slice-mark was on top. With care, he slipped the knife blade gently into the slice, under the shaving of bone. At an angle of about thirty degrees, the fit was perfect. The knife remained propped there without the need for additional support.
“Now, this other bone, that’s the sixth rib, the one right above, and the V-shaped gouge, as you see, is in the bottom of it, the underside. If I place it in position above the seventh and lower it...”
“The gouge was made by the back, the spine, of the knife!” Caravale exclaimed on seeing the snug fit. “A single weapon, a single thrust!”
“Exactly. It’s V-shaped, not square, you see, even though the spine of the knife is square, because it went in at an angle. See, a single sharp weapon can make a lot of different-shaped wounds depending on the way it goes in, or how far it penetrates, or whether it was twisted in a manner that—” He realized he was on the verge of lecturing again and caught himself. “Anyway, with the blade going in like that”—he gestured at the knife and the two ribs, locked together in a circle of light like some grisly museum exhibit—“the point couldn’t have missed penetrating the left atrium of the heart. Death inside of a minute, probably sooner. What? Is something bothering you?”
Caravale had been frowning, fingering his side, near the bottom of his rib cage, like a man whose ulcer was worrying him. “I don’t mean to question your expertise, but... well, a few years ago I fractured a rib in an automobile accident. Down here.”
“Yes?”
“The doctor said...Well, I’m fairly certain he said... that it was my seventh rib.”
“That looks about right,” Gideon agreed. “The seventh or eighth.”
“But the heart, isn’t it up here?” He put his other hand, with the cigar, on his sternum. At Gideon’s nod, he went on. “Well, then, how could a knife thrust here, at the seventh rib, go into the heart? That is, unless it was practically straight up—which our knife there isn’t. It would go into, into...”
“The left lobe of the liver, correct. Several inches below the heart.”
“So . . .?” Caravale shook his head, lost.
Gideon laughed. “What you’re forgetting is that the ribs don’t go straight around, they angle upward from front to back. Yes, that’s the seventh rib down there in front, but by the time it curves around and connects to the vertebral column in back, it’s way up here.” He reached around and with one finger tapped Caravale on the upper back, between the left scapula and the spine. “And that’s where the knife went in.”
“Ahh,” said Caravale with his brown-toothed grin. “I see. Straight into the heart.”
“Well, it would have had to get through a few muscle layers first, and the left lung, but yes. Straight into the heart.”
“Stabbed in the back.”
Gideon nodded. “Yup.”
They stood looking down at the bones. “So he put his arm up to ward off the blow—that’s how he got it broken— succeeded for a moment...,” Caravale took a final drag on his cigar stub and ground it out in a metal ashtray. “. . . but must have fallen and gotten himself knifed in the back.”
“That’s pretty much it, but from the angle of the thrust, it doesn’t look to me as if he was on the ground when the blade went in. I think he probably just twisted around, maybe trying to get away, and got stabbed before he could make it. He was an old man, and he was lame.”
Gideon finished his Brio and tossed the bottle into a wastepaper basket under the table. It still surprised him how easy it was to talk about these hideous events as if they hadn’t really happened to a living human being, as if they hadn’t involved agony and terror and unspeakable, bloody horror.
“All right, so what do we know now that we didn’t know before?” he asked, musing, getting his mind back on the clean, comfortable present.
“Several things,” said Caravale. “We know the cause of death. We know for certain that he was murdered. Until now it was strictly circumstantial—he was buried, therefore, he must have been murdered. But now we
“Yes, sure. But why did somebody try to steal the bones? Why was I attacked? What was that all about? Okay, so we know he was murdered with a kitchen knife or something like it. So what? Why kill me to keep that from coming out?”
Caravale pensively scratched his cheek. “It could be to make sure we didn’t identify the murder weapon and somehow connect it to the killer.”
“So throw away the knife. They’ve had ten years to do it. Wouldn’t that be a whole lot simpler?”
“And safer.” Nodding, Caravale plucked a dark fleck of tobacco from his lip. “There must be something else.”
“Maybe, but I sure can’t imagine what. I’ll go over every single bone, though. Give me an hour.”
With Caravale gone, Gideon worked bone by bone by bone, sliding each one into the light, turning it over in his fingers to see and to feel every angle and facet, scanning it with the magnifying glass, putting it aside into the “discard” pile, and moving smoothly on to the next one. He could work far more quickly than usual because there was no reason to measure them, apply height or race formulas, or do anything else to help in the identification process. All he had to do, basically, was look for anything unusual; in particular, trauma and pathologies.
There was nothing that amounted to anything. Some dental caries, a lot of expectable age-related arthritis, and various long-standing deformities of the lumbar vertebrae and of the knee, ankle, and foot joints, all of which were clearly related to the old man’s hip problem, but that was all. Nothing new, nothing that explained anything.
Still, it ended up taking quite a bit more than an hour, and when he found Caravale in his office to tell him the results, Caravale simply looked up with a grumpy expression and said: “Jesus, it’s about time. I’ve been sitting here listening to my stomach rumble for the last twenty minutes. Let’s go and have some lunch.”
CARAVALE preferred not to eat in Stresa, where so many people knew him. Instead, they drove a few miles up the lakeshore road, past graceful villas and Art Nouveau hotels, to the quieter town of Baveno, where they pulled into the parking lot of a rustic, homey restaurant called II Gabbiano, the seagull. The owner knew Caravale and his
