Skull Duggery

by Aaron Elkins

  All of this came as a welcome relief to Gideon. Like any forensic anthropologist, he took satisfaction and pleasure in working with skeletons, in reconstructing, at least in part, the living human being—sex, age, habits, appearance, occupation, the whole history of a life, and often the nature of its death—from a pile of bones. But fresh, or rather not-quite-fresh, corpses were another thing. Unlike most of his forensic colleagues, he had never inured himself to the nasty phases that bodies went through on their journey from flesh and blood to bare bones—“decomps,” as they were called in the trade. In what he considered the immortal words of the Munchkin Coroner of Oz, he preferred his corpses “not only really dead, but really most sincerely dead,” the older the better. A decade was usually a safe bet, a millennium better still. He was, in a word, squeamish.

  But then he’d never meant to become a forensic anthropologist, had he? A quiet, scholarly career as a professor of physical anthropology was more what he’d had in mind. His doctoral dissertation had been on early Plestocene hominid locomotion, and he had assumed his subsequent teaching and research would keep him immersed in the femurs, pelves, and tibias of that period, a comfortable million or so years back. Indeed, his academic life had done just that. But physical anthropology professors were necessarily expert “bone readers,” and like others in the field, he had been called on to put this expertise to more contemporary uses. And in truth, it had proven fascinating, if sometimes stomach-churning, this scientific detective work. Nowadays, to his own surprise, he felt himself a little at loose ends if he wasn’t involved in some forensic case or another.

  And, as Julie suggested, it was never very long before one came and found him. Even in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico.

  Sandoval, a small, soft, nervous, harried sort of man who reminded Gideon strongly of someone—he couldn’t put his finger on whom—had filled him in on the finding of the body and on Dr. Bustamente’s conclusions concerning it. Now, gloved hands behind his back—a pair of disposable gloves had been provided for him—Gideon stood looking at it from three or four feet away, the chief fidgeting away at his side. The earthly remains of Manuel Garcia, if that was really his name, were lying mostly on their right side on the chipped, enameled tabletop—a type of embalming table that had been up-to-the-minute a hundred years ago. One knee was drawn up, the other extended. The left arm, twisted so that the palm faced up, was stiffly stretched along the left side and down toward the drawn-up knee, the right arm hidden beneath the body.

  Below the waist, the left side—the uppermost side—had rotted away here and there, allowing glimpses of the skeletal underpinnings—the sharp rim of the innominate, the knobby, yellow, lateral condyles of the femur and tibia. A couple of inches above the knee, the bone had once suffered a break, possibly when he’d been a child. It had healed a long time ago, but it had been badly set, or more likely not set at all, so that there was a kink in the bone, an angle that didn’t belong there.

  “Healed transverse fracture, distal third of the right femoral shaft,” he murmured automatically, making mental notes for his report. “Fully remodeled but poorly set, with medial and cranialward displacement of the distal segment.”

  “What?” Sandoval said, alarmed.

  “It’s nothing to do with his death,” Gideon said. “I was just thinking out loud.”

  The right side appeared to be intact. The face too was intact but much shriveled, so that the mustache looked outlandishly big—a Mario Brothers mustache, a Groucho Marx mustache—and the strong, crooked, brown teeth were bared in what looked like a snarl. The eye sockets, of course, were empty. stiff whitish hairs bristled around the mouth. The feet were nothing but bones and ligaments, with no skin on them at all.

  He moved a little closer, hands still behind his back (he had learned that he did better when he approached this kind of thing gradually). The musty smell became more noticeable, mostly, he thought, because the interior of the thorax was open to the air. Dr. Bustamente had not used the Y-incision typical of autopsies, in which the arms of the Y begin at the lateral ends of the collar bones and come together at the sternum, and the tail runs from there down the center of the abdomen, all the way to the pubis, usually with a neat little jig to spare the navel. The resulting flaps can then be peeled back to expose the insides. Instead, Bustamente had simply hacked a rough oval all the way around the perimeter of the chest and the upper part of the abdomen, and pulled off the entire front wall of the body. He had used a pair of shears, a still-shaken Sandoval had told him. Shears! As if he were cutting up a hunk of cowhide for a saddle!

  But with mummified remains, Gideon knew, such a procedure wasn’t unusual. On a body like Garcia’s, the hide was thick and hard enough to take the edge off a scalpel after one swipe, and the flaps were almost impossible to bend and peel back away from the sternum. Using a sturdy pair of shears to remove the entire chest wall in one piece was the simplest route, and Bustamente had taken it.

  He took the final step necessary to reach the table and leaned over the remains. There were no identifiable internal organs to be seen; no heart, no lungs, no liver, no adrenals, no kidneys, only some dry, blackened, anonymous lumps of tissue sticking to the ribs and inner wall of the hide here and there. It was a picture-book stage C4 of the Galloway categorization of mummified remains: “Mummification of tissues with internal organs lost through autolysis or insect activity.”

  The rib cage seemed to be complete, although it had suffered many fractures. Most of the ribs had snapped, some at multiple points. It took an enormous amount of force to do this much damage, Gideon knew. The rib cage was the most flexible bony assemblage in the body (if it weren’t, breathing would be a bit tricky). With much of it made of highly elastic cartilage, it gave before it bent, and it bent before it cracked, and it cracked before it snapped.

  “The cliff he was found at the base of; how high was it?”

  Sandoval shrugged. “Not so very high, perhaps fifteen meters.”

  Fifteen meters. Five stories, more or less. That was more than enough to do this kind of damage. Bustamente had probably been correct about his having fallen from the top, or at any rate from some considerable height. Either that, or, like the unlucky guy in the saturday morning cartoons, he’d been walking under that upper-story window just when the safe fell out of it.

  “He was found on his left side, I take it?” Gideon said.

  The question startled the jittery, preoccupied Sandoval, made him jump. “Let me think . . . yes, on his left side. How did you know?”

  “Well, because that side didn’t get as mummified; it’s more eaten away. That’s because the bugs that do the work were more protected from the sun’s dehydration.”

  “I see. Yes.”

  Gideon still hadn’t moved. “What was he wearing, Chief?”

  “Wearing?” Sandoval was impatient. It was help he wanted from Gideon, not more questions. “I don’t know . . . clothes. . . . What difference does it make?”

  “It’d be nice to see if there are any bullet holes in them, even blood, perhaps. The policía ministerial will want them too. Do you still have them?”

  Sandoval’s stricken look was answer enough. “Dr. Bustamente, he didn’t say . . . So I just . . . I just . . . Really, there wasn’t much left, only a few shreds. . . .”

  “What was he wearing on his feet, do you remember?”

  “On his feet? I don’t know, sandals, like anybody else. It was warm.”

  “Are you sure? Not shoes? Boots, maybe?”

  “No, I’m not sure,” Sandoval said querulously. “What difference does that make? Who cares . . .” His brow furrowed, then smoothed. “Yeah, you’re right. Boots—leather boots, up to his ankles. I helped Dr. Bustamente take them off. But how do you know that?”

  “Same reasoning, nothing mysterious. The feet are almost completely skeletonized. See, the heavy leather acts as a kind of umbrella against the sun. The tissues stay moist, and the maggots and beetles can work away on them
at leisure. Bodies that are heavily clothed don’t mummify. On the other hand, of course, you’re pretty unlikely to find heavily clothed bodies in environments that are conducive to mummification in the first place, so—”

  But he had lost Sandoval, who was getting squirmier by the moment and making the kinds of faces that go along with a growing stomachache. Clearly the chief was anxious for him to stop talking and get on with it.

  Taking pity on him, Gideon switched gears. His more general examination could wait till later. “Bueno, vamos a ver sobre esa bala, sí?” he said to make Sandoval a little more comfortable, and perhaps to show off his Spanish a little. Well, let’s see about that bullet, shall we?

  Apparently he got it right, because Sandoval responded with a vigorous nod. “Sí, señor, por favor.”

  “Bien, dónde está la cómoda?” he asked. Okay, where’s the chest? He wanted to start by looking at the entry wound that the doctor had found.

  “La cómoda?” Sandoval echoed blankly, obviously not comprehending. “Dónde está la cómoda . . . ?”

  Gideon sighed. This was the kind of reaction he often got when he showed off his Spanish a little too much. Or his German. Or French. Or Italian. As if they went out of their way not to understand their own language. He decided, as usual, that things would go better if he stuck with English. “His chest,” he said, patting his own to clarify.

  “Ah, his chest,” said Sandoval. “Aha-ha, yes, sure, I see. Well, it’s over there.” He pointed to a sink along the back wall: cast iron, coated with white enamel, of about the same antique vintage as the embalming table. In it the thing lay, outer side up. Gideon had known what to expect, of course, and yet he was unexpectedly affected—embarrassed, really—to find himself looking down at something so . . . so personal, so intimate, so oddly naked; a chest, a human chest, lying there in the chipped, discolored, enamel bottom of an old sink, ten feet away from the body to which, in all decency, it still should have been attached. A pair of nipples, a few sparse, graying chest hairs, a navel, an old appendicitis scar—

  He swallowed and made himself concentrate on the wound, a comma-shaped hole a couple of inches to the left of center, just below the left nipple. It was half an inch wide at its greatest width and surrounded by an irregular ring of dark, abraded flesh. The hole was big enough for him to insert his gloved pinky, but not big enough for his ring finger. Entry-wound sizes could be wildly variable, but this was about right for a .32-caliber slug, as Bustamente had suggested, or perhaps a 9 mm one. Between the two of them, bullets of these sizes accounted for the majority of firearm homicides in the United States, and probably in Mexico as well.

  And a bullet penetrating there—right there; he pressed a thumb to the same spot on his own chest to feel what lay beneath—would most likely enter the fifth intercostal space about an inch to the left of the edge of the sternum, possibly clipping one of the two bordering ribs, the fifth or the sixth. Whichever, it would then necessarily plow into either the left ventricle of the heart, or that part of the right ventricle that extended to the left of the sternum. Either way, it wouldn’t have been good news for the heart. Or for Garcia. Death within a few seconds.

  But there was something about the wound, about the ribs, something that had him wondering . . . wondering. . . .

  “Let’s go back to the table,” he murmured, returning there with Sandoval trailing behind. A quick survey of the body’s exterior confirmed Bustamente’s observation that there was no exit wound in the back wall of the thorax or along the sides. As Bustamente had said, if a bullet had entered Garcia’s body, it had never exited.

  If.

  Sandoval read something in Gideon’s face: doubt, uncertainty . . . His own worried expression lightened a little. “What? What is it? Is there something—”

  Gideon quieted him with a motion of his hand. “Give me just a second. I need to . . .”

  The words trailed away as his attention focused hard on the shattered rib cage, in particular on the broken, splintery fifth and sixth ribs. Then he straightened up and returned to the sink, where, for a long few moments, he stood looking down at the dry, brown chunk of hide; at that comma-shaped hole.

  Sandoval followed him. “What is it?” he pressed. “What have you found? What are you thinking?”

  “What I’m thinking,” Gideon said slowly, after a silence that practically had Sandoval ready to explode, “is that Dr. Bustamente may have been wrong.”

  Sandoval blinked. A tremor of hope ran over his face. “Wrong? You mean . . . he didn’t get murdered?”

  “No, I’m not ready to go that far yet, but you see, the thing is, bullets don’t come out of the holes they go in by.”

  “But Dr. Bustamente, he said—”

  “No, they just don’t. They can’t, not unless they haven’t quite penetrated the skin in the first place. But this hole goes clean through, you see?”

  The reason they couldn’t come out was that, while an entry wound itself might remain open, the track that a bullet made through the underlying soft tissue closed up after the slug’s passage. Of course it was hypothetically possible, Gideon supposed, that in a case like this, where the internal organs had all pretty much disappeared so that the bullet might have been rattling around an empty torso, that it had found its way back out through the entry hole while the body was bouncing along on the burro. But he had never heard of such a thing happening, and the possibility seemed too remote to consider seriously.

  Besides, he had a better hypothesis.

  It was too much for Sandoval to handle. “So . . . so . . . what does it mean? Where is the bullet? If it entered through this hole here and there is no other hole by which it came out, and it did not come out through the same hole, then . . . then . . . ?”

  “Then we need another explanation, and mine is that this isn’t an entry wound at all; it’s an exit wound.”

  “But the, the abrasion collar . . .” He pointed at the abraded area around the hole. “Dr Bustamente, he said an abrasion collar—”

  “And he was right. An abrasion collar usually does denote an entry wound. The bullet’s rotation—”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” Sandoval said, hurrying things along with a rapid, rotating motion of his hand. “Dr. Bustamente explained very thoroughly. Very thoroughly.”

  “Okay, good, but, you see, there is a situation in which an exit wound can show an abrasion ring very similar to the one around an entrance wound, and that’s when the skin is pressed against something—a floor, a wall, the back of a chair, even clothing, something like a belt—when the bullet exits. The pressure keeps the wound from tearing wide open the way a typical exit wound would, and the abrasion comes, not from the bullet itself, but from the skin’s being scraped raw by whatever it’s impacting against.”

  “And that’s what this is?”

  “I think so.” A shored exit wound, it was called, “shored” in the sense that whatever the skin is pressed against shores up and supports the edges of the opening.

  “And if that’s the case,” he went on, “we have to ask—”

  But Sandoval’s despondency had gotten the better of him. “Entrance wound, exit wound, what difference does it make which way the bullet was going? Murdered is murdered.” He made a hopeless, harassed gesture with both hands and Gideon suddenly realized whom he reminded him of. With his round but pointy-chinned, mobile face and gleaming, bulgy eyes, he was like a Mexican Peter Lorre; Peter Lorre in Casablanca, at his squirrelly, angst-ridden best.

  “Oh, but it makes a big difference,” Gideon said. “Just bear with me now, Chief. Think about it for a minute. If this is an exit wound, then where’s the entrance wound?”

  Sandoval frowned. “If . . . what?”

  “There’s no other hole of any size anywhere on the torso or abdomen. This is the only one. How can that be? Obviously, you can have an entrance wound with no exit wound, but how can there be an exit wound with no entrance wound?”

  Sandoval jerked his head in f
rustration. “Please, profesor, have mercy . . . can’t you just . . . ?”

  “Chief Sandoval,” Gideon said quietly, glad to be able to tell the chief something he so desperately wanted to hear. “I don’t think this is a bullet wound at all.”

  Once again, Sandoval’s eyes lit up, but warily this time. He’d already had his hopes raised once, only to have them promptly dashed. “But what then would it be? You said yourself, there is no entrance wound. How can an object exit from a body if it has never entered it?”

  “It can do it if it’s been inside all along.”

  “If it’s—” Sandoval did a classic double take. “If . . .”

  “Come on,” Gideon said, “I want to try something.”

  He bent to pick up the slab of all-too-human hide, hesitated as a brief shiver of distaste ran up his spine, then grasped it resolutely by its edges and returned with it to the embalming table, the utterly perplexed Sandoval tagging along a couple of feet behind him. Once there, Gideon held it to the front of the body in about its natural place, although the warping and twisting that went along with mummification made it impossible to do this precisely. Then, grasping the rear portion of the broken sixth rib with his other hand, he tugged it a quarter of an inch upward, which put its front end directly in line with the hole in the chest. A little gentle pressure on the chest, a slight rotation, and the rib’s jagged, broken end pushed through the hole with a fit so tight, so near perfect, that when he let go of both chest and rib, they remained locked together, unmoving.

  Sandoval stared, openmouthed. “A rib?” His plump face crinkled with happiness. He began to laugh. “A rib made this hole? His own rib? From inside?”