Dying on the Vine

are good. I could make a meal of these things.”

“Probably wouldn’t be the first time somebody did,” John said. He used his fork to pluck another from the rapidly emptying basket and more or less flipped it into his mouth, to be quickly followed by one more. When Bruno bobbed up again with menus, Gideon told him they were waiting for two ladies and would order after they arrived. Bruno’s shoulders lifted and fell with acceptance and resignation, as if Fate itself had decreed that these two difficult americani were to be his burden for tonight.

“Hey, Bruno,” John called after him, holding up the basket. “We could stand another order, un altro ordero, of these things. My buddy here, mi amigo, has pretty much gobbled them up, tutto.”

Bruno came back and snatched the basket out of his hand. “Will be cost,” he told them, as if expecting an argument.

“Va bene, amigo, no problemo,” John told him with an expansive wave, but then turned seriously to Gideon. “Doc, you can see that you’ve got Rocco thinking about getting the whole case reopened, can’t you?”

“Well, maybe he should. Something’s weird.”

“Yeah, but you have to understand, it’s not just a question of him going to his boss and saying, ‘We should reopen this case.’ It’s a lot more complicated, a lot dicier, than that.”

“Dicier? Why?”

“Because egos are involved, man. When you close a file, especially on a high-profile homicide—in the Carabinieri, or the FBI, or the Podunk PD—a lot of people—prosecutor, judge, the cop that was in charge—have put their reputations on the line by signing off on it, on whatever the conclusions were. Believe me, they are not happy when some underling comes along wanting to open it up again. So Rocco knows he’s probably gonna get crucified when he brings up the idea. If he brings up the idea. He needs some solid ground to stand on.”

“And you don’t think what I’ve been telling you is solid enough.”

“Well, let me ask it this way. How sure are you about what you’ve been saying?”

“About which part?”

“About the weird part; that the fall came first, that she was already dead before she was shot.”

“Well—”

“No fancy explanations, no lectures.”

“No mumbo jumbo,” Gideon said with a smile.

“Right. Just how sure are you? Say on a scale of one to ten.”

“Come on, John, I can’t do that. Look, when I say that if you’re conscious when you fall, you’re going to land on your feet, I’m making a generalization. You realize that, don’t you? I don’t know that it works that way every single time. How could I know? How could anyone? And even when we say that a bullet traveling through the middle of the brain always produces instant loss of consciousness, how could we possibly know something like that for a certainty? And when we say—”

John tossed back his prosecco in a single impatient gulp. “Goddamn it, it never fails. It’s exactly what my boss says about you. You come on the scene, you throw a monkey wrench into everything, but then, when we want to act on it, the first thing you do is cover your rear end. ‘Gosh almighty, folks, I’m just making a generalization here, don’t hold me to it.’”

“That’s not fair, John. I can tell you what I find and what I conclude from it. I can’t tell you what I don’t know. I’m not going to make stuff up.”

John shrugged. “Okay then, tell me what you do know. What are the statistics? What percentage of conscious people land on their feet, and what percentage don’t? Because you can damn well bet it’s gonna get asked in an Italian court if this ever gets there, so give me some figures. Something Rocco can work with.”

“John, you can’t—”

“You don’t have any percentages, do you? There aren’t any, are there?”

Gideon leaned back with a sigh. “Boy, in your next career, you know what you ought to be? A defense lawyer. You sound like the kind of gorilla-for-hire that comes after me in cross-examinations. ‘Can you tell the jury, Doctor Oliver, exactly what percentage of proximal tibial epiphyseal unions are complete by age twenty-two and one half among Hispanic females with one non-Hispanic maternal grandparent, as compared to that among Hispanic females with—’”

John cracked a smile. “Okay, okay, but seriously, are there any statistics? I’m just asking you: do you think Rocco should go back and stir this kettle up again unless you’re pretty sure it needs it? I mean, even if he reopens it and it goes nowhere—especially if it goes nowhere—he’ll still have a bunch of important people ticked off at him.”

“Let me put it this way—”

“Statistics,” John demanded.

With a sigh, Gideon leaned back in his chair. John had a point, but what he wasn’t taking into account was that forensics didn’t have the advantages of the experimental sciences. You couldn’t push a thousand conscious people off a cliff to see how they landed, and then shove a thousand more unconscious ones over the edge to find out how the two groups compared. All you had to work with were the suicides, murders, and accidents that happened on their own, without your help—and of those, only the ones that happened to come your way or happened to get written up, which the great, great majority of them didn’t. And even in those you were familiar with, you could only rarely be certain that a supposed suicide really was a suicide, or an accident an accident. Not after the fact.

Bruno returned with another basket of coccolini and even two more proseccos (without additional cost, presumably). John happily busied himself with them.

True, Gideon thought, there were experiments in which dummies or pig cadavers had been dropped from cranes, and those were instructive, but dummies, even anthropomorphic ones with weight distributions precisely like people’s, weren’t people. The upshot was that your forensic conclusions were often grounded on a shockingly small database, a compilation of your own experiences and those of a few others, along with an intuition that (you hoped) was based on years of subliminal information-processing But there wasn’t any point in going through all the ifs, buts, and maybes with John, who’d heard it all before anyway. “If what you’re asking me is, could I prove, to the certain satisfaction of a judge and jury, that she was still alive when she fell, still conscious, then my answer has to be no. Nobody could prove it because it’s unprovable one way or the other. Do I believe she was? Yes, definitely, and I’ve got some decent scientific backing for my opinion. But would I bet my life on it? No way.”

John shook his head. “Oh, that’s just great.”

Gideon pondered for a moment longer, gaze turned inward, finger to his lips. “Your life, maybe.”

That won a laugh from John. “Okay, so what do you think? Is there enough there to suggest that maybe this was a double murder, not a murder-suicide? Or let me put it this way: if it were you, would you push the buttons to get the case reopened? Considering that, if it didn’t come to anything, you’d be in the doghouse for the next five years.”

Gideon leaned back. “Well, before I did, what I’d really want would be to have a look at the other skeleton, the husband’s skeleton. See if it’s got anything to say for itself. But—”

“Rocco said it’d been cremated.”

“That’s right, he did. But wait a minute.” He put down the prosecco he’d been sipping. “There’s bound to be a report of some kind from the medico: an autopsy or something like it.”

“An autopsy of a bunch of bones? Be pretty short, wouldn’t it?”

“Probably, but you never know what you might find. You know, I think I’ll ask Rocco if he can send me a copy.” He searched for and found Rocco’s card and flipped his cell phone open.

As he began to dial, the sound of a welcome voice floated over his shoulder. “Well, you two weren’t very hard to find. We just followed the words ‘skeleton’ and ‘murder,’ and here you are.” She grinned at the woman standing next to her. “Do we know our husbands or don’t we?”

Gideon looked up laughing, but with a catch in his throat too. It was ridiculous, really; almost a decade of