Caravale tipped his chair back and folded his hands in front of his belt. “I don’t know either. But I think you might have it right.” He paused. “Oh. I meant to tell you. They tried to steal your bones last night.”
“Uh... come again?”
“At three o’clock in the morning. Someone tried to break into the morgue. When the Polizia Municipale showed up, he ran off. But he’d been trying to force the door of the room where Domenico’s bones were being kept. And there was nothing else in there but some linens.”
“So first they tried to get the bones,” Gideon said slowly. “And when that didn’t work, they came after me.”
“It looks that way.”
“Then that’s why the attempt on me was so...so crude, so risky—I mean, coming up behind a guy in a public park and choking him? Not exactly brilliantly planned. But they were running out of time, they’d already failed to get the bones, and I was going to examine them in a couple of hours. They were desperate. So they hung around the hotel waiting for me to come out, and...well, there it is.” Thoughtfully, he finished the last of his cooling, grainy coffee and took a sip from the glass of water that had been brought with it.
“Yes, there it is.” Caravale slapped the table with the palm of his hand and got briskly out of his chair. “If you’re up to it, let’s get to them, then.”
Gideon, whose thoughts had been straying, looked up at him. “To what?”
“The bones. Let’s see what it is they don’t want you to find out.”
DOMENICO de Grazia’s remains were no longer at the hospital. After the attempted break-in, Caravale had ordered them brought to
The bones were in two cardboard cartons and a large paper bag that had been laid on the table. Whoever had put them in had apparently used size as his sole criterion for sorting. The big bones—the cranium, pelvic bones, and arm and leg bones—were in a printer-paper box; the mediumsized bones—the mandible, ribs, vertebrae, scapulas, clavicles, and sternum—were in a canned mushroom carton; and the small ones—the wickedly irregular, tiny, exasperating-to-sort bones of the hands and feet, all one hundred six or so of them (more than half the body’s bones were in the hands and feet)—were in the bag, along with a few loose teeth. If the good Corporal Fasoli had really gone to the trouble of arranging them anatomically, it had all gone to waste.
But at least they were clean. “He did a good job, your Corporal Fasoli,” Gideon said, beginning to get them out onto the table. The bones showed the usual unappetizing stains of blood, mold, earth, and body fluids—it would have taken bleach to get them out, and there really wasn’t any good reason for doing that (Gideon’s aesthetic sensitivities weren’t good enough reasons)—but the clotted dirt and the dried remnants of ligaments, tendons, and whoknows-what were pretty much gone.
He squinted up at the ceiling lights, four long neon tubes behind pebbled, translucent sheets of plastic.
“Something wrong?” Caravale asked.
“The light’s awfully flat. I need something that will cast sharper shadows, bring out texture. A desk lamp would do if it’s bright enough. Maybe there’s a goose-necked one somewhere that I could use? Oh, and a good magnifying glass?”
“Goose-necked?” It was an unfamiliar term to him, but when Gideon demonstrated with his hands, he nodded and moved toward the open door. “Give me two minutes.”
“Okay, yeah,” Gideon said, already absorbed in gingerly removing the mortal remains of Domenico de Grazia from their containers. Ordinarily, the next task would have been to lay the bones out anatomically, every single one of them, including those tricky hand and foot bones, but this wasn’t an ordinary case, and he was eager to get to the crucial question: Was there anything here that could shed light on old Domenico’s death? What Gideon did, therefore, was to separate the bones he wanted to look at first, the ones most likely to hold clues to the cause of death: the skull, for obvious reasons; the ribs, for injuries that might indicate damage to internal organs; and the metacarpals and phalanges of the hands, for nicks or small fractures that might have come from clutching at a blade in self-defense or warding off a blow.
The skull was first. The shriveled husk of brain still lay within. For forensic purposes, it was useless. He lifted it out with two fingers and placed it in a clean sack, to eventually go back to the family with the bones.
A cursory examination of the cranium showed nothing. Unquestionably, the broken parietal and maxilla were recent damage. But sometimes new injuries could cover the signs of old ones, so he went over the broken areas with care. Still nothing. As for the loose teeth in the bag—an upper incisor and first molar—the sharp-edged, unbroken sockets from which they’d come showed that they’d fallen out long after death, a normal occurrence as the soft tissue holding them in place shrank and disappeared. There were four other teeth missing as well, but they had come out decades before death; their sockets barely existed now, the bone having been slowly reabsorbed over the years. There seemed to be nothing else, no signs of—
“Gideon?”
He jumped. Caravale was standing behind him with a goose-necked desk lamp in one hand and a rectangular magnifying lens with a built-in light in the other. “Will these do?”
“They’ll do fine, thanks.”
“It’s all right if I watch?”
“Sure, stay.” Why not, it wouldn’t kill him not to talk to himself for a while.
Gideon plugged in the lamp and set it up on the table, adjusting its neck so it cast a sidewise light that would emphasize textural irregularities—depressions, cracks, nicks, anything. Then, using the magnifying glass, but without flicking on its bulb (a direct light would only flatten everything out again), he began going over the skull one more time.
Meanwhile Caravale, whom Gideon hadn’t seen smoke before, opened a packet of Toscano cigars, pulled out
