Skull Duggery

TWELVE

When the colonel got back to his office a little after five, he found Gideon getting up from Corporal Vela’s computer. The colonel raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

“Just looking up a few things on the Internet,” Gideon explained cheerfully.

The eyebrows settled down and morphed into one of Marmolejo’s familiar, foxy expressions. “I know that look,” he said, leveling a finger at Gideon. “You’ve come up with a rabbit, after all.”

Gideon grinned. “I think I just might have,” he agreed. GIDEON, having been breathing bone dust for several hours, wanted some fresh air, so they went outside and sat on one of the peeling metal Libertad benches that lined the brick plaza out front. It was late afternoon now, with a drowsy sun on its way down, and the people going in and out of the Procuraduria, or just hanging around the vicinity, seemed mellower than they had earlier. Several pairs of people, mostly men, sat chatting and laughing on the other benches, or on the rims of the rusting fountains, and others were wolfing down tacos and Cokes in the clusters of plastic chairs that had been set up around umbrellaed food carts at the edges of the brickwork. Near the benches, three or four shoeshine stands-green-awninged metal chairs on wheels-had been set up. All had waiting customers.

It was all a little exotic and unfamiliar to Gideon, of course, but tinged with an everyday, life-goes-on normalcy that he found welcome. As always, it was restorative, even slightly surprising, to come out into the daylight after a session with the pitiful remains of a murder victim and find the sun shining and the world going along as usual.

“So, then,” said Marmolejo. “Tell me.” He sat peering at Gideon, very upright as usual, with a hand on each knee, and the toes of his tiny, perfectly buffed shoes barely touching the bricks, more than ever like a wise old monkey. Or perhaps better yet, a meerkat, erect, alert, attentive, intelligent.

“Umm…”

Marmolejo frowned. “Why do you hesitate?”

“I’m hesitating,” Gideon said, “because I don’t know which would be more fun: stringing you along bit by bit, or boggling your mind by giving it to you all at once.”

“All at once, I think.”

“Good enough. I was wrong about the age, and Orihuela was even more wrong about the age. She wasn’t a girl, she was a grown woman-”

Marmolejo was not a man whose surprise plastered itself across his face, but this time it couldn’t be missed. “A grown woman-”

“-who happened to be-”

“One moment please. Kindly wait until my mind stops boggling. All right, go ahead.”

“-who happened to be a ballet dancer.”

Marmolejo stared at him. “Do you mean to say you know who she was?”

“No, only what she was. You’ll have to figure out the who.”

“When you say ballet dancer, do you mean a professional ballet dancer?”

“Professional? That I don’t know. Maybe. Serious? Yes.”

“A grown woman, a ballet dancer,” Marmolejo repeated. Hm.” He continued to sit there inscrutably, meerkat-like, unmoving and silent, his chin slightly uplifted as if he were sniffing for the scent of outsiders on the wind.

“Uh… Javier, would you care to hear the brilliant manner in which I reached this new and startling conclusion, or aren’t you interested?”

“Of course I’m interested. I said nothing because I knew I had no choice in the matter in any case. Go ahead, please. Tell me.”

Gideon smiled and stood up. “No, I’ll show you. Come on, let’s go back to the bones.”“IT wasn’t really so brilliant,” Gideon said. “In fact, I was pretty slow to put things together. It was this bone here.” He laid his finger on that enlarged second metatarsal, which had been put back in its place relative to the other foot bones, so that they were looking at an entire skeletal foot. “As you see, it’s the longest of the metatarsals, which is normal, but ordinarily it’d be about the same thickness as these other three that lead to the smallest three toes, and only half as thick as this first one that goes to the big toe. But this one is huge, just about as thick as the first one.”

“I see. And from this you infer?”

“That she engaged often, and over many years, in some kind of activity that put continuing heavy stress on this particular bone, which reacted to it, as bones do, by thickening up to better withstand it.”

“And this activity you mention, this would be ballet dancing?”

“Right.”

“Ballet dancing and only ballet dancing? Nothing else could account for it?”

“As far as I know, no. Nothing else stresses the second metatarsal and only the second metatarsal; or rather, I should say, nothing that anybody has found so far. That’s what I was checking on the computer to make sure when you saw me there.”

“I see.” He scratched delicately and thoughtfully at his cheek. “From dancing en pointe, I presume.”

“So you’d think-so I thought-but as a matter of fact, no, that isn’t what does it. If it was, only female dancers would be affected, because they’re the only ones who go around on tippy-toe, but male and female dancers get this equally. No, it’s from dancing on what they call half- and three-quarter point, which is what they’re all on most of the time. In that position the metatarsals act like an extension of the leg, and since the second metatarsal is the longest one, it takes most of the punishment. As I’ve just learned, something like sixty percent of professional dancers have second metatarsals like this one.”

“All right, she was a dancer. But why have you changed your mind about her age? What happened to your previous certainty?” He sat himself on the one chair in the cubicle and turned his eyes up toward the stained acoustic-tile ceiling. “Let me see… ‘The epiphyses do not lie,’ ” he said, deepening his voice in imitation of Gideon’s. “Isn’t that the way you put it?”

“Did I say that? Well, then maybe I overstated it a bit,” Gideon admitted. “It’s not that they lie, but sometimes they do hoodwink you a little, and this was one of those times. Young female ballet dancers-gymnasts too, by the way-are notable for having delayed skeletal maturation. Apparently, there’s something about that kind of training that slows it down, or it might be that having slower skeletal maturation gives you an edge of some sort; nobody’s really sure about the cause, but everybody agrees that it’s a fact. According to the study I was reading when you came back, the average delay is about three years. So-”

“So,” said Marmolejo, “your previous estimate of fifteen to sixteen now becomes eighteen to nineteen?”

“That’s it. The emerging wisdom teeth lend some support to that too, by the way.”

Marmolejo stood up and came again to the desk to look down on the bones. “Let me see if I can summarize. What we now believe we have before us is a woman eighteen or nineteen years of age-”

“Give or take a year either way to play it safe.”

“-who had undergone serious ballet training, and whose dentition displays a condition known as congenital…?”

“Congenital hypodontia involving the second premolars. I’ll write it all up for you, Javier. You’ll want to see if you can get some DNA samples from the bones too. If so, you’ll be a long way toward identifying her.”

Marmolejo nodded and looked quizzically up at Gideon. “This is quite a different story from the one you told me with so much certainty not much more than an hour ago. I mean no offense, my friend, but you were quite confident of your ‘facts’ then. How confident are you now?”

Gideon grinned. “Pretty confident,” he said.

Marmolejo just rolled his eyes.