Dying on the Vine

And no bidet-like conveniences for flushing away the bodily flu- ids and other nastinesses that came out of corpses. None of the other medieval-torture-chamber implements he’d expected either—the tongs, the knives, the alarming hypodermics. Of course—he’d forgotten: Italians by and large didn’t practice embalming. Rooms like this were used for little more than a washup, a little cosmetic work if necessary, and a proper fitting-out for viewing at the memorial, which usually took place within a couple of days, for obvious reasons.

There were two standard zinc work tables in the room, though, on one of which Cippollini placed the remains, enclosed in a three-foot-long box of heavy cardboard; a child’s cremation container, Gideon assumed.

“Let’s get at it,” he said when Cippollini reluctantly left them to it. “Rocco, this is your treat, so if you’ll remove the bones one by one, I’d like everyone to work together getting them laid out as near as possible to their anatomical relationship. And I’ll just watch from back here and keep my mouth shut.”

“Don’t bet on it,” muttered a big Hawaiian with an affable, easy laugh.

“Hey, when I say something, you can take it straight to the bank,” Gideon said, smiling back.

John Lau was his closest friend, an FBI special agent out of the Seattle field office. They had worked together more than once, and the two of them with their wives got together regularly back home. John had taken a similar seminar from Gideon years ago, when the symposium had convened in St. Malo, France, but science, as does everything else, changes with time, and he, like two of the other attendees, was back for a refresher. Gideon and John had both come with their wives and had been seeing Florence together in their off-time, so it had been as much pleasure as work. And then when the seminar ended the following day, the four of them were off to a winery out in the Tuscan countryside, where the two women had signed up for a five-day cooking class.

Rocco had barely gotten the skull out of the box when John was proved right. “Whoa, hold it, what do we have here?” Gideon exclaimed.

“Ha,” observed John in quiet triumph.

Rocco handed over the skull, and Gideon peered hard at the frontal bone, running his fingers over an area in the center of the forehead, where the hairline would be on a living person. “Well, this is something you don’t see every day,” he murmured.

“Oh, I can tell you what that is,” Rocco said. “We figured that out pretty fast.”

“I’m sure you can, but let’s see what the rest of us come up with, okay? Anybody got a flashlight?”

Someone handed over a penlight attached to a key chain, and Gideon stuck it in the opening at the base of the skull to light up the interior. “Huh,” he said, “that’s what I thought. Interesting.” He handed back the penlight, turned the skull right side up, and held it in both hands just above the tabletop so that the area he’d been so interested in was uppermost. At that spot there was a sort of escarpment; an inch-long ridge of bone rising from the flat, curving plateau of the skull, looking for all the world as if there had been an eruption below the surface.

“Ideas, anybody? What do you suppose this could be?”

“Would it be a genetic thing?” someone asked.

“Nope.”

“Some kind of bone disease?

“Nope.”

“Brain disease?” This from John.

“Uh-uh.”

“Some kind of trauma?”

“Good man. Trauma it is; blunt trauma. What we have here, you see, is an unusual kind of depressed fracture—what I think of as a reverse depressed fracture.” He explained that a depressed fracture was a fairly common kind of cranial injury that jams a segment of bone inward, so there is (usually) a sharply defined indentation in the bone. For example, a blow with a ball-peen hammer can leave a dent the exact shape and size of the hammer’s ball, sometimes even reproducing its irregularities closely enough to permit identification of the specific weapon. The area on the underside of the dent, of course, is necessarily forced inward, frequently causing grave damage to the brain.

“You’re losing me, professor,” someone said. “This part here”—the speaker fingered the ridge—“isn’t dented in, it’s sticking up.”

“Exactly,” Gideon replied. “Which is why I call it a depressed fracture in reverse—the force came from inside the head and pushed outward.”

This produced the expected murmurs of incredulity. “How can that be?” someone said.

“Ah,” said Gideon, “that is for me to know and you to find out—shut up, Rocco—which I have no doubt that you will do in the next few minutes. But for the moment, go ahead and continue laying out the bones. I’ll just stand here and keep perfectly quiet.” He leveled a quick forefinger at John as his friend opened his mouth to speak. “Watch it.”

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.”