Good Blood

by Aaron Elkins

  A ragged, stained ribbon of fabric about an inch wide lay across the sacrum, apparently circling around under it. This, he was fairly certain, was the waistband of a pair of underpants. Cotton underwear on a decomposing corpse was quickly soaked through with body fluids and decayed rapidly, soon disappearing completely in most cases. But waistbands, usually being made of synthetic elastomers, didn’t. There were also some shreds of faded blue cotton fabric—trousers or shorts, probably—mixed in with the bones and, in places, stuck to them.

  After a couple of minutes of just looking, he reached out and ran his finger gently over the rim of the fifth lumbar—the lowest and largest vertebra in the spinal column, the one just above the sacrum—and then straightened up, wincing at the increasingly familiar creaks and pops in his knees. His own articular surfaces were beginning to show their age.

  “Well,” he murmured, “it’s not a rabbit, that’s for sure.”

  IT also wasn’t Achille de Grazia.

  The bones were not only essentially bare, they were heavily flaked, pitted, and abraded, and that wouldn’t have happened in eight months, let alone eight days. Eight years, maybe, but fifteen or twenty was more like it.

  On the other hand, he did have to allow for their being buried in gravel, not soil. That meant that there would be more extreme ups and downs in temperature as the weather aboveground changed, and that the moisture level would fluctuate more. When it rained, they would be soaked faster than if they’d been in soil; when the rain stopped, they would dry faster. All of that would hasten the processes of decay and weathering, as would the easy access that bugs would have. And then the gravel itself was composed of angular pieces, not rounded pebbles. Since there would necessarily have been some shifting and compression when vehicles rolled over them, the bones would have suffered more abrasion than they would have in ordinary soil.

  He picked up a few of the individual stones. Granite. Granite, if he remembered right, had an acidic pH, and an acidic environment was one more thing that made bones weather faster. So maybe eight years was pretty close after all. “Between five and fifteen years,” he announced to himself, mentally preparing the on-the-safe-side report he’d turn in to Caravale afterward.

  He went back to the car and returned with his hat, a crumpled, tan canvas tennis hat with a brim all the way around (it was the back of the neck that got broiled in work like this), and with his tools. He’d brought no equipment with him to Italy, and it had been too late last night, and too early this morning, to buy anything, so he had borrowed a teaspoon, a tablespoon, and a ladle from the hotel kitchen, a ruler from the desk clerk, and a toothbrush from himself. It was hardly the recommended assemblage for forensic exhumation, but since Caravale had told him the remains were in gravel, he hoped there wouldn’t be any stubborn roots to be pruned, or hard, compacted soil to dig through, or fragile bones to free from a soil environment that could bond with them almost like concrete. As for containers, cameras, tape, etc., he knew the crime-scene van would be stocked with plenty of those; shovels too, if it turned out that he needed them.

  He didn’t. The gravel, as expected, was loosely packed, and he was able to scoop it away mostly with his bare hands, putting each handful into ten-gallon buckets, also provided by the van, for later screening by the technicians. He started at the exposed hip joint and slowly began to work his way outward, moving both up and down the body. As he worked, he concentrated on exposing the bones without damaging or moving them, rather than on examining them. That would be the interesting part, of course, and he preferred to save it for later, after he’d cleaned them up, in a morgue or laboratory that had good lighting and room to work standing up, instead of on his knees. Besides, he’d already made all the preliminary conclusions he was likely to come up with on-site. The remains, in addition to being human and having been buried about ten years ago, plus or minus five years, were those of an adult male, and an older one at that; at least in his fifties, probably more.

  The sexing had been simple and sure. The pelvic girdle, the one part of the skeleton from which you could make a nearly one hundred percent certain sexual determination, was masculine in every indicator, from the narrow sciatic notch to the oval obturator foramen. That the remains were those of an adult was equally clear from his first quick look at the pelvic girdle and femur. The epiphyses, the separate sites of bone growth that appear at the ends of the long bones and along the edges of the innominate in infancy, and then ossify and attach to the body of the bone as the skeleton matures, were all fully attached. And that process didn’t finish up until the twenties.

  As for the specific age, his estimate of fifty-plus had come from running his fingers over the fifth lumbar vertebra. The vertebral “lipping” that goes along with degenerative arthritis—unfortunately, a normal accompaniment of aging—was well advanced, and the surface of the bone showed mild but visible signs of osteoporosis and thinning, also age-related phenomena. There were diseases that could mimic these changes, so it was always possible he was off-base, but once he got to the lab, there would be other indicators to check; the pubic symphyses in particular. With luck, he’d be able to narrow down the age quite a bit more.

  Work proceeded rapidly and relatively comfortably—Caravale had thoughtfully provided a knee pad from the van—although there were frequent pauses to allow for photographs and sketches by the crime-scene team, and for one of the techs to help out as the few remnants of clothing turned up: the nylon cuffs and tab (the strip down the front with the buttons) of a jacket, a few of the buttons themselves, the soles and a little bit of the uppers of a pair of canvas deck shoes, a leather belt, and the zipper from the trousers, with a little of the fabric attached. These the rubber-gloved tech removed with tweezers and tongs, and carried them off to the van. Caravale popped in and out for updates, but was more interested in the work of his men than in the bones.

  The whole process took two and a half hours, at the end of which Gideon got up, stretched, and walked up and down the road a little, working his cramped neck and shoulder muscles. He chatted with Caravale awhile. Then he came back for another look at what he had, before doing the bagging and labeling for the trip to the lab.

  The remains were wholly uncovered now, and for once he seemed to be looking at a complete skeleton, right down to the hyoid, the terminal phalanges of the fingers and toes, and the irregular, pebble-like wrist and ankle bones—probably even the six tiny ossicles of the inner ear; all two hundred six bones of the human body (more or less: it depended on age—the older you got, the fewer you had, because certain adjacent bones tended to fuse together with time; on the individual—some people had thirteen thoracic vertebrae instead of twelve, some people had twenty-five or twenty-six ribs instead of twenty-four; and on how you defined “bone”).

  Either there weren’t any bone-stealing carnivores around, or the gravel had been a barrier to them. As he’d thought, the body had been buried on its back, with the legs flexed and turned to the left. The skull was also half-turned to the left, the mandible agape in a typical skeleton grin and a little awry. The right arm lay across the chest—that is, across the collapsed ribs—and the left arm was extended, palm up, alongside the body.

  Although the remains appeared to have been unmoved since the burial, the skeleton had suffered some damage. In addition to the broken innominate, the vault of the skull was caved in on the right side, with several big pieces of parietal bone now lying inside the skull along with a lot of gravel and a shrunken, dried-up lump that was what remained of the brain. And the face—the maxillary bone—had suffered too. The right side of the maxilla was crushed from palate to orbit, and the strange, flimsy, curling bones inside the nasal cavity—the conchae, the vomer, the ethmoid—were pulverized beyond the possibility of reconstruction.

  It struck him, not for the first time, how peculiarly fragile the human face was, considering the critical environmental monitoring devices it had to protect—sight, smell, and taste. The maxilla was one of the thinne
st bones in the body, and hollowed out besides, by the big maxillary sinuses. If you held it up in front of a lamp, it was like eggshell; you could see the light right through it. Generally speaking, Gideon marveled at the astounding engineering of the human skeleton. But the face—that, as he sometimes told his students, he would have designed differently. Maybe left a little more hard, bony snout, just to be on the safe side, had he been in charge of human evolution.

  The facial damage was unfortunate—who knew what evidence it might obscure?—but not significant in itself. It was clearly the result of repetitive, long-lasting compression, not of sudden blunt-force trauma; truck or heavy equipment pressure over time, in other words. The burial had put the skull a little higher than the rest of the body, and just where the right-side tires of a truck would roll over it on the way from the road to the parking area, and the left-side tires on the way back. Eight or ten years of that were more than it could stand.

  The right ulna and radius (the two bones of the forearm) had also been broken, but these had been snapped, not crushed. Unlike the breakage of the pelvis, the broken edges were as gravel-colored as the rest of the skeleton. That suggested that they had already been broken when the body was buried. And not very long before, either, because there were no signs of healing. Of course, that didn’t prove much because there wouldn’t be any signs of healing for sixteen or seventeen days after a bone had broken. From simply looking at the surface of a fracture, you’d ordinarily have no way of telling if the break had occurred two weeks before death, or two seconds before.

  But in this case, Gideon thought, there was a way. And his conclusion was that two seconds was about right.

  “It looks as if you’re done,” Caravale said.

  Gideon jumped. As always, he’d been deep, deep in his work, and Caravale’s coming up to stand behind him had startled him. “Just about.” He turned his head and squinted into the sun. “I could use a few dozen bags to get all this stuff into, and a marking pen to label them. Once they’re in the morgue, they’ll have to be cleaned up before I get down to a serious examination.”

  “And how long will that take, the cleanup?”

  “The rest of the day,” Gideon said with a weary sigh.

  “It’s unpleasant? Something you don’t like doing?”

  “Boring, not unpleasant. It’s just drudgery.”

  “Can I have someone help you with it?”

  “You can have somebody do it,” Gideon said, jumping at the chance. “It’d take me about five minutes to show him how.”

  Caravale nodded. “All right, I’ll give you Fasoli.”

  Gideon gave him a grateful smile. “Wonderful.” He got gingerly to his feet, pleased not to hear any crik-craks from his knees. “You’ll also want to have somebody sift through the gravel underneath here, after the bones have been removed. I’d take it right down to the floor of the ditch. You can never tell what you’ll find.”

  “I know. Such as bullets, for example. When they stay lodged in the body, they can fall out into the ground as the tissues decompose, sink into it over time.” He was showing Gideon that he knew something about this sort of thing too.

  “That’s true enough, but in this case I don’t think you’re going to find any bullets.”

  “And why would that be?”

  “I don’t think he was shot.”

  Caravale scowled. He looked from Gideon to the bones and back again. “Excuse me, but isn’t it a little early to make such an assumption? Just because there are no bullet wounds on the skeleton, it doesn’t follow that there wasn’t any shooting. The slug, it might have gone through his throat, or between his ribs, or, or—”

  “Sure, only the murder weapon wasn’t a gun.”

  “Not a gun.”

  “No.”

  Well, probably not, but Gideon was giving in to the secret vice and sport of forensic anthropology: the playful boggling of the minds of policemen great and small. Professionally speaking, he was going a bit beyond what he was certain of, which was admittedly reprehensible, but then he had just spent over two hours kneeling on sharp stones (the knee pad helped, but not that much after the first hour), hunched over a pile of musty bones and inhaling gravel dust under an increasingly warm sun, while Caravale had spent most of the time standing around, and sometimes sitting in a folding chair, in the pleasant shade of the nearby woods, giving orders and watching other people work. That being the case, Gideon felt he had earned the simple reward of enjoying the expression on his face. Or the expressions, to be more precise, as they went from perplexity to doubt, to outright skepticism.

  “What are you telling me then? That you found the weapon?” His eyes darted over the area, looking for something that Gideon might have discovered and laid out on the gravel.

  “Nope.”

  “But you think you know what it was.” He was beginning to show some impatience.

  “No, not exactly. Sort of.”

  Caravale sighed. “Not exactly. Sort of. Are there signs on the bones then, or not? Wounds?” His eyes raked the skeleton again. “The crushed skull?”

  “No, I already told you, that happened over time. No, I haven’t found any marks on the bones yet; that is, nothing to identify the weapon. Maybe later.”

  “Then would you mind telling me how the hell you—” An impatient blast of air hissed through Caravale’s wide nostrils. “Look, I don’t have time—”

  Gideon relented. He didn’t really want to make Caravale angry. Besides, enough was enough, and he was starting to feel a little guilty. But only a little.

  “Take a look at this, will you?” he said, leaning over to touch the broken right ulna and radius with the handle of a spoon. The breaks were next to each other, about a third of the way down from the elbow. “This is what I was looking at just now. These fractures—they aren’t new. They happened right around the time of death. Very close to the time of death, I’d say.”

  “Because there’s no difference in color, right.”

  “Well, not only that—”

  “But how do you know they weren’t broken right after his death, during the burial, say—an accident with a shovel? They don’t look hard to break.”

  “No, they would have been easy enough to break, but the fact—”

  “And whenever they were broken—before, after, during, whatever—I’m having a hard time understanding what they have to do with whether he was or was not shot.”

  “Give me a chance now,” Gideon said, laughing. “I’m trying to explain.”

  “It’s about time,” Caravale grumbled, but he was smiling.

  With the colonel now an engaged audience, Gideon pointed out that the fractured ends of the broken forearm bones didn’t lie adjacent to each other, as might have been expected. Instead, the lower halves of the ulna and radius had ridden up a couple of inches over their upper halves. That, he explained, was a just-about-sure sign that the fracture had occurred while the person was still alive. With the living muscles of the arm convulsing in shock, and the stability provided by the bones themselves suddenly gone, the two segments of each bone had been yanked together and pulled up over each other.

  “I see,” Caravale said, nodding. “That’s very interesting.”

  “And if you look carefully at the way the splintering occurred at the break points, you can tell the direction of the blow as well.” He offered a borrowed magnifying glass to Caravale, who gave it a try, but within a few seconds he handed back the lens, shaking his head.

  “I’ll take your word about the splinters, but let me guess the direction of the blow.” He held his left hand up, as if shading his eyes with his forearm, and with the fingers of his other hand, tapped his arm a few inches below the elbow.

  “Here.”

  Gideon nodded. Caravale had tapped himself on the ulnar aspect—the pinky side—of the forearm. It was the classic location of the fracture that resulted when a person threw up his arm to protect himself from an attack—the so-called “nightstick frac
ture.”

  “And what that tells me . . .” Gideon began.

  “What that tells you,” said Caravale slowly, “is that it’s extremely unlikely that he was shot. Because if the killer had a gun, he’d just go ahead and shoot him, right? Why would he have to attack him with some other object? Is that your reasoning?”

  “That’s my reasoning.”

  Caravale, who had grown increasingly absorbed, nodded thoughtfully several times. “Well, I think you’re on to something.”

  Gideon felt as if he’d just passed a test. But then, so had Caravale. It worked both ways. The man was a quick study. He’d caught on at once, had taken the basic idea, and had run with it.

  “So here’s what we think we know about him,” Caravale said a few minutes later. They were twenty yards from the burial, sitting in directors’ chairs from the van, in the shade of some softly rustling poplars. Nearby, the crime-scene crew was also taking a break, sprawled on the ground, smoking and animatedly arguing the finer points of a soccer match the evening before.

  “We have a burial that’s been there for perhaps ten years—”

  “Very approximately. Plus or minus five.”

  “An adult male, fifty or more—”

  “Make it sixty or more,” Gideon interrupted. He had upped his estimate as he’d gotten a better idea of the extensive porosity and thinning that was to be found in the bones. The scapulas in particular showed the atrophy and demineralization he’d expect in a man of seventy. “Also, he was a fairly small guy, and lightly built.”

  “Lightly built . . . do you mean thin? Not fat?”

  “No, there’s no way to tell fat or thin from the bones. What I meant was lightly muscled, what we call ‘gracile.’ I don’t know what the Italian word is.”

  “The same,” said Caravale. “Gràcile.” Grah-chee-lay.

  “Ah, gràzie, Vaccari,” he said to one of his men, who had brought cans of Cola Light for him and Gideon. Popping the top on one, he arranged himself more comfortably in the chair. “All right, to review: sixty or more, male, lightly built, probably killed with a blunt instrument—”