Curses!

He needn't have worried. Gideon wasn't about to touch it, for Dr. Plumm was very wrong—this was definitely not in his line of work, and he didn't find it of interest at all; not in the way the physician had meant. Yes, Gideon did forensic consulting and, yes, he frequently enjoyed his work for the FBI. But he was an anthropologist, a bone man, and the older and the browner the bones were, the better. Body fluids, brain tissue, and torn flesh were things he was constitutionally averse to, and the farther he could stay away from them the better.

'If it's still wet,” he'd once told the FBI's John Lau, “call somebody else, will you?” Not that the FBI always obliged.

Stan Ard's head was still wet, and while Gideon didn't react the way he had the first time he'd been called in to look at a corpse with a massive cranial wound (he'd thrown up into a stainless-steel sink in San Francisco's Hall of Justice, scandalizing the medical examiner's staff), his stomach did turn queasily over.

'Well, I'm not a pathologist or a medical doctor, you know, Dr. Plumm. I'm an anthropologist. I don't really —'

'But you're the Skeleton Detective,” Plumm replied, as if that said it all. “I've never been called upon to do this before, you see—to be the physician on the scene of a murder—and of course it's terrifically exciting, but I—well, there are more police on their way from Merida, and they've asked for my report, but I'm afraid I may have missed something that would be terribly obvious to someone with experience. I was hoping you might point out any oversights.'

He looked hopefully at Gideon with his mild, friendly eyes. His mustache was so meticulously trimmed it might have been two strips of white felt, neatly pasted on. “I should hate to look like a fool before the police.'

Gideon relented. “I'd be glad to help if I can, Doctor.'

Plumm relaxed visibly. “Well. I've made an examination, of course, although I thought I shouldn't touch anything before the police arrive. That's the proper drill, isn't it?'

'Right.'

'Right, then. Of course, with a wound like that there was no question of resuscitation. The man's dead as mutton.” He winced. “Oh, I am sorry. He was a friend of yours, wasn't he?'

'An acquaintance. I barely knew him.'

Gideon made himself look at Ard again. Nowadays it wasn't so much the gore, the simple physical nastiness, that made his insides twist. Despite himself, he'd seen enough to get past that. But not enough to do what a seasoned homicide investigator could do: look at murder victims and see nothing but clues, diagnostic indicators, evidential data. For bones, yes; for bodies, no. To Gideon, the overwhelming fact, the only fact for the first few moments, was always that of murder itself; of willful, blood-soaked violence; of one person's actually doing this to another; of the terrible penetrability of skin, the brittleness of bone. It was always pathetic, always sordid, always horrible.

But Plumm had more experience of human penetrability, if not of murder. For him Ard was just another case, but of more than usual interest. “Well,” he said, and rubbed his dry, clean hands together, let me tell you what I've come up with, and you tell me where I've gone wrong, how's that?'

'That's fine,” Gideon said, “but I'm sure you haven't gone wrong.'

Overhead a helicopter was clattering its way toward the Chichen Itza landing pad. Plumm peered up at it. “The police.'

Together they knelt at the side of the body.

'No toque,' growled the guard.

'Gracias, senor, Comprendemos,' Plumm replied politely. “Now,” he said, all business, “he must have been killed very shortly before he was found.” He pointed to Ard's poor, beefy, flaccid fingers. “There's no sign of rigor yet. There's no lividity yet, either, and the blood is still quite liquid. Of course, Lord knows evaporation takes forever in this climate, but I feel reasonably safe in saying he hasn't been dead more than two hours. More likely only one.'

He looked at Gideon. “Er, what do you think?'

'You're the expert, but it sounds right to me.'

Plumm permitted himself a little gratified quirk of the lips. “Well, then, let's get on to the cause of death. Not much doubt as to that, is there, even if no one seems to have heard the report. A gunshot wound to the head.'

No, there wasn't much doubt as to that. Ard's forehead had literally exploded. Just below the hairline there was a dreadful, ragged wound nearly in the shape of a star, with curling petals of flesh peeling outward from its red center.

Gideon turned his eyes away with a shudder. Maybe he'd never get used to this.

'Now,” Plumm said with a mixture of reticence and enthusiasm, “what we seem to have here is an exit wound. Classic stellate pattern. The entrance must be in the back of the head, probably near the occiput, where we can't see it. But you can see that quite a bit of blood has soaked into the ground under his neck.'

He peeked at Gideon from under a neat white eyebrow. “How am I doing, Professor?'

'Makes sense to me.'

Plumm's pink cheeks shone with pleasure. “May I give you my, er, reconstruction of events?'

Gideon nodded. “I'd like to hear it.'

'Well, at first I was misled by the subcutaneous hemorrhaging in the orbits.” He pointed to Ard's eyes. The upper lids were blue, swollen sacks, as dark and shiny as little plastic trash bags. “I assumed he'd been confronted here on the path and there'd been a terrific fight; hence the black eyes. But'—he waved at the surrounding ground—'there's no sign at all of a struggle, at least none that I can see. And no other facial damage of the sort you'd expect, although it's impossible to say for sure until he's been cleaned up. So I had to conclude there was no fight, and the orbital hemorrhaging happened when his head hit the ground. He must have struck it quite hard. Does that sound plausible?'

'I guess so,” Gideon said slowly, but something was bothering him now. He made himself look at the bullet