“We have a burial that’s been there for perhaps ten years—”
“Very approximately. Plus or minus five.”
“An adult male, fifty or more—”
“Make it sixty or more,” Gideon interrupted. He had upped his estimate as he’d gotten a better idea of the extensive porosity and thinning that was to be found in the bones. The scapulas in particular showed the atrophy and demineralization he’d expect in a man of seventy. “Also, he was a fairly small guy, and lightly built.”
“Lightly built...do you mean thin? Not fat?”
“No, there’s no way to tell fat or thin from the bones. What I meant was lightly muscled, what we call ‘gracile.’ I don’t know what the Italian word is.”
“The same,” said Caravale. “
“Ah,
“No, not necessarily blunt,” Gideon said. He was working his cramped neck muscles, tilting his head back and rolling it from side to side, watching the tree branches move against a bright blue sky. “It could have been a sharp instrument too; a knife, even.”
“A knife? You mean a knife could have cut through the bones like that? Both bones?”
“No. But remember, this was a fragile old guy, and the radius and ulna are thin bones to begin with. Say he threw up his arm to try to fend off a knife attack. His forearm could have been broken just from the force of the other guy’s arm.”
“Yes, all right.”
“But I’m hoping it wasn’t a knife. There are too many ways to kill someone with a knife without leaving a mark on the skeleton. I’m hoping he was killed with something cruder—an axe or a club.”
Caravale laughed softly. “A strange thing to hope for.”
“I only meant—” Gideon shook his head and drank from the can. It was too hard to explain. Anyway, Caravale knew what he meant: Not that he wished this man or anyone else to have been hacked to death with an axe or clubbed with a steel pipe, but only that— inasmuch as the deed was already done and he was dead anyway—it would be nice if the weapon was the kind that would leave some skeletal evidence, and maybe provide a clue or two.
All the same, Caravale had a point. It was a hell of a thing to be hoping for. But then, this kind of work had a way of altering your perspective on things.
“Is there anything else you can tell me at this point?” Caravale asked. “To help identify him?”
“Well, I’m pretty sure he limped,” Gideon said.
“Limped.” Caravale cocked his head and looked at him. “Is that so?”
“Yes, there’s aseptic necrosis over most of the right femoral head, probably avascular in origin—”
Caravale held up both palms and shook his head. His English, fluent as it was, had its limits, and Gideon didn’t have the ghost of an idea of how to say it in Italian. He put his Coke on the ground and stood up. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
ELEVEN
ATthe exact moment that Gideon and Caravale rose from their chairs, some five miles to the south in Stresa, Leonora Fucini was setting out the swiveling postcard racks in front of her souvenir shop on Via Bolongaro. She was nervous, thinking about getting Davide from the tobacco shop next door to come over and do something about the unkempt youth who’d been looking at an umbrella display in her window when she had arrived twenty minutes ago, and who was still there. Staring at four plaid folding umbrellas on a shelf for twenty minutes. He was dirty—she’d caught a whiff of him when she’d first brushed by on her way in— and swaying slightly, forward and back. He was on drugs, no question about it, or maybe coming off a drunken spree the previous night. Either way, she didn’t want him out there. He was frightening away customers, and he was frightening her. She’d give him two more minutes, and then she’d call Davide.
But as soon as she went back into the shop, he stumbled in after her, a loose-lipped grin on his face. His eyes were frighteningly empty. She stiffened and backed against the counter, her hands raised in front of her.
He was wearing a shirt that said hootie and the blowfish. “Is this...” he said thickly, swaying so much he had to prop himself on a counter. His speech was slurred, his eyes only half-open. “Is this a police station?”
“WHAT we’re looking at is the femoral head,” Gideon told Caravale, indicating the globular top of the thigh bone, the “ball” that fit into the cuplike “socket” of the hip. He had lifted the right femur from its place in the gravel to show to Caravale. “And if you compare it to the other one, you can see that it’s got this unhealthy, shriveled, caved-in look. That’s because it was dead bone, not living; it wasn’t getting any blood supply. It would have been painful, and it would definitely have made him limp, maybe use a cane or even go around in a wheelchair. From the looks of it, it’s been this way for decades, maybe since he was a kid.”
“Childhood disease?”
“Possibly, but I doubt it. Most of the diseases that would do this would be bilateral; that is—”
“Two sides,” Caravale said. “Yes, yes, I know.”
“Sorry. Yes, two sides. But the left one is healthy. So I think it was an accident, a fall, probably, that broke the neck of the femur. That’s this part.” He tapped the diagonal, two-inch-long length of bone that connected the head to the femoral shaft. “It’s not an uncommon injury, especially in childhood, and if it’s a bad break, it can tear apart the blood vessels that run to the femoral head. And when that happens, this is what you get: aseptic necrosis of the femoral head.”
Caravale ran his finger down the neck of the femur. “I can’t tell where it was broken, exactly.”
“Neither can I. It’s repaired itself and I haven’t found any sign of the actual fracture yet. If it’s a really old break
