Skull Duggery

SIX

As mummified remains went, they weren’t that bad.

The body had been out there long enough, and in an environment that was hot enough and dry enough, so that there was nothing anyone would call a stench-just an earthy, musty smell, like decaying bark on the forest floor. And it had dried out enough that the skin-the hide was more like it, at this point-no longer glistened with exuded fat or other nasty effluvia. It had become a stiff, brown parchment-like object whose appearance had more in common with the mummy of Ramses II than with anybody who’d been walking around on two legs six months earlier.

All of this came as a welcome relief to Gideon. Like any forensic anthropologist, he took satisfaction and pleasure in working with skeletons, in reconstructing, at least in part, the living human being-sex, age, habits, appearance, occupation, the whole history of a life, and often the nature of its death-from a pile of bones. But fresh, or rather not-quite-fresh, corpses were another thing. Unlike most of his forensic colleagues, he had never inured himself to the nasty phases that bodies went through on their journey from flesh and blood to bare bones-“decomps,” as they were called in the trade. In what he considered the immortal words of the Munchkin Coroner of Oz, he preferred his corpses “not only really dead, but really most sincerely dead,” the older the better. A decade was usually a safe bet, a millennium better still. He was, in a word, squeamish.

But then he’d never meant to become a forensic anthropologist, had he? A quiet, scholarly career as a professor of physical anthropology was more what he’d had in mind. His doctoral dissertation had been on early Plestocene hominid locomotion, and he had assumed his subsequent teaching and research would keep him immersed in the femurs, pelves, and tibias of that period, a comfortable million or so years back. Indeed, his academic life had done just that. But physical anthropology professors were necessarily expert “bone readers,” and like others in the field, he had been called on to put this expertise to more contemporary uses. And in truth, it had proven fascinating, if sometimes stomach-churning, this scientific detective work. Nowadays, to his own surprise, he felt himself a little at loose ends if he wasn’t involved in some forensic case or another.

And, as Julie suggested, it was never very long before one came and found him. Even in Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico.

Sandoval, a small, soft, nervous, harried sort of man who reminded Gideon strongly of someone-he couldn’t put his finger on whom-had filled him in on the finding of the body and on Dr. Bustamente’s conclusions concerning it. Now, gloved hands behind his back-a pair of disposable gloves had been provided for him-Gideon stood looking at it from three or four feet away, the chief fidgeting away at his side. The earthly remains of Manuel Garcia, if that was really his name, were lying mostly on their right side on the chipped, enameled tabletop-a type of embalming table that had been up-to-the-minute a hundred years ago. One knee was drawn up, the other extended. The left arm, twisted so that the palm faced up, was stiffly stretched along the left side and down toward the drawn-up knee, the right arm hidden beneath the body.

Below the waist, the left side-the uppermost side-had rotted away here and there, allowing glimpses of the skeletal underpinnings-the sharp rim of the innominate, the knobby, yellow, lateral condyles of the femur and tibia. A couple of inches above the knee, the bone had once suffered a break, possibly when he’d been a child. It had healed a long time ago, but it had been badly set, or more likely not set at all, so that there was a kink in the bone, an angle that didn’t belong there.

“Healed transverse fracture, distal third of the right femoral shaft,” he murmured automatically, making mental notes for his report. “Fully remodeled but poorly set, with medial and cranialward displacement of the distal segment.”

“What?” Sandoval said, alarmed.

“It’s nothing to do with his death,” Gideon said. “I was just thinking out loud.”

The right side appeared to be intact. The face too was intact but much shriveled, so that the mustache looked outlandishly big-a Mario Brothers mustache, a Groucho Marx mustache-and the strong, crooked, brown teeth were bared in what looked like a snarl. The eye sockets, of course, were empty. stiff whitish hairs bristled around the mouth. The feet were nothing but bones and ligaments, with no skin on them at all.

He moved a little closer, hands still behind his back (he had learned that he did better when he approached this kind of thing gradually). The musty smell became more noticeable, mostly, he thought, because the interior of the thorax was open to the air. Dr. Bustamente had not used the Y-incision typical of autopsies, in which the arms of the Y begin at the lateral ends of the collar bones and come together at the sternum, and the tail runs from there down the center of the abdomen, all the way to the pubis, usually with a neat little jig to spare the navel. The resulting flaps can then be peeled back to expose the insides. Instead, Bustamente had simply hacked a rough oval all the way around the perimeter of the chest and the upper part of the abdomen, and pulled off the entire front wall of the body. He had used a pair of shears, a still-shaken Sandoval had told him. Shears! As if he were cutting up a hunk of cowhide for a saddle!

But with mummified remains, Gideon knew, such a procedure wasn’t unusual. On a body like Garcia’s, the hide was thick and hard enough to take the edge off a scalpel after one swipe, and the flaps were almost impossible to bend and peel back away from the sternum. Using a sturdy pair of shears to remove the entire chest wall in one piece was the simplest route, and Bustamente had taken it.

He took the final step necessary to reach the table and leaned over the remains. There were no identifiable internal organs to be seen; no heart, no lungs, no liver, no adrenals, no kidneys, only some dry, blackened, anonymous lumps of tissue sticking to the ribs and inner wall of the hide here and there. It was a picture-book stage C4 of the Galloway categorization of mummified remains: “Mummification of tissues with internal organs lost through autolysis or insect activity.”

The rib cage seemed to be complete, although it had suffered many fractures. Most of the ribs had snapped, some at multiple points. It took an enormous amount of force to do this much damage, Gideon knew. The rib cage was the most flexible bony assemblage in the body (if it weren’t, breathing would be a bit tricky). With much of it made of highly elastic cartilage, it gave before it bent, and it bent before it cracked, and it cracked before it snapped.

“The cliff he was found at the base of; how high was it?”

Sandoval shrugged. “Not so very high, perhaps fifteen meters.”

Fifteen meters. Five stories, more or less. That was more than enough to do this kind of damage. Bustamente had probably been correct about his having fallen from the top, or at any rate from some considerable height. Either that, or, like the unlucky guy in the saturday morning cartoons, he’d been walking under that upper-story window just when the safe fell out of it.

“He was found on his left side, I take it?” Gideon said.

The question startled the jittery, preoccupied Sandoval, made him jump. “Let me think… yes, on his left side. How did you know?”

“Well, because that side didn’t get as mummified; it’s more eaten away. That’s because the bugs that do the work were more protected from the sun’s dehydration.”

“I see. Yes.”

Gideon still hadn’t moved. “What was he wearing, Chief?”

“Wearing?” Sandoval was impatient. It was help he wanted from Gideon, not more questions. “I don’t know… clothes… What difference does it make?”

“It’d be nice to see if there are any bullet holes in them, even blood, perhaps. The policia ministerial will want them too. Do you still have them?”

Sandoval’s stricken look was answer enough. “Dr. Bustamente, he didn’t say… So I just… I just… Really, there wasn’t much left, only a few shreds…”

“What was he wearing on his feet, do you remember?”

“On his feet? I don’t know, sandals, like anybody else. It was warm.”

“Are you sure? Not shoes? Boots, maybe?”

“No, I’m not sure,” Sandoval said querulously. “What difference does that make? Who cares…” His brow furrowed, then smoothed. “Yeah, you’re right. Boots-leather boots, up to his ankles. I helped Dr. Bustamente take them off. But how do you know that?”

“Same reasoning, nothing mysterious. The feet are almost completely skeletonized. See, the heavy leather acts as a kind of umbrella against the sun. The tissues stay moist, and the maggots and beetles can work away on them at leisure. Bodies that are heavily clothed don’t mummify. On the other hand, of course, you’re pretty unlikely to find heavily clothed bodies in environments that are conducive to mummification in the first place, so-”

But he had lost Sandoval, who was getting squirmier by the moment and making the kinds of faces that go along with a growing stomachache. Clearly the chief was anxious for him to stop talking and get on with it.

Taking pity on him, Gideon switched gears. His more general examination could wait till later. “Bueno, vamos a ver sobre esa bala, si?” he said to make Sandoval a little more comfortable, and perhaps to show off his Spanish a little. Well, let’s see about that bullet, shall we?

Apparently he got it right, because Sandoval responded with a vigorous nod. “Si, senor, por favor.”

“Bien, donde esta la comoda?” he asked. Okay, where’s the chest? He wanted to start by looking at the entry wound that the doctor had found.

“La comoda?” Sandoval echoed blankly, obviously not comprehending. “Donde esta la comoda…?”

Gideon sighed. This was the kind of reaction he often got when he showed off his Spanish a little too much. Or his German. Or French. Or Italian. As if they went out of their way not to understand their own language. He decided, as usual, that things would go better if he stuck with English. “His chest,” he said, patting his own to clarify.

“Ah, his chest,” said Sandoval. “Aha-ha, yes, sure, I see. Well, it’s over there.” He pointed to a sink along the back wall: cast iron, coated with white enamel, of about the same antique vintage as the embalming table. In it the thing lay, outer side up. Gideon had known what to expect, of course, and yet he was unexpectedly affected-embarrassed, really-to find himself looking down at something so… so personal, so intimate, so oddly naked; a chest, a human chest, lying there in the chipped, discolored, enamel bottom of an old sink, ten feet away from the body to which, in all decency, it still should have been attached. A pair of nipples, a few sparse, graying chest hairs, a navel, an old appendicitis scar He swallowed and made himself concentrate on the wound, a comma-shaped hole a couple of inches to the left of center, just below the left nipple. It was half an inch wide at its greatest width and surrounded by an irregular ring of dark, abraded flesh. The hole was big enough for him to insert his gloved pinky, but not big enough for his ring finger. Entry-wound sizes could be wildly variable, but this was about right for a. 32-caliber slug, as Bustamente had suggested, or perhaps a 9 mm one. Between the two of them, bullets of these sizes accounted for the majority of firearm homicides in the United States, and probably in Mexico as well.

And a bullet penetrating there-right there; he pressed a thumb to the same spot on his own chest to feel what lay beneath-would most likely enter the fifth intercostal space about an inch to the left of the edge of the sternum, possibly clipping one of the two bordering ribs, the fifth or the sixth. Whichever, it would then necessarily plow into either the left ventricle of the heart, or that part of the right ventricle that extended to the left of the sternum. Either way, it wouldn’t have been good news for the heart. Or for Garcia. Death within a few seconds.

But there was something about the wound, about the ribs, something that had him wondering… wondering…

“Let’s go back to the table,” he murmured, returning there with Sandoval trailing behind. A quick survey of the body’s exterior confirmed Bustamente’s observation that there was no exit wound in the back wall of the thorax or along the sides. As Bustamente had said, if a bullet had entered Garcia’s body, it had never exited.

If.

Sandoval read something in Gideon’s face: doubt, uncertainty… His own worried expression lightened a little. “What? What is it? Is there something-”

Gideon quieted him with a motion of his hand. “Give me just a second. I need to…”

The words trailed away as his attention focused hard on the shattered rib cage, in particular on the broken, splintery fifth and sixth ribs. Then he straightened up and returned to the sink, where, for a long few moments, he stood looking down at the dry, brown chunk of hide; at that comma-shaped hole.

Sandoval followed him. “What is it?” he pressed. “What have you found? What are you thinking?”

“What I’m thinking,” Gideon said slowly, after a silence that practically had Sandoval ready to explode, “is that Dr. Bustamente may have been wrong.”

Sandoval blinked. A tremor of hope ran over his face. “Wrong? You mean… he didn’t get murdered?”

“No, I’m not ready to go that far yet, but you see, the thing is, bullets don’t come out of the holes they go in by.”

“But Dr. Bustamente, he said-”

“No, they just don’t. They can’t, not unless they haven’t quite penetrated the skin in the first place. But this hole goes clean through, you see?”

The reason they couldn’t come out was that, while an entry wound itself might remain open, the track that a bullet made through the underlying soft tissue closed up after the slug’s passage. Of course it was hypothetically possible, Gideon supposed, that in a case like this, where the internal organs had all pretty much disappeared so that the bullet might have been rattling around an empty torso, that it had found its way back out through the entry hole while the body was bouncing along on the burro. But he had never heard of such a thing happening, and the possibility seemed too remote to consider seriously.

Besides, he had a better hypothesis.

It was too much for Sandoval to handle. “So… so… what does it mean? Where is the bullet? If it entered through this hole here and there is no other hole by which it came out, and it did not come out through the same hole, then… then…?”

“Then we need another explanation, and mine is that this isn’t an entry wound at all; it’s an exit wound.”

“But the, the abrasion collar…” He pointed at the abraded area around the hole. “Dr Bustamente, he said an abrasion collar-”

“And he was right. An abrasion collar usually does denote an entry wound. The bullet’s rotation-”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Sandoval said, hurrying things along with a rapid, rotating motion of his hand. “Dr. Bustamente explained very thoroughly. Very thoroughly.”

“Okay, good, but, you see, there is a situation in which an exit wound can show an abrasion ring very similar to the one around an entrance wound, and that’s when the skin is pressed against something-a floor, a wall, the back of a chair, even clothing, something like a belt-when the bullet exits. The pressure keeps the wound from tearing wide open the way a typical exit wound would, and the abrasion comes, not from the bullet itself, but from the skin’s being scraped raw by whatever it’s impacting against.”

“And that’s what this is?”

“I think so.” A shored exit wound, it was called, “shored” in the sense that whatever the skin is pressed against shores up and supports the edges of the opening.

“And if that’s the case,” he went on, “we have to ask-”

But Sandoval’s despondency had gotten the better of him. “Entrance wound, exit wound, what difference does it make which way the bullet was going? Murdered is murdered.” He made a hopeless, harassed gesture with both hands and Gideon suddenly realized whom he reminded him of. With his round but pointy-chinned, mobile face and gleaming, bulgy eyes, he was like a Mexican Peter Lorre; Peter Lorre in Casablanca, at his squirrelly, angst-ridden best.

“Oh, but it makes a big difference,” Gideon said. “Just bear with me now, Chief. Think about it for a minute. If this is an exit wound, then where’s the entrance wound?”

Sandoval frowned. “If… what?”

“There’s no other hole of any size anywhere on the torso or abdomen. This is the only one. How can that be? Obviously, you can have an entrance wound with no exit wound, but how can there be an exit wound with no entrance wound?”

Sandoval jerked his head in frustration. “Please, profesor, have mercy… can’t you just…?”

“Chief Sandoval,” Gideon said quietly, glad to be able to tell the chief something he so desperately wanted to hear. “I don’t think this is a bullet wound at all.”

Once again, Sandoval’s eyes lit up, but warily this time. He’d already had his hopes raised once, only to have them promptly dashed. “But what then would it be? You said yourself, there is no entrance wound. How can an object exit from a body if it has never entered it?”

“It can do it if it’s been inside all along.”

“If it’s-” Sandoval did a classic double take. “If…”

“Come on,” Gideon said, “I want to try something.”

He bent to pick up the slab of all-too-human hide, hesitated as a brief shiver of distaste ran up his spine, then grasped it resolutely by its edges and returned with it to the embalming table, the utterly perplexed Sandoval tagging along a couple of feet behind him. Once there, Gideon held it to the front of the body in about its natural place, although the warping and twisting that went along with mummification made it impossible to do this precisely. Then, grasping the rear portion of the broken sixth rib with his other hand, he tugged it a quarter of an inch upward, which put its front end directly in line with the hole in the chest. A little gentle pressure on the chest, a slight rotation, and the rib’s jagged, broken end pushed through the hole with a fit so tight, so near perfect, that when he let go of both chest and rib, they remained locked together, unmoving.

Sandoval stared, openmouthed. “A rib?” His plump face crinkled with happiness. He began to laugh. “A rib made this hole? His own rib? From inside?”

Gideon laughed along with him, pleased for Sandoval’s sake. It had been the form of the wound that had gotten the gears of his mind going: Somewhere between round and oval, but with a little tail hooking out of it. “Comma shaped” was the way he had described it to himself, and the term had rung a bell with him. “Comma shaped” was also the shorthand term he used in describing to his students the shape of the thoracic ribs in cross-section. Comma-shaped hole, comma-shaped shaft of bone… Could it be…? he had wondered.

It could, and it was.

“He must have hit on his left side,” he said now. “So that when the broken rib punched through, that side was flush up against a rock, or against the ground, which would have resulted in the abrasion ring.”

“Then there is no reason to believe he was murdered?” Sandoval said joyously. He had the result he’d wanted but had hardly dared hope for. “A simple fall, no more!” Then, deciding the situation required more decorum, he gravely added: “A terrible, unfortunate, fatal fall, the poor man.”

“Oh, it would have been fatal, all right, enough to kill him twice over.” He had pulled the chest slab off the rib and laid it aside while they’d been talking, and was again peering into the chest cavity, with the body still on its side.

“What are you looking for now?” Sandoval asked a little nervously.

“Nothing in particular,” Gideon said truthfully. “But I’ve hardly looked at him. As long as I’m here, I ought to see what else I might be able to come up with. You never know.”

“Oh, I don’t think there’s anything else that’s necessary, do you? Perhaps you would permit me to buy you a cup of coffee now? We have an excellent coffeehouse here, yes, right here in Teotitlan, the American tourists kept asking for it, you see, and now I myself have developed a taste for cappuccinos, ha-ha…” On he nattered, arching his body backward, trying to manifest enough psychic force to draw Gideon away from the table. He didn’t like the idea of Gideon continuing to poke around and coming up with God knows what.

Sandoval’s psychic force had no effect on Gideon whatever. “Well…” He was probing gently with his fingers at the cervical vertebrae, or rather at the dried ligaments and intervertebral fibrocartilage that held them together. “Most of the time, people killed in falls-falls from heights-die because they fracture their spines up here in the neck, which tears apart their aortas, so I just wanted to see if… ah, indeed, that’s what we have here. The first cervical vertebra-the atlas-has been completely separated from the second one, the axis. The ligaments and fibrocartilage are torn clear through. In the absence of anything else, that’s a pretty good cause of death right there.”

“So, that’s that, then,” Sandoval said joyously. “A job well done! Muchisimas gracias, profesor, I am so grateful-”

“Hold on, now,” Gideon murmured, mostly to himself. “What have we here?”

Something had caught his eye, toward the back of the rib cage; he rubbed away a bit of dried, tarry black matter, impossible to identify (crud was the technical term usually employed), that was stuck to the interior surface of one of the ribs, and bent to take a closer look. “I’m afraid we might have something worth looking into after all,” he said softly.

Sandoval’s shoulders sagged. The faintest, saddest of sighs escaped his lips. He’d known it was too good to be true. “What?” he asked in a grim monotone, a voice of doom.

“Well, I’m not really sure,” Gideon said. “It looks like… it almost looks like…”

What it almost looked like-what it very much looked like-was a bullet hole. In the ventral surface-the inside surface-of the seventh rib on the right side. Like many of the other ribs, this one had snapped about halfway back, the front piece still connected via the costal cartilages to the sternum, the rearward piece still attached by ligaments to the vertebral column. The hole was in the rearward segment, about three inches from the vertebral column, so that it faced diagonally forward. Much smaller than the wound in Garcia’s chest, almost perfectly round even when seen from a few inches away, and penetrating only partway through the body of the rib, it might have served as a textbook illustration of the not-uncommon situation in which a bullet, having expended almost the last of its energy in getting most of the way through the body, had just enough oomph left to penetrate the surface of the rib but not enough to make it all the way through.

Now it was Gideon who was perplexed. If this was a bullet hole, then where was the original entrance wound? There was only one possibility: the chest wound that Gideon had so confidently, so magisterially, declared to be an exit wound and not even a ballistic exit wound at that. Could a bullet have entered there, under the left nipple, on a trajectory that took it diagonally through the thorax, transpiercing the left lung, the heart, and the right lung before plowing into the ventral surface of the seventh rib on the other side? short answer: yes, it could. Had he been wrong, then, about the broken rib breaking through the chest wall to leave the comma-shaped wound? Given the fit of rib to wound, that seemed virtually impossible. Well, highly- extremely highly-improbable. But if he was right about that, about there not being an entrance wound, then where had this bullet hole in the seventh rib come from? How had the bullet entered the body?

Again, if.

“It almost looks like what?” Sandoval pressed. “Tell me.”

“Look, I may have already jumped the gun once today. If it’s okay with you, let me look him over a little more thoroughly before I do it again.”

What he wanted now was a good, clear look at that seventh rib, but the room was ill lit for a skeletal examination; windowless and with only a pair of discolored fluorescent tubes on the ceiling that threw a flat, undiscriminating light on the body. He needed a slanting light, something that would throw into sharp relief the bumps and crevices and indentations that were the essence of his work.

“Chief, could you possibly get me a flashlight of some kind?”

“But I want to know-”

“Please.”

Sandoval, having little choice, gave up ungracefully. “They got some work lamps in the other room,” he said grudgingly.

“No, I want something small, something I can move around inside the torso. The smaller the better. And if you can find a magnifying glass, that’d be helpful too.”

“Okay, okay,” he snapped. He turned on his heel, stomped into the equipment room next door, and returned in a few seconds. “Is this small enough?”

“Perfect,” said Gideon. It was a tiny but piercingly bright single-cell Maglite flashlight, the kind that was made to carry on a key ring. “Couldn’t have picked a better one myself.” Sandoval had brought a magnifying glass as well, an old-fashioned round one with a metal frame and a wooden handle.

He flicked the light on, rotated the knurled head to focus the output into a narrow beam, picked up the magnifying glass, and went to work.

“Ah,” he murmured. “Mm. Sonofagun.”

“What? What is it?” pleaded Sandoval.

But Gideon in the midst of a skeletal examination was not easy to reach. “Oho,” he said. “So.” And looked up at the ceiling, cogitating.

At which point Chief Sandoval came to the end of his tether. “What is it?” he cried in a strangled voice. “What have you found? Was he murdered or was he not?”

“Let me just see if-”

“Por favor, senor-si o no?”

Gideon sighed. From Sandoval’s point of view, that was of course the critical question. It was naturally enough a question that he got asked a lot by cops, and it was one that he couldn’t, in all truth, answer definitively; then, or now, or ever. He was a physical anthropologist. What he knew was bones. Sure, he was often able to say with confidence that a skeletal wound was made (or wasn’t made) by bullet, knife, or club, but the absence of such wounds on the skeleton was hardly evidence of non murder. The rib cage is made more of air than of bone. There is plenty of room between the ribs for blades or bullets to find their way to the vital organs.

On the other side of the coin, no skeletal wound that he did find was unconditional proof of murder. In themselves, broken bones don’t kill people. Sure, a bullet-shattered skull was a pretty good clue that you had a homicide on your hands, but even then it wasn’t the damage to the skull, but to the brain, that was the immediate cause of death-or, as forensic pathologists had it in one of their more charming locutions, was “incompatible with life.” Broken bones, even if you break all two hundred and six of them, are not a good thing to have, but they are not “incompatible with life.” Not strictly.

But there was no point in going into all this with Sandoval. He answered as truthfully and simply as he could: “I think so. Yes.”

The air went out of Sandoval. “I see,” he said wretchedly. Then, as an apathetic afterthought: “How then was he killed?”

“I need to do a little more work on the body,” Gideon said instead of answering. “Do you think you could find me a screwdriver next door?”

Sandoval stared at him. “A what?”

“A…” Gideon groped for the Spanish word. “Un… un desarmador,” he said, amazing himself by plucking it out of whatever dim neural recess it had been hiding in, patiently waiting to be summoned, probably for the first time since he’d learned it decades ago. A wonderful thing, the human mind.

“Un DESARMADOR?” Sandoval bleated, no less bewildered.

After a couple of frustrated seconds, Gideon realized that this time it wasn’t a question of Sandoval’s not understanding, it was a question of not believing what he was hearing. First a pair of shears, now a screwdriver; what next, a hammer and nails?

Gideon couldn’t help smiling. “Right, can you get me one? Not the flat-bladed kind, the Phillips head. Feeyeeps,” he amended, giving the spelling his best Spanish pronunciation.

“Feeyeeps,” Sandoval echoed robotically. “Si. Un desarmador de cruz.” He turned toward the door.

“And a piece of wood.”

“And a piece of wood,” Sandoval said, beyond astonishment now. “Sure. What kind of wood? How big?”

“It doesn’t matter. Any old piece of scrap lumber. A board.”

His actions, when Sandoval came back and handed the items to him, proved that Sandoval was not beyond astonishment after all. The screwdriver and the board, a foot-long piece of whatever the metric equivalent of a two-by-four was, were taken to the sink, where the board was placed on the sturdy counter beside the basin. Gideon picked up the screwdriver, raised it over his head, and drove it hard into the board. A second time. A third. Sandoval watched, openmouthed.

Gideon held the board up to examine it. “Mm,” he said inscrutably. “Let’s go back to the body now.”

He stood gazing down once more at Manuel Garcia. He had already satisfied himself that there were no other visible perforations in the hide; just the wound in the chest. But the left arm, extending rigidly down and slightly forward along the left side, partially blocked his view of the axilla-the armpit-and the area just below it, and this was a region Gideon particularly wanted to see now. Placing one hand on Garcia’s left shoulder joint to steady the body, he used the other to grasp the left arm just above the elbow and began to pull gingerly.

Nothing happened. Barely any give at all. Cowhide-stiffened cowhide-was in fact very much what the body felt like. He took his stance again, set his feet, grasped the arm more firmly Sandoval flinched and paled. “I think I need to go to the police station for a few minutes now,” he murmured, hurrying the words. “There are things that must be attended to. Would that be all right?” He was already making for the door. “I’ll only be a couple minutes,” he yelled over his shoulder and was gone.

“Take your time,” Gideon said, envying him. He wouldn’t have minded leaving for this part too. The bones in mummified remains had been known to snap when you tried to move the limbs, and he was all set to flinch himself-he was already flinching mentally-if that were to happen. He took in a breath, held it, and pulled harder, steadily and slowly bearing down on the shoulder joint. Something-not bone, thank God-gave, and the arm moved an inch, two inches. Enough. It remained in the position to which he’d pulled it. The humerus hadn’t broken or popped out of its socket.

He let out his breath, wiped off the sheen of sweat that had beaded on his forehead, and bent to see under the arm. The skin there had folded over itself in the process of loosening and mummifying, and it took him a good ten minutes to pry the fold apart with his fingers so that he could see what might be hidden within. He was just straightening up when he heard Sandoval’s car pull up outside the building. The chief, who’d been gone about twenty minutes, came in, preceded by a wintergreen gust of Pepto-Bismol. He had brought two cardboard cups of still-steaming cappuccino, one of which he handed to Gideon, who gratefully gulped half of it down. The Sacred Bean Cafe was the logo on the side.

“Pretty good, huh?” Sandoval said with a reasonable semblance of cheer.

“It sure is. Thanks.”

“See, didn’t I tell you?” The break and the Pepto-Bismol had done him good. While hardly happy with the way things were going, he did seem reconciled to his fate.

For a while they stood beside the table, companionably drinking their coffees.

“So, profesor, he was murdered? That’s it?”

Again, Gideon gave him the short answer. “I believe so. Someone did their best, that’s for sure. But not with a gun.”

“But how? If not by bullet, then by what? Show me.”

Gideon guessed that there was little genuine interest behind the request, that Sandoval was merely playing the role that he thought was expected of him as police chief. But then Gideon wasn’t a man who needed a lot of coaxing when it came to providing skeletal edification. To ask was to receive.

“Sure, I’ll show you. Take a look at this.” He grasped the rear segment of the seventh rib and pulled it slightly forward. “What do you see?”

Sandoval studied it. “A hole,” he replied sensibly.

“But not all the way through.”

“No, not all the way through.”

“But almost through.” Gideon turned on the Maglite and held it behind the rib. “See? Look into the hole. You can see that some light comes through.”

“Ye-es,” Sandoval said slowly, peering hard. Perhaps, thought Gideon, he really has gotten interested, or at any rate curious. “I can see a little point of light, where the bone is just barely broken all the way through.”

“It’s not just a pinpoint, Chief. Use the magnifying glass.” Gideon kept the flashlight steady behind the rib. “What’s it shaped like?”

Sandoval peered through the glass. His eyes widened. “Ah, I see. It’s… I don’t know… it’s like a, like a tiny star… no, like a little equis.”

Equis. The Spanish word for the letter X.

“Yes, that’s one way to describe it,” Gideon said. “Or you could call it a cross?”

“I suppose so, yes.”

“And when I asked you for a Phillips-head screwdriver a little while ago, you called it un desarmador de…?”

“De cruz.” Sandoval’s eyes widened. He straightened up. “Cross! A cross-shaped screwdriver!” He bent to stare through the lens again. “Then a screwdriver made this hole?”

For an answer Gideon held up the board for him to see the indentations the screwdriver had made. Each thrust had left a neat little X -shaped dent in the wood, all identical to one another and almost exactly like the one in the rib. The conclusion was inescapable. Garcia had been stabbed, at least once, with a Phillips-head screwdriver, which had penetrated the front of the rib, its tip breaking through the back just enough to leave its X -shaped perforation. The initial X -shaped perforation in front had, of course, been obliterated by the round shaft as the thrust continued.

Sandoval straightened up, his forehead wrinkling. “Stabbed to death by a screwdriver…” He scowled. “But wait-there is no wound in the skin, no entrance wound. How can-?”

“Ah, but there is an entrance wound,” Gideon said. “Three of them, in fact.”

He showed Sandoval what he had found under the arm: a cluster of three tiny black holes in the armpit.

“They’re so small,” Sandoval said.

“They were small enough to start with, so they were able to contract and close up a little afterward,” said Gideon. Whichever one made the hole in the rib would probably have gone through the lungs and the heart and thus killed him. Even if it hadn’t, he could very well have bled to death.

Sandoval still looked puzzled. “But to be stabbed in the, the…” He sought the English word and failed. “En el sobaco.” He indicated his own armpit. “ Three times! Why would… how would…”

“It’s not that uncommon,” Gideon said. “Someone tries to stab you, you throw up your arm to protect yourself-” He demonstrated. “And, ouch, that’s where you wind up getting it.”

“I see. Yes, it’s all very interesting.” He thought for a moment. “Profesor-”

“Please, call me Gideon.”

Sandoval responded with a cautious smile. “Flaviano.” Self-consciously, very formally, they shook hands. “You know… Gideon… I must file a report on this. What you told me-the ribs, entry wounds, exit wounds-I don’t know if I can explain-”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ll write it all up for you to include with your report. It’ll have to be in English, though. My Spanish isn’t good enough for material like this.”

“Thank you. When do you think you could do this?”

“I can do it right now, if you like.”

“Ah, good. The policia ministerial, they won’t be happy if I wait too long.” He sighed softly.

Mention of the policia ministerial put an end to his relative good humor, which had been ebbing anyway over the last few minutes.

“Well, look at the bright side,” Gideon said, taking a page from Julie’s playbook.

“Yes? What is the bright side?”

“You have the satisfaction of knowing Dr. Bustamente’s findings are dead wrong.”

That earned a twinkle of the eye and a furtive little grin. “Well,” Sandoval said, cheered at least a little, “let’s go back to the police station now. You can use the computer there. But first, lunch.”