Skull Duggery

EIGHT

The offices of the Procuraduria General de Justicia were located well south of downtown Oaxaca, out near the airport, in a once-palatial nineteenth-century building that had gone sadly to seed. There were still touches of elegance to be seen on the outside-ornate grillwork on the upper-story windows, the remnants of fine stucco-work here and there, panels of veined marble, a pair of fountains flanking the grand stone entrance stairway, a row of elaborately wrought metal benches-but all was run-down and tatty. The stucco was flaking, the rusted fountains no longer flowed, and the benches had been painted so many times, and were so in need of yet another coat, that they were a mottled black and white, impossible to tell whether the black had chipped away to reveal the white or vice-versa. In some places-the arms, or the ornamental rosette that topped their backs, the successive layers of paint were worn all the way down to bare, gray metal. On one rosette Gideon was able to make out a single brave word in bold relief: Libertad.

The building itself, coated in two equally repellent shades of green, was also seriously in need of a new paint job (in different colors, one would hope). Only the neat line of flowering shrubs along the foundation showed signs of loving, or at least painstaking, care.

All this Gideon had to take in on the fly as he and the heavily perspiring Sandoval walked rapidly-trotted, in the smaller Sandoval’s case-over the brick-paved front plaza and up the two flights of wide, curving stone steps to the entrance. From Sandoval’s point of view, the day had gotten off to a disastrous start. He had allowed what he thought was more than ample time for the drive from Teotitlan, but he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and had had a terrible time finding the place. Thus, instead of being fifteen minutes early for his two o’clock appointment, they were ten minutes late. They would have been only five minutes late had matters not been made worse when, having no convincing credentials to produce, he had been denied entrance to the official-business parking lot and had had to park on a side street two blocks away. As a result, Chief Sandoval, who had been a nervous wreck to begin with, was practically a moving puddle by the time they got there.

Once through the entrance they found themselves in a plain lobby that smelled of disinfectant, unadorned except for much-thumbed sheaves of official-looking documents hanging on cords from the walls. People moved in and out of corridors radiating from the lobby, the bureaucrats and civil servants (confident, decisive, focused) easily distinguishable from the ordinary citizens (apprehensive, uncertain, demoralized).

On one wall was a building directory, from which Gideon read aloud: “ ‘Director de la Policia Ministerial, planta sotano.’ Basement.”

“Dungeon,” Sandoval amended in a strained voice.

At the bottom of the stairwell they were blocked by a hulking giant with an imposing black mustache. He was at least a couple of inches taller than Gideon’s six-two, and a whole lot wider, dressed in black military fatigues and combat boots, with the blunt, squarish black handle of what appeared to be a 9-mm Beretta sticking out of his belt.

He looked them offensively up and down. “You’re in the wrong place,” he said dismissively in Spanish. “This is police headquarters.” With a jerk of his chin he gestured for them to get the hell back upstairs.

Sandoval instantly began babbling away with a stammering, apologetic explanation for their presence that got nowhere until Gideon interrupted.

“We have an appointment with Sergeant Nava,” he said in Spanish.

Until now, the cop had fixed his attention mostly on Sandoval. Now he turned it on Gideon and came a step closer; two steps. Whatever he’d had for breakfast, it had been heavily doused with cumin and garlic. “You’re not Mexican.”

“No. American.”

“American.” Disdainful, skeptical. “What’s your business here in Oaxaca?”

Gideon was quickly learning why the Oaxaca police, and to a lesser extent the police of Mexico, had the reputation they did. And it wasn’t simply the man’s size and attitude that intimidated, it was that gun stuffed so thuggishly into his belt. Was that meant to be intimidating (which it was)? What, could they not afford holsters?

“I’ve already told you why we’re here,” he said sharply, answering discourtesy with discourtesy. “Now where can we find Sergeant Nava, please?”

The cop narrowed his eyes, glared at him and opened his mouth to speak, at which point Sandoval started in again, grinning and wheedling and talking twice as fast as before. “Officer… sir… I’m the, the chief of police, you see-from, from Teotitlan del Valle? I have… there was… Sergeant Nava, he said to… he knows me, he told me-”

He was cut off by a weary bellow from down the hall. “Donardo, for Christ’s sake, will you put an end to that goddamn racket and bring them back here?” Gideon’s Spanish wasn’t up to getting every word, but following the gist was easy enough.

“Yes, Sergeant,” Donardo muttered with a roll of his eyes. Giving them a silent look that made it clear they had made no friend of him and would be wise not to cross his path again, he turned and led them down a linoleum-floored corridor bordered by a string of ramshackle office cubicles constructed from shoulder-high, building-grade plywood partitions that had been nailed together and covered over in watered-down white paint, the many knotholes, patches, and joints still plainly visible.

Sergeant Nava’s cubicle was no different from the ones they had glimpsed on their way: a cramped enclosure with an old metal desk and chair, a computer, a file cabinet, two unmatched metal chairs for visitors, and papers and files scattered over every available surface. There was nothing in it that wasn’t utilitarian in the extreme; not a photograph, not a coffee cup, not an ashtray. The Sergeant himself was cut in the Donardo mode, thickly built, blackly mustached, wearing black fatigues with the gun tucked into his belt. He was, however, marginally more polite than his subordinate-not polite enough to smile or say hello or get out of his chair, but enough to indicate with a wave of his fingers that they should take chairs as well, into which they squeezed, Gideon with some difficulty. With the back of the chair shoved right up against the wall to make some Space, his knees were still pressed against the desk.

Wordlessly, Nava watched them sandwich themselves in. Then, with a tired sigh, he leaned back-he had more room than they did-and addressed Sandoval.

“So. You again. This time a mummy.”

Sandoval giggled. “Yes, Sergeant, I’m afraid it’s me again. I’m sorry to bother you with this, but I knew that the proper action, in a matter such as this, was to inform you at once, so after Dr. Bustamente kindly-”

“This happy little village of yours-it’s getting to be quite a dangerous place, isn’t it? As bad as Mexico City.”

“Well, this didn’t happen in the village, Sergeant. Neither did the other one, the little girl. They were both found-”

Nava silenced him with a brusque motion of his hand. “All right, just tell me about it. And speak more slowly, for God’s sake. I already have a headache.” He jerked up the cuff of his shirt, grasped the face of his watch between thumb and forefinger, and studied it, sending a clear message: I am a busy man. My time is extremely valuable. I will allot a little of it to you, but be quick about it.

Still, he listened to what Sandoval had to say, or at least he allowed Sandoval to talk without interrupting him, other than the occasional finger-waving “Yes, yes,” to hurry him along-for almost five minutes. But he made it no secret that his mind was elsewhere. He asked no questions and jotted down only a couple of brief notes.

Obviously, he wasn’t much interested in the case, for which Gideon couldn’t blame him: a drifter, his body subjected to the depredations of the desert for half a year before anybody found it, with no apparent clues as to who had killed him or why-there wasn’t much the policia were going to be able to do about it, or, frankly, much impetus for them to try. Nava was doing pretty much what an American police Sergeant would do in his place: going through the motions for the record. But most American sergeants, or so Gideon hoped, would have done it a little more courteously.

Sandoval too was quick to spot the lack of interest, and it cheered him up perceptibly. His thoughts flowed across his mobile face as clearly as if he’d spoken them: maybe this wasn’t going to be as bad as he’d feared, maybe they’d just tell him to go ahead and bury the body and they’d get around to it when they could sometime, maybe Nava had been thumbing abstractedly through the thin folder that Sandoval had supplied, and his first question, interrupting Sandoval in mid-sentence, was directed at Gideon. He held up the report on Garcia’s body.

“You’re Professor Oliver? You wrote this?”

“Yes.”

“It’s in English.”

“Yes.”

“But obviously you speak Spanish.”

“Speak, yes-a little. But I don’t write it well enough for a police report. I assumed you’d have somebody here who could translate. I’ll be glad to help.”

“Mm.” Nava’s lips, barely visible under his mustache, were pursed. Sandoval held his tongue, only too happy to have the sergeant’s attention directed at Gideon and not at him. However, when Nava spoke again it was to Sandoval. With a jerk of his head at Gideon, he said, “If you think we are paying for his report, you’re mistaken. It was authorized without my permission. God knows we spent enough on your last case. Unless you have a budget for it, he will have to go without his fee.”

“There’s no charge for my services,” Gideon said, more curtly than he’d intended, but the continuing rudeness from Nava and from the guard had riled him. In most matters he didn’t have a particularly short fuse, but some things could quickly get under his skin, and gratuitous rudeness from people in positions of power was one of them. Especially when they were gun-toting guys with necks that were thicker than their heads. Bullying was what it was, plain and simple. Still, he understood all too well that he was in a culture not his own, with mores he wasn’t accustomed to. His readiness to take offense at this sort of treatment in similar situations had gotten him into difficulties more than once before. He resolved to do better at holding his temper, if for no other reason than to keep from getting Sandoval into trouble.

Fortunately, Nava hadn’t even noticed his sharpness. He was thinking, his fingers drumming on the desk. He lifted his head and called: “Cruz! Who knows English around here?”

The reply came over the partition from the next cubicle. “The colonel speaks very good English, Sergeant.”

“Maybe, but I’m not bothering him with this. The less he knows about what’s going on, the happier I am. Is there no one else?”

A moment of thoughtful silence. “I’m pretty sure his adjutant knows some too. Corporal Vela.”

“That will be better. All right, I have something for you to take to him for translation.”

“Now?”

“No, next month. Of course, now.”

Another mustached, slab-like face loomed up over the shoulder-high partition, although on Cruz it came only up to the middle of his chest. Where do they get these monsters? the physical anthropologist in Gideon wondered. In Mexico, especially this far south, you wouldn’t expect to run into too many men over five-seven or five-eight. But he’d yet to see a member of the policia ministerial who wasn’t a good six-two, and built like a UPS truck to boot.

With the cubicles as compact as they were, Cruz didn’t have to come around for the report, simply reaching a brawny, black-clad arm down for it.

“Now make sure you ask the colonel first if it’s all right with him if we borrow Vela for a few minutes,” Sandoval cautioned, handing it up to him. “We don’t want to get into trouble with him.” Gideon thought he saw Nava’s right hand make an incipient sign of the cross, a warding off of calamity. “You know what he can be like.”

“I know, I know.”

Nava began to wrap up their interview, but Cruz was back before a minute had gone by. “The colonel wants to see him,” he told Nava.

“He does?”

Sandoval paled. “Mother of God,” he said in English, “I don’t want to see no colonel.” He looked futilely around him for help.

“Not you. Him.” Cruz pointed at Gideon. Sandoval closed his eyes and sagged with relief.

“Him?” Nava was puzzled. He looked at Gideon, looked at Sandoval, and looked again at the folder, reassessing. Was there more to this than he’d realized, some import he hadn’t grasped, something on which he’d better make sure he was up to snuff?

“All right, Cruz, if the professor wouldn’t mind…” An inquiring pause, a newly polite manner, to which Gideon responded with a nod to show that no, he didn’t mind. “…take him there, please.” Then he turned to Sandoval with freshened interest and a deferential gesture. “Perhaps, Chief Sandoval, if you would be kind enough to go over this in a little more detail…”

Trailing behind Cruz, Gideon, wondering himself why a colonel-a very high level in the Mexican police system-would take an interest in something like this, walked down the corridor past another half dozen cubicles, where the hallway widened out to create a sort of anteroom in front of a wooden door, a real door that opened and closed, the first he’d seen here. Beside it was a desk at which yet another six-foot-plus cop in black sat at a computer. Corporal Vela, Gideon assumed, and was proved correct when he picked up a telephone, hit a button, and said: “He’s here, Colonel. Yes, sir.”

He got up, went to the door, opened it, and politely motioned for Gideon to enter. “Please,” he said in English.

Gideon sucked in a breath, stood up straight, promised himself not to lose his temper, and walked into a room that was like the important offices in the building must have been in the glory days before the place was chopped up into cubicles: a shining slate floor (instead of tired old linoleum); a high plaster ceiling (instead of a low-hung one of acoustic tiles) edged with ornate floral cornices; tall, mullioned, Gothic-arched windows on two sides; heavy, black, old furniture in a sort of Hispanic-Victorian style, oiled and gleaming. All very imposing and forbidding, as if designed to make a petitioner or a miscreant feel inconsequential, vulnerable, and small. Add a few age-darkened fifteenth-century Spanish paintings of crucifixions and martyrdoms, Gideon thought, and it would have made a fine office for a deputy grand inquisitor. There were age-darkened paintings on the walls, all right, but they were portraits of high-collared nineteenth-century officials and bureaucrats.

In the exact center of this room, under a rudely hammered iron chandelier that had once held oil lamps but now had electric bulbs in ornamental hurricane-lantern fittings, was a massive, carved desk. At it was the fear-inspiring colonel himself, under the circumstances an astonishing sight. Dwarfed by the huge desk and his thronelike carved chair, looking directly at Gideon, he hardly seemed to be a member of the same species as the gorillas Gideon had been running into until now; closer to a marmoset, and a good-humored, wise old marmoset at that. Nor was he swathed in grim matte black either, but wearing a Yucatecan guayabera, the embroidered, open-throated, and distinctly informal white shirt worn outside the trousers. On his lined, clean-shaven, mahogany-skinned, twinkly-eyed face was a perfectly delighted grin.

“Hello, my friend,” he said in elegantly accented Englih. “How are you? And how is your beautiful wife, the charming and gifted Julie?”

Astounded, even speechless for a couple of seconds, Gideon stared at him. “…I don’t believe it… Javier?”

“None other,” said Colonel Javier Marmolejo, coming out from around the desk (and not coming up much higher than he’d been when sitting in the big chair). They shook hands warmly and even tried a brief, gingerly abrazo, although their size difference made it awkward, and neither of them went in much for such things in any case.

They stepped apart to look each other over. “Well, you’ve gotten a little older, Gideon. Is that a bit of gray I see in your hair?”

“Yes, a little,” Gideon said. “I have to say, you sure look exactly the same.” This was a bit of a lie. seen close up, Marmolejo had grown even more wizened than he’d been before; he was beginning to look less like a monkey than the mummy of a monkey. But there was no mistaking the wit and intelligence that still flashed in his eyes. “Except where’s the ever-present cigar?” Gideon asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without one before.”

“Oh, I’ve given up cigar smoking. At my age, one has to care for one’s health.”

Gideon couldn’t help laughing. “You mean cigar holding,” he said. The Marmolejo he remembered had always had a cigar around, all right, but it was strictly a prop cigar. Gideon couldn’t remember ever seeing him light it.

Happily chuckling, Marmolejo took him by the arm to a grouping of handsome leather armchairs and a low table in a corner of the room near the windows. “My old friend, I was amazed-thrilled, as you can imagine, but amazed-to see your name on the report. What in the world brings you to Oaxaca?”

“I’m here on vacation, Javier. Julie is filling in for her cousin at a resort in Teotitlan, and I’m along for the ride. But I still don’t-”

Marmolejo laughed and held up Gideon’s report. “And this is how you spend your vacation? Performing forensic analyses on corpses? Well, I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“Well… this just came along. I mean, I just happened to be… Hey, never mind about me. What are you doing here? The last time I saw you…”

The last time he’d seen him had been in Merida, on the Yucatan Peninsula, where he had been an inspector in the Yucatecan State Judicial Police. Gideon had met a lot of interesting and unusual policemen in his life, but Javier Alfonso Marmolejo took the cake, a real one of a kind. Half Mayan Indian, born in his Mayan mother’s village of Tzakol, a huddle of dilapidated shacks near the Quintana Roo border (Gideon had been there once; what he chiefly remembered were the pigs sunning themselves in the middle of the single, muddy street), Marmolejo had not learned Spanish until he was seven, when his father moved the family to Merida. At ten, he was one of the army of rascally, going-nowhere kids selling takeaway snacks of sliced coconuts and grapefruit and orange slices from homemade carts around the main market square. Against all odds, he had gotten himself through school and saved enough to buy his way into the then graft-riddled Yucatecan police department. A drastic cleanup a few years later had resulted in throwing out half the police force, but Marmolejo’s integrity and abilities had been recognized and he’d been kept on. A few years later he’d graduated from the national police academy in Mexico City-one of the few provincial cops to do so, and probably the first Mayan Indian-and, in his forties, had gone on to a master’s degree in public administration from the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan. He’d studied English and German, he’d become an educated man, and now, in his mid-fifties, here he was a full-fledged “…full-fledged colonel!” Gideon said. “In Oaxaca, five hundred miles from Merida. How did that happen?”

“A thousand, actually,” Marmolejo said. “And although I am indeed a full-fledged colonel, as you are generous enough to point out, I am not a colonel in the Oaxacan police force but in the PFP, the Federal Preventive Police, to which I applied three years ago and to which I was subsequently admitted. My assignment to Oaxaca is a temporary one.” He eyed Gideon, his head cocked. “Why are you smiling?”

Gideon was smiling because he was remembering a comment a mutual friend had once made about the striking incongruity between Marmolejo’s furtive, cunning appearance and his often elegant English: “You look at the man and you expect ‘I don’ got to show you no steenkin’ bedge.’ Instead, you get Ricardo Montalban.” And he was smiling because he was still thinking about the absent cigar, remembering Marmolejo’s uncanny ability to have an unlighted one wedged in his mouth on and off throughout the day without making a gummy, oozy mess out of it. Unlike most unlit-cigar fanciers, he didn’t chew on the things any more than he actually smoked them. There had been a running joke about it in Yucatan: Do you think he really has more than one cigar, or is that the same one he brings with him every day?

“I’m smiling because I’m just so damn glad to see you again,” Gideon said, which was also true enough on its own. “But go ahead. If you’re with the federales, what are you doing behind a desk in Oaxaca?”

His responsibilities with the PFP, Marmolejo explained, involved straightening out local police forces with less than stellar reputations, an assemblage in which the Oaxacan policia ministerial was-or at any rate, had been-a prime member. The initial impetus for sending him here had come in 2006, when federal police more or less had to take over the city during a string of violent antipolice protests with which the local police couldn’t cope. In the aftermath, the feds had concluded that a general housecleaning was in order and Marmolejo had been one of three experienced federal cops temporarily assigned to high-level line positions in Oaxaca. He functioned as the titular head of homicide investigations, but his primary responsibility was to mount a thorough review of past cases. The Oaxaca police, beset by graft, negligence, and plain old bungling, had a sorry history of dubious case closures and unresolved investigations, and it was Marmolejo’s job to dig out the worst of them and rectify what could be rectified. Not only could he reopen old investigations; he’d been given full authority to demote, indict, or summarily boot out dishonest, obstructive, and incompetent cops. He had in fact, done exactly that with his predecessor in this fine office, the notorious, corrupt, and roundly hated Colonel Salvador Archuleta, at that time the second most powerful cop in Oaxaca.

No wonder Sergeant Nava wanted to keep on his good side.

“Interestingly enough,” Marmolejo told him, “one of these ‘cold cases,’ as you call them, and a relatively recent one at that, involves this same village of Teotitlan and this same Chief Sandoval of yours. I was looking at it only this morning.”

“Yes, he was telling me about it.” Gideon hesitated. “I can’t say he was too happy with the way the police ran things then. He’s petrified at the idea of going through it again.”

Marmolejo nodded. “I’ve been going over it, and I can’t say that I’m too happy with it either. And as you might guess, it is a case that disturbs me deeply.”

“It does? Why?”

Marmolejo scowled. The question surprised him. “Why? A young girl, an innocent barely into her teenage years, murdered after God knows what was done to her, her body callously thrown down a mine shaft and left for the worms? An investigation ended after a single month, with the child never identified, with no one charged, no credible suspects named? How can I not be disturbed?”

“I see. I didn’t know she was so young.”

“Yes, only thirteen or fourteen. Or so the forensic report concluded. The remains had been there for some time, you see. They were skeletonized.”

“It was a skeleton?” Again Gideon hesitated, not wanting to give offense. But being Gideon, he was interested. “Um, are you sure it was a girl? I mean, when you’re dealing with someone as young as that, determining sex from the skeleton can be tricky.”

“Can it?” Marmolejo asked. “I didn’t realize.”

“More than tricky, really. You see, if the secondary sexual characteristics-the ones on the outside-haven’t fully developed yet, the skeletal indicators aren’t all that reliable either. In fact, until you get to eighteen or so, you’re on pretty thin ice when it comes to sex. I mean, a competent anthropologist might be maybe sixty or seventy percent confident, but that’s not good enough to be much use in an investigation, and it’s sure not good enough to go into court with.”

“You don’t think so? If all my leads had a sixty or seventy percent chance of proving accurate, I would be a happy man. And a far more successful policeman.”

“Not when it comes to sexing a skeleton. Look at it this way. sixty percent right means forty percent wrong. But there are only two sexes to begin with, so you can do damn near as well flipping a coin, and it’s a whole lot less work.”

“Yes, I see your point.” Marmolejo considered. “This interests me. Would you be interested in seeing the report for yourself?”

“If you think I might be able to help, sure.” Or even if not.

“Good.” Marmolejo went to the door. “Alejandro, can you put aside what you’re doing and translate something for Professor Oliver, please? The forensic report on the unidentified child from Teotitlan del Valle. And bring me the entire file.”

As he returned, Gideon was struck all over again by what a truly tiny man Marmolejo was. Standing no more than five-two in his ridiculously small, well-cared-for oxfords, and dressed in guayabera and neatly pressed, light blue trousers, he seemed as improbable a cop as Sandoval. But Gideon knew better. Marmolejo was quick-witted, astute, and thorough, with an enviable intuitiveness, a kind of outside-the-box sixth sense that Gideon liked to think had something to do with the mystical teachings of his Mayan heritage-or rather that he would have thought, had he not been the thoroughgoing rational empiricist that of course he was.

“The new case you’ve brought is interesting too,” Marmolejo said, sitting down. His toes-but not his heels-touched the floor. “A Phillips-head screwdriver? An unusual weapon, wouldn’t you say?”

“First time I’ve ever run into it myself. But there was a report on something similar in one of the journals not long ago. Otherwise, I’m not sure I would have realized what I was looking at.”

“And what do you surmise from it?”

“From the fact that it was a Phillips-head screwdriver? Nothing. Well, no, not quite nothing. I think we can assume that it was unpremeditated, a crime of passion, a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

“On the grounds that a killer planning murder would hardly bring along a screwdriver as his weapon of choice?”

“Right. Listen, Javier, do you think there might be a connection between the two killings? I mean, two dead bodies found in the space of a year near a town that hadn’t had a murder in fifty years…”

“Oh, no, I shouldn’t think so. I understand the man, Garcia, was killed only six months ago. The little girl was found a year ago, and it was estimated that her body had been there for five years.”

“Ah, I didn’t know that either.”

Corporal Vela returned with the translated report and handed it to Gideon. “I’m sorry, this was not easy for me. English to Spanish, I can do this. Spanish to English-not so good. Also, there was some words, scientific words I did not know to translate. I leave them in Spanish.”

“I’m sure it’ll be okay; a lot better than I could do,” Gideon said. It was the syntax of the original, not the technical vocabulary, that would have been likely to give Vela trouble. Scientific terms, inasmuch as they were mostly Latin or derived from Latin, were pretty interchangeable from language to language. While Marmolejo began to go through the case file, he settled back to read. There was only three-quarters of a page, not much more than he had written on Garcia.

Examination of skeleton remains, Case Number 08-Teo dVl, conducted 23 May 2008, by Dr. Gerardo Puente Orihuela, forensic physician, Oaxaca ministerial police. These remains was previously examined by Dr. Bustamente, medico legista, Tlacolula District. Remains are very partial and was too much chewing by animales.

Bones Present:

The craneo and the mandibula, the right clavicula, the right pelvis bone, the left leg bones, numerous bones of the hands or feet, and some tooths.

Time Since the Death:

I estimate that these bones are since five years exposed.

Condiciones patologicas:

None

Trauma:

The craneo is muchly broken into pieces. Frontal bone, zigomatico, maxilar bone all are broke. My conclusion is these breakings are from the fuerza despuntada at the time of the death and that they directly caused or contributed to the death.

Gideon looked up. “ Fuerza despuntada -that would be ‘blunt force’?”

“Blunt force,” Marmolejo agreed.

Gideon nodded. It was impossible to say without more detail, or without having seen the bones for himself, whether or not the doctor’s conclusion was accurate. Conceivably, the damage could have occurred through some kind of accident after death, or could have been due to carnivore foraging. But on the face of it, perimortem blunt force trauma as the cause of death-murder, in other words-certainly seemed like a good bet when you took the context (a body presumably flung down a mine shaft) into consideration. So far, he had no dispute with Dr. Orihuela.

Years:

Was determined from the status of epifisis closings as well as erupcion of the tooths. The second muelas was present, but not the third, indicating the age of more than twelve years.

“ Muelas?” Gideon asked. “Molars?”

“Molar teeth, yes,” said Marmolejo.

“Mm.” Gideon went back to reading.

Certain epifisis of the bones has begun to connect but not yet completed. Other ones are completed. This condition indicates the presence of more than twelve years but not so many as sixteen years. Therefore, I estimate this individual person had thirteen to fifteen years.

Thirteen to fifteen seemed perhaps a little overly specific coming from someone not trained in physical anthropology, but it was also evident that the doctor had some grounding in developmental osteology and dentition, so one could probably assume that he was at least roughly in the ballpark. But the next entry, the last, gave him pause.

Genero:

The skeleton is a female. This is showed from the shape of the pelvis and certain other factors.

“Now there I do have a problem,” he said aloud. “Sex.”

“Indeed, a problem for us all,” Marmolejo murmured without looking up.

“Sex determination,” Gideon amended with a smile.

Now Marmolejo looked up, frowning. “A mistake? It’s not a female?”

Gideon was pleased at the colonel’s ready acceptance of his judgment; back in Yucatan, it had taken a while to win him over. All the same, a little backing off was required. “No, I wouldn’t go that far. It’s just that Dr. Orihuela didn’t give any details. ‘Shape of the pelvis and certain other factors’-well yeah, sure, the pelvis would be your best bet, but it’s full of shapes; there are all kinds of curves and angles and measurements. Some are reliable, others aren’t. Which did he mean? Did he use more than one? In any case, whatever he did use, it’s hard to see how he could have been that sure of himself; not with a thirteen- to fifteen-year-old. Now if he said, ‘This skeleton would appear to be that of a female,’ okay. Or ‘in my opinion, the skeleton is probably that of a female.’ Or ‘most sexual indicators suggest the sex is female.’ But just a flat-out ‘the skeleton is a female’? Sorry, I have to have my doubts.”

Marmolejo stroked the corners of his lips. “So it might be the skeleton of a boy and not a girl?”

Gideon understood why this was of concern. If the police had been operating on the assumption that the remains were those of a female and they were actually those of a male, they would have been looking in all the wrong places. The entire investigation would have been thrown off track.

“I don’t like second-guessing your pathologist,” he said, “but… well, let me just say I have to wonder about his being that cut-and-dried about it. Yes, sometimes children’s bones do sexually differentiate at an early age-these are quantitative criteria we’re dealing with, after all, continuous variables ranging from no visible development at all to completely developed, so some kids are going to be ahead of other kids, ahead of the crowd, the same as they are in height, or weight, or mental development. I’ve seen kids myself, almost that young, with enough skeletal sexual differentiation to definitively mark them as boys or girls… but I haven’t seen them very often, and that’s what’s worrying me. It’s possible, of course, that this just happens to be one of them, but…”

He trailed off, thinking. “You know, there’s another possibility, Javier,” he said after a moment. “It’s probably more likely, now that I think of it-and that is that it’s the age he was mistaken about. Determining age is a lot harder than figuring out the sex.”

“Of course. With sex one has two possible choices. With age, there are many.”

“Yes, that’s part of it, but it’s also that the criteria are more complex. You have to know a lot more about skeletal development to read those epiphyseal unions than you do to evaluate the sex indicators.”

“So now you are suggesting that we may be dealing with a female after all, but an adult female?”

“Right. If she were an adult there wouldn’t have been much problem in properly determining the sex. Of course, if that’s true, then the police would still have gone off entirely in the wrong direction. They would have been investigating the murder of a child, when in reality it had been an adult.”

Marmolejo sighed, but he did it with a smile. “Gideon, I already begin to regret bringing you into it. Before, we were faced with trying to identify a female child. Now that you have looked into it, it seems we may be trying to identify a female child or a male child or a female adult. How is it,” he mused, probably thinking about the Yucatan case he had earlier been involved in with Gideon, “that the more information your expertise provides, the less information we seem to have?”

“Interestingly enough,” Gideon said, laughing, “you’re not the first person to make that observation. Well, look at it this way: at least I’ve eliminated the one remaining age-sex possibility. Assuming that Orihuela had any idea of what he was doing, which seems likely, you can forget about the category of adult male. You won’t have to waste any time exploring that particular avenue.”

“No,” Marmolejo said dryly. “Merely the other three.”

“What can I say?” Gideon said. “I sure wish I could have seen those bones myself.”

Marmolejo emitted a mild, interested “Ah?”

It seemed to Gideon that the colonel had something up his sleeve. “There wouldn’t be any photos in the file, would there?” he asked hopefully. “I might be able to tell something from them.”

“Unfortunately, there are none.”

Gideon spread his hands. “Well, then, I don’t know what else-”

“No, no photos were taken, alas. All we have are the bones themselves.”

Gideon blinked. “You still have them?”

“According to this file, we do.” He tapped a page in it. “Until this moment I was unaware of it myself.”

“And I could see them?”

Marmolejo smiled. “I suspect I can arrange it. When would you like to do it?”

“How about now? Who knows, I might be able to come up with something else as well.” He was three-quarters out of his chair.

“No, my friend, not so fast. They’re not here. According to this, they’re in a government warehouse in Xochimilco, north of the city. I can have them brought here on tomorrow’s morning run, which generally arrives in the early afternoon. Would you be free then? Say two o’clock, to be on the safe side? I have no doubt you will continue to astound and confound me with more of the wonderful osteological rabbits that you pull from your hat with such seeming ease.”

“I don’t know about the osteological rabbits,” Gideon said with a smile, “but yes, tomorrow afternoon is fine. Javier, why was the case closed after only a month? That’s pretty short for giving up on a murder investigation, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would.” He clapped his small, clean hands together soundlessly. “Let’s find out, shall we?”

He went to the door and opened it. “Alejandro, will you ask Sergeant Nava and Chief Sandoval if they would be kind enough to join us? Tell them I would like to talk about the young girl’s skeleton that was discovered last year near Teotitlan. Oh, and coffee for all, if you please. Espresso, I think.” To Gideon he said, “You will forgive me if I speak spanish. Nava has no English.”

“I’m sure I’ll be able to follow most of it.”

When the two entered a few moments later it was hard to tell who was more scared, Nava or Sandoval. Both seemed surprised when they were motioned to the armchair area and not the visitor’s chairs at the desk. Nava no longer had a gun stuck in his belt. Sandoval wouldn’t sit down until he was specifically asked to, and when the coffee arrived, he couldn’t quite make himself believe it was meant for him until Marmolejo personally poured it and slid a demitasse cup and saucer toward him.

“Chief Sandoval,” a smiling Marmolejo said, as Sandoval tremblingly lifted the cup to his lips, “I’ve been looking at the file concerning the case you were involved in last year. Perhaps you can tell us a little more about the circumstances under which the girl’s remains were found. You would know more about that than anyone else.”

With a visible effort, Sandoval managed to set the cup back on its saucer with only a minimum of clatter. “Well, there’s not much to tell, Sir. They were discovered when a Canadian tourist fell into an old mine in the hills about three kilometers east of my village.”

“And what type of mine was it? Copper? Silver? Gold?”

“It was an old silver mine, Colonel. They say it’s a thousand years old.” He paused. “La Mina de los Muertos.”

“The Mine of the Dead?” Marmolejo repeated in Spanish. “And why was it called that, do you happen to know?” Gideon could see that he was trying to set Sandoval at ease, asking questions he thought the man could answer.

“Oh, that’s not its real name,” said Sandoval, who did indeed seem to be growing more confident with this line of questioning. “I don’t think it has a name. People started calling it that maybe ten years ago, when someone found an old skeleton in it, in another passage.”

Marmolejo’s eyebrows drew together. “Do you mean another human skeleton?”

“Oh yes, but one of the Ancients, an Old One, you know? A thousand years old, maybe more.”

“Ah,” Marmolejo said with a sober little smile. “And now we find ourselves dealing with a New One, eh? A Young One. Well thank you, Chief. Now, Sergeant Nava, please tell me how it was it that you were made aware of these remains?”

The two men gradually relaxed further as Marmolejo asked his innocuous questions, gently and with no intimation of fault-finding or accusation, at least until he came to the crucial question.

“Sergeant Nava, can you enlighten me as to why the case was closed after a single month?”

Even before this, Nava’s huge, thick-fingered hand had been having trouble manipulating the tiny cup and saucer; watching him was like watching a trained bear trying to do some delicate trick that was too minuscule for his paw. Now he carefully, clumsily put them, clattering, down on the table. “It wasn’t closed, colonel,” he said, looking nervous again. “It was suspended.”

“Ah, suspended. I see. And can you tell me why it was suspended after a single month?”

“There was no place to go with it, sir. We couldn’t find out who the victim was. We looked through the records of three years ago, five years ago, eight years ago, to try to find a girl of that age who was missing. In all of Oaxaca we found no one it could possibly have been. And there were no clues-the murderer, the motive-nothing. And the case, it was so old-” Marmolejo made the smallest of gestures with his hand, only the faint shadow of a shushing gesture, but it was enough to stop Nava at once.

“What if it had been a boy, not a girl?” the colonel asked. “Would that have made a difference?”

“If it had been a-” A sweaty sheen had popped out on Nava’s forehead. “But the forensic report, it said-”

“I understand,” Marmolejo said kindly. “But now it seems the report may have been in error. Professor Oliver is going to look into that. Would you foresee any problem with reopening the matter if there is a reason; assigning some of your better men to it?”

“No, sir, absolutely not. With your permission, I would like to work on it myself.”

“Very good. I will let you know. As we proceed on these matters, I trust you will show Chief Sandoval and Professor Oliver every courtesy.”

“Of course. They have been extremely helpful, most obliging. We are most fortunate to have their expert counsel available to us.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

Nava, attuned to understanding a dismissal when he heard one, rose, bowed, and took his leave, still sweating but looking relieved to get out of there in one piece. His expression said it all: Madre de Dios, it could have been a whole lot worse.

“And now, Chief Sandoval,” Marmolejo said genially, “would you care for a little more of this excellent coffee?”

“Why yes, Colonel, I believe I would,” said Sandoval, smiling broadly and extending his cup. “With maybe a little sugar this time. But only if it’s not too much trouble, of course.”