Good Blood (14 page)

Gideon took a sip of the Vecchia Romagna-he’d developed a taste for the flinty Italian cognac on an earlier trip-which he’d poured into a bathroom glass before sitting down to return Caravale’s call, and pondered. What was this about? Did there lurk the possibility-he hardly dared allow himself to hope-that there was something doing in this for him? A forensic case to get into? A possible escape, even if temporary, from Paula Ardlee-Arbogast, Garnoth-Thoth, and the cunning EBEs?

“That depends on a lot of things, Colonel,” he said. “First of all, the environment-whether the body was indoor or outdoors-”

“Outdoors.”

“Outdoors. Okay, that speeds decomposition up. Was it buried or was it on the surface?”

“Buried.”

“Buried. All right, that slows decomposition down. Clothed or unclothed?”

“That I don’t know.”

“What kind of soil is it in, what’s the weather, what-”

“It’s here, in the soil of Piedmont; a gravel bed. The temperature’s moderate, the rainfall’s-I don’t know-light, I guess.” He waited.

“Look, Colonel,” Gideon said, getting a little impatient, “how about just telling me exactly what it is you need to know?”

“Could it turn into a skeleton in one week?”

“Highly doubtful.”

Just about flat-out impossible, but he’d learned not to commit himself, especially on the basis of someone else’s description of skeletal remains. Skeletonization was tricky business, depending on a lot of variables, many of which were imperfectly understood. Once he’d exhumed a Civil War burial, and the corpse had looked (and smelled) as if it had died the week before. Another time he read a police report’s description of a defleshed shoulder girdle that had been fished out of Puget Sound and recklessly said (this was before he’d learned not to commit himself) that it had been in the water a week to ten days. The body had gone in the night before.

“What about eight days?” Caravale asked.

Gideon’s interest quickened. He did a quick calculation. “Eight days, did you say?” Let me take a wild guess here.

“Colonel, do you think you might have found the de Grazia boy, is that it?”

Caravale let loose a long, troubled sigh. “De Grazia paid the ransom yesterday. His son was supposed to be released right away. He hasn’t shown up yet. And now, this afternoon, two local workmen come upon some human bones buried in a shallow grave. So, yes, the thought that it just might be Achille de Grazia has crossed my mind.”

There was almost no chance that the skeletonized body could be that of Achille de Grazia, but bones were bones, and he could surely help. Caravale might not be the most amenable colleague in the world, but he was better than Paula Ardlee-Arbogast. “I doubt it very much, but would you like me to look at them? I’d be happy to.”

Caravale hesitated, reluctant to ask for more assistance. “I wouldn’t want to take you away from your travel group,” he said gruffly.

“That’s all right,” Gideon said. “I don’t mind at all. Are we talking about tomorrow? I could do it tomorrow.” Say yes.

“Tomorrow?” There was another pause, and then the colonel took the plunge. “Tomorrow morning would be excellent, Professor. Perhaps I could pick you up at seven? Or even at six, if you don’t mind getting up early. I put off the crime-scene search until daylight, so we sealed the site and left things as they are for the night, under guard, of course, but I’d like to get at it as early as possible.”

“Six is fine,” Gideon said. “Six is perfect.”

He hung up the phone and stood looking out the window, at the iron-stained stone bellower of the old church across Via Cavour, and at the lake, rose-colored in the day’s last light, and at the soft green mountains beyond. Another rich, slow sip of cognac slid warmly down.

Things were looking up.

How many times, Gideon mused, had he been part of this slow, solemn scenario? A quiet forest in the early morning with threads of fog still drifting among the trees, and the dew shimmering on spiders’ webs that had been woven during the night, and the moist fragrance of the woods at its sweetest. And wandering over the leaf-littered forest floor, heads down, a silent group of half-a-dozen intent men, photographing, drawing, taking notes, or kneeling with tweezers to stuff some tiny crumb-a single dull black tooth from a comb, a cigarette smoked down to the filter, a plastic nubbin from some unknown gadget-into a plastic envelope or a paper bag. Considering that he had started his career with dreams of making some small but important theoretical contribution to the study of protohominid locomotion, it was a hell of a thing to be so intimately familiar with.

Life was funny.

They had arrived here, on the gentle lower slopes of Mount Zeda, at 6:30 A.M., both men dressed in short-sleeved knit shirts and jeans. Caravale had pulled his unmarked black Fiat up behind a slab-sided crime-scene-investigation van parked at the side of a dirt road that ran through a broad, winding grove of gnarled oaks, laurels, cypresses, and olive trees. The trees had been there a long time, probably for centuries, but there was a spanking new, walled housing development-red-tile-roofed condominiums, tennis courts, swimming pool-off to the left, among rolling meadows, and another one being built upslope around a golf course. The twenty-first century had come to Mount Zeda.

For a few minutes they remained in the car, finishing the cappuccinos they’d picked up in Intra and observing the disciplined crime-scene crew go about their jobs.

“So then, are you ready?” Caravale asked, crumpling his empty cup.

“Any time.”

Getting out of the car, Caravale returned the waves of the crew and asked a quick question of the only man in uniform, a sergeant. “Anything?”

The answer was one of those minimalist but multifunction Italianate shrugs that subtly involves not only the shoulders, neck, and hands, but eyebrows, eyes, mouth, and chin as well: Nothing important so far, but then we just got started and we’re still looking, and with a little luck, who knows what we’ll find-maybe nothing, maybe something.

Caravale gave him an almost equally complex, wrist-rolling wave of the hand in return: Go ahead, keep on with what you were doing, I’ll be around for a while. I’ll check with you later.

The colonel had described the physical situation to Gideon on the drive, but spatial relations in the abstract had never been Gideon’s forte, and he hadn’t really grasped it until this moment. Now he saw that a few yards ahead of them there was a turnoff from the road, over a drainage ditch that paralleled the road, and onto a small graveled parking or turnaround area. Through the bottom of the turnoff ran a culvert to allow the water to continue on its way down the ditch. The turnoff itself consisted simply of a few tons of gravel that had been dumped into the ditch over the ten- or twelve-foot length of culvert. The gravel had then been leveled to a three-foot height, effectively covering the pipe, bridging the four-foot-wide, three-foot-deep ditch, and providing a surface on which vehicles could cross. A second length of drainage pipe lay in the parking area, alongside the culvert.

The bones had been discovered late the previous afternoon, by workmen from Aurora Costruzioni, Vincenzo de Grazia’s company, which had acquired the land twenty years ago and was responsible for the nearby developments. One of the workers, using a spade to dig a channel for a second culvert pipe, had jammed it against something under the surface, had jerked the spade out, and had partly plucked out a human pelvis-or so the police physician who had been called to the site had determined. Gideon, remembering Caravale’s earlier story about the bone-identification skills of local physicians, was reserving judgment but hoping it was a different physician. At the moment, the remains in question were out of sight, at the far edge of the turnoff, where the gravel slanted down and away.

“I see you have your men working everyplace but in the gravel itself. Have they already gone over that?”

“No,” Caravale said. “Not where the remains are. I thought it would be best to leave that untouched for you.”

It was the answer he’d wanted. “Good.”

“I looked you up on the Web,” Caravale said abruptly. “I entered your name in Google.”

“And?”

“And I found one hundred forty-four references. Your friend was right, you are well known. And highly regarded.”

Gideon smiled. “Well…”

“Look, I know I was pretty rude the other day,” Caravale said, speaking fast, “and I feel bad about it. It was only that I had a lot on my mind, and besides, I didn’t think you were really… Well, the thing is, I really appreciate your agreeing to help us out here.” He hesitated a second, then offered his hand.

Handsomely done, thought Gideon. “There’s absolutely nothing to apologize for,” he said, taking Caravale’s hand. “I guess I was a little brusque myself. And believe me, Colonel, you have no idea how glad I am to be here.”

“Well, good. Where are you from, Professor?”

“The Seattle area, Colonel.”

“Good, what do you say we dispense with the Colonel-Professor routine? I don’t know about Seattle, but in New Haven we’re pretty informal. My name’s Tullio.”

The remains were at the upstream end of the culvert, in a depression that had been gouged out of the gravel slope angling down from the leveled surface of the turnoff to the floor of the ditch. All that was visible was the pelvic girdle-the hip joint-and half of the right femur, the thigh bone. The body was apparently lying on its back, with the legs bent and twisted sharply to the left, so that the right hip and femur were closest to the surface. The rest of the body-assuming there was a “rest”-was lying on its left side, still covered by more than a foot of gravel.

With an “it’s all yours” wave, Caravale went to check on his crew, for which Gideon, who preferred to work without an audience, was grateful. He believed himself to be disciplined and objective when it came to drawing conclusions, but he knew that his manner of working-the process by which he found his way to his conclusions-was often intuitive and based on hard-to-quantify judgments, which made it cumbersome and sometimes impossible to explain to a lay observer what it was he was doing and why.

That was one reason he was disposed toward working in private. The other was that he liked to talk to himself when he examined a skeleton, and the things he muttered tended to be pretty pedestrian: “Hmm, what’s this?” Or “Now what do you suppose could have caused that?” Or “Say now, look at this.” So with people around he kept his mouth shut, which cramped his style.

“Well, now, let’s see what we have here,” he said, settling down to his first cursory survey. He didn’t touch the bones, but simply squatted on his haunches to look at them.

The right innominate bone-that is, the right half of the pelvis-had apparently been the piece that had gotten caught by the spade, so that the rest of the pelvis had been tugged out of position, pulling the adjacent bones with them. Thus, the upper ends of both femurs, the sacrum, the coccyx, and the lowest two lumbar vertebrae were also partly exposed. Except for some scraps of dried ligament at the articular surfaces, there was no soft tissue to be seen. This, as far as Gideon was concerned, was a welcome sign. It meant that there was unlikely to be soft tissue-flesh, fat, decomposing organs-to contend with anywhere else on the body. The sacroiliac and sacrolumbar ligaments were just about the hardiest tissues in the body, other than the bones themselves. If they were dried up and essentially gone, he probably wasn’t going to have to be scraping nasty stuff off the bones anywhere else.

That, he told himself, would save time, always a consideration to a professional. But he knew full well that time wasn’t the main issue for him. As forensic anthropologists went, Gideon was among the more squeamish. After all these years, “wet” remains could still make his stomach churn. He hated handling them; the looks, the stench, the greasy feel of them. The older, the drier, and the less smelly a skeleton, the happier he was. In his opinion, hundred-thousand-year-old burials were perfect, but that wasn’t a luxury that often came his way in forensic cases.

He leaned a little closer to the bones. The right iliac blade-the thinnest part-of the innominate had been snapped clear through at its narrowest point, through the base of the sciatic notch, just above the acetabulum, the socket into which the head of the femur inserts, but that had obviously happened only a short time ago, long, long after the body had been interred. Most of the skeleton was an ashy gray (bones eventually took on the color of their environment), with ugly black and rust-colored stains and splotches on it. If the fracture had occurred at or before the time of death, its edges would have looked like the rest of the skeleton. Instead, they were a fresh yellow-white, the normal color of bones that haven’t been subjected to the bursting and decomposition of organs and blood vessels, or exposed to the weathering of time. So: no forensic significance.

A ragged, stained ribbon of fabric about an inch wide lay across the sacrum, apparently circling around under it. This, he was fairly certain, was the waistband of a pair of underpants. Cotton underwear on a decomposing corpse was quickly soaked through with body fluids and decayed rapidly, soon disappearing completely in most cases. But waistbands, usually being made of synthetic elastomers, didn’t. There were also some shreds of faded blue cotton fabric-trousers or shorts, probably-mixed in with the bones and, in places, stuck to them.

After a couple of minutes of just looking, he reached out and ran his finger gently over the rim of the fifth lumbar-the lowest and largest vertebra in the spinal column, the one just above the sacrum-and then straightened up, wincing at the increasingly familiar creaks and pops in his knees. His own articular surfaces were beginning to show their age.

“Well,” he murmured, “it’s not a rabbit, that’s for sure.”

It also wasn’t Achille de Grazia.