Skull Duggery (3 page)

He was much relieved that the smell (almost nonexistent) and the feel (like parchment) of the thing had been nowhere as bad as he’d expected. It was terrible to look at, all right, but then it wasn’t necessary for him to look very closely to set it on the burro’s back and quickly cover it with a tarpaulin, during which he did a great deal of squinting and eye-averting. Still, by the time he’d gotten the tarpaulin tied down, he could feel his stomach acting up.

As soon as he had assured himself that what Nacho had seen the previous day was truly a body, he had used his cell phone to alert old Bustamente, the district medico legista. Bustamente had immediately driven in from Tlacolula and was now waiting impatiently-almost avidly, Sandoval thought unkindly-in the cemetery, at the door of the two-room concrete-block building, one room of which served as municipal tool and equipment storage, and the other as the village mortuary. Once the body was in the windowless mortuary room and on the ancient, enameled-iron embalming table, Bustamente had taken charge of it, a responsibility Sandoval was all too happy to relinquish.

He had planned to remain there with the doctor, having steeled himself to do what he regarded as his duty. And indeed, he managed to last through the cutting away of the tattered clothing and even to assist in a gingerly fashion. But his resolution began to fade when the boots came off to reveal not the hide-like tissue that covered the rest of the body, but horrible, greasy skeleton feet: eaten-away bones held together by rotting ligaments. Still, Sandoval held his ground, despite the noises coming from his stomach.

Not for long, however. When the leathery skin proved too tough for Bustamente’s scalpels, the doctor had gone grumbling into the storage room and emerged with a pair of heavy-duty pruning shears. “Ha, these should do the job,” he said, clacking them together and advancing on the corpse. That had been too much for Sandoval, who fled.

He took the opportunity to walk the few blocks to his office in the municipal building to swallow a couple of spoonfuls of Pepto-Bismol and sit quietly with the shades down for twenty minutes to settle his stomach. It didn’t help much. Beyond even the revolting physical aspects that were bothering him, he just didn’t have a good feeling about this business. Maybe the corpse itself didn’t have a bad smell, but everything about it did.

He remained in the office as long as he could, long enough to swallow another dose of the Pepto-Bismol. The second one did calm some of the roiling that was going on inside him, but it did little for his frame of mind. He returned with sinking heart and dragging step to the mortuary as Bustamente was just straightening up from the body, from which the entire front wall had been removed, so that it was wide open, like a picture in a medical book. On Bustamente’s face was a look of pinched satisfaction that struck terror into Sandoval’s heart. God help him, he’d known this was going to be trouble.

“Well?” he said gruffly.

“This man has been murdered,” Bustamente pronounced, relishing every word and speaking as if he were on the stand, somberly addressing the court as an expert witness. It was something the old fellow couldn’t have had the opportunity to say very often in his long tenure.

“Murdered,” Sandoval repeated hollowly from the depths of his chest. It was exactly what he’d been praying not to hear. What had he done to deserve this? How could this be happening to him again? It was incredible: only two murders in the last half-century, and both of them during the one-year tenure of Flaviano Sandoval, whose stomach fluttered at the idea of looking at a corpse. It was unbelievable, unfair, not to be borne.

However, once more he steeled himself to face the matter head-on, as the responsibilities of his position demanded. “What makes you think he was murdered?” He could hardly get the words out.

Bustamente bridled. “I don”t think, I know.” He crooked a bony finger at the police chief. “Come over here,” he commanded and led him to the sink. “Look at this.” When Sandoval realized he was looking at a man’s chest just sitting there in the sink like a slab of raw-hide, his insides started gurgling again.

Wordlessly, Bustamente stuck his finger into a dark hole not far from the middle of the slab. “You see?”

“From a bullet?” Sandoval asked. If he squeezed his eyelids together, leaving just a slit, he could see it without really seeing it.

“Without question.” He removed his finger. “You see how the borders of the perforation appear to have been eroded or eaten away? So that the hole is ‘cratered,’ as we might say?”

“Yes,” said Sandoval queasily, although all he could make out through his squint was a roundish hole with blackened edges. There was no denying, though, that it was the right size for a bullet hole. He had shot enough rabbits to know as much.

“This eroded area is what we refer to as an ‘abrasion collar,’ ” Bustamente continued, in the manner of a teacher talking to a not-too-bright pupil. “It is the result of scraping from the rotating motion of the bullet as it penetrates the skin. Being unique to gunshot wounds, it leaves no doubt as to the source of the penetration. Judging from the size of the hole, I would guess the bullet was. 32 caliber, but I leave that to the experts.”

“I see. And it would have killed him?”

Bustamente uttered a croaking, incredulous laugh. “Certainly, it would have killed him. Imagine if it had happened to you.” To illustrate, he jabbed a bony forefinger into Sandoval’s chest at about the same spot. “It would have exploded your heart, devastated it.”

“Ah,” said Sandoval, whose heart was, in fact, feeling more than a little devastated. Murder. Tumult. Inconvenience. The State Procuraduria de Justicia taking over his office, taking over the whole municipal building, all four rooms of it. The policia ministerial giving him orders, making clear their contempt for him, swaggering and bullying their way through the village. Detectives… judges…

It was only what he’d expected, he thought with a resigned sigh. Expect the worst, his stern, cheerless father had counseled him on many an occasion, and you will get what you expect. Only it will be worse. Sandoval had quoted it to one or two people and they had laughed. But his father hadn’t meant it as a joke, and the message had sunk in.

“And if by a miracle that were not enough,” continued Bustamente, “the fall would have finished the job.”

“He had a fall too?”

“A long one. There are many broken ribs. Was he perhaps found at the foot of a cliff or mountain, a height of some kind?”

“Yes.”

Bustamente was pleased. “You see?”

Sandoval heaved a forlorn sigh. “This means I will have to report the matter to the policia ministerial, doesn’t it?” he said glumly, already knowing the answer.

“The sooner the better, I would say. I would not waste any time. They don’t like delays.”

“And what happens to the body? Do you take it away with you?”

“Not me!” exclaimed Bustamente. “”I submit my own report. That’s the end of my responsibility.”

“So what do I do with him? We can’t just leave him here.”

“I suggest that is precisely what you do. Lock the place up securely and await the attentions of the policia, who will not be long in coming, I promise you.”

Sandoval nodded soberly. If only old Nacho had stayed on the regular paths like anyone else. Or if he had to stray sometime, couldn’t he have waited a few measly weeks longer? Sandoval would no longer have been the jefe by then; he would have been safely, agreeably, delightfully engaged in the administration of the village council’s affairs, with no responsibility for corpses or murders or “You have a problem on your hands, Chief Sandoval,” Bustamente observed.

“You’re telling me.”

“No, I mean an additional problem. I found no bullet. I searched the thoracic cavity thoroughly. It’s not there.”

Sandoval frowned. “But why should you expect to find the bullet? It might be anywhere. Do you expect to find the bullet when you shoot a rabbit or a deer? Bullets continue on their way-”

Bustamente shook his head. The problem was, he said, that there was no exit wound. The mummified skin on the back and sides of the body was intact. Ergo, the bullet had never exited. But he had searched the thoracic cavity thoroughly and it was nowhere to be found.

“I don’t understand. How can that be?”

Bustamente twisted his skinny neck, working out the kinks. “Shall we go outside now? I want some fresh air.”

They went to a stone memorial bench in the cemetery, where they sat awkwardly side by side. Sandoval himself felt a little better there; the air was fresh and he was among family. It seemed sometimes that half the population of Teotitlan was either a Sandoval or related by marriage to a Sandoval. Bustamente offered him a cigarillo, was turned down, and lit one for himself.

“So then where is it, this bullet?” Sandoval asked. “If not inside the body, then where?”

“There is only one possible answer.” Bustamente got his cigarillo going, shook out his match, and emitted twin streams of blue smoke from his nostrils. “It could only have fallen back out through the perforation by which it entered.”

That didn’t sound right to Sandoval. “But can a bullet do that? Come out through its own wound?”

“I don’t see why not. It’s not usual, that’s so, but-”

“And you said it was a problem for me. Why is it a problem for me if you found no bullet?”

Bustamente dropped the barely smoked cigarillo onto the concrete pad that supported the bench and ground it out under his sole.

He arched his scant eyebrows. “Do you want to turn in a report to the Procuraduria de Justicia in which you tell them you were not capable of finding a bullet that probably lies within a meter of where the corpse was discovered? Would you prefer the policia ministerial to find it for you?”

“I would not,” Sandoval said softly, but with feeling.

Bustamente uttered a short laugh. “I should think not. You had better return to where he was found and locate it. And if you do not find it there, you must search every millimeter of earth on the way back. That is my considered advice. It may well have come out while the body was on the burro.”

Sandoval blew out his cheeks and exhaled. What a job this was going to be. “I’d better get started now.” They both stood up. “Is there anything else you need to tell me?”

“Nothing that would interest you,” Bustamente said curtly. “I will have my own report for the police next week. And now if you’ll excuse me-”

Flaviano Sandoval was by nature a mild, even a timid, man, given to diffidence and conciliation, as opposed to temper outbursts, but at this he bristled. “I am the police,” he said forcefully. “If you have additional information, I wish to know it.”

But Dr. Bustamente was not a man to be intimidated, least of all by Flaviano Sandoval. “I meant the real police,” he said drily, but it was beyond him to resist demonstrating his expertise. “If you must know, however, I can tell you that it is my judgment that to become desiccated to this extent, he had to have been lying out in the open for at least eight months, more likely ten.”

“And I would say no more than six months,” Sandoval said, still bristling.

Bustamente stared at him. “Chief Sandoval, I have twenty-two years of experience in these matters. I have certificates in forensic medicine, in clinical pathology, in maxillofacial pathology…”

Sandoval let him rattle on. It was Bustamente’s fault he was in this mess-well, in a way it was-and he owed the officious, self-important old man a comeuppance.

“Six months,” Sandoval repeated when Bustamente paused for breath. “No more.”

Bustamente smiled a lipless smile. “Oh yes? And perhaps you would care to tell me on what premise you base this learned conclusion?”

“On the fact that I know who this man is, and he was most certainly alive six months ago.”

That very satisfactorily took the wind out of Bustamente’s sails. “You know… you saw… well, who is it-was it?”

“He claimed his name was Manuel Garcia. A vagrant. I had him in the jail for a night in May. Then I sent him on his way. I myself put him on the bus to Oaxaca. I watched the bus leave.”

Bustamente leaned back, narrow-eyed, reassessing him. “And why did you not bother to tell me this earlier?”

“Because you didn’t bother to ask me,” Sandoval said spitefully, but a moment later he felt a stab of guilt-well, a prick of guilt-partly because he knew he was being petty, but mostly because he knew it wasn’t the truth.

Why then had he kept it to himself? Because he’d been hoping that Bustamente would conclude that there was nothing sinister about the man’s death, that it had been the result of exposure, or a simple fall, or a heart attack, or best of all that the cause had been impossible to determine. Then Sandoval would have had Garcia quietly buried in a nameless grave at the far corner of the cemetery, an anonymous, unmourned death with no follow-up required. To have supplied his name would only have complicated things, and to no useful end. That far he’d been willing to go to preserve his and the village’s tranquility. But homicide? Murder? No, duty required otherwise, and for Sandoval duty was paramount.

Besides, Pompeo was sure to find out.

“And what else do you know about him that you neglected to tell me?” Bustamente asked coldly.

“Nothing at all.”

Nothing beyond what he knew within ten seconds of setting eyes on him: Manuel Garcia was going to be trouble. ALL the rest of that day, Sandoval, Pepe, and Pompeo searched diligently, twice walking the two kilometers that the burro had carried the body, and then back; four times altogether. The chief’s back locked up with an audible click after two hours of bending and stooping, so that he was reduced to prodding at objects on the road with a stick. Young Pepe began complaining of neck and knee pains not long after that, and even the granite face of the indestructible Pompeo wore a look of suffering by the time they were done. In all, they retrieved sixty-five pesos in small coins, five shotgun pellets (collected, just in case), and a Belgian five-cent Euro coin. But of anything even vaguely resembling a . 32-caliber bullet? Not a sign, not a hint. TWO or three times a week-the number was left to his discretion-Sandoval had his dinner up at the Hacienda, a familial perk that went along with his being the brother of their award-winning cook Dorotea; a delightful arrangement as far as he was concerned. He had eaten there the previous evening, and being conscientious about presuming upon the Gallaghers’ courtesy, he would ordinarily have avoided dining there twice in a row. But after the day he’d had, he was in sore need of the restorative powers of Dorotea’s cooking. An exception was in order.