Skull Duggery (8 page)

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 frustration. “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?”

Gideon laughed along with him, pleased for Sandoval’s sake. It had been the form of the wound that had gotten the gears of his mind going: Somewhere between round and oval, but with a little tail hooking out of it. “Comma shaped” was the way he had described it to himself, and the term had rung a bell with him. “Comma shaped” was also the shorthand term he used in describing to his students the shape of the thoracic ribs in cross-section. Comma-shaped hole, comma-shaped shaft of bone… Could it be…? he had wondered.

It could, and it was.

“He must have hit on his left side,” he said now. “So that when the broken rib punched through, that side was flush up against a rock, or against the ground, which would have resulted in the abrasion ring.”

“Then there is no reason to believe he was murdered?” Sandoval said joyously. He had the result he’d wanted but had hardly dared hope for. “A simple fall, no more!” Then, deciding the situation required more decorum, he gravely added: “A terrible, unfortunate, fatal fall, the poor man.”

“Oh, it would have been fatal, all right, enough to kill him twice over.” He had pulled the chest slab off the rib and laid it aside while they’d been talking, and was again peering into the chest cavity, with the body still on its side.

“What are you looking for now?” Sandoval asked a little nervously.

“Nothing in particular,” Gideon said truthfully. “But I’ve hardly looked at him. As long as I’m here, I ought to see what else I might be able to come up with. You never know.”

“Oh, I don’t think there’s anything else that’s necessary, do you? Perhaps you would permit me to buy you a cup of coffee now? We have an excellent coffeehouse here, yes, right here in Teotitlan, the American tourists kept asking for it, you see, and now I myself have developed a taste for cappuccinos, ha-ha…” On he nattered, arching his body backward, trying to manifest enough psychic force to draw Gideon away from the table. He didn’t like the idea of Gideon continuing to poke around and coming up with God knows what.

Sandoval’s psychic force had no effect on Gideon whatever. “Well…” He was probing gently with his fingers at the cervical vertebrae, or rather at the dried ligaments and intervertebral fibrocartilage that held them together. “Most of the time, people killed in falls-falls from heights-die because they fracture their spines up here in the neck, which tears apart their aortas, so I just wanted to see if… ah, indeed, that’s what we have here. The first cervical vertebra-the atlas-has been completely separated from the second one, the axis. The ligaments and fibrocartilage are torn clear through. In the absence of anything else, that’s a pretty good cause of death right there.”

“So, that’s that, then,” Sandoval said joyously. “A job well done! Muchisimas gracias, profesor, I am so grateful-”

“Hold on, now,” Gideon murmured, mostly to himself. “What have we here?”

Something had caught his eye, toward the back of the rib cage; he rubbed away a bit of dried, tarry black matter, impossible to identify (crud was the technical term usually employed), that was stuck to the interior surface of one of the ribs, and bent to take a closer look. “I’m afraid we might have something worth looking into after all,” he said softly.

Sandoval’s shoulders sagged. The faintest, saddest of sighs escaped his lips. He’d known it was too good to be true. “What?” he asked in a grim monotone, a voice of doom.

“Well, I’m not really sure,” Gideon said. “It looks like… it almost looks like…”

What it almost looked like-what it very much looked like-was a bullet hole. In the ventral surface-the inside surface-of the seventh rib on the right side. Like many of the other ribs, this one had snapped about halfway back, the front piece still connected via the costal cartilages to the sternum, the rearward piece still attached by ligaments to the vertebral column. The hole was in the rearward segment, about three inches from the vertebral column, so that it faced diagonally forward. Much smaller than the wound in Garcia’s chest, almost perfectly round even when seen from a few inches away, and penetrating only partway through the body of the rib, it might have served as a textbook illustration of the not-uncommon situation in which a bullet, having expended almost the last of its energy in getting most of the way through the body, had just enough oomph left to penetrate the surface of the rib but not enough to make it all the way through.

Now it was Gideon who was perplexed. If this was a bullet hole, then where was the original entrance wound? There was only one possibility: the chest wound that Gideon had so confidently, so magisterially, declared to be an exit wound and not even a ballistic exit wound at that. Could a bullet have entered there, under the left nipple, on a trajectory that took it diagonally through the thorax, transpiercing the left lung, the heart, and the right lung before plowing into the ventral surface of the seventh rib on the other side? short answer: yes, it could. Had he been wrong, then, about the broken rib breaking through the chest wall to leave the comma-shaped wound? Given the fit of rib to wound, that seemed virtually impossible. Well, highly- extremely highly-improbable. But if he was right about that, about there not being an entrance wound, then where had this bullet hole in the seventh rib come from? How had the bullet entered the body?

Again, if.

“It almost looks like what?” Sandoval pressed. “Tell me.”

“Look, I may have already jumped the gun once today. If it’s okay with you, let me look him over a little more thoroughly before I do it again.”

What he wanted now was a good, clear look at that seventh rib, but the room was ill lit for a skeletal examination; windowless and with only a pair of discolored fluorescent tubes on the ceiling that threw a flat, undiscriminating light on the body. He needed a slanting light, something that would throw into sharp relief the bumps and crevices and indentations that were the essence of his work.

“Chief, could you possibly get me a flashlight of some kind?”

“But I want to know-”

“Please.”

Sandoval, having little choice, gave up ungracefully. “They got some work lamps in the other room,” he said grudgingly.

“No, I want something small, something I can move around inside the torso. The smaller the better. And if you can find a magnifying glass, that’d be helpful too.”

“Okay, okay,” he snapped. He turned on his heel, stomped into the equipment room next door, and returned in a few seconds. “Is this small enough?”

“Perfect,” said Gideon. It was a tiny but piercingly bright single-cell Maglite flashlight, the kind that was made to carry on a key ring. “Couldn’t have picked a better one myself.” Sandoval had brought a magnifying glass as well, an old-fashioned round one with a metal frame and a wooden handle.

He flicked the light on, rotated the knurled head to focus the output into a narrow beam, picked up the magnifying glass, and went to work.

“Ah,” he murmured. “Mm. Sonofagun.”

“What? What is it?” pleaded Sandoval.

But Gideon in the midst of a skeletal examination was not easy to reach. “Oho,” he said. “So.” And looked up at the ceiling, cogitating.

At which point Chief Sandoval came to the end of his tether. “What is it?” he cried in a strangled voice. “What have you found? Was he murdered or was he not?”

“Let me just see if-”

“Por favor, senor-si o no?”

Gideon sighed. From Sandoval’s point of view, that was of course the critical question. It was naturally enough a question that he got asked a lot by cops, and it was one that he couldn’t, in all truth, answer definitively; then, or now, or ever. He was a physical anthropologist. What he knew was bones. Sure, he was often able to say with confidence that a skeletal wound was made (or wasn’t made) by bullet, knife, or club, but the absence of such wounds on the skeleton was hardly evidence of non murder. The rib cage is made more of air than of bone. There is plenty of room between the ribs for blades or bullets to find their way to the vital organs.

On the other side of the coin, no skeletal wound that he did find was unconditional proof of murder. In themselves, broken bones don’t kill people. Sure, a bullet-shattered skull was a pretty good clue that you had a homicide on your hands, but even then it wasn’t the damage to the skull, but to the brain, that was the immediate cause of death-or, as forensic pathologists had it in one of their more charming locutions, was “incompatible with life.” Broken bones, even if you break all two hundred and six of them, are not a good thing to have, but they are not “incompatible with life.” Not strictly.

But there was no point in going into all this with Sandoval. He answered as truthfully and simply as he could: “I think so. Yes.”

The air went out of Sandoval. “I see,” he said wretchedly. Then, as an apathetic afterthought: “How then was he killed?”

“I need to do a little more work on the body,” Gideon said instead of answering. “Do you think you could find me a screwdriver next door?”

Sandoval stared at him. “A what?”

“A…” Gideon groped for the Spanish word. “Un… un desarmador,” he said, amazing himself by plucking it out of whatever dim neural recess it had been hiding in, patiently waiting to be summoned, probably for the first time since he’d learned it decades ago. A wonderful thing, the human mind.

“Un DESARMADOR?” Sandoval bleated, no less bewildered.

After a couple of frustrated seconds, Gideon realized that this time it wasn’t a question of Sandoval’s not understanding, it was a question of not believing what he was hearing. First a pair of shears, now a screwdriver; what next, a hammer and nails?

Gideon couldn’t help smiling. “Right, can you get me one? Not the flat-bladed kind, the Phillips head. Feeyeeps,” he amended, giving the spelling his best Spanish pronunciation.