Things were looking up.
TEN
HOW many times, Gideon mused, had he been part of this slow, solemn scenario? A quiet forest in the early morning with threads of fog still drifting among the trees, and the dew shimmering on spiders’ webs that had been woven during the night, and the moist fragrance of the woods at its sweetest. And wandering over the leaf-littered forest floor, heads down, a silent group of half-a-dozen intent men, photographing, drawing, taking notes, or kneeling with tweezers to stuff some tiny crumb—a single dull black tooth from a comb, a cigarette smoked down to the filter, a plastic nubbin from some unknown gadget—into a plastic envelope or a paper bag. Considering that he had started his career with dreams of making some small but important theoretical contribution to the study of protohominid locomotion, it was a hell of a thing to be so intimately familiar with.
Life was funny.
They had arrived here, on the gentle lower slopes of Mount Zeda, at 6:30 a.m., both men dressed in short- sleeved knit shirts and jeans. Caravale had pulled his unmarked black Fiat up behind a slab-sided crime- sceneinvestigation van parked at the side of a dirt road that ran through a broad, winding grove of gnarled oaks, laurels, cypresses, and olive trees. The trees had been there a long time, probably for centuries, but there was a spanking new, walled housing development—red-tile-roofed condominiums, tennis courts, swimming pool—off to the left, among rolling meadows, and another one being built upslope around a golf course. The twenty-first century had come to Mount Zeda.
For a few minutes they remained in the car, finishing the cappuccinos they’d picked up in Intra and observing the disciplined crime-scene crew go about their jobs.
“So then, are you ready?” Caravale asked, crumpling his empty cup.
“Any time.”
Getting out of the car, Caravale returned the waves of the crew and asked a quick question of the only man in uniform, a sergeant. “Anything?”
The answer was one of those minimalist but multifunction Italianate shrugs that subtly involves not only the shoulders, neck, and hands, but eyebrows, eyes, mouth, and chin as well:
Caravale gave him an almost equally complex, wrist-rolling wave of the hand in return:
The colonel had described the physical situation to Gideon on the drive, but spatial relations in the abstract had never been Gideon’s forte, and he hadn’t really grasped it until this moment. Now he saw that a few yards ahead of them there was a turnoff from the road, over a drainage ditch that paralleled the road, and onto a small graveled parking or turnaround area. Through the bottom of the turnoff ran a culvert to allow the water to continue on its way down the ditch. The turnoff itself consisted simply of a few tons of gravel that had been dumped into the ditch over the ten- or twelve-foot length of culvert. The gravel had then been leveled to a three-foot height, effectively covering the pipe, bridging the four-foot-wide, three-footdeep ditch, and providing a surface on which vehicles could cross. A second length of drainage pipe lay in the parking area, alongside the culvert.
The bones had been discovered late the previous afternoon, by workmen from Aurora Costruzioni, Vincenzo de Grazia’s company, which had acquired the land twenty years ago and was responsible for the nearby developments. One of the workers, using a spade to dig a channel for a second culvert pipe, had jammed it against something under the surface, had jerked the spade out, and had partly plucked out a human pelvis—or so the police physician who had been called to the site had determined. Gideon, remembering Caravale’s earlier story about the bone- identification skills of local physicians, was reserving judgment but hoping it was a different physician. At the moment, the remains in question were out of sight, at the far edge of the turnoff, where the gravel slanted down and away.
“I see you have your men working everyplace but in the gravel itself. Have they already gone over that?”
“No,” Caravale said. “Not where the remains are. I thought it would be best to leave that untouched for you.”
It was the answer he’d wanted. “Good.”
“I looked you up on the Web,” Caravale said abruptly. “I entered your name in Google.”
“And?”
“And I found one hundred forty-four references. Your friend was right, you are well known. And highly regarded.”
Gideon smiled. “Well...”
“Look, I know I was pretty rude the other day,” Caravale said, speaking fast, “and I feel bad about it. It was only that I had a lot on my mind, and besides, I didn’t think you were really...Well, the thing is, I really appreciate your agreeing to help us out here.” He hesitated a second, then offered his hand.
Handsomely done, thought Gideon. “There’s absolutely nothing to apologize for,” he said, taking Caravale’s hand. “I guess I was a little brusque myself. And believe me, Colonel, you have no idea how glad I am to be here.”
“Well, good. Where are you from, Professor?”
“The Seattle area, Colonel.”
“Good, what do you say we dispense with the Colonel-Professor routine? I don’t know about Seattle, but in New Haven we’re pretty informal. My name’s Tullio.”
THE remains were at the upstream end of the culvert, in a depression that had been gouged out of the gravel slope angling down from the leveled surface of the turnoff to the floor of the ditch. All that was visible was the pelvic girdle—the hip joint—and half of the right femur, the thigh bone. The body was apparently lying on its back, with the legs bent and twisted sharply to the left, so that the right hip and femur were closest to the surface. The rest of the body—assuming there was a “rest”—was lying on its left side, still covered by more than a foot of gravel.
With an “it’s all yours” wave, Caravale went to check on his crew, for which Gideon, who preferred to work without an audience, was grateful. He believed himself to be disciplined and objective when it came to drawing conclusions, but he knew that his manner of working—the process by which he found his way to his conclusions—
