Skull Duggery (9 page)

“Feeyeeps,” Sandoval echoed robotically. “Si. Un desarmador de cruz.” He turned toward the door.

“And a piece of wood.”

“And a piece of wood,” Sandoval said, beyond astonishment now. “Sure. What kind of wood? How big?”

“It doesn’t matter. Any old piece of scrap lumber. A board.”

His actions, when Sandoval came back and handed the items to him, proved that Sandoval was not beyond astonishment after all. The screwdriver and the board, a foot-long piece of whatever the metric equivalent of a two-by-four was, were taken to the sink, where the board was placed on the sturdy counter beside the basin. Gideon picked up the screwdriver, raised it over his head, and drove it hard into the board. A second time. A third. Sandoval watched, openmouthed.

Gideon held the board up to examine it. “Mm,” he said inscrutably. “Let’s go back to the body now.”

He stood gazing down once more at Manuel Garcia. He had already satisfied himself that there were no other visible perforations in the hide; just the wound in the chest. But the left arm, extending rigidly down and slightly forward along the left side, partially blocked his view of the axilla-the armpit-and the area just below it, and this was a region Gideon particularly wanted to see now. Placing one hand on Garcia’s left shoulder joint to steady the body, he used the other to grasp the left arm just above the elbow and began to pull gingerly.

Nothing happened. Barely any give at all. Cowhide-stiffened cowhide-was in fact very much what the body felt like. He took his stance again, set his feet, grasped the arm more firmly Sandoval flinched and paled. “I think I need to go to the police station for a few minutes now,” he murmured, hurrying the words. “There are things that must be attended to. Would that be all right?” He was already making for the door. “I’ll only be a couple minutes,” he yelled over his shoulder and was gone.

“Take your time,” Gideon said, envying him. He wouldn’t have minded leaving for this part too. The bones in mummified remains had been known to snap when you tried to move the limbs, and he was all set to flinch himself-he was already flinching mentally-if that were to happen. He took in a breath, held it, and pulled harder, steadily and slowly bearing down on the shoulder joint. Something-not bone, thank God-gave, and the arm moved an inch, two inches. Enough. It remained in the position to which he’d pulled it. The humerus hadn’t broken or popped out of its socket.

He let out his breath, wiped off the sheen of sweat that had beaded on his forehead, and bent to see under the arm. The skin there had folded over itself in the process of loosening and mummifying, and it took him a good ten minutes to pry the fold apart with his fingers so that he could see what might be hidden within. He was just straightening up when he heard Sandoval’s car pull up outside the building. The chief, who’d been gone about twenty minutes, came in, preceded by a wintergreen gust of Pepto-Bismol. He had brought two cardboard cups of still-steaming cappuccino, one of which he handed to Gideon, who gratefully gulped half of it down. The Sacred Bean Cafe was the logo on the side.

“Pretty good, huh?” Sandoval said with a reasonable semblance of cheer.

“It sure is. Thanks.”

“See, didn’t I tell you?” The break and the Pepto-Bismol had done him good. While hardly happy with the way things were going, he did seem reconciled to his fate.

For a while they stood beside the table, companionably drinking their coffees.

“So, profesor, he was murdered? That’s it?”

Again, Gideon gave him the short answer. “I believe so. Someone did their best, that’s for sure. But not with a gun.”

“But how? If not by bullet, then by what? Show me.”

Gideon guessed that there was little genuine interest behind the request, that Sandoval was merely playing the role that he thought was expected of him as police chief. But then Gideon wasn’t a man who needed a lot of coaxing when it came to providing skeletal edification. To ask was to receive.

“Sure, I’ll show you. Take a look at this.” He grasped the rear segment of the seventh rib and pulled it slightly forward. “What do you see?”

Sandoval studied it. “A hole,” he replied sensibly.

“But not all the way through.”

“No, not all the way through.”

“But almost through.” Gideon turned on the Maglite and held it behind the rib. “See? Look into the hole. You can see that some light comes through.”

“Ye-es,” Sandoval said slowly, peering hard. Perhaps, thought Gideon, he really has gotten interested, or at any rate curious. “I can see a little point of light, where the bone is just barely broken all the way through.”

“It’s not just a pinpoint, Chief. Use the magnifying glass.” Gideon kept the flashlight steady behind the rib. “What’s it shaped like?”

Sandoval peered through the glass. His eyes widened. “Ah, I see. It’s… I don’t know… it’s like a, like a tiny star… no, like a little equis.”

Equis. The Spanish word for the letter X.

“Yes, that’s one way to describe it,” Gideon said. “Or you could call it a cross?”

“I suppose so, yes.”

“And when I asked you for a Phillips-head screwdriver a little while ago, you called it un desarmador de…?”

“De cruz.” Sandoval’s eyes widened. He straightened up. “Cross! A cross-shaped screwdriver!” He bent to stare through the lens again. “Then a screwdriver made this hole?”

For an answer Gideon held up the board for him to see the indentations the screwdriver had made. Each thrust had left a neat little X -shaped dent in the wood, all identical to one another and almost exactly like the one in the rib. The conclusion was inescapable. Garcia had been stabbed, at least once, with a Phillips-head screwdriver, which had penetrated the front of the rib, its tip breaking through the back just enough to leave its X -shaped perforation. The initial X -shaped perforation in front had, of course, been obliterated by the round shaft as the thrust continued.

Sandoval straightened up, his forehead wrinkling. “Stabbed to death by a screwdriver…” He scowled. “But wait-there is no wound in the skin, no entrance wound. How can-?”

“Ah, but there is an entrance wound,” Gideon said. “Three of them, in fact.”

He showed Sandoval what he had found under the arm: a cluster of three tiny black holes in the armpit.

“They’re so small,” Sandoval said.

“They were small enough to start with, so they were able to contract and close up a little afterward,” said Gideon. Whichever one made the hole in the rib would probably have gone through the lungs and the heart and thus killed him. Even if it hadn’t, he could very well have bled to death.

Sandoval still looked puzzled. “But to be stabbed in the, the…” He sought the English word and failed. “En el sobaco.” He indicated his own armpit. “ Three times! Why would… how would…”

“It’s not that uncommon,” Gideon said. “Someone tries to stab you, you throw up your arm to protect yourself-” He demonstrated. “And, ouch, that’s where you wind up getting it.”

“I see. Yes, it’s all very interesting.” He thought for a moment. “Profesor-”

“Please, call me Gideon.”

Sandoval responded with a cautious smile. “Flaviano.” Self-consciously, very formally, they shook hands. “You know… Gideon… I must file a report on this. What you told me-the ribs, entry wounds, exit wounds-I don’t know if I can explain-”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ll write it all up for you to include with your report. It’ll have to be in English, though. My Spanish isn’t good enough for material like this.”

“Thank you. When do you think you could do this?”

“I can do it right now, if you like.”

“Ah, good. The policia ministerial, they won’t be happy if I wait too long.” He sighed softly.

Mention of the policia ministerial put an end to his relative good humor, which had been ebbing anyway over the last few minutes.

“Well, look at the bright side,” Gideon said, taking a page from Julie’s playbook.

“Yes? What is the bright side?”

“You have the satisfaction of knowing Dr. Bustamente’s findings are dead wrong.”

That earned a twinkle of the eye and a furtive little grin. “Well,” Sandoval said, cheered at least a little, “let’s go back to the police station now. You can use the computer there. But first, lunch.”

There were only two restaurants in the village, both on the main street, Avenida Juarez, and Sandoval took Gideon to the Restaurante el Descanso, the smaller and simpler of the two, a clean, plain place-in the United States, it might have been called a deli-bakery-where Sandoval had a hamburger and Gideon got a bowl of creamy Oaxacan-style gazpacho, made with eggs and sour cream, and garnished with jicama and cumin-coated tortilla chips. When asked, he said, truthfully enough, that it was delicious. Sandoval made a show of insisting on picking up the tab, but if any money changed hands, Gideon never saw it.

From there, they walked the two blocks to the Palacio del Gobierno, a stuccoed one-story building where police headquarters, consisting of two currently empty jail cells, a hallway with two desks jammed side-to-side against the wall, and the chief’s “private” office (doorless), were housed. One of the hallway desks had a fairly new Dell computer on it, and Gideon was seated there to write up his report. A baby-faced police officer offered him a cup of coffee from the countertop coffeemaker, but Sandoval, standing behind him, made head-shaking, throat-cutting motions warning him otherwise, and he politely declined and got to work. AN hour later, Gideon was done. Most of the time had been wasted in trying to put together something close to his usual forensic report, covering all the typical bases: age, sex, condition of the body, old broken leg, and so on, but all of this wound up being deleted. In the first place, he hadn’t been asked to do, and hadn’t done, anything approaching a thorough examination. In the second, the state police, the policia ministerial, were sure to pursue this more thoroughly on their own, with their own experts. Third, and most important, they hadn’t asked for his help and weren’t anticipating it. Gideon, sensitive from long experience to issues of turf, decided it would be less than tactful to unexpectedly dump a formal, jargon-loaded case report, written by a prying, meddlesome Yanqui, into their laps. Sandoval would surely take the heat for it, and Sandoval was worried enough already.

With reason, Gideon thought. From what he’d heard and read about them, the Oaxacan state police were, or were alleged to be, a belligerent, thuggish bunch with a reputation for being easy to irritate and quick to anger. In the end, he boiled it down to a single unvarnished paragraph with a minimum of inferences:

On December 14, 2008, I was requested by Flaviano Sandoval, chief of police, Teotitlan del Valle, to examine a mummified body found in the nearby countryside. This brief examination was made after an earlier partial autopsy by Dr. Ignacio Bustamente, medico legista, Tlacolula District. It is my opinion that the deceased was stabbed at least three times with a Phillips-head screwdriver (un desarmador de cruz), the entry wounds clustered in the left axilla. One of these thrusts left a diagnostic, X-shaped perforation in the vertebral portion of the left seventh rib. The deceased also suffered massive trauma to the thorax in the form of severe compression of the rib cage, resulting in numerous injuries, one of which was a compound fracture that punctured the chest wall below and medial to the left nipple.

Respectfully submitted,

Gideon Oliver, Professor

Department of Anthropology

University of Washington

If I can be of further assistance, please feel free to contact me through Chief Sandoval. I will be staying at Teotitlan for the next several days.

He leaned back in his chair, read it over, considered deleting those last two sentences-if they wanted his help they could find him, so why push it?-but finally decided to let them stand, and hit the print button. ANNIE threw back her head and laughed. “You asked him where the guy’s comoda was and he didn’t know what you were talking about?”

“That’s right,” a still-puzzled Gideon said. “Doesn’t it mean ‘chest’?”

“Yeah, it means “chest”-only like in ‘chest of drawers.’ You know, comoda… commode?”

“Is that right?” Gideon said, also laughing. “So what’s my kind of chest? I mean-”

“ ‘ Pecho,’ ” Carl supplied with a smile.

“Ah, pecho,” said Gideon with his usual ineffective snap of the fingers. “Of course. Like ‘pectoral.’ ”

With Julie, they were having predinner drinks in the dining room, at the table in the rear that was kept for the Gallagher clan, separated from the others by a waist-level bookcase. It was a beautiful late afternoon and Gideon had initially wanted to have drinks out on the terrace, but two of the four close-together terrace tables were occupied by the feminist professors’ group, which was in the midst of extremely heated discourse, from which Gideon thought it wise to keep a safe distance. He was brave about many things, but he was not brave about this, and he had thought it was a good idea to take the prudent course and go inside. Carl had seconded the motion after hearing some of what they were saying. “Sounds like fightin’ words to me,” he’d said.

Over tongue-stinging but wonderfully refreshing micheladas -bottles of Tecate beer spiced with lime and chile sauce-Gideon had been telling them about the day’s events and they had been listening with interest.

Annie had just begun to ask a question when her telephone played the opening bars of “ La Cucaracha.” She took it from her bag, flipped it open. “Hello?” She broke into a smile. “Are you, really?… Both of you?… Well, that’s great, everybody’ll be pleased… Yes, they got here yesterday… No, I won’t be here, but I should be back in a few days… Sure, you too.” She flipped the phone closed.

“Guess what? Tony’s driving down early. He’ll be here tomorrow.”

“Hallelujah,” said Carl with absolutely no expression. Not exactly a shout of joy, Gideon thought. Wonder what that’s about.