Twenty blue devils

Chapter 27

John's typical laugh was a sunny, explosive, childlike peal, but when he was really amused, really tickled, what came out instead was a bursting, choking hee-hee-hee that could grate on Gideon from the first hee and then go on seemingly forever.

"Hee-hee-hee,” he said now, his eyes pinched shut, “heehee-hee, hee-hee-hee-hee-hee, hee-hee-hee-"

"The humor here escapes me,” Gideon said crossly when it appeared that an end was not in sight.

"Hee-hee-hee,” John gurgled. “That's because you couldn't see your face. Hee-hee… oh, God…I'm sorry, Doc, I couldn't help it, you were so-so-” And in he started again.

"I gather,” Gideon said stuffily, “that this is a small joke on your part?"

John held him off with raised hand, wiped his eyes, and let go a huge terminal sigh. “Oh, boy. No, it's not a joke. That's what they named him: Vernon Westmark Culpepper."

Gideon stared at him. “But-"

"In 1983 they named him Vernon W. Culpepper. For seven years Vernon W. Culpepper kept a low profile in Chicago, reported regularly to work, and generally stayed out of trouble and followed the witness protection rules. On February 11, 1990, he traveled to Quebec, Canada, which was within the rules, but he didn't come back. The Marshals Service eventually figured either he got tired of the restrictions and took off for good-they do that a lot of times-or that he got careless and that Nutso and the boys finally caught up with him."

"Nineteen-ninety…” mused Gideon.

"Nineteen-ninety. And four months later, in June of 1990, presto, here comes this guy named Brian Scott-with a whole lot of holes in his life story-who turns up out of nowhere at Nick's dinner table in Tahiti and never leaves again; never leaves Tahiti, I mean. Meanwhile, nobody ever hears from Vernon W. Culpepper again."

"So Brian could be Culpepper; could be Bozzuto, that is."

"I think we can be a little more definite than that. I found out what Bozzuto's job with Amtrak was. Care to guess?"

"No,” Gideon said. “I would definitely not care to guess."

John laughed-the more familiar chuckle this time. “I'm really sorry about that, Doc. I couldn't help myself. But this time there aren't any surprises. Klingo-Vernon-was hired by Amtrak as a customer services inspector. Not a conductor, but almost as good. He traveled the trains checking on food services, linens, staff behavior, stuff like that. Typically he'd spend eighty percent of his time-that's about eighteen days a month-on moving trains."

"For seven years, you said?"

John nodded. “Six hours a day. Would that be enough to develop those monster fibulas?"

Gideon relaxed and sank back against his chair. “It'd be enough,” he said.

"Then that settles it,” John said with a clenched-fist victory gesture.

"I think so,” said Gideon. “What with the timing, and Culpepper's disappearance, and those Superman fibulas, and everything else, the odds of being wrong have to be next to nothing."

Spontaneously, John reached across the low table to shake Gideon's hand. “Congratulations, Doc. That's really a neat piece of work."

Gideon shook hands with pleasure. He thought it was a pretty neat piece of work himself, and he was pleased for John's sake too. Although his friend hadn't said anything to suggest it, he knew that John was tremendously relieved to conclude that Brian Scott had once been Klingo Bozzuto. Because if he was Klingo, then the Mob would have been hunting him all this time; he'd probably had a price on his head. And if that was the case, then the chances were enormous that it was the professional bad guys that were behind his death after all.

And that meant that John could stop worrying about Maggie, or Therese, or Nelson, or anyone else in his family being a murderer. True, they'd apparently been suckered by an ex-mobster who'd probably tucked their names away under “future marks” during the trial, but that was merely cause for a few self-recriminations; it wasn't going to tear the family apart.

"Congratulations to us both,” Gideon said with a smile.

The telephone chirped. Gideon picked it up. “Hello?"

"Ah, Dr. Oliver, good morning to you.” The voice was French-accented; a jovial rasp, vaguely familiar. “I didn't wake you?"

"No, not at all."

"Excellent. This is Viennot."

"Um…Viennot?” The name was vaguely familiar too.

"The physician,” the voice on the other end said, and then when Gideon didn't respond: “The police surgeon? We met at-"

"Oh, yes, of course. Good morning, Dr. Viennot. What can I do for you?"

"I am calling from the hospital, professor. I have been working on the body of the large gentleman who was shot yesterday-"

Viennot got off to an early start, then. It wasn't much after seven even now.

"-and it suddenly occurred to me that if you are not otherwise occupied you might enjoy participating in the autopsy?"

Not by a long shot, he wouldn't. “Thank you, doctor,” he said politely, “but I don't think-"

"Are you certain? The man is an extraordinary specimen in many ways."

Gideon doubted this not at all, but it didn't make him any more eager to watch Viennot open him up. Professional courtesies were pleasant things, but this one-which was offered him from time to time-was one he was generally happy to do without. “I appreciate it very much, sir, but I think I'd better say no."

"I wish you'd reconsider. I ask as a colleague in need of counsel. There are some things here that puzzle me."

"Well, I'd be glad to help if I could, but I'm afraid I'm no pathologist. My-"

"Skeletal things,” Viennot said with the happy, singsong inflection of a man who had just turned up four of a kind.

Which he had. Gideon's interest was instantly sparked. “Oh? Like what?"

"I'm sure it would be better if you saw for yourself, colleague,” Viennot said smoothly. “I may expect you, say, in an hour?"

"In an hour,” Gideon said. “I'll see you then."

"You going into town?” John asked when Gideon had hung up.

"Uh-huh. To the morgue."

"Let me get dressed and I'll ride in with you. Nelson wants to talk to me about something and I told him I'd come by the Papeete office. And I can swing by the police station first and let Bertaud know about all this new stuff. Want to come with me? Should be exciting when he hears."

"I can't. I promised to sit in on Tari's autopsy."

"Hey, lucky you,” John said, heading for the door.

Quickened interest notwithstanding, Gideon's spirits were flagging as he took the stairway down to the basement of the Centre Hospitalier Territorial. He had witnessed the efficient and enthusiastic Dr. Viennot in action before and he was not looking forward to seeing the progress he had been making on Tari's corpulent remains.

He needn't have worried. While he was still in the corridor Viennot called out to him, not from the autopsy room, but from the little conference room next door, where Gideon had worked on the bones two days earlier.

"In here, sir!"

The physician, an intense, ruddy, clear-eyed man in his forties, sat at the table, smoking one of his crooked black cigars.

In front of him, on a few layers of brown butcher paper, was a gleaming object about the size, shape, and color of a soccer ball cut in half: It was the sawed-off top of a human skull, but the Stryker saw had been applied lower than was usual in autopsies, sawing through the bone just above the orbits, running backward and slightly downward through the squamosal and lambdoid sutures, across the triangular apex of the occipital bone, and back around the other side. The result was that everything above the eyes was included; in effect, the entire braincase, scrupulously cleansed of soft tissue.

Gideon's initial glance told him it was a male, and a big male at that. There was a neat, round hole-a bullet's entrance hole-in the sphenoidal angle of the right parietal, just behind the coronal suture-in other words, through the temple. Toward the rear of this large, plate-like bone and a little higher, where the curvature of the skull was most marked, was a small depressed fracture-that is, a cracked, irregular, sunken island of bone, about an inch long and half an inch wide, with more cracks radiating out from it over the adjacent bone; precisely the kind of wound to be expected if a person were to fall backward and strike his head on a hard, straight, sharp-edged object-the corner of a raised fireplace hearth, for example.

"Tari?” Gideon asked unnecessarily.

Viennot nodded. “Indeed. I thought I would bring the segment here for you, inasmuch as you preferred not to be in the autopsy room."

Gideon looked at him, surprised. “When did I say-"

"Some things, one doesn't have to say.” He laughed. “Of course, if you would prefer that we go to the-"

"This'll do fine, thanks. Now, what in particular did you want me to look at?"

"This. What do you make of it?"

He turned the skullcap so that Gideon could see the other side, the left side. At the top rear corner of the parietal, an inch left of the sagittal suture-on a living head it would have been just behind the crown and a little to the left of center-there was a more unusual wound; another island of bone, much like the one on the right side in that it was cracked and irregular, with rough, crumbled margins. But this one was more nearly round and several times larger, about the size of a silver dollar. And most striking, unlike the other it was raised, not sunken; a sort of depressed fracture in reverse, indicating that the bone had been thrust out from inside and not the other way around.

"An elevated fracture,” Gideon said, running his fingers around the margin. With a little pressure applied from the inside he could easily have popped the chunk of bone altogether out. “It's the bullet's exit wound-in this case, an incomplete exit wound."

Viennot was pleased. “Yes?"

"The bullet didn't make it all the way out. You should find it still inside him."

"As we did.” Viennot produced a misshapen slug. “Wedged between the dura mater and the cranial vault, a few centimeters anterior to the exit fracture."

He handed it to Gideon, who politely examined it and put it back on the table.

"Now then,” Viennot said. His cigar had gone out. He paused while he got it lit with a wooden match from a pocket pack. “You understand, we do not see many lethal gunshot wounds here in our pacific little community, and this"-he gestured with the cigar- “this ‘incomplete exit wound’ is new to my experience. To what would you ascribe the cause of such a wound?"

It was a question Gideon had heard before, from other physicians lucky enough to lack a big-city medical examiner's day-in-day-out familiarity with death by firearms. “Well, it's not really all that infrequent. The bullet sometimes just doesn't have sufficient impetus to make it all the way out of the skull, so-"

"Of course, of course,” Viennot interrupted, “but consider: here we have a case of a point-blank shooting-this was confirmed by the existence of powder marks around the entrance wound in the scalp-with a powerful weapon, and ammunition that Colonel Bertaud assures us was in good working order despite its age. The projectile, once fired, cleanly pierces a thin plate of bone-the right parietal-and subsequently passes through the soft mass of the brain for a total of one hundred and forty-two millimeters before arriving at the opposite side of the skull, yes? Neither a very great distance nor a very arduous path for a bullet, you will agree. Why then should it lack sufficient energy to fully penetrate the parietal bone on the other side?"

"Well, sometimes it can tumble on the way in, especially if it's an old weapon or old ammunition. Or it can be deflected by the bone, so that it glances off the surfaces and ricochets around inside the skull before-"

"My dear man,” Viennot said, laughing, “I may no longer be practicing in Lyons, but give me some credit. The brain has been partially dissected. The path of the bullet is perfectly straight, perfectly true."

"Then the most likely reason is that that side of Tari's head was against some solid object or surface when the gun was fired-"

Viennot's lively eyes lit up. “Ha, exactly as I surmised. I thought as much!"

"-and that it was hard enough and firm enough to keep the slug from completely shattering the bone and exploding out."

'Viennot raised a finger as if he himself had made a telling point. “Ah,” he said quietly and cocked an eyebrow, “but exactly what was it, this object or surface?"

"Oh, well, you know, it could easily have been…’ He stopped. “Son of a gun,” he murmured. “I see what you mean.” Here he'd been airily treating Viennot to a chowder-head version of Forensic Anthro 101, and Viennot had been three steps ahead of him the whole time. It was only now, thanks to Viennot's persistence, that it struck Gideon that there was a serious inconsistency in Rudy's version of events. Rudy had said that he had grabbed Tari's arm while Tari had been rummaging in a drawer for the gun, and that the gun had gone off instantly.

So how could Tari's head have been leaning against anything?

"Rudy was pretty excited,” Gideon said, thinking out loud. “He'd been stunned a moment before. He might have wrestled Tari against the wall without knowing it. The whole thing was over in a second. In the shock of the moment it would have been easy to forget exactly what happened."

Viennot shook his head. “I think not. Once shot in this manner, the man would have dropped like a stone-as he did, striking his head upon the hearth. His feet, in such circumstances, would naturally have remained in approximately the location that they'd been in when he was shot. But in this case, they were over a meter from the nearest wall."

"Ah,” said Gideon appreciatively. Now he was the one getting the chowderhead forensics course. Turnabout time again, and richly deserved. “Then that settles it,” he said slowly. “Rudy didn't quite tell it the way it was, did he?"

"Indeed not,” Viennot said, twirling his cigar for emphasis. “And I think we can hypothesize with some confidence as to what his reason was, don't you, colleague?…Colleague?"

Gideon had taken the skull into his hands while Viennot was speaking and had turned it around to take his first careful look at the other side, the right side, the one with both the round entrance wound and the depressed fracture suffered when Tari struck his head on the hearth in falling. He traced his fingers over the network of cracks between them. Well, well…

"Colleague?"

"Hm?” Gideon surfaced. “Oh, I'm sorry. You were saying…?"

"That we might hypothesize with some confidence as to what actually happened."

"I don't think there'd be any point in that, sir."

The physician's mobile features contracted into a scowl. “No point?"

"In hypothesizing.” Gideon replaced the skull on the butcher paper. “I know what actually happened,” he said with perhaps a little more panache than was strictly required; it was a common failing with him at such moments.

It takes a ham to appreciate a ham, and, as Gideon thought he might be, Viennot was delighted. After an astounded silence during which the cigar stub hung pasted to his lower lip he barked with laughter. “You know!" he cried happily. “ How do you know?” He chomped down on the cigar and leaned expectantly forward, elbows on the table, his nose no more than a foot from the bone. Like every true man of science he was at his happiest when about to be instructed.

"I know,” Gideon said, “because cracks don't cross cracks."