that they had happened at about the time of death; whether before or after there was no way to tell. Either way, they didn't prove murder, nor even suggest it; not taken on their own.
He brought over a gooseneck lamp from a side table and set it up over the right hand for a closer look at the cut marks. They were knife wounds for sure: straight, narrow, and V-shaped, with clean, sharp edges. Other than those four lined-up notches, there were no other marks on the bones of the hand. Or of the other hand, or of the forearms, all likely sites for defense wounds. That implied that Brian had managed just one lunge at the knife to protect himself; death or incapacity had come quickly. The single line of cuts also meant that the weapon had probably been single-edged. Had it been double-edged, there would most likely have been a matching set of cuts on the bones of Brian's fingers, where they had closed around the opposite edge of the blade.
All right then, he was already able to make some reasonable assumptions. One, it had been a quick death. Two, the weapon was apparently not some professional assassin's murderous stiletto but probably some everyday kind of knife—a kitchen knife, a fishing knife—that might be found anyplace. Fine, but that didn't get him anywhere that he could see. He was certain enough that Brian had been murdered, but he was well shy of proof. Attacked, yes, those deep cuts in the palm attested to that, but you didn't die from a cut palm.
He shifted the lamp to the ribs and bent it so that the light was only a few inches from the tabletop, shining laterally across the bones. When you were looking for tiny nicks or clefts, or even thinly shaved bone, it helped to have shadows to highlight any roughness or smoothness that didn't belong there.
Nothing on the fronts of the ribs or the sternum, nothing on the backs. This was unsurprising because Brian's T-shirt had had no telltale knife slits in it. Still, Gideon had thought that a knife might have gone in above the scooped-out neck or below the hem on the bottom. But no such luck (so to speak). Except for that broken left clavicle there was no damage to ribs, sternum, collarbones, or scapulae. That didn't mean that Brian hadn't been stabbed in the chest or back, of course, it only meant that there was no evidence of it. Once Gideon had examined the skeleton of a man whose shirt had knife holes from thirteen deep stab wounds in it. (He knew they were deep because they had found the knife, and the size of the holes matched the width of the blade just under the haft and almost six inches from the point.) But only one of the thirteen thrusts had nicked any bone. There was a lot of room between the ribs.
On to the region of the throat, then. If there was going to be anything to find, here is where it would be.
And it was. On the front surface of the sixth cervical vertebra was a single, V-shaped, clean-edged, horizontal notch, not a puncture wound but a cut, shallower than the ones on the metacarpals and no more than half an inch long, easy to miss if you weren't looking for it or didn't know what you were looking for, but no less lethal for that. It struck him again how innocent-looking the signs of violence on bones could be, how removed they were from pain and struggle. If he'd found a tiny nick like this on a plastic model of a vertebra that he'd just received from a biological supply house, he would have shrugged it off and said no problem, no real damage done.
Ah, but on a living body! To make that seemingly inconsequential little mark a knife blade would have had to cut through two and a half inches of flesh and gristle: the ventral muscles of the throat, the thyroid and cricoid cartilages, the pharynx, the larynx, the vagus nerve, the phrenic nerve, the jugular vein. And of course one or both of the great common carotid arteries.
And with the carotid arteries severed one's life's blood poured out and was gone in a few seconds. No wonder Brian hadn't done much struggling.
So that was that. Brian Scott's throat had been cut.
Gideon went back to the autopsy room for more coffee (luckily, Dr. Viennot was deep in the pelvic cavity and never saw him come in), then returned to the conference room, sat in one of the comfortable swivel chairs with the bones before him, and pondered. Cut throats were nothing extraordinary in this line of work, but they were usually found in either of two sets of circumstances: first, in suicides (which this wasn't, unless Brian had gotten that defense wound fending himself off), and second, in connection with killings of manic violence, where a cut throat was just one of many wounds from stabbing, cutting, hacking, and whatever else you could do with a knife (which this wasn't either).
The thing was, it wasn't easy to cut someone's throat without a struggle. Vulnerable as it was, the front of the throat made a small, difficult, mobile target, was naturally shielded by the chin, and was easy to protect, at least temporarily, with the hands and arms. You didn't just walk up to someone and do it. Thus, when you found someone murdered in this manner, with very little other violence apparent, you concluded that it was more than likely that the victim was either immobilized at the time (which Brian wasn't, or there wouldn't have been any defense wounds at all), or was surprised from behind, or was already unconscious when attacked.
And of those, the best was that he was already unconscious. As in sleeping.
At ten he called Bertaud to make a preliminary report. “Colonel,” he said when he had finished and Bertaud had politely but coolly complimented him, “I was wondering about his sleeping bag. Did anyone have a look at it?'
'Sleeping bag?” Bertaud repeated. “I don't believe such a thing was found.'
'Wasn't his gear at his campsite up above?'
Papers shuffled at Bertaud's end. “Cooking tools, yes, clothing, food...I think there was no sleeping bag.'
'But—that seems odd, doesn't it?'
'I suppose it does, but there was no reason at the time—” Abruptly he saw where Gideon was heading. “You think the murderer came upon him in his sleep? That the bag was bloodied and therefore disposed of somewhere to hide it?'
Gideon was glad that Bertaud had come up with it on his own. “It's possible, don't you think? God knows there'd have been plenty of blood.'
'God knows. I'll have the area more thoroughly searched, Dr. Oliver. You'll have a written report for me later?'
'This afternoon. You're taking this on as a full-scale investigation, then?'
'Personally,” said Bertaud at his most resolute. “And if you will ask Mr. Lau to come and see me and tell me again about these American mobsters of his, you can say to him I will pay closer attention this time “
The rest of Gideon's examination produced nothing of significance, but there were two areas that particularly caught his interest. He spent some time over the old repairs to the skull simply because he was so impressed. The original damage had been even more devastating than had been visible the night before, involving not only the forehead but the delicate bony orbits of the eyes and the zygomatic bones alongside them. They too had been wired back together in several places, and the surgeon had done an amazing job of restoration the sort of miracle operation that orthopedic surgeons modestly and routinely referred to as “bone carpentry.” The fact that Brian had
