Dying on the Vine

petty to me. I guess my problem is that I’m a carabiniere, yeah, but underneath, I’m still Rocco. Unfortunately.”

A few moments passed with Gideon silent and Rocco morosely smoking away.

“We’d better get back in, I think,” Gideon said. “They should be finished by now.”

Rocco nodded, took another pull, flipped the cigarette away, and they headed back. “I guess I’m just going to have to learn to toe the line a little better,” he said, but as the door swung open, the edges of his mouth curled into a cherubic little smile, and he put a hand on Gideon’s forearm to stop him.

“Hey, how many carabinieri does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

• • •

IN the preparation room, the others were still writing up their report on the board and arguing out the last of their differences. Gideon used the time involved to have his first uninterrupted, solitary look at the remains. He went through them slowly, turning this bone over and over in his fingers, lifting that one to his eye and scanning it at an angle, the way you’d examine a pool cue to see if it were straight. By the time he was done, the report was finished, written with red marker on the glossy white board, in the exuberant, loopy script of a sergeant major from Nigeria:

“In examining the skeletal remains presented to us for our analysis, the following traumatic injuries to the skull have been identified: a ballistic entrance wound in the center of the back of the skull, just below the occipital protuberance, and what appears to be an incomplete exit wound at the front, in the form of a ‘reverse depressed fracture.’ We believe that this GSW was the cause of the victim’s death, which was probably instantaneous.

“Trauma to the rest of the body includes fractures of both tibias and fibulas, both femurs, both sides of the pelvis, and numerous thoracic and lumbar vertebrae. Many of these bones suffered multiple breakages. In addition, there were fractures of the bones of the left foot. These injuries are all consistent with a fall from a height. There were also many signs of animal gnawing.

“Our findings: The victim was killed by a fatal gunshot to the head. Her body then fell some distance, sustaining much additional damage. We also attribute the basal ring fracture of the foramen magnum to this fall.

“In conclusion, we conclude that the findings presented by Lieutenant Gardella are supported by the evidence.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you all,” said Rocco, taking bows all around.

“Good job, everybody,” Gideon said. “You’ve all been working hard. Let’s take five minutes for a break. Rocco, can I talk to you for a minute?”

“What’s up?” said Rocco as the others wandered off in twos and threes. “They did a great job, don’t you think? It took our medico two days to get it right.”

“Well, yeah, they did a good enough job, but the thing is, they didn’t get it right. And neither did you guys. I wanted to talk to you about it before I made my comments. I wouldn’t want to make you look bad in front of them, and—”

Rocco lifted his hand. “Don’t give it a thought, Gid. Those weren’t our findings, they were the medico’s findings. Everything I know about skeletal trauma I learned from you in the last three days. Anyway, it was the public prosecutor who made it all official. He’s the boss. We just do the grunt work.” He followed this with a sudden grin. “And I have no problem at all with making Migliorini look bad; pompous, self- important twit that he is.”

“Okay, then.”

“But what exactly did they get wrong? She wasn’t shot in the head?”

“No, she was shot in the head.”

“She didn’t fall off the cliff?”

“No, she fell off the cliff.”

“So then what am I missing here?” He spread his hands. “What else is there to get wrong?”

“They’re starting to filter back in, Rocco. May as well wait till everybody’s here.”

• • •

GIDEON stood on one side of the table while the cops gathered in a standing half circle on the other side, a few feet back. “You did a fine job,” he began. “You only made one mistake, but it’s a zinger. A big one,” he emended, seeing from a number of frowns that zinger wasn’t in everybody’s vocabulary. “Now, you got the basics right: she was shot in the back of the head. The hole near the occipital protuberance is the entrance wound, and the defect in the forehead, that ‘reverse depressed fracture,’ is indeed a partial exit wound. By the way, Rocco, did you find the bullet? Was it still in her skull?’

“It was, just rattling around in there.”

“Okay, so we can consider it definitely established that, for whatever reason—maybe it was old, maybe it was the wrong caliber for the gun, maybe the charge had gotten damp or wasn’t big enough, maybe something else—whatever, the bullet didn’t have enough oomph to make it all the way through. But since it did make it to the inside of the front of the skull, we know that it had to have passed right through her brain, back to front. All the same, I think we can safely say that it didn’t kill her.”

A tentative hand went up; the formal, scholarly chief inspector from Gibraltar. “I certainly don’t mean to question your judgment, Professor Oliver, but I served as a paramedic in Afghanistan, so I know something about head wounds. And—no offense, sir—but a bullet that took this trajectory would necessarily destroy so much vital brain tissue that . . . well, in my belief, death would have been, well, certain . . . and instantaneous.”

“I agree with you, Clive. And remember, a bullet destroys a lot more than what lies directly in its trajectory, because the energy it generates hollows out a cavity much wider than the bullet’s actual diameter. And the brain is the softest organ in the body, more like jelly than any other human tissue, so it pulps very easily. And then don’t forget that the bullet carries pieces of bone and tissue along with it, and that messes up things too. So yes, that bullet would have killed her, all right. And almost certainly, it would have been instantly.”

“Hey, wait a minute, Doc,” John said. “Didn’t you just say—?”

“I didn’t say it wouldn’t have killed her, I said it didn’t kill her.” To himself Gideon somewhat shamefacedly admitted that he was having fun. The boggling of policemen’s minds was one of the innocent little vices of the forensic set.

“And there’s a difference?” someone finally asked.

“Ah, well, there we have—”

One of the two women, a polizeihauptkommissarin from Vienna, lifted her hand. “Professor, I regret to interrupt, but we run a bit late. Already it is four hours twenty, and there are five o’clock section meetings for some among us, so—”

“So we’d better wrap up right now. All right,” he said, “go ahead and get the remains back in the carton— carefully—and we’ll head back to Florence. We’ll finish this up tomorrow morning.”

Rocco was frowning hard. “Wait, wait, wait, at least tell us—”

Gideon shook his head. “Tomorrow.” He was a longtime believer in the Creed of the Artful Professor:

Always leave ’em wanting more.

SIX

ROCCO, John, and Gideon all drove back to Florence in different vehicles; the same ones they’d come in, but when the cars pulled into the Carabinieri parking lot alongside the Great Cloister, Rocco was waiting for him. He was still scowling. “Listen, Gid, I can’t figure out what to make of what you were telling us back there. If the shot didn’t kill her, what did?” This was the second time that Rocco had called him Gid, and Gideon resisted the impulse to ask him to knock it off. For whatever reason—he didn’t know himself—it annoyed him to be addressed by diminutives or nicknames—he liked his own full name—and he didn’t hesitate to say so. He had only one friend, none other than John Lau himself, who was granted the privilege. John had been calling him Doc since the day they’d met, and Gideon had had no choice but to go along with it. Gid was even worse than Doc, but somehow, coming out of Rocco’s mouth, it couldn’t have been more natural. It fitted with his brash, wise-guy manner in a way that the prissier Gideon wouldn’t have. So now there were two who were allowed to get away with it. He was mellowing with age.

“The fall is what killed her,” he said.