rocco tossed his cap onto a chair and studied the bones for a minute, hands clasped behind him. “Well, as far as fracturing goes—”

“We’ll get to the fracture patterns in a minute, but for now, does anything else catch your eye?”

“Not really, no. What else is there?”

John sent the same message, along with a shrug. “What are we supposed to be looking for?”

“Compare them in your mind to what Nola’s upper body looked like,” Gideon suggested. “How are these different? Anything pop out at you?”

Rocco began to shake his head no, but suddenly stopped. “These have been chewed on!”

Gideon nodded. “Exactly.”

“So?” John said. “Nola’s were chewed on too.”

“Not the ribs, not the arms,” Rocco exclaimed, his interest growing. “But these, they’re all . . . but how the hell could that be?”

“That,” said Gideon, “is the question.”

“What is the question?” John demanded. “How could what be?”

Rocco answered. “He was wearing a leather jacket, John. They both were. Down to the waist, with long sleeves. Good, thick jackets. And there weren’t any holes or tears in them. So naturally, the animals couldn’t get their teeth into Nola’s upper body. But they did plenty of chewing on this one, on Pietro’s. So . . . how come? That’s the question.”

“Well, what’s the answer? If his jacket wasn’t torn, how could the animals get to the bones under it?”

“Indeed,” said Gideon with a more or less inscrutable smile. “And the answer is: they didn’t.” Fun time again for the hardworking anthropologist.

“They didn’t . . . ?” Rocco echoed, brows knit.

“’Splain yourself, Lucy,” John growled.

“There weren’t any holes in the jacket because he wasn’t wearing it at the time.”

The other two stared at him. Rocco spoke. “What did you say?”

“I said there weren’t any—”

“We heard what you said. Are you telling us the jacket was put on him later—after he was dead? After the bugs and animals got to him? I’m sorry, Gid, but—”

“That’s what I’m telling you, Rocco.”

They waited for him to explain while he waited for what he’d said so far to sink in. “Consider. In Nola’s case, although her skull and lower body were gnawed, and her hands were gone, nothing that would have been covered by her jacket was touched by animals. Not so with Pietro. Logical explanation: Nola was wearing the jacket from the beginning; Pietro wasn’t—and it didn’t go on him until some time after he was killed—time enough for the animals to get in there and chew him up the way they did.”

“Which would be how long?” Rocco asked. “Are we talking hours? Days?”

“In this particular case, I’d say weeks.”

“Weeks!” Rocco shouted. The creases on his forehead got deeper. “Christ, it’s not enough that Nola was shot after she was dead, but now you’re saying someone changed Pietro’s clothes weeks after he was dead? Why? What for?”

“Hey, I’m just an anthropologist. I don’t deal with the whys. Whys are your problem, Tenente.”

“Yeah, but . . . “Rocco scowled. “Aw, this is nuts, Gid.”

John was laughing. “Good old Skeleton Detective. Does it every time.” He sipped some of his cappuccino and licked foam from his lips. “Okay, guys, let’s think this through. To start with, we’ve established where he was killed—the top of the cliff. We know that because that’s where you found the skull fragments, Rocco.”

“Yeah, there and some more of them along the way down the cliff wall, so we know . . . well, unless somebody scattered them there to make us think—”

“No-o,” Gideon said, “there’s such a thing as too weird, and that’s what that is. I think we can safely assume that that the top of the cliff is where he was shot.”

“All right, scratch that idea,” Rocco said. “So, now what’s our scenario? We’re up at the top of the cliff. Nola’s already been pushed off—”

“How do we know that again?” John asked.

“Because she was found up against this big rock, and he was found up against her, so she had to have gone first.”

“Oh, right—but hang on, how do we know someone didn’t arrange the bodies that way later? Or do you figure that’s too weird too?”

The three of them agreed that, while it might be weird, it was by no means too weird. It was something to be considered.

“Well, whatever,” Rocco said. “Thanks to you, at least we know that he was killed up there—”

“No, you said that. I didn’t say that,” said Gideon.

“The hell you didn’t.”

“Yeah, you did, Doc,” John said. “You said—”

“I said that he was shot up there.”

“And we can’t say for sure that a .32 slug that blows away half his head didn’t kill him?” John said, his voice rising. He was starting to wave his arms around, the way he did when he got excited. Then, suddenly, he sagged. “Oh no, what are you telling us? He was shot after he was already dead too? Like Nola? I think I saw this movie before. Come on, man, you gotta be kidding us.”

“Almost like Nola, but not quite,” Gideon said. “You’re forgetting. Nola was alive when she fell, and shot only afterwards . . . down at the bottom. Pietro was shot—not killed, because he was already dead—but shot—up at the top. Before he fell.”

“I’m starting to get a neck ache here,” Rocco said warningly. “Every time we think we figured out what you’re saying, you shake your head and say, ‘No, that’s not what I said.’” He turned abruptly to John. “Is he always like this?”

Gideon was all innocence. “Hey, I just figured it was better to explain things step by step. You know, build a foundation to establish that the underlying premises are valid before attempting to demonstrate that the ensuing deductions necessarily follow from them.” He smiled sweetly.

“Oh yeah,” John said airily to Rocco, “this is exactly what he’s always like.” And to Gideon: “Okay, Doc, don’t you think you’ve boggled the minds of us poor dumb coppers long enough? I mean, I know it’s one of your few pleasures, but how about just getting to the point of it and stop beating around the bush? We’re getting lost here.”

Rocco agreed. “Yeah, screw the underlying premises. How about just coming out and telling us what your ensuing deductions are?”

“Right,” John chipped in. “Get to the part that knocks our socks off.”

Gideon flopped into a chair, suddenly tired. “All right, here’s the punch line: Pietro Cubbiddu didn’t kill his wife. Or himself.”

“Well, you were kind of thinking along those lines before, weren’t you?” John said.

“Yes, but now there isn’t any ‘along those lines.’” He looked at Rocco. “I know that Pietro Cubbiddu didn’t kill his wife. He couldn’t have. There’s no longer any doubt about it. I think you’re going to want to reopen the case, Rocco.”

Rocco wasn’t pleased. He went back into his scowl. “And you ‘know’ this how?”

Gideon sighed. “You people are so untrustful. I know it because, at the time Nola was killed, Pietro was already dead. Long dead.”

“Long dead,” John repeated. “What does that mean? Hours, days . . . ?”

Gideon shook his head. “What I said before: weeks.”

“Weeks!” Rocco shouted. Now he was confused as well as unhappy. “How the hell can that be?” He was close to being angry as well. “How do you know that? What, from these stupid gnaw marks?”

Gideon drank down the rest of his latte before answering. “No, not from the gnaw marks. From the fracture patterns of the bones.”

“The fracture patterns of the . . .” Rocco dropped heavily into the chair beside Gideon and appealed to John. “He’s wearing me out. What the hell is he talking about now, do you know?”

John hunched his shoulders. “I don’t have a clue.” He looked at Gideon. “Doc?”

“The fracture patterning,” Gideon said. “That’s one of those underlying premises I was referring to.”

“Well, on second thought, maybe you ought to go back to establishing them, after all.”

“I would, John, but if I recall correctly, this gentleman from the Carabinieri advised—with some considerable heat, I might add—that I screw them.” The shot of caffeine in his system was already perking him up.

Rocco closed his eyes. “I’m gonna kill him,” he muttered, but he was laughing. John had already been laughing for a while, and now Gideon joined in too. “Okay,” he said, slapping his thighs and getting up, “come on, I’ll show you what I’m talking about.”

When the three of them stood over the bones, Gideon said, “We have a really strange situation here.”

“No kidding,” John said.

“No, this is one I’ve never run into before. Or anything close. All right, first a little general background on bones.”

“The underlying premises,” Rocco said, nodding.

“The underlying premises of the underlying premises,” Gideon corrected, and went on before they could comment.

“Living bone,” he explained, “is a very different thing than dead bone. The first is infused with fluid and grease and covered with moist tissue, something like a bark-covered branch on a living tree. The second is dried out, like a dead twig that’s been on the ground for a long time. The result is that they tend to fracture in different ways. For example, when a fresh bone—a living leg bone, say—is subjected to extreme pressure, it doesn’t just break: it bends. It’s actually flexible to some extent. So it’s more resistant to breaking, and when it does break, there’s a good chance it will splinter but stay in one piece, like a living branch—which is why that kind of break is called a green-stick fracture. But dead bone—like the dead twig—is no longer flexible. Try to bend it, and it just snaps into two pieces. Or three or four or five.”

“Like these,” John said, surveying the shattered bones on the table. “Clean breaks, almost all of them. But with Nola, a lot of them were those . . . what was it, green-twig fractures.”

“Green-stick,” Gideon said. “Right. Conclusion: unlike Nola, who was alive—whose bones were still moist, living tissue when she went off that cliff—”

“Alive and conscious,” Rocco added.

“—Pietro was already dead. And not only dead, but thoroughly dead. Long enough for his bones to start to dry out.”

“But what about these?” John asked, indicating a couple of ribs that had clear green-stick fractures, and two similar ones in the sacrum.

“Well, that’s why I said ‘long enough for his bones to start to dry out.’ It doesn’t happen all at once. And as to which ones dry first and which don’t, there are a million variables. In the case of these green-stick ones—the sacrum, the eleventh and twelfth ribs—they’re all in the body’s core, the area most thickly covered with fat and muscle and other tissue—clothing too—so they’d stay moist longer and be protected from drying. The other bones would dry out faster. So the same fall could very well have produced dry-stick fractures in some of the bones and green-stick fractures in others. Which is exactly what I think happened.”

“Hey, Doc, let me ask you something else,” John said. “When you say he had to have been dead long enough for the bones to start drying out, how long would that be?

Gideon sighed. “Maybe one of you ought to write this down. What we’re talking about here are weeks.”

Rocco’s expression was pained. “Oh, please . . .”

“Weeks,” repeated Gideon. “Look, he left home for his cabin on, what was it, September first, right?”

Rocco nodded.

“Okay, so we know he was definitely alive then. And we’re assuming that the two of them got thrown off the cliff a month later, on October 1, when she came to pick him up.”

“It’s a pretty safe assumption,” Rocco said. “She left her aunt’s that morning, but she didn’t show up—neither of them showed up—at Villa Antica that afternoon.”

Gideon nodded. “Well, I tell you, how long it takes for human bone to dry out is extremely variable. It depends on temperature, humidity, the health of the victim, what he was wearing—”

“Here we go again,” said John.

“No,” Gideon said firmly. “Here we do not go again. I will say—and I’m willing to go on the record with this—that Pietro Cubbiddu had to have been dead a minimum of two weeks, and most likely more, when he was shot and his body thrown off that cliff. And my guess—which I’m not quite willing to go on the record with—is that it had to have been closer to four weeks than to two. In other words, not very long after he arrived at the cabin, sometime in that first week or so of September.”

“Which would have made it kind of hard for him to kill Nola in October,” John observed with a baffled frown.

No one said anything for a few seconds, and then Rocco asked: “So exactly what the hell do we think did happen?”

“Don’t look at me,” John said with a shake of his head. “I’m more lost than I was before he started.”

“I don’t have an answer to that either,” said Gideon, “but it does seem to me there are some pretty interesting threads you can pull out of the circumstances as we now understand them, Rocco. However it worked—and whatever was behind it—the killer had to be there waiting when Nola arrived, to make it look as if Pietro killed her.”

“Which means he had to know when she was coming,” John said. “The exact day she’d show up at the cabin. Which must mean we’re not talking about a whole hell of a lot of people. I mean, how many people would know something like that?”

Rocco was nodding along with him. “Right. And then who would even know where the cabin was? The family kept that to themselves. Pietro insisted on being left alone up there. Even they weren’t welcome during that one month. He kept a cell phone for emergencies, and that was all the contact he wanted with the outside world. So . . . I think maybe—if we reopened the case—we’d be looking at the family itself and any really close confidantes. That would be the place to start, anyway.”

“So that would include . . . ?” Gideon asked.

“The sons, of course—Franco, Luca, Nico . . . and Cesare, naturally . . . and Luca’s wife, Linda, I guess. And the lawyer, Quadrelli; he’s in on everything.” He’d been counting the names on his fingers as he said them, and he was on the first finger of the second hand. “Six in all. And probably some of the employees. But not a whole lot of people, at least to start with. It’s doable. You got any tips for me?”

That was Gideon’s cue to tell him about Cesare, and about the aborted Humboldt-Schlager deal. He half expected Rocco to flare up again, but he was uncharacteristically grateful instead. “You guys have been a huge help. I want to thank you. It’s obvious we screwed up the first time around, and you opened up my eyes.”

“I appreciate that. And if there’s any other way I can help, just ask,” Gideon said.

“Me too,” John said. “Count me in.”

Rocco smiled. “Yeah? What are the two of you doing right now?”

“Not a lot,” John said hopefully. He’d been getting a little bored with life in Figline.

“Good. Let’s drive back up to Florence. I’m gonna have to get my boss to agree to it, and I don’t think I can do it without you guys there to help me explain. Captain Conforti’s a tough nut to crack. He’s a very smart guy, don’t get me wrong, but he’s also a bureaucrat, and he hates it when things aren’t nice and neat. He also doesn’t like it when you tell him he got something wrong.”

“Who does?” said Gideon.