was often intuitive and based on hard-to-quantify judgments, which made it cumbersome and sometimes impossible to explain to a lay observer what it was he was doing and why.
That was one reason he was disposed toward working in private. The other was that he liked to talk to himself when he examined a skeleton, and the things he muttered tended to be pretty pedestrian: “Hmm, what’s this?” Or “Now what do you suppose could have caused that?” Or “Say now, look at this.” So with people around he kept his mouth shut, which cramped his style.
“Well, now, let’s see what we have here,” he said, settling down to his first cursory survey. He didn’t touch the bones, but simply squatted on his haunches to look at them.
The right innominate bone—that is, the right half of the pelvis—had apparently been the piece that had gotten caught by the spade, so that the rest of the pelvis had been tugged out of position, pulling the adjacent bones with them. Thus, the upper ends of both femurs, the sacrum, the coccyx, and the lowest two lumbar vertebrae were also partly exposed. Except for some scraps of dried ligament at the articular surfaces, there was no soft tissue to be seen. This, as far as Gideon was concerned, was a welcome sign. It meant that there was unlikely to be soft tissue—flesh, fat, decomposing organs—to contend with anywhere else on the body. The sacroiliac and sacrolumbar ligaments were just about the hardiest tissues in the body, other than the bones themselves. If they were dried up and essentially gone, he probably wasn’t going to have to be scraping nasty stuff off the bones anywhere else.
That, he told himself, would save time, always a consideration to a professional. But he knew full well that time wasn’t the main issue for him. As forensic anthropologists went, Gideon was among the more squeamish. After all these years, “wet” remains could still make his stomach churn. He hated handling them; the looks, the stench, the greasy feel of them. The older, the drier, and the less smelly a skeleton, the happier he was. In his opinion, hundred-thousand-year-old burials were perfect, but that wasn’t a luxury that often came his way in forensic cases.
He leaned a little closer to the bones. The right iliac blade—the thinnest part—of the innominate had been snapped clear through at its narrowest point, through the base of the sciatic notch, just above the acetabulum, the socket into which the head of the femur inserts, but that had obviously happened only a short time ago, long, long after the body had been interred. Most of the skeleton was an ashy gray (bones eventually took on the color of their environment), with ugly black and rust-colored stains and splotches on it. If the fracture had occurred at or before the time of death, its edges would have looked like the rest of the skeleton. Instead, they were a fresh yellow- white, the normal color of bones that haven’t been subjected to the bursting and decomposition of organs and blood vessels, or exposed to the weathering of time. So: no forensic significance.
A ragged, stained ribbon of fabric about an inch wide lay across the sacrum, apparently circling around under it. This, he was fairly certain, was the waistband of a pair of underpants. Cotton underwear on a decomposing corpse was quickly soaked through with body fluids and decayed rapidly, soon disappearing completely in most cases. But waistbands, usually being made of synthetic elastomers, didn’t. There were also some shreds of faded blue cotton fabric—trousers or shorts, probably—mixed in with the bones and, in places, stuck to them.
After a couple of minutes of just looking, he reached out and ran his finger gently over the rim of the fifth lumbar—the lowest and largest vertebra in the spinal column, the one just above the sacrum—and then straightened up, wincing at the increasingly familiar creaks and pops in his knees. His own articular surfaces were beginning to show their age.
“Well,” he murmured, “it’s not a rabbit, that’s for sure.”
IT also wasn’t Achille de Grazia.
The bones were not only essentially bare, they were heavily flaked, pitted, and abraded, and that wouldn’t have happened in eight months, let alone eight days. Eight years, maybe, but fifteen or twenty was more like it.
On the other hand, he did have to allow for their being buried in gravel, not soil. That meant that there would be more extreme ups and downs in temperature as the weather aboveground changed, and that the moisture level would fluctuate more. When it rained, they would be soaked faster than if they’d been in soil; when the rain stopped, they would dry faster. All of that would hasten the processes of decay and weathering, as would the easy access that bugs would have. And then the gravel itself was composed of angular pieces, not rounded pebbles. Since there would necessarily have been some shifting and compression when vehicles rolled over them, the bones would have suffered more abrasion than they would have in ordinary soil.
He picked up a few of the individual stones. Granite. Granite, if he remembered right, had an acidic pH, and an acidic environment was one more thing that made bones weather faster. So maybe eight years was pretty close after all. “Between five and fifteen years,” he announced to himself, mentally preparing the on-the-safe-side report he’d turn in to Caravale afterward.
He went back to the car and returned with his hat, a crumpled, tan canvas tennis hat with a brim all the way around (it was the back of the neck that got broiled in work like this), and with his tools. He’d brought no equipment with him to Italy, and it had been too late last night, and too early this morning, to buy anything, so he had borrowed a teaspoon, a tablespoon, and a ladle from the hotel kitchen, a ruler from the desk clerk, and a toothbrush from himself. It was hardly the recommended assemblage for forensic exhumation, but since Caravale had told him the remains were in gravel, he hoped there wouldn’t be any stubborn roots to be pruned, or hard, compacted soil to dig through, or fragile bones to free from a soil environment that could bond with them almost like concrete. As for containers, cameras, tape, etc., he knew the crime-scene van would be stocked with plenty of those; shovels too, if it turned out that he needed them.
He didn’t. The gravel, as expected, was loosely packed, and he was able to scoop it away mostly with his bare hands, putting each handful into ten-gallon buckets, also provided by the van, for later screening by the technicians. He started at the exposed hip joint and slowly began to work his way outward, moving both up and down the body. As he worked, he concentrated on exposing the bones without damaging or moving them, rather than on examining them. That would be the interesting part, of course, and he preferred to save it for later, after he’d cleaned them up, in a morgue or laboratory that had good lighting and room to work standing up, instead of on his knees. Besides, he’d already made all the preliminary conclusions he was likely to come up with on-site. The remains, in addition to being human and having been buried about ten years ago, plus or minus five years, were those of an adult male, and an older one at that; at least in his fifties, probably more.
The sexing had been simple and sure. The pelvic girdle, the one part of the skeleton from which you could make a nearly one hundred percent certain sexual determination, was masculine in every indicator, from the narrow sciatic notch to the oval obturator foramen. That the remains were those of an adult was equally clear from his first quick look at the pelvic girdle and femur. The epiphyses, the separate sites of bone growth that appear at the ends of the long bones and along the edges of the innominate in infancy, and then ossify and attach to the body of the bone as the skeleton matures, were all fully attached. And that process didn’t finish up until the twenties.
As for the specific age, his estimate of fifty-plus had come from running his fingers over the fifth lumbar vertebra. The vertebral “lipping” that goes along with degenerative arthritis—unfortunately, a normal accompaniment of aging—was well advanced, and the surface of the bone showed mild but visible signs of osteoporosis and thinning, also age-related phenomena. There were diseases that could mimic these changes, so it was always possible he was off-base, but once he got to the lab, there would be other indicators to check; the