Twenty Blue Devils

by Aaron Elkins

  Like the screw in the middle of Brian's skull, for example.

  * * * *

  Even then, it was John who spotted it.

  "What the hell is that?” he said suddenly.

  Gideon surfaced with a start. He had been scrubbing away at the proximal end of a femur, having almost forgotten that John was there, watching over his shoulder with an understandable mixture of fascination and repugnance.

  "What's what?” Gideon said grumpily. He'd liked it where he was, in his gauzy semitrance.

  "That.” John pointed. “There's a screw in his head."

  There certainly was, an ordinary-looking metal screw two inches above the nasal bones, its slotted head visible among the rags and tags of muscle and fascia still stuck to the front of the cranium. Gideon quickly cleared the overlying tissue away. (The frontalis muscle, with nothing much to do other than raising the eyebrows and wrinkling the forehead, was one of the thinnest in the body, and one of the few with no tough bony attachments to hack through.) What he found underneath was a substantial collection of hardware implanted in the skull: more screws, four thin strips of surgical steel, and ten or twelve snips of wiring, all of it having been used to hold a two-by-four-inch rectangular piece of frontal bone in place in the middle of the forehead, The reinserted segment of bone had been through a lot. There was a healed linear fracture running from top to bottom on its left side, a healed, smaller, diagonal fracture in the lower right comer, signs of chipping and splintering at several places around the margins. But the surgery had been beautifully performed, and with the exception of one small, round concavity in the upper right corner, the bones had long ago knitted together with no visible complications.

  "I'll be damned,” Gideon said.

  "What is it, Doc? What happened to him?"

  "Well, I'm not positive. He's been operated on, that's clear. This big chunk of frontal bone was removed and then replaced—see the little depression in this corner? That's a burr hole; they had to drill that to make a place for the saw to get in. And these metal strips are compression plates to hold the edges of the bone together. And these wires—"

  "Yeah, I see, but—I mean, I don't understand. Why would they take a piece out of his skull and then put it back? Did he have a brain operation?"

  "No, I don't think so. For brain surgery you generally don't need to remove a huge chunk of bone like this, and even if you did, it'd be done neatly. You wouldn't have all this scarring, and you certainly wouldn't have these fractures. There's been some pretty serious retooling of the bone done here, John."

  "Meaning what, plastic surgery?"

  "Not the usual kind, no. This is heavy-duty stuff—reconstructive surgery—putting things back together after some kind of horrendous accident; automobile crash, most likely. It's the kind of thing that happens when you hit a windshield frame that's just stopped and you're still going sixty miles an hour. From the looks of it, Brian was lucky to get out of it alive. The whole front of his head must have been—” He shivered. “You mean you didn't know anything about this?"

  "It's news to me. How long ago did it happen, can you tell?"

  "Long time. Five years, ten years, more."

  "Before I knew him,” John mused.

  "But there must have been some pretty bad scarring, John."

  "Of his face, you mean? Not that I ever noticed."

  "Well, did he look...a little odd? When you have this much repair involved, especially of the bone itself, it's pretty hard to put things back together quite the way—"

  "No, nothing, Doc. He was a good-looking guy. Believe me, he looked like anybody else. Better."

  "Yes, but there had to be—” And suddenly he ran out of steam. He leaned back on the stool he was sitting on and stretched, then sagged, his shoulders drooping. “Man, it's been a long, hard day,” he said.

  "Tell me about it."

  "Look, why don't we save this for tomorrow, when we're fresh? For now, let me just concentrate on getting the bones ready."

  "Suits me,” said John.

  And back into the vat they went, this time to soak in a twenty percent solution of DesTop, the French counterpart of Liquid-Plumr, for another hour, after which, almost free of adherent tissue now except for the fibrous stuff around the joints, they were removed for yet another scrub-down and then returned to the vat, this time in a watery solution of an enzyme-loaded French detergent called Arid kept at a temperature just below a simmer.

  "One more scrubbing, maybe,” Gideon said, unutterably weary of scraping and hacking at the greasy, stubborn remnants of what had once been ligaments and tendons—the very machinery of human motion—"and then they'll go back into the detergent for the rest of the night. Bleach in the morning, and that'll be it, I hope."

  At eleven, tired, bored, and depressed, John called a taxi, went back to the hotel, and fell into bed.

  At 1:30 A.M., tired, bored, and miserably grungy, Gideon left precise instructions with the orderlies, drove to the hotel, showered under scalding water so hard and for so long that he went through an entire bar of coconut-scented soap, and fell into bed.

  * * * *

  In the morning, by prior agreement, the two met in the dining room at 7 A.M., when it opened. They were surprised to find their usual table taken, and three or four others as well, with large, jolly, Spanish-speaking people, all of whom seemed to know one another. The Chileans, it appeared, really did patronize the place. Apparently they had arrived by way of the midnight Lan-Chile flight from Santiago, and true to Dean's word, they were a lively, laughing bunch. Children merrily chased mynah birds, adults merrily flipped croissants at one another.

  Parks himself, his long face flushed with goodwill, moseyed laughing from table to table, glad-handing his guests, clapping tank-topped shoulders, and chattering away in drawling, Texas-style Spanish.

  "What do you know,” Gideon mused, “he really does have other customers."

  They found an unoccupied table on the slate terrace, a long way from the buffet tables, but out in the fresh morning breeze and within hearing of the gentle, purling waves of the lagoon. Neither of them had eaten dinner the previous night, and they made their way through their heaped trays for some minutes before getting down to serious conversation.

  "Find anything else after I left?” John asked around a mouthful of scrambled eggs and hard roll.

  Gideon shook his head as he finished his own eggs and bacon. “No, the bones were still soaking in the detergent when I left. By now, the orderlies should have given them a final bath in the bleach, dried them, and delivered them back to the autopsy room."

  "The bleach disinfects them?"

  "Yes, but it's not that so much; it just cleans them up, gets rid of the grease, makes them pleasanter to work with."

  John chewed and thoughtfully watched the waves for a while. “So Brian is now just a pile of bleached bones,” he said.

  "So will we all be, eventually."

  John smiled crookedly. “Yeah, but not literally.” He sipped his coffee. “So what happens now, Doc?"

  "Now we go back to the hospital, we set the bones out on a table, and we see what there is to find. It's going to be pretty slow, so if you'd rather do something else for a few hours, feel free."

  "Well, as a matter of fact, I was thinking of going over to Nick's place. Bertaud stopped in to see him last night to tell him what was going on, that they were starting a full-scale investigation and everything, and Nick called me this morning."

  "Mad?"

  "Nick? No, I wouldn't say mad. He sounded kind of—I don't know, mixed up. But the thing is, he wants to talk to me about it. And I sure want to talk to him."

  "Watch out you don't tread on Bertaud's toes, John."

  "Who, me? Anyway, he's on our side now, remember?"

  "That's right, I forgot. Look, when you talk to Nick, ask him if he knows how Brian got his face smashed up, will you?"

  "Why, is it important?"

  "I don't know. I just—"

/>   A callused hand clapped him on the shoulder. “Mornin', gents,” Dean Parks said. “Listen, if you don't have anything planned, I hope I can talk you into some of the day's activities. These good folks'd just love to have you along."

  "Actually—” Gideon said.

  "Snorkeling at ten, beach picnic at twelve, glass-bottomed boats at one—"

  "Thanks, Dean, but—” John said.

  "—and then we take the Leaky Tiki—that's our genuine giant Polynesian outrigger motor canoe—down to Marae—that's a genuine old-fashioned Tahitian village—where two of these fine, fun-lovin’ couples'll be married, Tahitian style, body tattoos and everything—"

  "Body tattoos?” Gideon said. Fun-loving was right.

  Parks lowered his voice. “Well, just cockamamies, really. They wash right off, but still, it's something to see. After that, we've got ourselves a beautiful sunset cruise...or, say, do you boys have your own entertainment planned?"

  "I'm afraid we do,” Gideon said.

  Parks leered engagingly. “Well, then, don't let me stand in your way. Maybe tomorrow."

  "Come on, Doc,” John said, draining his coffee. “Let's go get entertained. I'll drop you off at the morgue."

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Chapter 22

  * * * *

  As expected, the bones were waiting for him on a gurney in the autopsy room. The room, however, was already in use.

  "Ah, bonjour!" Dr. Viennot called merrily when Gideon entered. He had a cigar in his mouth, smoked down to a stub but unlit at the moment. “I hope you don't mind sharing the facility."

  The police physician, rubber-gloved and white-coated, was at one of the two tables, working on a fresh body with the help of a sober, elderly assistant. The body, its lower half covered by a sheet, was that of an obese, middle-aged Tahitian woman. Viennot and the assistant had obviously been at work for a while. The standard Y-shaped incision of the torso had been made, the skin flaps laid back, and the sternum and central portions of the ribs cut away and removed, along with a few overlying bits of lung, to a pan on the counter. The two men, Gideon saw, were checking for air embolism, an unlovely procedure involving the filling of the pericardial sac with water and the capturing of escaping gases. The exhaust fan over the table was humming, but even so, you didn't need your eyes to tell you that there was a newly opened human body in the room with you.

  "Oh, good morning, doctor,” Gideon said. “I guess I'd better find someplace else."

  "Nonsense,” Viennot said, his slender, gloved hands wrist-deep in chest cavity. “Glad to have you. You won't bother us a bit."

  But that wasn't the issue, not by a long shot. Autopsy rooms made Gideon skittish even when they were corpseless. The tiled walls, the dully gleaming zinc-topped tables, the sinks, the drains, the basins underneath to collect fluids—all were enough to unsteady his stomach and give him the willies. The fact that a perfectly respectable and even moderately distinguished career as an evolutionary theorist had led to his seemingly always popping in and out of these dismal places was one of the continuing mysteries of his existence.

  "No, no,” Gideon sang out, “that's all right, I wouldn't want to get in the way."

  And over Viennot's well-meant protests ("At least have a cup of coffee—it's over there, by the lung.") he escaped, wheeling the gurney out of the room and into the hallway. He was fortunate in finding an unused conference room just one door down, and there he spread a double layer of newspapers, a three-week-old copy of La Depeche de Tahiti, on the wooden table that took up most of the room, and laid out the bones.

  The successive baths bad done their work as well as could be expected in a single night. The bones were not quite white but a sort of glaucous ivory, darker near the tips and still just a little greasy to the touch. But for all intents and purposes, they were bare, and that was what was important. As always, his first job was to lay them out in anatomical position, or as close to anatomical position as they could get. For a change, he had a complete skeleton to work with, including every last one of the 106 bones of the hand and foot. (In the adult human, more than half the bones in the body are in the hands and feet, to the great annoyance of forensic anthropologists, many of whom— Gideon among them—had a hard time keeping all the tarsals, the carpals, and the phalanges straight, particularly when it came to telling right from left.) To get them all arranged took him almost an hour, but it was work he didn't mind; it was the first step of phase two, the beginning of the hunt. And there was nothing gooey, or squelchy, or otherwise repellent about it, at least not to him. No embolisms, no lungs sitting in pans. Just nice, clean bones. Bleached bones.

  When the skeleton was laid out, he changed his mind and went back to the autopsy room to bring back some coffee (Viennot was delighted to see him: “Come look at this, colleague! Did you ever see such a thrombus!"). Then he sat on a corner of the table, sipping from the cardboard cup and looking down at the neatly ordered remains of Brian Scott.

  That it was Brian he no longer doubted. There was the diastema, for one thing, the blond hair for another, and now, as he could plainly see, healed fractures of the right ulna and radius, which corresponded to the right arm, broken in two places, that Brian had suffered when the jeep went off the road. Spaces between the teeth, blond hair, and healed fractures were hardly distinctive enough to serve as positive identifiers on their own, but put them all together, with everything else, and they added up to Brian—a conclusion that no one else but Gideon had questioned anyway. Besides, if it wasn't Brian, who would it be? And where was Brian? All the same, bowing to habit—and to be on the safe side—he ran through a quick evaluation of race, sex, age, and height, always the forensic anthropologist's starting points.

  Everything fit. The skull's narrow, “steepled” nasal bones, the sharply defined nasal lower border or sill, and the tapering, parabolic shape of the palate assured him that he was dealing with a Caucasian. The generally rugged appearance of the bones was enough to tell him it was male, and application of the anthropologist's “rule of thumb” confirmed it—place a thumb in the greater sciatic notch of the pelvis to see if you had room to wiggle it back and forth; if you did, it was a female. But if the fit was snug, which it was in this case, it was a male.

  Age was harder, as it always was, for several reasons. First, the odds were longer. With sex you had only two choices; all you had to do was toss a coin and you were going to get it right half the time. But with age the odds were necessarily against you; it took more than a coin toss to get it right half the time, and even then you were dealing with broad ranges—eighteen to twenty-five, twenty-five to thirty, and so on. Second, once the epiphyses—the ends—of all the long bones had fused to the shafts, which began in the teens and ended in the late twenties, the skeleton was next to impossible to age with any confidence for thirty or forty years; there were time-related changes, of course (none of them good), but they didn't occur in any kind of predictable pattern; at least not one that anthropologists could agree on, although there had been some recent progress on the ribs.

  The sole notable exception was the pubic symphyses, the matching surfaces of the two halves of the pelvis where they met at the midline of the body just above the genitals. For reasons nobody had ever figured out, the appearance of these surfaces was the adult skeleton's best age indicator, growing steadily more fine-grained, pitted, and sharp-edged over time.

  Using a set of comparison drawings he had brought with him, Gideon placed the symphyses squarely in Phase IV of the Suchey-Brooks progression—approximately thirty-five years old, with a standard deviation of nine years. And Brian, he knew, had been thirty-eight. So that fit too.

  As did the height. He used the old Trotter and Gleser equations to estimate living stature from the combined lengths of the femur and tibia. The result was seventy-one inches, plus or minus one inch, which was smack on the button, inasmuch as John had told him that Brian was six feet tall, or maybe a little under.

  So Brian i
t was, no doubt about it. That resolved, he settled down to his real job: a bone-by-bone examination for other signs of how death had occurred. The cuts on the metacarpals he had already remarked, of course, and since then he had found in passing a green-stick fracture of the left humerus, at the point at which it narrowed just above the elbow; two crushed lumbar vertebrae; a snapped left clavicle; and a long, jagged crack in the skull, running horizontally along the parietal, from the occipital bone to the frontal. All of them were perfectly consistent with the fall that Brian had presumably taken from the plateau, and none showed any signs of healing, which meant that they had happened at about the time of death; whether before or after there was no way to tell. Either way, they didn't prove murder, nor even suggest it; not taken on their own.

  He brought over a gooseneck lamp from a side table and set it up over the right hand for a closer look at the cut marks. They were knife wounds for sure: straight, narrow, and V-shaped, with clean, sharp edges. Other than those four lined-up notches, there were no other marks on the bones of the hand. Or of the other hand, or of the forearms, all likely sites for defense wounds. That implied that Brian had managed just one lunge at the knife to protect himself; death or incapacity had come quickly. The single line of cuts also meant that the weapon had probably been single-edged. Had it been double-edged, there would most likely have been a matching set of cuts on the bones of Brian's fingers, where they had closed around the opposite edge of the blade.

  All right then, he was already able to make some reasonable assumptions. One, it had been a quick death. Two, the weapon was apparently not some professional assassin's murderous stiletto but probably some everyday kind of knife—a kitchen knife, a fishing knife—that might be found anyplace. Fine, but that didn't get him anywhere that he could see. He was certain enough that Brian had been murdered, but he was well shy of proof. Attacked, yes, those deep cuts in the palm attested to that, but you didn't die from a cut palm.