Marmolejo looked at him without expression.
Gideon smiled. Yes, really. But there were a few other things of interest he might be able to come up with too. Best to start with basics. He squatted next to the skeleton, elbows on his thighs, and looked at the ruined pelvis. Gingerly, with Marmolejo's permission, he used a trowel to lift some of the decayed remnants of the shorts. They stuck to the bone a moment, then popped off.
'Well, it's definitely a male,” he announced. That was simple enough. Everything about the pelvis shouted it: obtuse pubic angle, rounded ramus, rectangular sacrum, narrow sciatic notch. They should all be so easy.
Marmolejo nodded. So far so good.
Delicately, Gideon used the tip of the trowel to pick some cartilage from the pubic symphysis, the place where the right and left pelves join between the legs. Of all the surfaces on all the two hundred and six bones in the human body it is there, in that hidden and private place, that the signs of age and degeneration are most clearly and ineradicably engraved, decade by slow decade.
With the trowel held loosely in his hand he studied the narrow, rippled surface of the bone.
'Fifty years old,” he said after a few seconds. “Give or take five years.'
'Ah,” Marmolejo said, pleased. “Avelino, he was forty-seven.” He darted a sidelong look at Gideon. “Did you happen to know that?'
No, Gideon hadn't known.
Then he got down to serious work. He examined the long bones, roughly measuring a femur and a humerus against the yardstick of his own hand and forearm. With Marmolejo's approval he used his fingers to pull out some of the dirt that had lodged in the jaws, the eye sockets, and the cranium itself. He scooped out most of the dirt beneath the skull, leaving it somewhat precariously supported on a rim of debris. Each small load of dirt was placed in a separate, precisely labeled envelope for sifting by the police forensic team.
He had one of the policemen move the lamps so that the light shone horizontally across the bones, highlighting the ridges and hollows and irregularities that could tell so much, if only you knew what to look for. And then, lying prone in the dirt, propped on his elbows, he studied them, fingering the surfaces, probing them, thinking, calculating, speaking only to ask for increasingly finicky readjustments of the lamps. Twenty minutes passed. Twenty-five.
'A
After half an hour the inspector became openly restive, walking back and forth on one of the stairs; two small steps one way, pivot, two steps the other. Like a wolf in a cage. Marmolejo did not enjoy being an observer
Gideon, engrossed in a set of unusual protuberances on the mandible, hardly noticed him. There were two bumps on each side of the jaw, right on the mandibular condyles—the knobs that fit into hollows on the sides of the skull to form the hinges of the jaw. He'd found nothing similar on the rest of the skeleton, so he knew it wasn't some generalized bone condition. Just two sharp little tubercles on each condyle, one on the outside, one on the inside. Only one thing could conceivably cause them, and that was the forceful, habitual use of the external pterygoids, the inconspicuous little cheek muscles that had their insertion points right there.
Peculiar, but probably of no importance. Yet he knew those spiky little buttons would nag at him until he made sense of them. Hadn't he run across something similar before? The memory was there, but just out of reach. All right, then figure it out from scratch. What did the external pterygoids do? They were part of the chewing apparatus, of course; thick, triangular little fiber bundles that protruded the lower jaw and moved it from side to side in the complex and improbable process of human chewing. But a lifetime of ordinary chewing wouldn't produce these bumps. So what he needed to figure out was...no, wait a minute. It had been that Pittsburgh case...
Marmolejo's impatience finally got the better of him. “Well, are you able to tell me
'What?” Gideon surfaced slowly, his mind still on the tubercles. “Uh...no,” he said.
'No, you're unable to say, or no—'
'No, it's not Avelino.'
Wrong answer. Marmolejo's half-closed eyes opened briefly, then slitted again. The cigar stub jerked irritably. “Just like that? One look and the answer is no?'
Gideon glared up at him, matching irritation for irritation. If Marmolejo thought it was such a quick look he should have tried it on his elbows and belly. The back of Gideon's neck ached from keeping his head up, his left hand had fallen asleep, and when he lifted his elbows from the pebbly debris, they felt as if a set of tacks were being pushed into them. He stood up, rubbing the numb hand.
These remains, he explained crisply, were assuredly not Avelino Canul's, whatever the inspector wanted to believe. This had been a man anywhere from six feet tall to six-feet-two, judging from the quick-and-dirty measurement of the humerus and femur, and Canul wouldn't have been anywhere near that.
'I will check,” Marmolejo said. “I'm certain I have his height in my files.'
Gideon merely looked at the five-foot-tall Marmolejo. What difference did the files make? Couldn't he
Besides, he pointed out, in almost every way the skull was everything that a Mayan skull was not. The cranium wasn't wide and round—the Mayan brachycephalic norm—but long and narrow, a typical northern European dolichocephal. The cheekbones were curving, not squared; the palatal arch was V-shaped, not U-shaped; the orbits squarish and smoothly bordered, not sharp; the face as a whole was rugged and large-featured, not smooth and compact. In all, a classic Caucasoid skull, suitable for an illustration in a textbook.
And there was more—
But Marmolejo withered under the assault and lifted a resigned hand. “I submit,” he said, and even managed a small, not unfriendly smile. “I know when I am beaten.” He stared thoughtfully down at the skeleton.
'Who, then?” he murmured.
Gideon waited until the inspector's wide-set eyes swung up to meet his.
