Good Blood

“Not a gun.”

“No.”

Well, probably not, but Gideon was giving in to the secret vice and sport of forensic anthropology: the playful boggling of the minds of policemen great and small. Professionally speaking, he was going a bit beyond what he was certain of, which was admittedly reprehensible, but then he had just spent over two hours kneeling on sharp stones (the knee pad helped, but not that much after the first hour), hunched over a pile of musty bones and inhaling gravel dust under an increasingly warm sun, while Caravale had spent most of the time standing around, and sometimes sitting in a folding chair, in the pleasant shade of the nearby woods, giving orders and watching other people work. That being the case, Gideon felt he had earned the simple reward of enjoying the expression on his face. Or the expressions, to be more precise, as they went from perplexity to doubt, to outright skepticism.

“What are you telling me then? That you found the weapon?” His eyes darted over the area, looking for something that Gideon might have discovered and laid out on the gravel.

“Nope.”

“But you think you know what it was.” He was beginning to show some impatience.

“No, not exactly. Sort of.”

Caravale sighed. “Not exactly. Sort of. Are there signs on the bones then, or not? Wounds?” His eyes raked the skeleton again. “The crushed skull?”

“No, I already told you, that happened over time. No, I haven’t found any marks on the bones yet; that is, nothing to identify the weapon. Maybe later.”

“Then would you mind telling me how the hell you—” An impatient blast of air hissed through Caravale’s wide nostrils. “Look, I don’t have time—”

Gideon relented. He didn’t really want to make Caravale angry. Besides, enough was enough, and he was starting to feel a little guilty. But only a little.

“Take a look at this, will you?” he said, leaning over to touch the broken right ulna and radius with the handle of a spoon. The breaks were next to each other, about a third of the way down from the elbow. “This is what I was looking at just now. These fractures—they aren’t new. They happened right around the time of death. Very close to the time of death, I’d say.”

“Because there’s no difference in color, right.”

“Well, not only that—”

“But how do you know they weren’t broken right after his death, during the burial, say—an accident with a shovel? They don’t look hard to break.”

“No, they would have been easy enough to break, but the fact—”

“And whenever they were broken—before, after, during, whatever—I’m having a hard time understanding what they have to do with whether he was or was not shot.”

“Give me a chance now,” Gideon said, laughing. “I’m trying to explain.”

“It’s about time,” Caravale grumbled, but he was smiling.

With the colonel now an engaged audience, Gideon pointed out that the fractured ends of the broken forearm bones didn’t lie adjacent to each other, as might have been expected. Instead, the lower halves of the ulna and radius had ridden up a couple of inches over their upper halves. That, he explained, was a just-about-sure sign that the fracture had occurred while the person was still alive. With the living muscles of the arm convulsing in shock, and the stability provided by the bones themselves suddenly gone, the two segments of each bone had been yanked together and pulled up over each other.

“I see,” Caravale said, nodding. “That’s very interesting.”

“And if you look carefully at the way the splintering occurred at the break points, you can tell the direction of the blow as well.” He offered a borrowed magnifying glass to Caravale, who gave it a try, but within a few seconds he handed back the lens, shaking his head.

“I’ll take your word about the splinters, but let me guess the direction of the blow.” He held his left hand up, as if shading his eyes with his forearm, and with the fingers of his other hand, tapped his arm a few inches below the elbow.

“Here.”

Gideon nodded. Caravale had tapped himself on the ulnar aspect—the pinky side—of the forearm. It was the classic location of the fracture that resulted when a person threw up his arm to protect himself from an attack—the so-called “nightstick fracture.”

“And what that tells me...” Gideon began.

“What that tells you,” said Caravale slowly, “is that it’s extremely unlikely that he was shot. Because if the killer had a gun, he’d just go ahead and shoot him, right? Why would he have to attack him with some other object? Is that your reasoning?”

“That’s my reasoning.”

Caravale, who had grown increasingly absorbed, nodded thoughtfully several times. “Well, I think you’re on to something.”

Gideon felt as if he’d just passed a test. But then, so had Caravale. It worked both ways. The man was a quick study. He’d caught on at once, had taken the basic idea, and had run with it.

“So here’s what we think we know about him,” Caravale said a few minutes later. They were twenty yards from the burial, sitting in directors’ chairs from the van, in the shade of some softly rustling poplars. Nearby, the crime- scene crew was also taking a break, sprawled on the ground, smoking and animatedly arguing the finer points of a soccer match the evening before.