Switcheroo (A Gideon Oliver Mystery Book 18)

by Aaron Elkins

  “Of course. And I’ll be here.”

  “Not at the front.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Ten minutes,” was her parting valediction.

  “The bailiff?” Gideon asked when they were out of earshot.

  “Oh, no, a much more important figure than that, a person whose good offices one is well advised to cultivate. Henrietta Scaliffe is the bailiff’s secretary. I don’t know the way it is in the United States, but here—”

  “It’s the same in the States,” Gideon said.

  In the anteroom, Rafe paused alongside one of the portraits, pointing to the brass plate below it:

  Howard Francis Carlisle

  Senator, 1937–1962

  President pro tempore, 1961–1962

  “Ah,” said Gideon. “This would be . . . let’s see, your grandfather, Roddy Carlisle’s father.”

  Rafe nodded. “The brightest light of our long genealogy. Unfortunately, he was gone long before I was born.”

  Gideon studied the portrait, that of a handsome, florid, robust-looking man in his midsixties, dressed in a dark, midcentury-style business suit rather than in the ceremonial robes most of the other subjects wore. His left hand rested gracefully inside the opening of his suit coat as if it were an admiral’s tunic.

  “Looks like a competent guy. And I love the Napoleonic pose. Very magisterial.”

  “Oh, there was a reason for that. He had a disfigured hand that he preferred to hide. An injury from the First World War, I understand.”

  “Not at all,” said a scratchy voice from behind them. “Howard’s hand was not ‘disfigured,’ except in his own mind. Nor was it the result of an injury in the Great War or in any other war.”

  “Why, hello there, Senator,” Rafe said brightly. “Senator, this is my friend Dr. Gideon Oliver, an esteemed professor of forensic anthropology from the University of Washington. Gideon, allow me to introduce my learned colleague Wilton Goldsworthy, our longest-serving assembly member and an invaluable asset to our ancient and sadly enfeebled institution.”

  Senator Goldsworthy was a sturdy, square-shaped man in his midseventies who projected a hard-to-miss air of authority. His thick gray hair was longish but beautifully barbered and blow-dried. He’d have had no trouble passing for an American senator.

  “Eh? What’s that?” he said, cupping a hand to his ear and stiffening in mock indignation. “Did you just refer to me as an ancient and sadly enfeebled institution, Senator?”

  “Certainly not, Senator.”

  “I should hope not, Senator.”

  Pretty lame as banter went, but fun to listen to, anyway—except that Gideon thought he detected a trace of artificiality to it, as if they were working too hard at being convivial, putting on an act for his sake.

  Goldsworthy and Gideon shook hands. “Long-serving enough to have worked alongside your granddaddy in the last years of his life, Rafe,” he said. “Even when I began, merely as an awestruck messenger boy, a lad of fifteen, he was very kind to me.”

  “And there wasn’t anything wrong with his hand?” Rafe asked. “Then why the pose?”

  “Oh, the two middle fingers on that hand were—how would one put it?—were fused together so that they looked almost like a single thickened finger. You know the old Mickey Mouse films? The creatures all wore puffy white gloves, and their hands had only a thumb and three fingers, but no one would call them unsightly. They look right somehow.”

  “Does Mickey Mouse have only four fingers? I never noticed,” Gideon said.

  “He does, indeed. As do Minnie and the quacking duck chap and the rest of that crew. But you see? You never noticed. Well, that’s what Howard’s hand was like. It didn’t call attention to itself. It was symmetrical, you see. I certainly wouldn’t call it misshapen.”

  “Syndactyly,” Gideon said.

  “Sir?”

  “Syndactyly. That’s what the condition is called. From the Greek, syn meaning—”

  “Syn meaning together, and dactyl meaning finger,” Goldsworthy said testily. “Or toe. I may not be up on this ‘forensic anthropology’ of yours, Professor, but when I was a schoolboy, the classic languages were still being taught. And learned.”

  “And remembered, I see.”

  But Goldsworthy didn’t care for the flattery. He frowned. “I’d best be getting along.” He nodded curtly. “A pleasure meeting you, Professor.” And he continued on his way to the Chamber.

  “Something wrong between you two?” Gideon asked.

  Rafe looked surprised. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Oh . . . I don’t know. I had the impression there was something a little, well, theatrical about all that hearty good fellowship. Not my business, Rafe, I don’t know why I mentioned it. Probably misread it anyway.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  As they talked, Gideon was fighting to keep from looking too obviously at Rafe’s hands to check them, but Rafe caught him at it anyway and held them up, laughing. “Nope, not a webbed finger among them. Why, is it something that’s inherited?”

  “It tends to run in families, yes.”

  “Well, then, I’ve lucked out. It died with Granddad. My father didn’t have it either, or at least no one’s ever told me about it. I gather it’s not very common?”

  “About one in four thousand, I think it is. But if you’ve got the autosomal dominant variant, which is the most common one, then there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’re going to pass it along to your offspring. And it can skip a generation or two and then show up again, and—”

  “Yes, I see.” Rafe glanced at a clock on the wall. “Well . . .”

  “I know, you’ve got a meeting to go to, so I’ll leave you to it. Thanks for the heads-up on tomorrow. I’ll call Abbott in the morning.”

  “Right. Good.” He paused, looking uncharacteristically sheepish. “Ah, Gideon? I was being untruthful a moment ago. Do you remember my telling you about a man who’d been put out of business by my father’s . . . ah, irregular business practices? The prime suspect in his death at the time?”

  “Sure. You said there was still some bad feeling there.”

  “That’s right. Well, that man—”

  “—is your esteemed fellow senator Wilton Goldsworthy. Yes?”

  “Yes,” Rafe said with a grin. “Not much gets by you, does it, old man?”

  Gideon laughed. “Old fellow, you’d be surprised.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Energized, alert, and pleasantly filled with Stilton and sourdough, the Skeleton Detective was once more ready to ply his trade. Standing at the table, he examined the bones again, and it was one of the cranial fragments that caught his attention; he saw now that it was a piece of the right parietal. He turned it in his hand for a moment, then laid it, interior side up, on the white paper, which was smudged now with pitch residue. With the magnifying glass held just a few inches in front of his eyes, he leaned over the fragment . . .

  It was half an hour before he fully straightened up, and that was only because John had walked in.

  Startled, Gideon unbent a bit too quickly. “Ow. Damn.”

  “Yeah, I’m glad to see you too,” John said.

  “No, it’s only that I’ve been leaning over for too long.” He stretched backward, pressing his hands to the base of his spine. “Getting old, or at least my back is.”

  “Ha,” said John, “tell me about it.” He was forty-three, a year older than Gideon. He waved a manila envelope he was carrying, the kind you tie by wrapping a string around a couple of flat paper buttons. “Cop was delivering it downstairs when I came in.”

  “Probably Carlisle’s autopsy report.”

  “Yeah, you want it?” He held it out.

  “Not yet, no.”

  John came up to the table and looked down at the fragments. “Not a whole hell of a lot there. Is that all there is?”

  “That’s it.” Gideon stretched himself backward even more and then relaxed. “Ah, that’s good, my lu
mbar spinal extensors are starting to unknot.”

  “Yeah, you gotta watch those lumbar spinal extensors.” He picked up a fragment and turned it over. “Parietal, right?”

  Gideon nodded. “Very good.”

  John shrugged. “Nothin’ to it; you just have to have the knack.”

  “Which side?”

  “Left.”

  “Try again.”

  “Right.”

  “Excellent. You do have the knack.”

  “So, anyway, tell me,” John said, “what do you know now that you didn’t know before? Anything?”

  “Um, well, yes, a few things, I guess you could say.”

  “Uh-oh, now he’s getting coy. That usually means I better get ready to get my mind blown. How did Clapper say it? ‘Boggle the minds of us poor coppers.’”

  “Of you ‘poor, benighted coppers’ is what he said. Not that I would say it.”

  However, Clapper was basically right, and so was John. One of the more enjoyable rewards of forensic work—and this was another thing not to be found in the textbooks—was the guilty (but not terribly guilty) pleasure you took in watching a cop’s face when you pulled the occasional rabbit out of a hat right in front of his eyes.

  But Gideon didn’t quite have his rabbits ready yet. “Tell you what, John. I have a few more things I need to tease out first. Why don’t you take the report out into the living room and read it, and by the time you finish, I should have my act together.”

  Within seconds he was in the highly focused, almost trancelike state he fell into at such times, so that he was once again startled when John poked his head into the workroom.

  “Didn’t want to read it, after all?”

  “Doc, it’s been almost twenty minutes. It’s two lousy pages. I read it three times. You need some more time? I could always memorize it if you want.”

  “Nope, I’m ready. Got ourselves a few surprises here, my friend. Come on in, I’ll go through it with you. We can begin with just how many people we have represented here.”

  “Not two? Peltier and Carlisle?”

  He shook his head. “Just one. Carlisle. No evidence of anyone else.”

  “No kidding.” He moved closer to the table. “Show me.”

  Show me. That was one of the many things that made John fun to be with, the pleasure he took in hands-on forensics. He was a good learner, too. He’d sat in on a three-day seminar of Gideon’s at an earlier Science and Detection conference, and he’d taken away—and retained—more information than some of Gideon’s students got from a quarter’s instruction.

  “Sure, but first I’d like to know what made the guy who did the autopsy think there were two people in the first place.”

  John scanned the report. “Okay, the guy that wrote it is named Dr. Victor Graydon, MB, ChB, blah, blah, blah, Office of the Coroner, Viscount’s Department. Hey, I love that—Viscount’s Department. That’s what we need at the Bureau, a Viscount’s Department. Anyway, he says they have to be from more than one person because the bones, they’re from two different-aged guys.”

  “Oh, that’s right, a twenty-five-year-old or above and a . . . what, a nineteen-year-old or below?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Twenty and twenty-five. Yes. And what exactly made him think . . . wait, let me guess. It wouldn’t have anything to do with epiphyses, would it?”

  “Yup, you got it. The good old epiphyses.” John had been around Gideon long enough to know exactly what an epiphysis was and how it was used in skeletal age determination.

  The body’s “long” bones—legs, arms, clavicles, and ribs—grow not only by getting longer from the center outward but by laying on new cartilaginous material at both ends: these are the epiphyses. (Epiphysis, from the Greek epi “on, in addition” and phusis “growth.”) With time—a lot of time—the cartilage ossifies and becomes permanently fused to the shaft of the bone, at which point the bone has finished growing. And when the last epiphysis has fused to the last shaft, which for all but a couple of them is somewhere in the midtwenties, that’s when we’ve finished growing too. Alas, from then on, after a pathetically few years in our “prime,” we get going in the other direction: we start getting shorter. Happily, the process is a lot slower and less drastic than when we were coming the other way.

  The time between the start of epiphyseal attachment and full union and ossification varies from bone to bone, but for each individual bone, the general chronology is known. Obviously, then, the state of epiphyseal union in the various bones is helpful in aging a skeleton anywhere from childhood up through the middle or late twenties.

  “So what does Dr. Graydon have to say about them?” Gideon asked. “It’s the clavicle he’s talking about, right?”

  “The clavicle and the humerus.”

  “The humerus!” It was one of the nine fragments he’d set aside as not being of any help.

  “Yeah, the humerus.” John scrutinized the table and laid his finger on the humeral fragment. “Here, it’s this one.”

  “Oh, really,” Gideon said. “So that’s a humerus. What do you know.”

  “A left one.”

  “Thank you.”

  John read aloud. “‘Epiphyseal union of the head of the humerus begins at the age of sixteen and is completed by the age of twenty-five. In this particular specimen, fusion has been fully achieved. Thus, a minimum age of twenty-five can be associated with it. On that basis it is reasonable to conclude that this bone is part of the remains of Roderick Carlisle.’” He looked up. “That’s not right?”

  “Let’s have a look.” Gideon picked up the six-inch chunk of bone, the largest of the twelve fragments, and tapped the humeral head, the near-spherical upper end of the arm that nestles into a deep, concave hollow in the edge of the shoulder blade to form the ball joint that connects the arm to the torso. “Now, this part here, the ball—” he began.

  “—is the epiphysis, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And it is fused to the rest of the bone . . . right?”

  “Sure is.” Gideon ran his finger along the barely visible groove across the base of the humeral head, all that was left to show where the ball had fused to the shaft. “Never going to get any more ossified than that.”

  “So then,” John said, “if Graydon was right about that not happening until you’re twenty-five—”

  “Roughly right. A little too exact, but close enough for our purposes. So, would you agree with his age estimate then?”

  John lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “That’s gotta be a trick question.”

  “Not at all. Why would you even say something like that?”

  “Ho. Okay, what the hell. Yes, I would agree with Dr. Graydon. This humerus once belonged to someone who was twenty-five or older. Roughly.”

  “And you would be right. Roughly. I have no problem with it.”

  “But I thought youv . . . So what is the problem, then?”

  “The problem is with this.” The fragment that Gideon picked up now was two and a half inches long, one of the two similar but reversed C-shaped halves of the collarbone that together made up the complete, S-shaped clavicle.

  “The left collarbone,” John announced. “The inside half, the part that hooks onto the breastbone. The medial half, as we call it in the trade.”

  Gideon laughed. “You really are getting good at this. Left, right—not so easy with a clavicle, especially half a clavicle.”

  “Yeah, well, it helps when you just finished reading a report telling you what it is. What’s the problem with it, though?”

  “What did Graydon say about it?”

  “Mmm, lemme see . . . Okay, he says: ‘In the case of this specimen, no epiphysis is present. Union has yet to begin. Since fusion at the medial end of the clavicle is known to regularly commence by the age of twenty in males, a maximum age of twenty years can be associated with this bone.’” He put the report down. “Peltier, in other words. And you say what?”

  “Well,
let’s look at this one too.” He put it on the table directly in front of them.

  John shook his head. “To tell you the truth, Doc, I can’t remember what the epiphysis on this thing is supposed to look like.”

  “Which is completely understandable. It’s not anything like the big, round humeral head; it’s just a sort of facet that mounts it on the sternum. And he’s correct: it isn’t there.”

  John was starting to look confused. “So he’s right about this too? This is a younger guy?”

  “No, he’s not right.”

  John thought for a moment. “It was there, but it got broken off? Sure doesn’t look like it got broken off.” He fingered the end in question. “Smooth as can be.”

  “Which is exactly what confused him. He figured that because the shaft just ends, nice and smooth, he was looking at a bone that never did develop its epiphysis, a young guy, in other words. But he’s wrong.”

  John sighed. “And are you going to tell me why he’s wrong anytime soon, or should I go get some dinner and then come back?”

  Gideon handed John the magnifying glass. “Here, check it out for yourself through this.”

  John took the bone and held it up to the lens, rotating it to see both sides. “Ooh, yeah, I see . . . It’s not smooth at all . . . tiny little scratches, little nicks, especially there at the end, tons of them.” He put down the glass. “I can see them through this, but . . .”

  “Right. You didn’t before. You needed the magnification. Well, they’re from little crabs, or prawns, or maybe crayfish—something that takes the flesh off a corpse with little pincers, a shred at a time, and puts these characteristic, barely visible nicks in the bone when they reach it.”

  “So it did have an epiphysis, is what you’re telling me, but the crabs ate it? So this guy was not under twenty or so?”

  “No, I can’t say that for sure. Maybe he had an epiphysis, maybe he didn’t, but with the end of the bone gone, I don’t have any way to tell, and neither, really, did Graydon.”

  “So we don’t know which of them it’s from, Carlisle or Peltier.”

  “Literally, that’s true, but if the other fragments all fit Carlisle, then there’s really no reason, no forensic reason, to put Peltier into the equation at all. As far as I can tell, they’re all Carlisle.”