Dying on the Vine (A Gideon Oliver Mystery) Page 5

  John raised both hands to profess innocence of intent, and Rocco got back to work unloading and laying out the bones.

  The two-and-a-half-day forensic anthropology seminar was midway through its second day, so there had been time for only a few hours of training in the basics of bone identification. Nevertheless, they did pretty well. Gideon was pleased; apparently they’d been paying attention, and perhaps had even gone so far as to study the handout materials in the evenings. Inside of fifteen minutes, they had what was left of the skeleton laid out on its back: skull, mandible, pelvis, scapulas, vertebral column, arm and leg bones, one collarbone, and most of the ribs. The hands, right foot, left collarbone, and some of the vertebrae were missing, probably carried off by carnivores, and the facial skeleton, mandible, and leg bones had been gnawed. The bones of the left foot—un-gnawed—were in a clasp envelope, with “bones found in left shoe” written on it in Italian. Gideon told them not to worry about identifying those individually. (Distinguishing between the five metatarsals and fourteen phalanges of the human foot—let alone telling left from right, and distinguishing the metatarsals of the foot from the metacarpals of the hand—took a lot more than a few hours’ training.) There were also a lot of broken fragments, most of which the group had correctly identified as crumbling chunks of vertebrae.

  “How’d we do?” they wanted to know.

  “You did a good job,” Gideon said, surveying the result.

  “You mean we even got the ribs right? Amazing.”

  “Don’t be amazed. I said ‘good,’ not ‘perfect.’ You didn’t get them all.” He did some deft, rapid rearranging while he spoke. “This goes here, this goes here, this goes . . . here. And you got the clavicle upside down and backward—and on the wrong side. It goes here, like this. And the fibulas are on the wrong sides too. But look,” he said, responding to the grumbles and the accusatory Didn’t I tell you thats that fluttered around the group, “you’re cops, not anthropologists. No reason for you to know all that. I don’t care if you can’t tell a right clavicle from a left clavicle or which side goes up, I’d just like you to be able to say that’s what it is when you see one lying out in the woods—a clavicle, a human clavicle, and not some bone from a rabbit or a fox. The forensic specialists can take it from there. So I’m telling you: you did well.”

  A final look at the arrangement and a nod of approval. “Okay, we know this is a female because Rocco told us so yesterday. But you should be able to tell even without that. Anyone care to tell me how? We talked about it in yesterday’s session.”

  Among others, John raised his hand, but Gideon called on a ruddy-cheeked Swiss oberstleutnant whose hand had shot up before the question had been finished. Helmut Waldbaum was a good, eager student, but his English, while more than sufficient for him to understand things, was close to impenetrable.

  He grinned when Gideon called on him. “Za ghrule oaff tzoom,” he said proudly.

  Gideon, who had gotten used to the accent, nodded. “Right. The rule of thumb.”

  This referred to the fastest and simplest approach to sexing a skeleton, and a fairly reliable one, although not so reliable as was once thought. What you did was to place your thumb—or imagine placing your thumb—into the sciatic notch, the indentation that separated the ilium of the pelvis from the pubis (the upper from the lower half). If it was so narrow that the fit was snug, then it was a male you were looking at. But a female’s sciatic notch was wider, with plenty of wiggle room. Often you could fit two fingers into the notch.

  “Now here’s something interesting to think about: why would this particular difference between the sexes exist? And once again, natural selection provides the answer. Since childbearing requires more of a bowl-shaped container for the growing fetus, the biomechanical forces of evolutionary development . . .” He caught himself with a laugh. “There I go again. Strike that from the record. Let’s move on.”

  He turned the skull upside down again so the bottom faced up. They found themselves looking at a caved-in skull base. A good third of it—much of the rear half—had been thrust a half inch inward (upward in a person standing erect), cracking a ragged-edged disk of bone two to three inches in diameter. In the center of the disk, as in the center of a CD, was a smooth-rimmed hole, the foramen magnum, the opening through which the spinal cord emerges from the brain.

  “Is this another depressed fracture?” someone asked, fingering the collapsed bone. “Only this one goes the right way, pushed in, not out.”

  “Right,” Gideon said.

  “But that’s huge,” Rocco said. “What the hell caused that?”

  “You don’t know?” Gideon asked.

  “No, I don’t,” Rocco said defensively. “Look, I never actually saw the skull before, all cleaned up like this.”

  “But your medico’s report didn’t say?”

  Rocco shrugged. “It said a lot of the bones were busted. Was I supposed to memorize them or something?”

  “Hey, relax, Rocco. I just thought he might have made a special point about it.”

  “Well, he didn’t.”

  “Then he missed something pretty significant,” Gideon said, laying the skull back on the table. “This is what is known as a basilar ring fracture. It’s not very common, and it tells us something important about what exactly happened here.”

  “What?” asked someone.

  “Well, let me give you a chance to figure the whole thing out for yourselves first. It’d be a better exercise if we didn’t know what the circumstances were and what had actually happened, but Rocco’s already told us, so—”

  “No, he told us what the Carabinieri concluded had happened,” somebody said archly. “That’s a different thing.”

  Rocco pulled a face. “Thanks a lot, pal.”

  “Actually, that’s a good way to look at this whole exercise, if you like,” Gideon said. “Your job is to review the police findings on these bones and see if you agree or disagree. Murder-suicide, both deaths by gunshot, and so on—did they get it right? And just concentrate on the trauma, don’t worry about the other things we’ve talked about—race, age, occupational indicators, height—just the trauma. I’ll give you”—he looked at his watch—“twenty minutes, plus another five minutes to write up your report on the dry-marker board over there.”

  “What if we all don’t agree?” someone asked.

  “Then indicate that in the report. Okay, folks, the clock is running. Better get on with it.”

  While John and the others went to work, Gideon and Rocco sat on stools next to the other table, with Rocco back in a good mood and telling dumb-carabinieri jokes. Apparently there was no shortage of them.

  “So this village station commander—a maresciallo, a marshal—is sitting in his car, and he calls one of his carabinieri over. ‘Martino, take a look at my rear turn lights, will you, and tell me if they’re working right.’ The carabiniere goes to the back of the car and watches, while the commander holds down the turn-indicator lever.

  “‘Yes, maresciallo,’ he says after a second, ‘they work fine. No, wait, they don’t. No, wait, they do. No, wait, they don’t. No, wait . . .’”

  Gideon smiled, which encouraged Rocco. “Why do carabinieri always work in pairs?

  “Beats me.”

  “One to read and one to write.” Rocco laughed.

  “I gather there are a lot of these?” Gideon asked.

  “Millions. In real life, though,” Rocco said, turning serious, “the Carabinieri are a pretty selective outfit with some really stiff standards. Hell, my own brother applied, but they turned him down. You know why?” He waited for Gideon to bite, but Gideon wouldn’t, so Rocco supplied the answer. “He scored too high on the intelligence test.”

  They were only a few feet from the work table, so the others had no trouble hearing them, and most grinned at the jokes every now and then. But a Carabinieri major from Rome, the highest-ranking officer there, had been glaring over his shoulder at Rocco for a while, clear
ly unamused.

  “Um, Rocco . . .” Gideon began.

  “Hey, do you know why carabinieri trousers have those red stripes down the sides? So they can find the pockets, hee-hee.”

  The major continued to glare. “Rocco, I think maybe . . .”

  “Okay, wait, this guy lives halfway up a narrow mountain road. So one day he sees this Carabinieri car driving backward up the mountain. ‘How come you’re driving backward?’ he wants to know. ‘Because we’re not sure if there’ll be a place to turn around at the top,’ they tell him. An hour later, here they come back down the mountain . . . backward again. ‘So why are you still driving backward?’ he asks. ‘Because we found a place to turn around after all.’”

  When Rocco paused to think up the next one, Gideon was finally able to break in. “Rocco, I think you might be annoying the stern, important-looking gentleman over there at the foot of the table,” he said quickly, hoping to head Rocco off.

  Rocco glanced up. “Major Grimaldi?” he whispered back. “He’s been listening? Oh Christ, that’s all I need. Come on, let’s get some fresh air. I need a smoke.”

  “Are you in trouble?” Gideon asked when they’d stepped outside into the rear parking lot and gotten under an eave to avoid the misty rain that had begun to fall. Gideon had gotten a soft drink, a limonata, from the vending machine next to the door, and he pulled back the tab and took a couple of gulps.

  Rocco, in the meantime, flipped open a box of Marlboros, pulled one out with his lips, lit up, and blew out a long breath. “Nah, not trouble, exactly. But I know Grimaldi. He’ll report it to my captain, who won’t be happy. Ah, don’t worry about it, no big deal.”

  “Carabinieri jokes are a no-no?”

  “Everything’s a no-no, Gideon, everything that doesn’t make the carabinieri look like God’s gift to the world. You know what this general told us the day we graduated from the academy?” He tucked in his chin and lowered his voice to a magisterial bass. “‘From this day forward, no longer are you Paolo, Mario, or Giovanni. You are a carabiniere. Everything you say, everything you do, is a reflection on the republic which we are honored to serve, and the glorious history of the body of which you are now a part.’ And God, did he mean it.”

  Another long pull on the Marlboro. “One time, when I was still on patrol, I was eating my lunch in the car, relaxing, noshing on a panino, you know? And this call comes in. There’s a knife fight in a bar less than a block away from where I’m sitting, and somebody’s gonna get killed. So I drop what I’m eating, jump out of the car, and run over there, and, sure enough, there are these two guys having at it, and they are seriously trying to hurt each other. I get in between them, which is when I got this”—he held out his hand, showing a thin white scar running diagonally along the heel of his palm—“and manage to get them apart. One guy was totally whacked out on something, and I had to get him down on the floor and cuffed before he calmed down. Anyway, I called it in, got them arrested, went to the hospital to get stitched up, and was back at headquarters in an hour to write up my report. What do you think I got for my trouble?”

  “Not an award, I’m guessing.”

  “A reprimand. Because why? Because I appeared in public without my cap.” He grunted a laugh. “Can you believe it? Jesus H. Christ.”

  “Rocco, I have to say—are you sure the carabinieri are a good fit for you? You don’t quite seem . . . well, cut out for the life.”

  The lieutenant was shocked. “Are you kidding me? I love the corps. It’s fantastic. I’m proud to be on it. It’s just that they can be a little . . . tight-assed sometimes, about things that seem pretty petty to me. I guess my problem is that I’m a carabiniere, yeah, but underneath, I’m still Rocco. Unfortunately.”

  A few moments passed with Gideon silent and Rocco morosely smoking away.

  “We’d better get back in, I think,” Gideon said. “They should be finished by now.”

  Rocco nodded, took another pull, flipped the cigarette away, and they headed back. “I guess I’m just going to have to learn to toe the line a little better,” he said, but as the door swung open, the edges of his mouth curled into a cherubic little smile, and he put a hand on Gideon’s forearm to stop him.

  “Hey, how many carabinieri does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

  • • •

  IN the preparation room, the others were still writing up their report on the board and arguing out the last of their differences. Gideon used the time involved to have his first uninterrupted, solitary look at the remains. He went through them slowly, turning this bone over and over in his fingers, lifting that one to his eye and scanning it at an angle, the way you’d examine a pool cue to see if it were straight. By the time he was done, the report was finished, written with red marker on the glossy white board, in the exuberant, loopy script of a sergeant major from Nigeria:

  “In examining the skeletal remains presented to us for our analysis, the following traumatic injuries to the skull have been identified: a ballistic entrance wound in the center of the back of the skull, just below the occipital protuberance, and what appears to be an incomplete exit wound at the front, in the form of a ‘reverse depressed fracture.’ We believe that this GSW was the cause of the victim’s death, which was probably instantaneous.

  “Trauma to the rest of the body includes fractures of both tibias and fibulas, both femurs, both sides of the pelvis, and numerous thoracic and lumbar vertebrae. Many of these bones suffered multiple breakages. In addition, there were fractures of the bones of the left foot. These injuries are all consistent with a fall from a height. There were also many signs of animal gnawing.

  “Our findings: The victim was killed by a fatal gunshot to the head. Her body then fell some distance, sustaining much additional damage. We also attribute the basal ring fracture of the foramen magnum to this fall.

  “In conclusion, we conclude that the findings presented by Lieutenant Gardella are supported by the evidence.”

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you all,” said Rocco, taking bows all around.

  “Good job, everybody,” Gideon said. “You’ve all been working hard. Let’s take five minutes for a break. Rocco, can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “What’s up?” said Rocco as the others wandered off in twos and threes. “They did a great job, don’t you think? It took our medico two days to get it right.”

  “Well, yeah, they did a good enough job, but the thing is, they didn’t get it right. And neither did you guys. I wanted to talk to you about it before I made my comments. I wouldn’t want to make you look bad in front of them, and—”

  Rocco lifted his hand. “Don’t give it a thought, Gid. Those weren’t our findings, they were the medico’s findings. Everything I know about skeletal trauma I learned from you in the last three days. Anyway, it was the public prosecutor who made it all official. He’s the boss. We just do the grunt work.” He followed this with a sudden grin. “And I have no problem at all with making Migliorini look bad; pompous, self-important twit that he is.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “But what exactly did they get wrong? She wasn’t shot in the head?”

  “No, she was shot in the head.”

  “She didn’t fall off the cliff?”

  “No, she fell off the cliff.”

  “So then what am I missing here?” He spread his hands. “What else is there to get wrong?”

  “They’re starting to filter back in, Rocco. May as well wait till everybody’s here.”

  • • •

  GIDEON stood on one side of the table while the cops gathered in a standing half circle on the other side, a few feet back. “You did a fine job,” he began. “You only made one mistake, but it’s a zinger. A big one,” he emended, seeing from a number of frowns that zinger wasn’t in everybody’s vocabulary. “Now, you got the basics right: she was shot in the back of the head. The hole near the occipital protuberance is the entrance wound, and the defect in the forehead, that ‘reverse
depressed fracture,’ is indeed a partial exit wound. By the way, Rocco, did you find the bullet? Was it still in her skull?’

  “It was, just rattling around in there.”

  “Okay, so we can consider it definitely established that, for whatever reason—maybe it was old, maybe it was the wrong caliber for the gun, maybe the charge had gotten damp or wasn’t big enough, maybe something else—whatever, the bullet didn’t have enough oomph to make it all the way through. But since it did make it to the inside of the front of the skull, we know that it had to have passed right through her brain, back to front. All the same, I think we can safely say that it didn’t kill her.”

  A tentative hand went up; the formal, scholarly chief inspector from Gibraltar. “I certainly don’t mean to question your judgment, Professor Oliver, but I served as a paramedic in Afghanistan, so I know something about head wounds. And—no offense, sir—but a bullet that took this trajectory would necessarily destroy so much vital brain tissue that . . . well, in my belief, death would have been, well, certain . . . and instantaneous.”

  “I agree with you, Clive. And remember, a bullet destroys a lot more than what lies directly in its trajectory, because the energy it generates hollows out a cavity much wider than the bullet’s actual diameter. And the brain is the softest organ in the body, more like jelly than any other human tissue, so it pulps very easily. And then don’t forget that the bullet carries pieces of bone and tissue along with it, and that messes up things too. So yes, that bullet would have killed her, all right. And almost certainly, it would have been instantly.”

  “Hey, wait a minute, Doc,” John said. “Didn’t you just say—?”

  “I didn’t say it wouldn’t have killed her, I said it didn’t kill her.” To himself Gideon somewhat shamefacedly admitted that he was having fun. The boggling of policemen’s minds was one of the innocent little vices of the forensic set.