Good Blood

and was properly set, there may not be any sign. Or it could have been a stress fracture, in which case there might not be anything to see anymore. We’ll see later, when we get this scuzz cleaned off. But the neck’s a lot thicker and rougher than it ought to be, and that’s what injured bone tends to do when it heals itself. Look at the left one in comparison.”

Caravale did. “Gra-chee-lay,” he said after a moment.

“Exactly.”

Caravale now lost interest in the femur and knelt to peer into the empty mouth cavity of the skull, between the crushed maxilla and the mandible. He straightened up and brushed gravel dust from his knees, “It’s true, isn’t it, that it’s possible to identify a body—I’m talking about absolute certainty—from the dental work on its teeth?”

“Sure. So we’ll have your people take some close-up photos of the dentition and I’ll draw up a chart that can be sent around. This guy has had a number of teeth worked on, and any dentist should be able to recognize his own work.”

“Right. Good.” Caravale seemed barely to be listening. “Excellent.”

“I’m not sure you do see, Tullio. The identification itself is easy... once you find the right dentist. The trick is finding the right dentist. Where do you even start looking?”

“Colonel?”

Caravale turned. It was the uniformed sergeant. “Yes, Rocca?”

Rocca was bursting with excitement. “They’ve found him, the de Grazia boy.”

“Alive?”

“Yes, alive! He just walked into a shop in Stresa. He’s been drugged, he thought it was a police station. Apparently they let him out of a car nearby and he walked—”

“He’s not hurt?”

“I don’t think so. Just drugged. He—”

“Where is he now?”

“At the shop, Colonel. This happened only a minute ago. The call just came in.”

“All right.” Caravale was already walking rapidly toward his car. “I want him taken to the hospital to be looked at. I’ll be there in ten minutes myself. And I want his father called and informed. And—oh.” An afterthought. He looked back over his shoulder. “Gideon, is it all right if you go back to Stresa in the van later? With the bones?”

“With the bones is fine. I have a little more to do anyway. And hey—I’m glad the de Grazia boy’s all right,” he called, but Caravale was already in the car, leaning over the wheel and gunning the engine.

BY 11 a.m. the bones had been bagged, labeled, and boxed, ready for their trip to the morgue, which was in the hospital in Stresa, which turned out to be located on Via de Martini, only two blocks from the Hotel Primavera. Gideon, going along with them in the van, saw them safely delivered, took a break to clean up at the hotel and have lunch among the living and breathing at one of the hotel restaurants on the Corso Italia, shopped for the few forensic supplies that would be needed, and walked back to the hospital.

There he found Corporal Fasoli waiting for him. One of the youngest of the officers, he seemed genuinely interested in the bones and paid close attention as Gideon demonstrated, with some of the metacarpals, how it was to be done. Each bone was to be cleaned with nothing more than the fingers and the small paint brush or soft toothbrush that Gideon had provided, using water or acetone if necessary, to get the dried glop off. If any of the adhering tissue was stubborn, it was to be left for Gideon to deal with. The stains were not to be worried about. The most important thing, aside from taking care not to clean too vigorously, especially where there had been abrasion or breakage, was to be careful not to lose anything. If bones were washed in the sink, it was to be done over the screen-bottomed tray he’d brought. When the cleanup was finished, the bones were to be laid out on paper toweling on one of the autopsy tables to dry overnight, and in the morning Gideon would position them in anatomical order and get to work.

Fasoli, who had already rolled up his sleeves, nodded crisply, eager to begin. He understood perfectly. It was a privilege to assist the famous detective delle ossa. Would the professor like him to try to place the bones in the proper anatomical positions himself? He could surely find an anatomy book here at the hospital, and it was a task he would like to try.

In the face of Fasoli’s natural enthusiasm, Gideon felt no guilt whatever about leaving him to the cleanup, and at one-thirty in the afternoon he was sitting happily on the grass in the sunshine, eating mortadella and tomato- andcheese panini with Phil and Julie (by his reckoning, having had no breakfast entitled him to two lunches) at Camping Costa Azzurra, a giant camping village on the lake near Fondotoce, between Stresa and Ghiffa. As scheduled, the Pedal and Paddle group had pulled in early to allow for a visit to the little stone Oratorio of Saint Giacomo, said to be from Roman times, and to take it easy for an afternoon before embarking on the two-day bicycling excursion to Lake Orta the next morning.

“Leave it to you,” Julie said in mock wonderment when he had finished telling them about the events of the last few hours. “Come to Italy for a vacation and wind up digging a skeleton out of a shallow grave in the woods. Amazing.”

“Just another knack, I guess,” Gideon said.

“But that’s really great news about Achille,” Phil said. “I was starting to get worried when he didn’t show up.”

“So was everybody else. Caravale looked as if someone just took a hundred-pound load off his shoulders when they

told him.”

“Speak of the devil,” said Phil, pointing with his chin.

Gideon, following his gaze toward the parking area, was surprised to see Caravale himself climb out of his black Fiat and look around, shading his eyes with his hand, obviously searching for someone. As to who that might be, there wasn’t any doubt. Gideon had given him the group’s itinerary in case there was any reason to find him. “I’ll be damned,” he said and got up on one knee to wave. “Tullio—over here!”