supramastoid crest on down. The burned, exposed bone shows marked deformation at its upper margins, and there are two roughly parallel, roughly vertical linear fractures about three inches apart in the squamous portion of the temporal bone, both originating at the upper, burned, broken edge of the vault. The anterior one runs down in the general direction of the external auditory meatus, and the posterior one toward the occipito-temporal suture-” He poked a little more with the probe. “-or maybe the posterior portion of the mastoid process. It’s hard to see; the inferior portions of both fractures are hidden by the neck and jaw musculature.”
He was speaking basically for his own benefit. He worked better when he talked to himself. But Kaz was understandably under the impression that they were having a conversation.
“This cracking and warping,” he said sagely, colleague to colleague, “are, of course, what we would expect in thermal destruction of such magnitude, both from heat itself, and also from falling debris. ”
“Well, yes, sure,” Gideon said, his eye caught by something about the anterior fracture, the one that ran down in the direction of the auditory meatus – the opening for the ear. “But, you know, there are cracks… and there are cracks…”
“Ah, yes?” Kaz looked at him with a puzzled scowl. “Cracks and cracks?”
“Mmm.” Gideon fingered the crack in question. “You notice anything different about this one?”
“You mean compared to other one?”
Gideon nodded.
The young man stared painfully hard at it, working to come up with something. “Is a little wider than other?” he tried at last. “Almost like silver is missing from.”
Gideon frowned. “Pardon?”
“Almost like silver is missing,” Kaz repeated patiently and very slowly. He was used to his accent causing problems. “Silver. Of. Bone.” Silwer. Awv. Bawn.
“Silver of…?” a befuddled Gideon began.
“ Sliver, for Christ’s sake,” Fausto intervened. “What’s the matter, you don’t understand English?” Drawn by curiosity, he had come up to the table for a look too, although he kept his hands in his pockets to protect those taintless French cuffs.
“Silver, silver,” Kaz agreed. “Of bone.”
“Oh, yes, sliver,” Gideon said. “It does look like that, Kaz, as if a sliver, a splinter, has popped out. But that’s not why the crack is wider. It’s wider because-”
“Because the sides of it are all eaten away,” Fausto said, peering at it. “The other crack, it’s got these clean edges. You could fit the two sides right back together. But this one, you couldn’t. The sides are all, like, eroded.”
“Exactly,” Gideon said.
“Which means?”
“Well, let’s look at a little more of it before I go out on a limb. I want to see the whole length of the cracks. Kaz, would you mind removing the soft tissue around the base of the skull?” he asked brightly. “I’d do it myself, but I’m sure you’d be better at it.”
A snort from Fausto, and a contemptuous “Yeah, right.” Meanwhile, he himself had now returned to his spot a good five feet away.
“And be really careful with it, will you, Kaz? We don’t want to damage it any more than it already is.”
Kaz’s mobile features pulled together and darkened. “I will try my best,” he mumbled, believing his professional competence had been called into question.
“Sorry, Kaz,” Gideon said quickly. “I didn’t mean you had damaged it. I can see what a good job you’ve done with it so far. I know you’ll be careful. I don’t know what made me say that.”
He knew what had made him say it, all right. He knew that pathologists, with their natural focus on organs and soft tissue, could be downright careless about bone. Many a nick or scratch on a skeleton that had first been taken to be a sign of foul play had turned out in the end to be nothing more than the slip of a pathologist’s knife during the autopsy. And many a genuine sign of antemortem trauma had been obliterated or made unusable as evidence in the same way.
But Kaz was a meticulous dissector, his long, deft fingers slicing, tugging, and delicately scraping away with skill and control. In a few minutes the lower right-hand side of the skull was as clean as a scalpel could get it.
“Nicely done,” Gideon said truthfully, which mollified Kaz, assuming that his re-reddening ears could be taken as an indication.
Gideon leaned over the broken skull, breathing as shallowly as he could. Kaz’s scalpel had released a fresh puff of barbecue-grill aroma. But one quick look made him forget all about the odor. He’d come up with something, something crucial. A familiar and irrepressible feeling of satisfaction, almost of triumph, ran through him.
“All right, men, we’ve got something here. Look at the fracture, the one we’ve been talking about, where it runs into the unburned bone, where the muscle was covering it before you cut it away, Kaz.”
“Okay, we’re looking,” Fausto said, growing impatient. “Come on, my attention span isn’t that great. Why don’t you just tell us what we’re supposed to see?”
“Because I’m a professor. This is what I do. Come on, look at the crack. What happens to it?”
Fausto sighed. “Nothing happens to it. The damn thing goes down into the, what do you call it, the ear-hole thing.”
“The auditory meatus.”
“Whatever. And it disappears in there.”
“Very good. Now compare it to the other fracture, where it runs into the unburned bone that was under the muscle.”
Kaz’s brows knit. “I don’t-”
“There’s nothing to compare, dammit,” Fausto said through clenched teeth. “The other crack doesn’t run down that far.”
Gideon straightened, stripped off his gloves, and tossed them on the tray. “Bingo,” he said.
FIFTEEN
For almost two hundred years the Alameda Botanical Gardens have been a peaceful, restorative haven where the people of Gibraltar could go to get away from the congestion, dust, and bustle of the city. Lovers – moony teenagers and shuffling old married folk – still stroll hand in hand among its lush plantings, stately civic memorials, and nineteenth-century cannons, planning their futures and recalling their pasts.
Strolling there hand in hand, Gideon told Julie about the burned body in the morgue.
“So he was murdered,” she said thoughtfully.
“I’m pretty sure.”
“And does Fausto go along with you?”
“Oh, yes. He was setting up some interviews when I left him. Rowley’s at the top of the list.”
“He suspects Rowley?”
“No, but Rowley drove Ivan home that night. He’s probably the last one who saw him alive before the killer. He probably knows Ivan better than anyone else too.”
“Does Fausto have anybody he suspects? Do you?”
“No. Do you?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m trying to imagine a reason any of these people would want to kill him, and I can’t come up with one.”
“I know. I would have thought he didn’t have an enemy in the world. I’m sorry you didn’t know him before; he was impossible to dislike. But then, we know next to nothing about his outside life. There’s more to him than archaeology. Family, acquaintances, old enemies, maybe…”
“I know. But if you add in the attacks on you, and Sheila Chan’s ‘accident,’ it just has to have something to do with Gibraltar Boy and all that – which means something to do with these people – your friends.”
“Julie, we have no compelling reason to think what happened to Sheila wasn’t an accident, and as for the supposed attacks on me, the jury’s still out, right? There’s no hard evidence anyone really attacked me.”
