Twenty Blue Devils

Chapter 22

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As expected, the bones were waiting for him on a gurney in the autopsy room. The room, however, was already in use.

'Ah, bonjour!' Dr. Viennot called merrily when Gideon entered. He had a cigar in his mouth, smoked down to a stub but unlit at the moment. “I hope you don't mind sharing the facility.'

The police physician, rubber-gloved and white-coated, was at one of the two tables, working on a fresh body with the help of a sober, elderly assistant. The body, its lower half covered by a sheet, was that of an obese, middle-aged Tahitian woman. Viennot and the assistant had obviously been at work for a while. The standard Y- shaped incision of the torso had been made, the skin flaps laid back, and the sternum and central portions of the ribs cut away and removed, along with a few overlying bits of lung, to a pan on the counter. The two men, Gideon saw, were checking for air embolism, an unlovely procedure involving the filling of the pericardial sac with water and the capturing of escaping gases. The exhaust fan over the table was humming, but even so, you didn't need your eyes to tell you that there was a newly opened human body in the room with you.

'Oh, good morning, doctor,” Gideon said. “I guess I'd better find someplace else.'

'Nonsense,” Viennot said, his slender, gloved hands wrist-deep in chest cavity. “Glad to have you. You won't bother us a bit.'

But that wasn't the issue, not by a long shot. Autopsy rooms made Gideon skittish even when they were corpseless. The tiled walls, the dully gleaming zinc-topped tables, the sinks, the drains, the basins underneath to collect fluids—all were enough to unsteady his stomach and give him the willies. The fact that a perfectly respectable and even moderately distinguished career as an evolutionary theorist had led to his seemingly always popping in and out of these dismal places was one of the continuing mysteries of his existence.

'No, no,” Gideon sang out, “that's all right, I wouldn't want to get in the way.'

And over Viennot's well-meant protests ('At least have a cup of coffee—it's over there, by the lung.') he escaped, wheeling the gurney out of the room and into the hallway. He was fortunate in finding an unused conference room just one door down, and there he spread a double layer of newspapers, a three-week-old copy of La Depeche de Tahiti, on the wooden table that took up most of the room, and laid out the bones.

The successive baths bad done their work as well as could be expected in a single night. The bones were not quite white but a sort of glaucous ivory, darker near the tips and still just a little greasy to the touch. But for all intents and purposes, they were bare, and that was what was important. As always, his first job was to lay them out in anatomical position, or as close to anatomical position as they could get. For a change, he had a complete skeleton to work with, including every last one of the 106 bones of the hand and foot. (In the adult human, more than half the bones in the body are in the hands and feet, to the great annoyance of forensic anthropologists, many of whom— Gideon among them—had a hard time keeping all the tarsals, the carpals, and the phalanges straight, particularly when it came to telling right from left.) To get them all arranged took him almost an hour, but it was work he didn't mind; it was the first step of phase two, the beginning of the hunt. And there was nothing gooey, or squelchy, or otherwise repellent about it, at least not to him. No embolisms, no lungs sitting in pans. Just nice, clean bones. Bleached bones.

When the skeleton was laid out, he changed his mind and went back to the autopsy room to bring back some coffee (Viennot was delighted to see him: “Come look at this, colleague! Did you ever see such a thrombus!'). Then he sat on a corner of the table, sipping from the cardboard cup and looking down at the neatly ordered remains of Brian Scott.

That it was Brian he no longer doubted. There was the diastema, for one thing, the blond hair for another, and now, as he could plainly see, healed fractures of the right ulna and radius, which corresponded to the right arm, broken in two places, that Brian had suffered when the jeep went off the road. Spaces between the teeth, blond hair, and healed fractures were hardly distinctive enough to serve as positive identifiers on their own, but put them all together, with everything else, and they added up to Brian—a conclusion that no one else but Gideon had questioned anyway. Besides, if it wasn't Brian, who would it be? And where was Brian? All the same, bowing to habit—and to be on the safe side—he ran through a quick evaluation of race, sex, age, and height, always the forensic anthropologist's starting points.

Everything fit. The skull's narrow, “steepled” nasal bones, the sharply defined nasal lower border or sill, and the tapering, parabolic shape of the palate assured him that he was dealing with a Caucasian. The generally rugged appearance of the bones was enough to tell him it was male, and application of the anthropologist's “rule of thumb” confirmed it—place a thumb in the greater sciatic notch of the pelvis to see if you had room to wiggle it back and forth; if you did, it was a female. But if the fit was snug, which it was in this case, it was a male.

Age was harder, as it always was, for several reasons. First, the odds were longer. With sex you had only two choices; all you had to do was toss a coin and you were going to get it right half the time. But with age the odds were necessarily against you; it took more than a coin toss to get it right half the time, and even then you were dealing with broad ranges—eighteen to twenty-five, twenty-five to thirty, and so on. Second, once the epiphyses— the ends—of all the long bones had fused to the shafts, which began in the teens and ended in the late twenties, the skeleton was next to impossible to age with any confidence for thirty or forty years; there were time-related changes, of course (none of them good), but they didn't occur in any kind of predictable pattern; at least not one that anthropologists could agree on, although there had been some recent progress on the ribs.

The sole notable exception was the pubic symphyses, the matching surfaces of the two halves of the pelvis where they met at the midline of the body just above the genitals. For reasons nobody had ever figured out, the appearance of these surfaces was the adult skeleton's best age indicator, growing steadily more fine-grained, pitted, and sharp-edged over time.

Using a set of comparison drawings he had brought with him, Gideon placed the symphyses squarely in Phase IV of the Suchey-Brooks progression—approximately thirty-five years old, with a standard deviation of nine years. And Brian, he knew, had been thirty-eight. So that fit too.

As did the height. He used the old Trotter and Gleser equations to estimate living stature from the combined lengths of the femur and tibia. The result was seventy-one inches, plus or minus one inch, which was smack on the button, inasmuch as John had told him that Brian was six feet tall, or maybe a little under.

So Brian it was, no doubt about it. That resolved, he settled down to his real job: a bone-by-bone examination for other signs of how death had occurred. The cuts on the metacarpals he had already remarked, of course, and since then he had found in passing a green-stick fracture of the left humerus, at the point at which it narrowed just above the elbow; two crushed lumbar vertebrae; a snapped left clavicle; and a long, jagged crack in the skull, running horizontally along the parietal, from the occipital bone to the frontal. All of them were perfectly consistent with the fall that Brian had presumably taken from the plateau, and none showed any signs of healing, which meant