Skull Duggery

THREE

Even at the best of times, Dr. Bustamente, with his bald, bony head, scrawny neck, and narrow, hunched shoulders, bore a remarkable (and frequently remarked-upon) resemblance to a vulture. But never so much as at this moment, thought Flaviano Sandoval. The old buzzard had been leaning over the leathery carcass for twenty minutes, probing, prodding, scrutinizing, his beaky proboscis almost buried in the dried-out cavity that had once held a full complement of internal organs.

Not that the thing on the table would have held interest for any but the most starving of vultures; not anymore. It had been out in the sun a long-a very long-time, and had been found the day before by old Nacho Lopez while he was out in the hills gathering firewood a couple of kilometers from the village. Findings had been scarce, so with his burro, he had strayed from the usual paths, paths that had been in use for a thousand years and more, since the days of the Old Ones. He had seen the thing from a distance, lying in an arroyo that ran along the base of a line of low cliffs, and he had thought he’d struck gold: a gnarled madrona trunk, he’d thought, something that had washed down from the wooded areas higher up during the last rainy season. Madrona was the best of all firewood, rarely found and hard to chop, but how it burned! Not only that, but this was a big trunk, thick as a man. It would save him an additional four-kilometer, mostly uphill trek to where the trees started, and his legs weren’t what they once were. He hurried to it, hauling along the braying, increasingly stubborn burro. But Nacho’s eyes weren’t what they’d once been either, and he was almost on it before he grasped its real nature. So shocked was he that his eyes had rolled up in his head and he had fallen down on the spot in a dead faint.

It wasn’t as if the old man had never seen a mummy before. Anyone who spent any time in these parched hills and valleys had come across them: shriveled, sun-blackened mice, rabbits, birds, even the occasional goat that had strayed from its herd and been lost. But a man? A withered, grinning mockery of a man still dressed in a few shreds of human clothing? It was the devil’s work, enough to make anyone swoon.

When he had come to, he had hurriedly untied the two old canvas feedbags from the burro’s back with shaking hands and had ridden the animal home to tell his wife, who had sent him to tell the priest, who had told the jefe.

That had been late yesterday afternoon, too late to do anything about it before dark. But this morning, Sandoval, old Nacho, and the burro had gone out into the hills to retrieve the body. They found it where Nacho said it was, in an arroyo at the base of a cliff, not more than a hundred meters from where the little girl’s skeleton had been found earlier (a bad omen, Sandoval thought at the time). Pepe, the junior of Sandoval’s two policemen, had come along to help with the lifting that would be necessary. But in the end, Sandoval had had to get it up onto the burro by himself. Young Pepe, although he offered to assist, looked so pale and faint-hearted that Sandoval hadn’t the heart to ask him. As for Nacho, once he’d pointed the thing out, he had crossed himself and retreated, refusing to come within ten meters of it. Sandoval wasn’t feeling at his most stout-hearted himself, but the remains were so light and so rigid that he had had no trouble getting them onto the animal without assistance.

He was much relieved that the smell (almost nonexistent) and the feel (like parchment) of the thing had been nowhere as bad as he’d expected. It was terrible to look at, all right, but then it wasn’t necessary for him to look very closely to set it on the burro’s back and quickly cover it with a tarpaulin, during which he did a great deal of squinting and eye-averting. Still, by the time he’d gotten the tarpaulin tied down, he could feel his stomach acting up.

As soon as he had assured himself that what Nacho had seen the previous day was truly a body, he had used his cell phone to alert old Bustamente, the district medico legista. Bustamente had immediately driven in from Tlacolula and was now waiting impatiently-almost avidly, Sandoval thought unkindly-in the cemetery, at the door of the two-room concrete-block building, one room of which served as municipal tool and equipment storage, and the other as the village mortuary. Once the body was in the windowless mortuary room and on the ancient, enameled-iron embalming table, Bustamente had taken charge of it, a responsibility Sandoval was all too happy to relinquish.

He had planned to remain there with the doctor, having steeled himself to do what he regarded as his duty. And indeed, he managed to last through the cutting away of the tattered clothing and even to assist in a gingerly fashion. But his resolution began to fade when the boots came off to reveal not the hide-like tissue that covered the rest of the body, but horrible, greasy skeleton feet: eaten-away bones held together by rotting ligaments. Still, Sandoval held his ground, despite the noises coming from his stomach.

Not for long, however. When the leathery skin proved too tough for Bustamente’s scalpels, the doctor had gone grumbling into the storage room and emerged with a pair of heavy-duty pruning shears. “Ha, these should do the job,” he said, clacking them together and advancing on the corpse. That had been too much for Sandoval, who fled.

He took the opportunity to walk the few blocks to his office in the municipal building to swallow a couple of spoonfuls of Pepto-Bismol and sit quietly with the shades down for twenty minutes to settle his stomach. It didn’t help much. Beyond even the revolting physical aspects that were bothering him, he just didn’t have a good feeling about this business. Maybe the corpse itself didn’t have a bad smell, but everything about it did.

He remained in the office as long as he could, long enough to swallow another dose of the Pepto-Bismol. The second one did calm some of the roiling that was going on inside him, but it did little for his frame of mind. He returned with sinking heart and dragging step to the mortuary as Bustamente was just straightening up from the body, from which the entire front wall had been removed, so that it was wide open, like a picture in a medical book. On Bustamente’s face was a look of pinched satisfaction that struck terror into Sandoval’s heart. God help him, he’d known this was going to be trouble.

“Well?” he said gruffly.

“This man has been murdered,” Bustamente pronounced, relishing every word and speaking as if he were on the stand, somberly addressing the court as an expert witness. It was something the old fellow couldn’t have had the opportunity to say very often in his long tenure.

“Murdered,” Sandoval repeated hollowly from the depths of his chest. It was exactly what he’d been praying not to hear. What had he done to deserve this? How could this be happening to him again? It was incredible: only two murders in the last half-century, and both of them during the one-year tenure of Flaviano Sandoval, whose stomach fluttered at the idea of looking at a corpse. It was unbelievable, unfair, not to be borne.

However, once more he steeled himself to face the matter head-on, as the responsibilities of his position demanded. “What makes you think he was murdered?” He could hardly get the words out.

Bustamente bridled. “I don”t think, I know.” He crooked a bony finger at the police chief. “Come over here,” he commanded and led him to the sink. “Look at this.” When Sandoval realized he was looking at a man’s chest just sitting there in the sink like a slab of raw-hide, his insides started gurgling again.

Wordlessly, Bustamente stuck his finger into a dark hole not far from the middle of the slab. “You see?”

“From a bullet?” Sandoval asked. If he squeezed his eyelids together, leaving just a slit, he could see it without really seeing it.

“Without question.” He removed his finger. “You see how the borders of the perforation appear to have been eroded or eaten away? So that the hole is ‘cratered,’ as we might say?”

“Yes,” said Sandoval queasily, although all he could make out through his squint was a roundish hole with blackened edges. There was no denying, though, that it was the right size for a bullet hole. He had shot enough rabbits to know as much.

“This eroded area is what we refer to as an ‘abrasion collar,’ ” Bustamente continued, in the manner of a teacher talking to a not-too-bright pupil. “It is the result of scraping from the rotating motion of the bullet as it penetrates the skin. Being unique to gunshot wounds, it leaves no doubt as to the source of the penetration. Judging from the size of the hole, I would guess the bullet was. 32 caliber, but I leave that to the experts.”

“I see. And it would have killed him?”

Bustamente uttered a croaking, incredulous laugh. “Certainly, it would have killed him. Imagine if it had happened to you.” To illustrate, he jabbed a bony forefinger into Sandoval’s chest at about the same spot. “It would have exploded your heart, devastated it.”

“Ah,” said Sandoval, whose heart was, in fact, feeling more than a little devastated. Murder. Tumult. Inconvenience. The State Procuraduria de Justicia taking over his office, taking over the whole municipal building, all four rooms of it. The policia ministerial giving him orders, making clear their contempt for him, swaggering and bullying their way through the village. Detectives… judges…

It was only what he’d expected, he thought with a resigned sigh. Expect the worst, his stern, cheerless father had counseled him on many an occasion, and you will get what you expect. Only it will be worse. Sandoval had quoted it to one or two people and they had laughed. But his father hadn’t meant it as a joke, and the message had sunk in.

“And if by a miracle that were not enough,” continued Bustamente, “the fall would have finished the job.”

“He had a fall too?”

“A long one. There are many broken ribs. Was he perhaps found at the foot of a cliff or mountain, a height of some kind?”

“Yes.”

Bustamente was pleased. “You see?”

Sandoval heaved a forlorn sigh. “This means I will have to report the matter to the policia ministerial, doesn’t it?” he said glumly, already knowing the answer.

“The sooner the better, I would say. I would not waste any time. They don’t like delays.”

“And what happens to the body? Do you take it away with you?”

“Not me!” exclaimed Bustamente. “”I submit my own report. That’s the end of my responsibility.”

“So what do I do with him? We can’t just leave him here.”

“I suggest that is precisely what you do. Lock the place up securely and await the attentions of the policia, who will not be long in coming, I promise you.”

Sandoval nodded soberly. If only old Nacho had stayed on the regular paths like anyone else. Or if he had to stray sometime, couldn’t he have waited a few measly weeks longer? Sandoval would no longer have been the jefe by then; he would have been safely, agreeably, delightfully engaged in the administration of the village council’s affairs, with no responsibility for corpses or murders or “You have a problem on your hands, Chief Sandoval,” Bustamente observed.

“You’re telling me.”

“No, I mean an additional problem. I found no bullet. I searched the thoracic cavity thoroughly. It’s not there.”

Sandoval frowned. “But why should you expect to find the bullet? It might be anywhere. Do you expect to find the bullet when you shoot a rabbit or a deer? Bullets continue on their way-”

Bustamente shook his head. The problem was, he said, that there was no exit wound. The mummified skin on the back and sides of the body was intact. Ergo, the bullet had never exited. But he had searched the thoracic cavity thoroughly and it was nowhere to be found.

“I don’t understand. How can that be?”

Bustamente twisted his skinny neck, working out the kinks. “Shall we go outside now? I want some fresh air.”

They went to a stone memorial bench in the cemetery, where they sat awkwardly side by side. Sandoval himself felt a little better there; the air was fresh and he was among family. It seemed sometimes that half the population of Teotitlan was either a Sandoval or related by marriage to a Sandoval. Bustamente offered him a cigarillo, was turned down, and lit one for himself.

“So then where is it, this bullet?” Sandoval asked. “If not inside the body, then where?”

“There is only one possible answer.” Bustamente got his cigarillo going, shook out his match, and emitted twin streams of blue smoke from his nostrils. “It could only have fallen back out through the perforation by which it entered.”

That didn’t sound right to Sandoval. “But can a bullet do that? Come out through its own wound?”

“I don’t see why not. It’s not usual, that’s so, but-”

“And you said it was a problem for me. Why is it a problem for me if you found no bullet?”

Bustamente dropped the barely smoked cigarillo onto the concrete pad that supported the bench and ground it out under his sole.

He arched his scant eyebrows. “Do you want to turn in a report to the Procuraduria de Justicia in which you tell them you were not capable of finding a bullet that probably lies within a meter of where the corpse was discovered? Would you prefer the policia ministerial to find it for you?”

“I would not,” Sandoval said softly, but with feeling.

Bustamente uttered a short laugh. “I should think not. You had better return to where he was found and locate it. And if you do not find it there, you must search every millimeter of earth on the way back. That is my considered advice. It may well have come out while the body was on the burro.”

Sandoval blew out his cheeks and exhaled. What a job this was going to be. “I’d better get started now.” They both stood up. “Is there anything else you need to tell me?”

“Nothing that would interest you,” Bustamente said curtly. “I will have my own report for the police next week. And now if you’ll excuse me-”

Flaviano Sandoval was by nature a mild, even a timid, man, given to diffidence and conciliation, as opposed to temper outbursts, but at this he bristled. “I am the police,” he said forcefully. “If you have additional information, I wish to know it.”

But Dr. Bustamente was not a man to be intimidated, least of all by Flaviano Sandoval. “I meant the real police,” he said drily, but it was beyond him to resist demonstrating his expertise. “If you must know, however, I can tell you that it is my judgment that to become desiccated to this extent, he had to have been lying out in the open for at least eight months, more likely ten.”

“And I would say no more than six months,” Sandoval said, still bristling.

Bustamente stared at him. “Chief Sandoval, I have twenty-two years of experience in these matters. I have certificates in forensic medicine, in clinical pathology, in maxillofacial pathology…”

Sandoval let him rattle on. It was Bustamente’s fault he was in this mess-well, in a way it was-and he owed the officious, self-important old man a comeuppance.

“Six months,” Sandoval repeated when Bustamente paused for breath. “No more.”

Bustamente smiled a lipless smile. “Oh yes? And perhaps you would care to tell me on what premise you base this learned conclusion?”

“On the fact that I know who this man is, and he was most certainly alive six months ago.”

That very satisfactorily took the wind out of Bustamente’s sails. “You know… you saw… well, who is it-was it?”

“He claimed his name was Manuel Garcia. A vagrant. I had him in the jail for a night in May. Then I sent him on his way. I myself put him on the bus to Oaxaca. I watched the bus leave.”

Bustamente leaned back, narrow-eyed, reassessing him. “And why did you not bother to tell me this earlier?”

“Because you didn’t bother to ask me,” Sandoval said spitefully, but a moment later he felt a stab of guilt-well, a prick of guilt-partly because he knew he was being petty, but mostly because he knew it wasn’t the truth.

Why then had he kept it to himself? Because he’d been hoping that Bustamente would conclude that there was nothing sinister about the man’s death, that it had been the result of exposure, or a simple fall, or a heart attack, or best of all that the cause had been impossible to determine. Then Sandoval would have had Garcia quietly buried in a nameless grave at the far corner of the cemetery, an anonymous, unmourned death with no follow-up required. To have supplied his name would only have complicated things, and to no useful end. That far he’d been willing to go to preserve his and the village’s tranquility. But homicide? Murder? No, duty required otherwise, and for Sandoval duty was paramount.

Besides, Pompeo was sure to find out.

“And what else do you know about him that you neglected to tell me?” Bustamente asked coldly.

“Nothing at all.”

Nothing beyond what he knew within ten seconds of setting eyes on him: Manuel Garcia was going to be trouble. ALL the rest of that day, Sandoval, Pepe, and Pompeo searched diligently, twice walking the two kilometers that the burro had carried the body, and then back; four times altogether. The chief’s back locked up with an audible click after two hours of bending and stooping, so that he was reduced to prodding at objects on the road with a stick. Young Pepe began complaining of neck and knee pains not long after that, and even the granite face of the indestructible Pompeo wore a look of suffering by the time they were done. In all, they retrieved sixty-five pesos in small coins, five shotgun pellets (collected, just in case), and a Belgian five-cent Euro coin. But of anything even vaguely resembling a . 32-caliber bullet? Not a sign, not a hint. TWO or three times a week-the number was left to his discretion-Sandoval had his dinner up at the Hacienda, a familial perk that went along with his being the brother of their award-winning cook Dorotea; a delightful arrangement as far as he was concerned. He had eaten there the previous evening, and being conscientious about presuming upon the Gallaghers’ courtesy, he would ordinarily have avoided dining there twice in a row. But after the day he’d had, he was in sore need of the restorative powers of Dorotea’s cooking. An exception was in order.

He parked his car in the lodge’s lot and made his way, somewhat more stiffly than usual, to the buffet table in the dining room. Sometimes he would eat with the guests to keep up his English skills-necessary because on summer weekends the village overflowed with American tourists-and because it pleased Mr. Gallagher to show off his relationship with the jefe de policia. But Tonio Gallagher wasn’t in residence this week and Sandoval was in no mood to sharpen his English. Instead, he carried his food to a separate nook at the back of the dining room that was kept for the various Gallaghers. He sat himself slowly and carefully down, with something between a groan and a sigh. As always, the smell of Dorotea’s thick, smooth mole sauce went a long way toward reviving his spirits.

After a while he was joined by old Josefa Gallegos, who supervised the housekeeping staff, and Annie Tendler, the receptionist. Josefa was Mexican and Annie was American, but both, he knew, were somehow related to Mr. Gallagher, as was everybody else in a management position at the Hacienda. From the beginning it had been a family affair.

As usual, Josefa had little to say. Elderly and increasingly deaf, she gave him a grunted buenas tardes and immediately set to attacking her enchiladas de pollo con mole poblano. Annie, also as usual, was more talkative.

“You don’t look your usual cheerful self, Chief,” she said in her perfect, idiomatic Spanish.

Sandoval had always found Annie easy to talk to-always a smile at the corners of her mouth, that one; never grumpy or taciturn, a good talker and a good listener both-and before they’d gotten to their coffee and flan he’d told her the whole story.

“We looked and we looked. It’s nowhere to be found, Anita. You don’t know how I hate to turn in my report without having found it. The policia ministerial will find it, I know they will-they have so many resources at their disposal-and we will look like bumbling incompetents. I will look like a bumbling incompetent.”

“You’re positive it’s not still in the body somewhere?”

“Yes. Well, not positive, no, but that is what Dr. Bustamente says. And I’m afraid to poke around in that thing myself. I wouldn’t know how to do it. I don’t want to do it.” He shuddered. “And then on top of that, there is the report I am required to file with the policia ministerial. How do I do that, what do I write? I know nothing of such things. The last time this happened, everything I did was wrong, but did they tell me how to do it right? They did not.”

“Couldn’t Dr. Bustamente help you with that?”

“Bustamente,” he said scornfully and drew himself up. “I refuse to give him the satisfaction.”

“Chief Sandoval,” Annie said slowly, “I have an idea.”

He looked at her with a modest upsurge of hope. An idea was one idea more than he had. “Yes?”

“You know I’m going to the United States in a couple of days. Well, my cousin Julie is arriving tomorrow to take my place, and her husband is coming with her on vacation. I’ve never met him, but he’s a forensic scientist who works on such things all the time. He might be able to help you, to examine the body, maybe find the bullet, or at least give you some advice. Maybe he could help you with your report. I’m sure he would know about these things.”

Sandoval considered. “But would he be willing to do that? A prominent man, on vacation, after all…”

“From what Julie tells me about him, he’d like nothing better.”

“He hasn’t seen that thing,” Sandoval muttered.

“What have you got to lose by asking him?”

“Indeed, nothing,” Sandoval said thoughtfully.

“He’s supposed to be very famous, you know. They call him the Skeleton Detective.”

“Skeleton detective.” Sandoval uttered a short laugh as he dug into the flan, then uttered what was for him a rarity: a joke. “I suppose you wouldn’t happen to know any mummy detectives?”

“Not enough chiles in the flan,” Josefa muttered in her thickly accented English, possibly to them, possibly to the flan itself. “She’s supposed to be such a wonderful cook, how is it she don’t know to put enough chiles in the flan?”