come out of it looking normal, had even been a “good-looking guy,” according to John, was astounding.
The other thing that he came back to, had already come back to again and again, was a phenomenon that had him intrigued and frankly puzzled. For at least the fifth time he picked up the fibulas and studied them, running his finger over the unusually roughened surfaces near their upper ends. On the face of it, they weren't anything very startling. The fibula was one of the two long bones of the lower leg—the thin one, not the thick, sturdy tibia that formed the shinbone—and the rough, pitted area at its top was merely the attachment site for one of the leg muscles. Nothing extraordinary in that. The exaggerated roughness simply meant that the muscle attached to it had seen heavy use; habitual, strenuous activity put stress on muscles, as everyone knew, and built them up. And where these built-up, heavily used muscles tugged on the bone—as forensic anthropologists and hardly anybody else knew—they too created stress and eventually built up and roughened the bony surfaces.
Given a knowing eye, these stressed and roughened skeletal surfaces could sometimes be read like a job description. Occupational indicators, they were sometimes called. There were “seamstress's fingers,” “waiter's humerus,” “shotputter's ulna,” “shoemaker's sternoclavicular joint'; even “executive's foot'— the result of years of sitting at a desk in a tipped-back swivel chair with the heels off the floor and the weight pressing on the toes.
But if there was any common name in the trade for an overdeveloped posterior aspect of the
So what did the soleus do, why did we have the things at all? The answer seemed to be that they were muscles of balance. They helped keep the ankles, and thus the body as a whole, firm and steady while walking. While standing still, for that matter. An important function, certainly, but not one that generally made great demands on the muscle fibers or the bone they attached to. Yet in Brian's case, not only was the attachment area heavily developed, but the pull of the muscles had been so powerful that the tops of both his fibulas had actually been tugged out of shape, bowing backward in their last couple of inches.
And this was something Gideon had not seen before. Brian Scott, whose bones in general showed that he was no more heavily muscled than the average man, had had the most extraordinarily developed soleus muscles he had ever run across. Why? How did you even get such things? If Gideon were asked what sort of exercises to do to develop them he wouldn't have known what to answer. Stand on the edge of a two-by-four an hour a day? Walk a tightrope every evening after dinner for an hour or two?
While he stood there pondering, he heard John speaking to Viennot in the autopsy room.
'I'm in here, John,” he called. “Next door.” He still had one of the fibulas in his hand when John came in with two cups of coffee.
'Fibula,” John proclaimed, setting one of the cups down for Gideon. Some years before, he had attended a seminar that Gideon had put on for law enforcement people.
'That's easy enough,” Gideon said. “But which one, right or left?'
'Hey, don't push your luck.” He looked down at the bones with a meditative air. “So this is Brian.” But he was clearly less disturbed by the idea than he'd been the day before. Cleaned skeletons can be fascinating, informative, evocative, puzzling—but they're not horrifying or pitiful, once you're used to them, and when you come down to it, they all look pretty much the same. See one and you've seen them all. It's hard to feel much in the way of emotion for any particular skeleton, or even to connect it in a visceral way with any particular person.
'So how's it going?” John asked.
Gideon pointed out the nicked cervical vertebra. “Cut throat, no question about it.'
John looked at it, even ran his finger over the cut. “That's an awful little ding to kill somebody. Is Bertaud going to buy it?'
'It's not the ding, it's what happened on the way to the ding. And yes, Bertaud's already bought it. I talked to him a few minutes ago.'
'Good, maybe we'll finally get some action.'
'I think so. He wants you to come in and tell him about the Mob connections by the way.'
'I already told him once.'
'He says he'll listen this time. How'd you do with Nick?'
'Hard to say. I think basically he just wanted to talk about it. I'll tell you one thing, I'm starting to believe him about Therese. I think maybe he did call it off because she was so shook up. And now he's worried about the memorial service and how that's going to affect her. He'd like to have Brian back in the ground by then; you know, so it's over and done. I told him I didn't think there was much chance.'
'I don't think so either.” Gideon sipped the coffee; stale but welcome. “Tell me, what did he say about the facial surgery? Did he know about it?'
'Not a thing. Brian never mentioned it. I'm not sure Nick believes you.'
Gideon sank into a chair and eased his shoulders back; he was still a little stiff from leaning over the bones. “Doesn't that strike you as peculiar, John? Here's some kind of absolutely devastating accident—it had to have been a major event in Brian's life—why would he make a secret of it?'
'Well, I don't know that he made a secret of it; maybe he just didn't like to talk about it. If it was that bad, you can't blame him.'
'Yes, but he's been part of the family for what, five years? People would have heard about it by now. At least he must have mentioned it to Therese, and she'd be bound to talk about it some time or other—unless he made it clear that he didn't want anybody to know. And why would he do that?'
'I don't know. Why?” John sat down opposite him and tilted his chair back against the wall.
'I don't know either. Let me ask you something else.” He showed him the fibulas and explained about the muscle attachment sites. “I've been trying to think of how he developed those. Any idea?'
John slowly shook his head. “Not a clue.'
