Dying on the Vine

FIVE

BUT the lieutenant had been unable to get through to almost-cousin Alberto, the almost-proprietor of the funeral establishment. As a result, Alberto Cippollini was understandably startled when three imposing midnight-blue Carabinieri vehicles—two Alfa Romeo 159 compact executives and one Iveco VM 90 van, plus one not- so-imposing two-seater, an aptly nicknamed ovetti (little egg) that looked like the cockpit of a helicopter (minus the helicopter)—pulled screeching into the parking area of Onoranze Funebri Cippollini and fourteen burly men (and two burly women) piled out of them. A tentative, nervous little man in a too-tight black suit and tie, he came to the glass doors looking a little sick.

Blinking, he opened one of the doors enough to stick his head through. “Che . . . che cosa . . . ?”

“It’s all right, Alberto,” Rocco yelled back to him in Italian, his hands lifted placatingly. “This is nothing official. We just want to look at that skeleton you got the other day. It’s for our school.”

“You mean right now? But . . . but there is a memorial service in progress in the chapel,” he whispered. “I can’t have you . . . marching through . . .” His hands were fluttering in front of his chest. Gideon expected him to start wringing them, and a second later he did. “The mourners . . .”

“Well, let us into the workroom through the back door, then. We won’t go anywhere near the chapel. They’ll never know we’re here.”

“You’re not going to take the, the remains away, are you? The cremation is tomorrow. It’s all been arranged by the son, and I don’t want—”

“I’m Professor Oliver,” Gideon interrupted in Italian. His command of the language was good enough to put together grammatically correct sentences (as long as they were in the present tense), and to comprehend a good deal more. “I’m in charge of the class, and I promise you that we won’t disturb the remains in any way. All we need is an hour, and we’ll leave everything as we find it.”

“Of course, yes, I see. Now, I . . . I haven’t done anything with them, you understand. That is to say, I haven’t prepared them, other than to clean them up a little—”

Rocco laughed. “Alberto, they’re bones. I don’t think anybody expected you to embalm them.”

“Well, that’s certainly so, ha-ha.” He cleared his throat and lowered his voice even more. “Come around to the back then. I’ll get them out for you.” He hesitated. “And Rocco—perhaps you could see to it that these police cars are moved out of sight to the parking area in back? It doesn’t look so good to visitors, you know?”

• • •

AS forensic scientists went, Gideon Oliver was a celebrated wuss. He didn’t like working with dead bodies, and the more violent the manner of death or the fresher the bodies, the queasier they made him. What he did like working with, what intrigued and motivated him, were skeletons: the cleaner, and drier, and older, the better. Early Pleistocene remains were about right, and they constituted his main area of scholarly research. He didn’t like autopsy rooms, he didn’t like dissection labs, and he didn’t like mortuary embalming rooms. As a result, the preparation room at Onoranze Funebri Cippollini came as a pleasant surprise. When the door was opened and signor Cippollini stepped out of the way to let them in, Gideon steeled himself for the expected odor (a combination of innards and formaldehyde, like a high-school lab where frogs and fetal pigs are dissected, only worse). Instead, what greeted him was a welcome wisp of lavender. And the room itself was almost jolly, with multicolored wall tiles randomly placed among the white ones. Even the bases of the two work tables were faced with colorful tile mosaics.

And no bidet-like conveniences for flushing away the bodily flu- ids and other nastinesses that came out of corpses. None of the other medieval-torture-chamber implements he’d expected either—the tongs, the knives, the alarming hypodermics. Of course—he’d forgotten: Italians by and large didn’t practice embalming. Rooms like this were used for little more than a washup, a little cosmetic work if necessary, and a proper fitting-out for viewing at the memorial, which usually took place within a couple of days, for obvious reasons.

There were two standard zinc work tables in the room, though, on one of which Cippollini placed the remains, enclosed in a three-foot-long box of heavy cardboard; a child’s cremation container, Gideon assumed.

“Let’s get at it,” he said when Cippollini reluctantly left them to it. “Rocco, this is your treat, so if you’ll remove the bones one by one, I’d like everyone to work together getting them laid out as near as possible to their anatomical relationship. And I’ll just watch from back here and keep my mouth shut.”

“Don’t bet on it,” muttered a big Hawaiian with an affable, easy laugh.

“Hey, when I say something, you can take it straight to the bank,” Gideon said, smiling back.

John Lau was his closest friend, an FBI special agent out of the Seattle field office. They had worked together more than once, and the two of them with their wives got together regularly back home. John had taken a similar seminar from Gideon years ago, when the symposium had convened in St. Malo, France, but science, as does everything else, changes with time, and he, like two of the other attendees, was back for a refresher. Gideon and John had both come with their wives and had been seeing Florence together in their off-time, so it had been as much pleasure as work. And then when the seminar ended the following day, the four of them were off to a winery out in the Tuscan countryside, where the two women had signed up for a five-day cooking class.

Rocco had barely gotten the skull out of the box when John was proved right. “Whoa, hold it, what do we have here?” Gideon exclaimed.

“Ha,” observed John in quiet triumph.

Rocco handed over the skull, and Gideon peered hard at the frontal bone, running his fingers over an area in the center of the forehead, where the hairline would be on a living person. “Well, this is something you don’t see every day,” he murmured.

“Oh, I can tell you what that is,” Rocco said. “We figured that out pretty fast.”

“I’m sure you can, but let’s see what the rest of us come up with, okay? Anybody got a flashlight?”

Someone handed over a penlight attached to a key chain, and Gideon stuck it in the opening at the base of the skull to light up the interior. “Huh,” he said, “that’s what I thought. Interesting.” He handed back the penlight, turned the skull right side up, and held it in both hands just above the tabletop so that the area he’d been so interested in was uppermost. At that spot there was a sort of escarpment; an inch-long ridge of bone rising from the flat, curving plateau of the skull, looking for all the world as if there had been an eruption below the surface.

“Ideas, anybody? What do you suppose this could be?”

“Would it be a genetic thing?” someone asked.

“Nope.”

“Some kind of bone disease?

“Nope.”

“Brain disease?” This from John.

“Uh-uh.”

“Some kind of trauma?”

“Good man. Trauma it is; blunt trauma. What we have here, you see, is an unusual kind of depressed fracture—what I think of as a reverse depressed fracture.” He explained that a depressed fracture was a fairly common kind of cranial injury that jams a segment of bone inward, so there is (usually) a sharply defined indentation in the bone. For example, a blow with a ball-peen hammer can leave a dent the exact shape and size of the hammer’s ball, sometimes even reproducing its irregularities closely enough to permit identification of the specific weapon. The area on the underside of the dent, of course, is necessarily forced inward, frequently causing grave damage to the brain.

“You’re losing me, professor,” someone said. “This part here”—the speaker fingered the ridge—“isn’t dented in, it’s sticking up.”

“Exactly,” Gideon replied. “Which is why I call it a depressed fracture in reverse—the force came from inside the head and pushed outward.”

This produced the expected murmurs of incredulity. “How can that be?” someone said.

“Ah,” said Gideon, “that is for me to know and you to find out—shut up, Rocco—which I have no doubt that you will do in the next few minutes. But for the moment, go ahead and continue laying out the bones. I’ll just stand here and keep perfectly quiet.” He leveled a quick forefinger at John as his friend opened his mouth to speak. “Watch it.”

John raised both hands to profess innocence of intent, and Rocco got back to work unloading and laying out the bones.

The two-and-a-half-day forensic anthropology seminar was midway through its second day, so there had been time for only a few hours of training in the basics of bone identification. Nevertheless, they did pretty well. Gideon was pleased; apparently they’d been paying attention, and perhaps had even gone so far as to study the handout materials in the evenings. Inside of fifteen minutes, they had what was left of the skeleton laid out on its back: skull, mandible, pelvis, scapulas, vertebral column, arm and leg bones, one collarbone, and most of the ribs. The hands, right foot, left collarbone, and some of the vertebrae were missing, probably carried off by carnivores, and the facial skeleton, mandible, and leg bones had been gnawed. The bones of the left foot—un-gnawed—were in a clasp envelope, with “bones found in left shoe” written on it in Italian. Gideon told them not to worry about identifying those individually. (Distinguishing between the five metatarsals and fourteen phalanges of the human foot—let alone telling left from right, and distinguishing the metatarsals of the foot from the metacarpals of the hand—took a lot more than a few hours’ training.) There were also a lot of broken fragments, most of which the group had correctly identified as crumbling chunks of vertebrae.

“How’d we do?” they wanted to know.

“You did a good job,” Gideon said, surveying the result.

“You mean we even got the ribs right? Amazing.”

“Don’t be amazed. I said ‘good,’ not ‘perfect.’ You didn’t get them all.” He did some deft, rapid rearranging while he spoke. “This goes here, this goes here, this goes . . . here. And you got the clavicle upside down and backward—and on the wrong side. It goes here, like this. And the fibulas are on the wrong sides too. But look,” he said, responding to the grumbles and the accusatory Didn’t I tell you thats that fluttered around the group, “you’re cops, not anthropologists. No reason for you to know all that. I don’t care if you can’t tell a right clavicle from a left clavicle or which side goes up, I’d just like you to be able to say that’s what it is when you see one lying out in the woods—a clavicle, a human clavicle, and not some bone from a rabbit or a fox. The forensic specialists can take it from there. So I’m telling you: you did well.”

A final look at the arrangement and a nod of approval. “Okay, we know this is a female because Rocco told us so yesterday. But you should be able to tell even without that. Anyone care to tell me how? We talked about it in yesterday’s session.”

Among others, John raised his hand, but Gideon called on a ruddy-cheeked Swiss oberstleutnant whose hand had shot up before the question had been finished. Helmut Waldbaum was a good, eager student, but his English, while more than sufficient for him to understand things, was close to impenetrable.

He grinned when Gideon called on him. “Za ghrule oaff tzoom,” he said proudly.

Gideon, who had gotten used to the accent, nodded. “Right. The rule of thumb.”

This referred to the fastest and simplest approach to sexing a skeleton, and a fairly reliable one, although not so reliable as was once thought. What you did was to place your thumb—or imagine placing your thumb—into the sciatic notch, the indentation that separated the ilium of the pelvis from the pubis (the upper from the lower half). If it was so narrow that the fit was snug, then it was a male you were looking at. But a female’s sciatic notch was wider, with plenty of wiggle room. Often you could fit two fingers into the notch.

“Now here’s something interesting to think about: why would this particular difference between the sexes exist? And once again, natural selection provides the answer. Since childbearing requires more of a bowl-shaped container for the growing fetus, the biomechanical forces of evolutionary development . . .” He caught himself with a laugh. “There I go again. Strike that from the record. Let’s move on.”

He turned the skull upside down again so the bottom faced up. They found themselves looking at a caved-in skull base. A good third of it—much of the rear half—had been thrust a half inch inward (upward in a person standing erect), cracking a ragged-edged disk of bone two to three inches in diameter. In the center of the disk, as in the center of a CD, was a smooth-rimmed hole, the foramen magnum, the opening through which the spinal cord emerges from the brain.

“Is this another depressed fracture?” someone asked, fingering the collapsed bone. “Only this one goes the right way, pushed in, not out.”

“Right,” Gideon said.

“But that’s huge,” Rocco said. “What the hell caused that?”

“You don’t know?” Gideon asked.

“No, I don’t,” Rocco said defensively. “Look, I never actually saw the skull before, all cleaned up like this.”

“But your medico’s report didn’t say?”

Rocco shrugged. “It said a lot of the bones were busted. Was I supposed to memorize them or something?”

“Hey, relax, Rocco. I just thought he might have made a special point about it.”

“Well, he didn’t.”

“Then he missed something pretty significant,” Gideon said, laying the skull back on the table. “This is what is known as a basilar ring fracture. It’s not very common, and it tells us something important about what exactly happened here.”

“What?” asked someone.

“Well, let me give you a chance to figure the whole thing out for yourselves first. It’d be a better exercise if we didn’t know what the circumstances were and what had actually happened, but Rocco’s already told us, so—”

“No, he told us what the Carabinieri concluded had happened,” somebody said archly. “That’s a different thing.”

Rocco pulled a face. “Thanks a lot, pal.”

“Actually, that’s a good way to look at this whole exercise, if you like,” Gideon said. “Your job is to review the police findings on these bones and see if you agree or disagree. Murder-suicide, both deaths by gunshot, and so on—did they get it right? And just concentrate on the trauma, don’t worry about the other things we’ve talked about—race, age, occupational indicators, height—just the trauma. I’ll give you”—he looked at his watch—“twenty minutes, plus another five minutes to write up your report on the dry-marker board over there.”

“What if we all don’t agree?” someone asked.

“Then indicate that in the report. Okay, folks, the clock is running. Better get on with it.”

While John and the others went to work, Gideon and Rocco sat on stools next to the other table, with Rocco back in a good mood and telling dumb-carabinieri jokes. Apparently there was no shortage of them.

“So this village station commander—a maresciallo, a marshal—is sitting in his car, and he calls one of his carabinieri over. ‘Martino, take a look at my rear turn lights, will you, and tell me if they’re working right.’ The carabiniere goes to the back of the car and watches, while the commander holds down the turn-indicator lever.

“‘Yes, maresciallo,’ he says after a second, ‘they work fine. No, wait, they don’t. No, wait, they do. No, wait, they don’t. No, wait . . .’”

Gideon smiled, which encouraged Rocco. “Why do carabinieri always work in pairs?

“Beats me.”

“One to read and one to write.” Rocco laughed.

“I gather there are a lot of these?” Gideon asked.

“Millions. In real life, though,” Rocco said, turning serious, “the Carabinieri are a pretty selective outfit with some really stiff standards. Hell, my own brother applied, but they turned him down. You know why?” He waited for Gideon to bite, but Gideon wouldn’t, so Rocco supplied the answer. “He scored too high on the intelligence test.”

They were only a few feet from the work table, so the others had no trouble hearing them, and most grinned at the jokes every now and then. But a Carabinieri major from Rome, the highest-ranking officer there, had been glaring over his shoulder at Rocco for a while, clearly unamused.

“Um, Rocco . . .” Gideon began.

“Hey, do you know why carabinieri trousers have those red stripes down the sides? So they can find the pockets, hee-hee.”

The major continued to glare. “Rocco, I think maybe . . .”

“Okay, wait, this guy lives halfway up a narrow mountain road. So one day he sees this Carabinieri car driving backward up the mountain. ‘How come you’re driving backward?’ he wants to know. ‘Because we’re not sure if there’ll be a place to turn around at the top,’ they tell him. An hour later, here they come back down the mountain . . . backward again. ‘So why are you still driving backward?’ he asks. ‘Because we found a place to turn around after all.’”

When Rocco paused to think up the next one, Gideon was finally able to break in. “Rocco, I think you might be annoying the stern, important-looking gentleman over there at the foot of the table,” he said quickly, hoping to head Rocco off.

Rocco glanced up. “Major Grimaldi?” he whispered back. “He’s been listening? Oh Christ, that’s all I need. Come on, let’s get some fresh air. I need a smoke.”

“Are you in trouble?” Gideon asked when they’d stepped outside into the rear parking lot and gotten under an eave to avoid the misty rain that had begun to fall. Gideon had gotten a soft drink, a limonata, from the vending machine next to the door, and he pulled back the tab and took a couple of gulps.

Rocco, in the meantime, flipped open a box of Marlboros, pulled one out with his lips, lit up, and blew out a long breath. “Nah, not trouble, exactly. But I know Grimaldi. He’ll report it to my captain, who won’t be happy. Ah, don’t worry about it, no big deal.”

“Carabinieri jokes are a no-no?”

“Everything’s a no-no, Gideon, everything that doesn’t make the carabinieri look like God’s gift to the world. You know what this general told us the day we graduated from the academy?” He tucked in his chin and lowered his voice to a magisterial bass. “‘From this day forward, no longer are you Paolo, Mario, or Giovanni. You are a carabiniere. Everything you say, everything you do, is a reflection on the republic which we are honored to serve, and the glorious history of the body of which you are now a part.’ And God, did he mean it.”

Another long pull on the Marlboro. “One time, when I was still on patrol, I was eating my lunch in the car, relaxing, noshing on a panino, you know? And this call comes in. There’s a knife fight in a bar less than a block away from where I’m sitting, and somebody’s gonna get killed. So I drop what I’m eating, jump out of the car, and run over there, and, sure enough, there are these two guys having at it, and they are seriously trying to hurt each other. I get in between them, which is when I got this”—he held out his hand, showing a thin white scar running diagonally along the heel of his palm—“and manage to get them apart. One guy was totally whacked out on something, and I had to get him down on the floor and cuffed before he calmed down. Anyway, I called it in, got them arrested, went to the hospital to get stitched up, and was back at headquarters in an hour to write up my report. What do you think I got for my trouble?”

“Not an award, I’m guessing.”

“A reprimand. Because why? Because I appeared in public without my cap.” He grunted a laugh. “Can you believe it? Jesus H. Christ.”

“Rocco, I have to say—are you sure the carabinieri are a good fit for you? You don’t quite seem . . . well, cut out for the life.”

The lieutenant was shocked. “Are you kidding me? I love the corps. It’s fantastic. I’m proud to be on it. It’s just that they can be a little . . . tight-assed sometimes, about things that seem pretty petty to me. I guess my problem is that I’m a carabiniere, yeah, but underneath, I’m still Rocco. Unfortunately.”

A few moments passed with Gideon silent and Rocco morosely smoking away.

“We’d better get back in, I think,” Gideon said. “They should be finished by now.”

Rocco nodded, took another pull, flipped the cigarette away, and they headed back. “I guess I’m just going to have to learn to toe the line a little better,” he said, but as the door swung open, the edges of his mouth curled into a cherubic little smile, and he put a hand on Gideon’s forearm to stop him.

“Hey, how many carabinieri does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

• • •

IN the preparation room, the others were still writing up their report on the board and arguing out the last of their differences. Gideon used the time involved to have his first uninterrupted, solitary look at the remains. He went through them slowly, turning this bone over and over in his fingers, lifting that one to his eye and scanning it at an angle, the way you’d examine a pool cue to see if it were straight. By the time he was done, the report was finished, written with red marker on the glossy white board, in the exuberant, loopy script of a sergeant major from Nigeria:

“In examining the skeletal remains presented to us for our analysis, the following traumatic injuries to the skull have been identified: a ballistic entrance wound in the center of the back of the skull, just below the occipital protuberance, and what appears to be an incomplete exit wound at the front, in the form of a ‘reverse depressed fracture.’ We believe that this GSW was the cause of the victim’s death, which was probably instantaneous.

“Trauma to the rest of the body includes fractures of both tibias and fibulas, both femurs, both sides of the pelvis, and numerous thoracic and lumbar vertebrae. Many of these bones suffered multiple breakages. In addition, there were fractures of the bones of the left foot. These injuries are all consistent with a fall from a height. There were also many signs of animal gnawing.

“Our findings: The victim was killed by a fatal gunshot to the head. Her body then fell some distance, sustaining much additional damage. We also attribute the basal ring fracture of the foramen magnum to this fall.

“In conclusion, we conclude that the findings presented by Lieutenant Gardella are supported by the evidence.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you all,” said Rocco, taking bows all around.

“Good job, everybody,” Gideon said. “You’ve all been working hard. Let’s take five minutes for a break. Rocco, can I talk to you for a minute?”

“What’s up?” said Rocco as the others wandered off in twos and threes. “They did a great job, don’t you think? It took our medico two days to get it right.”

“Well, yeah, they did a good enough job, but the thing is, they didn’t get it right. And neither did you guys. I wanted to talk to you about it before I made my comments. I wouldn’t want to make you look bad in front of them, and—”

Rocco lifted his hand. “Don’t give it a thought, Gid. Those weren’t our findings, they were the medico’s findings. Everything I know about skeletal trauma I learned from you in the last three days. Anyway, it was the public prosecutor who made it all official. He’s the boss. We just do the grunt work.” He followed this with a sudden grin. “And I have no problem at all with making Migliorini look bad; pompous, self-important twit that he is.”

“Okay, then.”

“But what exactly did they get wrong? She wasn’t shot in the head?”

“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.”

• • •

GIDEON stood 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.