“I don’t think so, Mike,” Gideon told him. “I think we’re looking at what’s left of Edgar Villarreal.”
“Edgar… Edgar…” Clapper turned around and stomped back to his office.
“Did I offend the man in some way?” Gideon called pleasantly across to Robb.
“No, no, he’s just gone back to get his cigarettes. Is it really that Villarreal chap?”
“I think so. Come on over, if you want. I’ll tell you about it.”
But the telephone rang again, and Robb dropped back into his seat just as Clapper, true to Robb’s word, came back out of his office shaking out a match, and talking around the freshly lit cigarette in his mouth. “Now, did I misunderstand, poor, dumb copper that I am, or did you not tell me, in this very room, only yesterday, that Edgar Villarreal was et up by a grizzly bear in the wilds of Canada some two years ago? Consumed, digested, and excreted in minute pieces?”
“Alaska,” Gideon said. “Yes, I did. I’m pretty certain now I was wrong. He’s in fairly minute pieces, all right, but it was a saw that did it, not a bear. The people in Alaska were wrong.”
“How could they be wrong about a thing like that?”
“I’m not sure,” Gideon said. “But if I’m right, they were wrong about more than that. After he left here, Villarreal was supposed to have faxed Kozlov a letter from the States, resigning from the consortium. That’s why— that was ostensibly why—he wasn’t here this year. And as soon as he got back to the States, he was supposed have gone right off to his summer base camp to study bears. Which is where one of them supposedly got him.”
“And you don’t think it happened that way?”
Gideon gently touched a scapula. “I don’t think he ever went home,” he said soberly. “I think he’s been right here at Halangy Point Beach all along.”
“But how do you explain the fax?” Robb called.
“What does it prove?” asked Gideon. “Anybody could have sent it. And what else is there to show that he was really alive after he left here?”
Clapper sucked furiously on his Gold Bond and expelled a haze of smoke from his mouth and nostrils. He was thinking hard, Gideon could see. “If you’re right… you’re right, then someone went to some pretty elaborate lengths to mislead everyone.”
“It looks that way, yes.”
Clapper thought some more. “All right, then, go ahead. What makes you so sure about this?”
“All right. First of all, you have to know that Edgar Villarreal had once been an agricultural worker, a fruit picker.”
Clapper began to say something, but then clamped his mouth shut.
“His parents were Cuban immigrants who worked in the citrus groves in Florida, and Edgar worked right with them for a long time—from the time he was five until he was seventeen, if I remember right.”
Clapper nodded. “Continue.”
Gideon cleared a small area around the scapulas. “If you look here, on both these bones, immediately medial to the supraglenoid tubercles, which are these—”
“Let’s keep it simple,” Clapper muttered.
“Okay, right. This general area”—using the right scapula, he fingered the ovoid, concave surface of the glenoid fossa—“is the place where the head—the ball—of the humerus fits.”
“The shoulder socket, you might say.”
“Exactly, and this small, flattened area at the top of it—”
“That? You’d better not tell me that’s another squatting facet.”
Gideon laughed. “Well, but that’s what it is, in a way. It’s been worn, or polished, into the bone as a result of another bone moving against it during a certain kind of activity. Only in this case it’s not squatting, of course. This is what you’d get in a person who spent a whole lot of time with his arms raised and moving above shoulder-level, okay? And look, here on the head of the humerus, exactly where it would come into contact with that facet, you can see a slight flattening. You can feel it better than you can see it.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Fine. Well, that goes along with the arms-above-the-shoulder idea. With me so far?”
“Yes, of course I see what you’re getting at. But Gideon, agricultural workers are hardly the only people who hold their arms up. So do barbers, or orchestra conductors, or, or—”
“Sure, but I’m only getting started. Give me a chance. Now, these are a couple of the cervical vertebrae—C6 and C7. They’d be right at the base of the neck. The lipping on the bodies of these vertebrae strongly suggest that this person regularly extended his neck and head dorsally—” He tipped his own head sharply back to demonstrate. “And I don’t think a barber or an orchestra conductor would be doing that too much. But a fruit picker on a ladder would, when he leaned his head back to see the fruit.”
Clapper smoked silently and frowned. He was coming around.
“Now here’s the clincher,” Gideon said. Most right and left scapulas look pretty much alike, but these are really different. The right one is pretty standard; your basic, everyday shoulder blade. But the left one is anything but. Look at how much bigger the acromial end of the scapular spine is, and—“
A hollow, rumbling growl from Clapper made him change course. “Let’s just say there are several indications of a lot more stress being placed on the left shoulder girdle than the right. Well, migrant citrus workers typically carry those long heavy ladders they work with over their left shoulders. Not only that, but that’s where they hang the bag of fruit as they pick, and a full bag of oranges weighs ninety pounds. That’s a lot of stress, Mike.” He waited for
