Good Blood (21 page)

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Gideon said. “My first thought was that it had to be about those bones, that somebody didn’t want me to examine them. But the more I thought about it, the less sense I could make out of it.”

“Why?”

“Because I could understand it if the idea was to keep us from finding out that Domenico de Grazia didn’t drown in the lake after all, but that somebody killed him and then hid his body in a culvert on Mount Zeda. But we already knew it was Domenico, so what would the point be-unless this somebody who tried to strangle me didn’t know you’d gone ahead and made the identification?”

“Possible, but doubtful. It would mean he would have had to be aware that the remains had been found, but not that they’d been identified. Who could that be? The de Grazia people-they’re the only ones we told, and they all know it’s Domenico. Who else would know anything about it?”

“Well, then, I don’t know what the point was.” He thought for a few seconds. “I haven’t found anything that indicates the cause of death yet. Maybe somebody doesn’t want us to know how he died, and thinks I might come up with it?”

“But why wouldn’t they want us to know? Knife, club, axe… what difference does it make? Why would someone commit murder to prevent its being known?”

“I already said I don’t know,” said Gideon with some annoyance. Caravale was holding something back. “Twice. Let’s hear your theory.”

Caravale tipped his chair back and folded his hands in front of his belt. “I don’t know either. But I think you might have it right.” He paused. “Oh. I meant to tell you. They tried to steal your bones last night.”

“Uh… come again?”

“At three o’clock in the morning. Someone tried to break into the morgue. When the Polizia Municipale showed up, he ran off. But he’d been trying to force the door of the room where Domenico’s bones were being kept. And there was nothing else in there but some linens.”

“So first they tried to get the bones,” Gideon said slowly. “And when that didn’t work, they came after me.”

“It looks that way.”

“Then that’s why the attempt on me was so… so crude, so risky-I mean, coming up behind a guy in a public park and choking him? Not exactly brilliantly planned. But they were running out of time, they’d already failed to get the bones, and I was going to examine them in a couple of hours. They were desperate. So they hung around the hotel waiting for me to come out, and… well, there it is.” Thoughtfully, he finished the last of his cooling, grainy coffee and took a sip from the glass of water that had been brought with it.

“Yes, there it is.” Caravale slapped the table with the palm of his hand and got briskly out of his chair. “If you’re up to it, let’s get to them, then.”

Gideon, whose thoughts had been straying, looked up at him. “To what?”

“The bones. Let’s see what it is they don’t want you to find out.”

Domenico de Grazia’s remains were no longer at the hospital. After the attempted break-in, Caravale had ordered them brought to carabinieri headquarters, where they had been placed in the evidence room, a cryptlike vault deep within the building, far from any windows; a blockhouse within a blockhouse, with one wall consisting of a steel-barred grille, like the door to a cell. Two of the other concrete-block walls were faced, floor to ceiling, with wooden pigeon holes in which there were tagged items in bags or boxes. Against the remaining wall was a chipped, stained, Formica-topped table. In the corner, standing on end, was a tagged crossbow, along with other objects-a mangled tire rim, a music stand, a kitchen stepladder-too large for the pigeon holes. It was, Caravale told him, probably the most secure room in the city of Stresa.

The bones were in two cardboard cartons and a large paper bag that had been laid on the table. Whoever had put them in had apparently used size as his sole criterion for sorting. The big bones-the cranium, pelvic bones, and arm and leg bones-were in a printer-paper box; the medium-sized bones-the mandible, ribs, vertebrae, scapulas, clavicles, and sternum-were in a canned mushroom carton; and the small ones-the wickedly irregular, tiny, exasperating-to-sort bones of the hands and feet, all one hundred six or so of them (more than half the body’s bones were in the hands and feet)-were in the bag, along with a few loose teeth. If the good Corporal Fasoli had really gone to the trouble of arranging them anatomically, it had all gone to waste.

But at least they were clean. “He did a good job, your Corporal Fasoli,” Gideon said, beginning to get them out onto the table. The bones showed the usual unappetizing stains of blood, mold, earth, and body fluids-it would have taken bleach to get them out, and there really wasn’t any good reason for doing that (Gideon’s aesthetic sensitivities weren’t good enough reasons)-but the clotted dirt and the dried remnants of ligaments, tendons, and who-knows-what were pretty much gone.

He squinted up at the ceiling lights, four long neon tubes behind pebbled, translucent sheets of plastic.

“Something wrong?” Caravale asked.

“The light’s awfully flat. I need something that will cast sharper shadows, bring out texture. A desk lamp would do if it’s bright enough. Maybe there’s a goose-necked one somewhere that I could use? Oh, and a good magnifying glass?”

“Goose-necked?” It was an unfamiliar term to him, but when Gideon demonstrated with his hands, he nodded and moved toward the open door. “Give me two minutes.”

“Okay, yeah,” Gideon said, already absorbed in gingerly removing the mortal remains of Domenico de Grazia from their containers. Ordinarily, the next task would have been to lay the bones out anatomically, every single one of them, including those tricky hand and foot bones, but this wasn’t an ordinary case, and he was eager to get to the crucial question: Was there anything here that could shed light on old Domenico’s death? What Gideon did, therefore, was to separate the bones he wanted to look at first, the ones most likely to hold clues to the cause of death: the skull, for obvious reasons; the ribs, for injuries that might indicate damage to internal organs; and the metacarpals and phalanges of the hands, for nicks or small fractures that might have come from clutching at a blade in self-defense or warding off a blow.

The skull was first. The shriveled husk of brain still lay within. For forensic purposes, it was useless. He lifted it out with two fingers and placed it in a clean sack, to eventually go back to the family with the bones.

A cursory examination of the cranium showed nothing. Unquestionably, the broken parietal and maxilla were recent damage. But sometimes new injuries could cover the signs of old ones, so he went over the broken areas with care. Still nothing. As for the loose teeth in the bag-an upper incisor and first molar-the sharp-edged, unbroken sockets from which they’d come showed that they’d fallen out long after death, a normal occurrence as the soft tissue holding them in place shrank and disappeared. There were four other teeth missing as well, but they had come out decades before death; their sockets barely existed now, the bone having been slowly reabsorbed over the years. There seemed to be nothing else, no signs of-

“Gideon?”

He jumped. Caravale was standing behind him with a goose-necked desk lamp in one hand and a rectangular magnifying lens with a built-in light in the other. “Will these do?”

“They’ll do fine, thanks.”

“It’s all right if I watch?”

“Sure, stay.” Why not, it wouldn’t kill him not to talk to himself for a while.

Gideon plugged in the lamp and set it up on the table, adjusting its neck so it cast a sidewise light that would emphasize textural irregularities-depressions, cracks, nicks, anything. Then, using the magnifying glass, but without flicking on its bulb (a direct light would only flatten everything out again), he began going over the skull one more time.

Meanwhile Caravale, whom Gideon hadn’t seen smoke before, opened a packet of Toscano cigars, pulled out one black, twisted stick, snipped it in two with a tiny pair of blunt-edged scissors he produced from somewhere, and put one of the evil-looking halves back in the packet.

“For later,” he said. “One a day, half in the morning, half in the afternoon.” He lit up-it smelled as bad as it looked-leaned against the grille, and watched; asking nothing, saying nothing.

Gideon worked steadily and silently, pulling over a stool when he got tired of bending over. There was nothing useful on the cranium, nothing on the mandible. The metacarpals and phalanges of the hands showed an old, healed fracture of the right fifth metacarpal and plenty of arthritis, but nothing else. After twenty intent, focused minutes he straightened up, stretched, and massaged the back of his neck. Caravale, who had left without his noticing, came back with a couple of cold bottles of Brio. Gideon accepted the quinine-flavored soft drink gratefully, taking a couple of long gulps and then turning to the ribs, examining them one at a time.

Ten minutes passed before he found anything. “Well, well,” he said, separating one rib from the rest and laying it aside.

Caravale came closer, leaned on the table. “What?”

Gideon motioned for him to wait another minute, which Caravale obediently did. Another ten minutes passed. “Ah, so,” Gideon said with satisfaction. A second rib was separated from the others.

He turned to Caravale, holding up a rib in each hand like a couple of batons. “Success. Got a cause of death for you.”

“This is the seventh rib, right side,” Gideon said. “And this is the vertebral end of it, the end in back, where it connects to the spinal column.”

“I never knew you could tell one rib from another. They all look the same to me.”

“If you have them all, it’s easy; you compare the relative lengths and the shapes of the arcs. But there are plenty of other differences too. See, here there are variations in the articular facets and tubercles of the first, second, tenth-”

With a raised palm, Caravale warded him off. “Please. I’ll take your word for it.”

“Well, you asked me.”

“And I deeply regret it, I assure you. Continue, please.”

Coming out of Caravale’s porky, beetle-browed face as it did, it made Gideon laugh. “Okay, I won’t try to educate you. Now take a look at the top side of the rib-this is the top side-near the back end. This is the back end. Do you see the-”

“This little sliver, coming out of the bone?”

“That’s right. That’s a knife cut.”

Caravale adjusted the lamp and bent interestedly over the rib. “It’s like a shaving, like what you get when you’re whittling a piece of wood.”

“That’s just what it is. When bone is green-when it’s alive-it’s soft, and if a knife slices into it at a shallow angle, a sliver of bone is likely to curl away from it. Like this. Once bone dries, it doesn’t happen. Try to cut it with a knife after it’s dry and the piece would just chip off.”

“Ah.” Caravale absently pulled out and lit the half-cigar he’d put away for the afternoon. “And this one small cut, this cut you can hardly see without the lens-this proves he was stabbed to death?” He was thinking ahead, to the presentation of evidence in a court of law, and he had his doubts.

“There’s more, Tullio.” He pulled the other rib into the circle of brightest light and pointed with a ballpoint pen. “This nick? That’s also a knife cut.”

“Is it?” He scrutinized it with the magnifying glass. “But it’s completely different. There’s no sliver. This is more like a, like a-”

“It’s more like a gouge. Which is what it is. It’s not a sharp slice, it’s a relatively blunt, V-shaped notch. If you use the glass again, you can see where the fibers at the edges have been mashed down into it.”

Caravale shrugged. He was willing to take Gideon’s word for that too. Smoking, he studied the gouge, “It’s like what you’d expect from an axe, or from an extremely dull knife…”

“Yes.”

“But the other wound is from a sharp blade.”

“Yes.”

“So… two different weapons?” He looked confused, as well he might.

“No, no, no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to mislead you. See, this one-wait, it’d be easier to show you. Is there a kitchen in this place?”

“A-? Yes, just down the hall there.”

“Okay, don’t go away.”

In the kitchen he startled the cook by barging in, saying he needed to borrow something, and snatching an eight-inch chef’s knife from the knife block. The frightened cook was looking mutely around for help when Corporal Fasoli, who was having a cup of coffee and a pastry, called through the opening from the dining room: “It’s all right, he’s with the colonel. He’s harmless.”

The cook recovered himself as Gideon was on his way out. “Just make sure you bring it back,” he called after him, brandishing a spatula to show he meant it.

When he returned to the evidence room, Gideon laid the seventh rib on the table, right side up, so the curling slice-mark was on top. With care, he slipped the knife blade gently into the slice, under the shaving of bone. At an angle of about thirty degrees, the fit was perfect. The knife remained propped there without the need for additional support.

“Now, this other bone, that’s the sixth rib, the one right above, and the V-shaped gouge, as you see, is in the bottom of it, the underside. If I place it in position above the seventh and lower it. ..”

“The gouge was made by the back, the spine, of the knife!” Caravale exclaimed on seeing the snug fit. “A single weapon, a single thrust!”

“Exactly. It’s V-shaped, not square, you see, even though the spine of the knife is square, because it went in at an angle. See, a single sharp weapon can make a lot of different-shaped wounds depending on the way it goes in, or how far it penetrates, or whether it was twisted in a manner that-” He realized he was on the verge of lecturing again and caught himself. “Anyway, with the blade going in like that”-he gestured at the knife and the two ribs, locked together in a circle of light like some grisly museum exhibit-“the point couldn’t have missed penetrating the left atrium of the heart. Death inside of a minute, probably sooner. What? Is something bothering you?”