by Aaron Elkins
Gideon ticked them off: The brow ridges were undulating, as opposed to the mesa-like ridges more characteristic of Negroid skulls; the nasal sill—the bottom of the nasal opening—was marked by a sharp border, and not the "scooped out" margin of the Negroid skull; the nasal bones themselves were "towered," giving the appearance of having been pinched together; the shape of the eye sockets tended toward the triangular, not the rectangular….
Merrill listened, entranced. "Oh, I say, that’s marvelous! I had no idea…! I must say, you’re certainly living up to your reputation."
"Actually, there’s more," Gideon said, not above flattery. "The arch of the palate, for example. You can look at it from underneath easily enough on this one, what with the throat muscles and the tongue gone." He tipped the head back on its neck rest. "The Caucasoid palate is very narrow; that’s why we suffer more from crowding of the teeth. The Negroid palatine arch, on the other hand—" He stopped suddenly, staring through the brown tatters of muscle to the bone and cartilage underneath.
"Ah, you’ve noticed, have you?" Merrill cried. "I was sure you would!"
With a probe, Gideon picked at a small U-shaped bone that lay above the larynx at the junction of jawline and throat. "It’s murder, isn’t it?" he said. "The hyoid’s fractured. He’s been strangled."
"Indeed he has. Manually strangulated. And not only the hyoid bone, but the thyroid cartilage as well." With his finger Merrill pushed at the stiff cartilage that formed the prominence of the Adam’s apple. "The left horn’s cracked. I’ve been a forensic pathologist for nineteen years and I’ve yet to see a thyroid broken this way—a single horn fractured—that wasn’t caused by manual strangulation. It’s the thumbs that do it, you know." Ever ready to demonstrate, he raised his hands, thumbs up. "They press in and…pop! Good-bye, thyroid."
The hands came down and he was abruptly grave. "So we have a male Caucasian, strangled from in front— otherwise the thumbs wouldn’t have cracked the thyroid horn—killed four weeks ago, perhaps a little less. What else can we infer?"
"Well, we can see he was a big guy, pretty powerfully built."
"I’ve estimated six feet two, living height; two hundred twenty pounds living weight. Why so thoughtful, Professor?"
"He was strangled from in front," Gideon said, "but how easy would it be to stand in front of a man that big—and presumably strong—and strangle him? I was just wondering if he might not already have been unconscious."
"We do think alike. That’s precisely my guess. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to try it with him awake. I’ve checked the head, thorax, and abdomen for any sign of a blow or wound that might have knocked him out, but I found nothing. Of course, he might have been drugged, but considering the condition of the internal organs…" He waved vaguely at the corpse and shrugged. "Still, the laboratories may find something suggestive."
Gideon nodded. "Well, let’s see what we can tell about his age."
"Good." Merrill leaned forward, full of interest. "I’ve cleaned the skullcap for you so you can look at the sutures."
"I won’t need to," Gideon said. "The pubic symphysis is a lot more reliable. That’s what I’ll want to see."
Merrill threw back his head and laughed. Puzzled, Gideon stared at him.
"No offense, Professor," Merrill said, "but you know what they say: The odontologists go for the mouth, the anthropologists go for the pubis."
No, Gideon didn’t know, but he smiled. It was hard not to loosen up with a man who enjoyed his work as much as Merrill did. "Do you mind if I carve up the pelvis a little? If I can use your saw, I’d like to have a look at the symphyseal surface."
Merrill promptly brought out a small battery-operated saw. "I’ll do it for you."
"No, that’s all right—"
"Wouldn’t hear of it." The pathologist elbowed an unprotesting Gideon out of the way, hacked briefly at the soft tissue of the groin with a knife, and set briskly to work on the left pubis with the buzzing saw. "I can see you’re not too keen on rooting about in the pelvic cavity, and I don’t mind in the least."
Gideon was surprised. He hadn’t known it showed. "No, really, I don’t mind—"
"Quite all right," Merrill said, now using a scalpel to hack through the tough cartilaginous disk that held the two halves of the pelvis together in front. "You’re a dry-bone man, aren’t you, and this sort of thing can be pretty revolt ing if you’re not used to it. What? Takes a queer bird like me not to mind it. Ah, here we are, here we are."
He had freed the small section of bone from the body. He scraped it clean with the dull end of the scalpel and rinsed it off at a stainless-steel sink in the corner. "One left pubic symphysis, clean as a whistle."
Gideon tookthe inch-long, flat-faced piece of bone. The os pubis was that part of the pelvis located exactly at the midline, just above the genitals. For reasons of which anthropologists are unsure, its symphyseal surface—the part that fits against its opposite member—is the skeleton’s surest guide to age, growing more fine-grained and pitted, in identifiable stages, from adolescence to late middle age.
Gideon studied it, explaining to an attentive Merrill as he went along. Finally he said, "I’d say he was about thirty-five."
"Marvelous," Merrill said. "Oh, good morning, Inspector."
Gideon looked up to see a big man in shirtsleeves more or less billow to the table, moving in slow, surging strides, like a diver walking on the ocean floor. He was very large, as tall as Gideon and a great deal wider.
"Hullo there, Dr. Merrill," he said. "And this must be the famous Professor Oliver, then." He spoke as he moved, rumbling along with an unhurried, stately rhythm, and he gave the impression of occupying a lot of space, even more than the considerable amount he actually did.
"Dr. Oliver," Merrill said, "this is Detective Inspector Bagshawe of the CID."
"Hello, Inspector."
"A pleasure, I’m sure, sir. You’ll forgive me if we don’t shake hands?"
Gideon forgave him. His own gloved hands were uninviting in the extreme, and Bagshawe’s crisply folded-back white shirtsleeves were scrupulously clean.
"Well," Bagshawe said, affable and placid. "Well, well. Imagine, Professor Gideon Oliver right here in Dorset. Well, now. And how have we been progressing? Does this unfortunate gentleman"—a flick of his head toward the cadaver— "appear to be Mr. Randall Alexander, or does he not?"
Gideon smiled. "That’s expecting a lot, Inspector."
"What?" The tufted eyebrows rose in patient incredulity. "Has the skeleton detective finally met his match? Surely not."
"Not at all, Inspector," Merrill interrupted. "We’ve made some real progress. Professor Oliver’s positively identified him as a Caucasian."
"Have you now?" Bagshawe looked at Gideon with something like a sparkle in his eye. "Why then, we’ve ruled out half the world already, haven’t we?"
"Three-quarters," Gideon said.
"Three-quarters?"
"Seventy-five percent of the world is nonwhite, and we can eliminate every one of them. So we really are making progress, you see. We’ve already narrowed it down to only a billion or so, out of a possible four billion. Half a billion, really, or even a little less, since we know he’s a male." Now why, Gideon wondered, am I being cute?
"Fancy," Bagshawe said. "Four billion people. Who would have thought?"
"And that’s not all," said Merrill. "We have an idea of his age now. That is to say, Professor Oliver has: approximately thirty-five years of age."
"Approximately? Would that be, say, thirty to forty?"
"Say thirty-four to thirty-five," Gideon said, drawing it a bit finer than the evidence warranted. Bagshawe had him showing off now. There was something about this peaceable, lumbering policeman that threw one off one’s stride. Quite an advantage for a detective, Gideon imagined.
"Indeed, now? Well, that certainly is something. A thirty-five-year-old Caucasian; quite helpful, quite helpful."
"I haven’t had a thorough l
ook at the skeleton yet," Gideon said. "I might be able to turn up something else."
"Do you think you could? I’d be most appreciative. Now, Dr. Merrill, I was just looking for your report, but I seem to have misplaced it."
"No, Inspector, I haven’t completed it yet. Why don’t I just come along and finish it right now? The file’s in your office. I imagine Professor Oliver would welcome the chance to work without having me underfoot."
EIGHT
WORKING alone suited Gideon, who depended more than most on intuition. To have to explain or defend what he was doing as he went along could throw him off the track or make him lose a glimmer of insight that might flash only once.
Alone, he went quickly over the skeletal system with a probe and gloved fingertips, looking for anything that might catch his attention. He had fought down his initial queasy reaction and was able to work objectively, if not quite with Merrill’s zest. The trick was to "unfocus" on the mutilated body that seemed to be rotting before his eyes, and think in terms of a series of bony condyles, fossae, foramina, and diaphyses to be dispassionately examined one at a time.
On the torso the only thing even moderately interesting was the existence of osteophytic growths—the bony excrescences of arthritis—on three of the five lumbar vertebrae, just above the hips. This was not rheumatoid arthritis, which can strike at any time, but the "normal" degeneration of bone surfaces that came to everyone with age. That was what made it odd. You’d expect vertebrae like these in a man of seventy, not one half that age.
Strange, too, that only three vertebrae should be affected. That suggested the growths and lipping were the results of localized trauma—of which he could find no other sign—or of some sort of long-term stress on the lower back. Gideon studied them for a while, finally gave up, and tucked the problem into a corner of his mind.
On the right forearm, masked by swollen, blackened soft tissue, he found something he did understand. Both bones, the ulna and the radius, were shattered, the only signs of antemortem injury other than the fractured hyoid and thyroid. The direction of the splintering and the way the lower parts of the shafts had ridden up over the upper made it clear that they had been broken by a single blow on the outside (the little-finger side) of the forearm. It was precisely the kind of damage done when a victim instinctively flings his arm up over his face to protect it against a club-wielding assailant—the so-called nightstick fracture.
It was also a serviceable explanation of how someone had managed to stand in front of a big, presumably healthy man like this one and choke him to death. Assuming that the blow had come before the strangling (there was no way to be sure, but why would it be afterward?), the big man would have been sick with pain and shock. And he would have had only one useful arm.
Something else had caught Gideon’s eye while he was laying back the mess of putrefying muscles and nerves over the forearm fractures: a pierced olecranon fossa. This is a hollow at the elbow end of the humerus—the bone of the upper arm. It serves as a socket in which the top of the ulna rocks back and forth like a hinge when the elbow is opened or closed. Every now and then—about five per cent of the time in Caucasians—the fossa will have a little, smooth, round hole right through it, and this was such a case.
A tiny bell in his mind began to jangle. He wasn’t sure why, but he’d heard it enough times to know better than to ignore it. There was something to be learned here. He pushed the probe slowly into and out of the hole.
Think. A pierced olecranon fossa was usually congenital, but some anthropologists believed it might also result from wear and tear. Gideon leaned over the body and opened up the other elbow joint, quickly cutting down to the bone. The fossa was unperforated. Since this kind of congenital condition was usually bilateral, that was a strong indication that the hole in the right fossa had indeed been caused by friction.
All right, assume the bone’s been worn through, then. Next question: What might have done it? What kind of movement, endlessly repeated, would grind the end of the ulna slowly through the back of the humerus? Gideon flexed and extended his own arm to feel the pull of tendons, to visualize the play of articulating bone surfaces. Lifting wouldn’t do it, no matter how strenuous, nor pulling either. No, what it would take was the full, snapping extension of the elbow joint.
Push-ups? Not unless you did five hundred a day for a year or two. Throwing something, maybe. Throwing hard, over and over again.
Pitching a baseball.
Randy Alexander, the southpaw who had—literally, it would appear—worn out his arm. A perforated olecranon fossa hardly proved it, but it was certainly starting to look that way. By now Gideon’s squeamishness had vanished completely. He was totally absorbed, making progress. And he had found something else.
While working on the arms, he had seen that the man had had powerful deltoids, the big shield-shaped muscles that flesh out the shoulder. It was, of course, impossible to tell this from the pulpy, rotted muscle tissue itself, but strong muscles needed strong tendons, and strong tendons sculpted ridges and crests into the bones that anchored them. And those bony ridges and crests didn’t rot. On this man’s humeri, the deltoid-pull areas were as rough and pronounced as mountain ranges on a relief map.
No particular surprise there. What was unusual was that only the deltoids had been particularly massive. Again Gideon stood quietly, thinking. What sort of activity would develop the deltoids—which rotate, flex, and raise the arms—yet not enlarge the other muscles of the shoulder girdle? Somewhere, in some recess of his mind, he already had the answer. It wouldn’t be the pitching….
Of course. The big deltoids tied right in with those three arthritic vertebrae. There was just one more thing to check. He turned the stiff, heavy body on its side so that he could get at the back of the thigh, then cut through the hamstring muscles and peeled them away. The femur, the body’s longest, strongest bone, lay exposed. Running down the back of its shaft was a well-defined muscle ridge, the linea aspera. "Rough line," it meant in Latin, and on this body it was extremely rough indeed.
It was precisely what Gideon had expected to find, and that settled it. As far as he was concerned, the examination was done. Accentuated linea aspera, enlarged deltoid pull, and premature arthritis of the lumbar vertebrae. He had seen the combination three times before, and he knew of only one thing that caused it—longtime riding of the elongated, low-slung motorcycles called "choppers."
It was the muscle strains brought on by the unnatural posture that did it; that, the bumping, and the increased buffeting by the wind that came from riding while leaning far back. This was Alexander’s body all right; coincidence was so improbable as to be out of the question. That "typical four-weeker" business was puzzling, but it would be up to Merrill to figure that out.
So Nate had been wrong after all. Randy was dead— murdered—and Gideon was more disturbed than he should have been. It was utterly irrational for him to feel any responsibility for the death, and he knew it, but there it was all the same. What if he hadn’t put Randy off? What if he’d listened to what he’d had to say, there on the hillside….
Abruptly, he stripped off the gloves and went to the sink to scrub his hands twice over with plenty of soap, and water as hot as he could stand it. Putting blame on himself made no sense at all, and he wouldn’t let himself do it. Besides, he’d just done a first-rate piece of skeletal detective work, and he had every right to be pleased with it. He sat down at an old steel desk against the wall, his back to the body, and began to write his report.
NINE
INSPECTOR Bagshawe’s reaction was extremely rewarding. "Get away!" he shouted so vehemently that the great, curving cherrywood pipe he was about to light slipped from between his teeth and clattered onto the glass-covered top of his desk, dispersing shreds of toast-brown tobacco through the litter of papers and folders. "A left-handed baseball pitcher who rode a motorcycle?"
Merrill’s happy laugh rang out. "That’s wonderful, Professor! How on earth did you
come up with that?"
When Gideon had explained, Bagshawe said, "So you’re reasonably certain it’s Alexander, are you?" His tone was distinctly more respectful than heretofore.
"I think so. I don’t imagine baseball pitchers are too common in England."
"No, but—"
"And a cricket bowler’s motion wouldn’t have done it. Not enough elbow snap."
Nodding his head, Bagshawe retrieved his pipe, shoveled some of the scattered tobacco back into it with a massive, cupped hand, and lit it, drawing deeply. "And it’s not only baseball players one doesn’t find here. These ‘choppers,’ as I believe you call them—not very popular here; not yet. And I say, thank the Lord for that. Well, Alexander’s background is easily enough verified, and I expect it will support your conclusions." He puffed contentedly and leaned back in his creaking wooden swivel chair. His eyes returned to the report. " ‘Radial and ulnar fractures,’ " he read aloud. "Those would be arm bones, would they?"
"Forearm, yes."
"Mm-hm, I see." His large hands rummaged awkwardly in a drawer and pulled out another sheet of paper. "Mm, I don’t seem to find…yes…no…I don’t believe you mentioned that in your report, Dr. Merrill."
Merrill appeared mildly taken aback, and Gideon intervened. "It was hardly noticeable, what with the swelling and distortion. Easy to miss."