pubic symphyses in particular. With luck, he’d be able to narrow down the age quite a bit more.
Work proceeded rapidly and relatively comfortably— Caravale had thoughtfully provided a knee pad from the van—although there were frequent pauses to allow for photographs and sketches by the crime-scene team, and for one of the techs to help out as the few remnants of clothing turned up: the nylon cuffs and tab (the strip down the front with the buttons) of a jacket, a few of the buttons themselves, the soles and a little bit of the uppers of a pair of canvas deck shoes, a leather belt, and the zipper from the trousers, with a little of the fabric attached. These the rubber-gloved tech removed with tweezers and tongs, and carried them off to the van. Caravale popped in and out for updates, but was more interested in the work of his men than in the bones.
The whole process took two and a half hours, at the end of which Gideon got up, stretched, and walked up and down the road a little, working his cramped neck and shoulder muscles. He chatted with Caravale awhile. Then he came back for another look at what he had, before doing the bagging and labeling for the trip to the lab.
The remains were wholly uncovered now, and for once he seemed to be looking at a complete skeleton, right down to the hyoid, the terminal phalanges of the fingers and toes, and the irregular, pebble-like wrist and ankle bones—probably even the six tiny ossicles of the inner ear; all two hundred six bones of the human body (more or less: it depended on age—the older you got, the fewer you had, because certain adjacent bones tended to fuse together with time; on the individual—some people had thirteen thoracic vertebrae instead of twelve, some people had twenty-five or twenty-six ribs instead of twenty-four; and on how you defined “bone”).
Either there weren’t any bone-stealing carnivores around, or the gravel had been a barrier to them. As he’d thought, the body had been buried on its back, with the legs flexed and turned to the left. The skull was also half- turned to the left, the mandible agape in a typical skeleton grin and a little awry. The right arm lay across the chest—that is, across the collapsed ribs—and the left arm was extended, palm up, alongside the body.
Although the remains appeared to have been unmoved since the burial, the skeleton had suffered some damage. In addition to the broken innominate, the vault of the skull was caved in on the right side, with several big pieces of parietal bone now lying inside the skull along with a lot of gravel and a shrunken, dried-up lump that was what remained of the brain. And the face—the maxillary bone—had suffered too. The right side of the maxilla was crushed from palate to orbit, and the strange, flimsy, curling bones inside the nasal cavity—the conchae, the vomer, the ethmoid—were pulverized beyond the possibility of reconstruction.
It struck him, not for the first time, how peculiarly fragile the human face was, considering the critical environmental monitoring devices it had to protect—sight, smell, and taste. The maxilla was one of the thinnest bones in the body, and hollowed out besides, by the big maxillary sinuses. If you held it up in front of a lamp, it was like eggshell; you could see the light right through it. Generally speaking, Gideon marveled at the astounding engineering of the human skeleton. But the face—that, as he sometimes told his students, he would have designed differently. Maybe left a little more hard, bony snout, just to be on the safe side, had he been in charge of human evolution.
The facial damage was unfortunate—who knew what evidence it might obscure?—but not significant in itself. It was clearly the result of repetitive, long-lasting compression, not of sudden blunt-force trauma; truck or heavy equipment pressure over time, in other words. The burial had put the skull a little higher than the rest of the body, and just where the right-side tires of a truck would roll over it on the way from the road to the parking area, and the left-side tires on the way back. Eight or ten years of that were more than it could stand.
The right ulna and radius (the two bones of the forearm) had also been broken, but these had been snapped, not crushed. Unlike the breakage of the pelvis, the broken edges were as gravel-colored as the rest of the skeleton. That suggested that they had already been broken when the body was buried. And not very long before, either, because there were no signs of healing. Of course, that didn’t prove much because there wouldn’t be any signs of healing for sixteen or seventeen days after a bone had broken. From simply looking at the surface of a fracture, you’d ordinarily have no way of telling if the break had occurred two weeks before death, or two seconds before.
But in this case, Gideon thought, there was a way. And his conclusion was that two seconds was about right.
“It looks as if you’re done,” Caravale said.
Gideon jumped. As always, he’d been deep, deep in his work, and Caravale’s coming up to stand behind him had startled him. “Just about.” He turned his head and squinted into the sun. “I could use a few dozen bags to get all this stuff into, and a marking pen to label them. Once they’re in the morgue, they’ll have to be cleaned up before I get down to a serious examination.”
“And how long will that take, the cleanup?”
“The rest of the day,” Gideon said with a weary sigh.
“It’s unpleasant? Something you don’t like doing?”
“Boring, not unpleasant. It’s just drudgery.”
“Can I have someone help you with it?”
“You can have somebody do it,” Gideon said, jumping at the chance. “It’d take me about five minutes to show him how.”
Caravale nodded. “All right, I’ll give you Fasoli.”
Gideon gave him a grateful smile. “Wonderful.” He got gingerly to his feet, pleased not to hear any crik-craks from his knees. “You’ll also want to have somebody sift through the gravel underneath here, after the bones have been removed. I’d take it right down to the floor of the ditch. You can never tell what you’ll find.”
“I know. Such as bullets, for example. When they stay lodged in the body, they can fall out into the ground as the tissues decompose, sink into it over time.” He was showing Gideon that he knew something about this sort of thing too.
“That’s true enough, but in this case I don’t think you’re going to find any bullets.”
“And why would that be?”
“I don’t think he was shot.”
Caravale scowled. He looked from Gideon to the bones and back again. “Excuse me, but isn’t it a little early to make such an assumption? Just because there are no bullet wounds on the skeleton, it doesn’t follow that there wasn’t any shooting. The slug, it might have gone through his throat, or between his ribs, or, or—”
“Sure, only the murder weapon wasn’t a gun.”
