one black, twisted stick, snipped it in two with a tiny pair of blunt-edged scissors he produced from somewhere, and put one of the evil-looking halves back in the packet.
“For later,” he said. “One a day, half in the morning, half in the afternoon.” He lit up—it smelled as bad as it looked—leaned against the grille, and watched; asking nothing, saying nothing.
Gideon worked steadily and silently, pulling over a stool when he got tired of bending over. There was nothing useful on the cranium, nothing on the mandible. The metacarpals and phalanges of the hands showed an old, healed fracture of the right fifth metacarpal and plenty of arthritis, but nothing else. After twenty intent, focused minutes he straightened up, stretched, and massaged the back of his neck. Caravale, who had left without his noticing, came back with a couple of cold bottles of Brio. Gideon accepted the quinine-flavored soft drink gratefully, taking a couple of long gulps and then turning to the ribs, examining them one at a time.
Ten minutes passed before he found anything. “Well, well,” he said, separating one rib from the rest and laying it aside.
Caravale came closer, leaned on the table. “What?”
Gideon motioned for him to wait another minute, which Caravale obediently did. Another ten minutes passed. “Ah, so,” Gideon said with satisfaction. A second rib was separated from the others.
He turned to Caravale, holding up a rib in each hand like a couple of batons. “Success. Got a cause of death for you.”
SIXTEEN
“THISis the seventh rib, right side,” Gideon said. “And this is the vertebral end of it, the end in back, where it connects to the spinal column.”
“I never knew you could tell one rib from another. They all look the same to me.”
“If you have them all, it’s easy; you compare the relative lengths and the shapes of the arcs. But there are plenty of other differences too. See, here there are variations in the articular facets and tubercles of the first, second, tenth—”
With a raised palm, Caravale warded him off. “Please. I’ll take your word for it.”
“Well, you asked me.”
“And I deeply regret it, I assure you. Continue, please.”
Coming out of Caravale’s porky, beetle-browed face as it did, it made Gideon laugh. “Okay, I won’t try to educate you. Now take a look at the top side of the rib—this is the top side—near the back end. This is the back end. Do you see the—”
“This little sliver, coming out of the bone?”
“That’s right. That’s a knife cut.”
Caravale adjusted the lamp and bent interestedly over the rib. “It’s like a shaving, like what you get when you’re whittling a piece of wood.”
“That’s just what it is. When bone is green—when it’s alive—it’s soft, and if a knife slices into it at a shallow angle, a sliver of bone is likely to curl away from it. Like this. Once bone dries, it doesn’t happen. Try to cut it with a knife after it’s dry and the piece would just chip off.”
“Ah.” Caravale absently pulled out and lit the half-cigar he’d put away for the afternoon. “And this one small cut, this cut you can hardly see without the lens—this proves he was stabbed to death?” He was thinking ahead, to the presentation of evidence in a court of law, and he had his doubts.
“There’s more, Tullio.” He pulled the other rib into the circle of brightest light and pointed with a ballpoint pen. “This nick? That’s also a knife cut.”
“Is it?” He scrutinized it with the magnifying glass. “But it’s completely different. There’s no sliver. This is more like a, like a—”
“It’s more like a gouge. Which is what it is. It’s not a sharp slice, it’s a relatively blunt, V-shaped notch. If you use the glass again, you can see where the fibers at the edges have been mashed down into it.”
Caravale shrugged. He was willing to take Gideon’s word for that too. Smoking, he studied the gouge, “It’s like what you’d expect from an axe, or from an extremely dull knife...”
“Yes.”
“But the other wound is from a sharp blade.”
“Yes.”
“So...two different weapons?” He looked confused, as well he might.
“No, no, no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to mislead you.
See, this one—wait, it’d be easier to show you. Is there a
kitchen in this place?”
“A—? Yes, just down the hall there.”
“Okay, don’t go away.”
In the kitchen he startled the cook by barging in, saying he needed to borrow something, and snatching an eight-inch chef’s knife from the knife block. The frightened cook was looking mutely around for help when Corporal Fasoli, who was having a cup of coffee and a pastry, called through the opening from the dining room: “It’s all right, he’s with the colonel. He’s harmless.”
The cook recovered himself as Gideon was on his way out. “Just make sure you bring it back,” he called after him, brandishing a spatula to show he meant it.
When he returned to the evidence room, Gideon laid the seventh rib on the table, right side up, so the curling
