His slow, tedious examination of the hand and foot bones produced nothing but more mouse nibbles. The same for the sternum, clavicles, and scapulas. He was almost finished with the ribs, and had about given up hope, when he finally found something. It was on the fifth rib of the left side, midway along its length; a crease across the narrow top of the bone, about an eighth of an inch deep. It wasn’t a normal indentation, and it wasn’t an anomaly either, like a sternal foramen.
And it sure as hell hadn’t been made by a mouse. Not scoop-shaped, this time, and not one of a parallel row of two or three. Just a single notch that didn’t belong there, all by itself, with a distinctive V-shaped cross-section and edges of telltale sharpness and clarity.
A knife wound. And from the broad, wedge-like shape of the notch it had been a large knife with a blade that thickened markedly as it neared the haft. Single-edged too; otherwise it would have nicked the underside of the rib above it as well. Most likely a big kitchen utility knife or a chef’s knife. Or maybe a wartime bayonet, given the time. And of course the breadth of the V made it clear that it had been no mere prick, but a deep, murderous thrust between the ribs.
Without doubt, it would have punctured the left lung, and then…He chewed thoughtfully on his cheek. Now exactly where the hell would a knife slipped in over the middle of the fifth rib go? It was hard to visualize; not as obvious as it seemed. The middle of a rib is not in the middle of the chest, but far around to the side; closer in fact to the back of the body than the front.
With the fingers of his right hand Gideon found the angle of Louis, the easily palpable bump on the upper segment of the sternum. That was where the second rib attached, and from there he counted downward to the fifth. Then he worked his way slowly along it, probing with some difficulty through the thick pectoralis muscle that covered it.
In the far corner-the very far corner, as far from the moldering remains on the table as they could get-the workmen were sitting on the floor, leaning comfortably against the wall and watching him. Freed from the eagle-eye of young Sergeant Denis, who had gone off to lunch, they had produced a meal of their own: tumblers of red wine from a plastic, screw-top liter-bottle, an aromatic, crumbly goat cheese, and hunks of bread torn from a couple of baguettes. For the moment, however, they had suspended conversation and even swallowing to watch with rapt gazes as the American fingered his way so engrossedly across his own chest.
Gideon nodded at them and groped onward. The middle of the rib was higher than he’d remembered-it was easy to forget how sharply the ribs curved upward, front to back-and directly under the arm. Deep in the armpit, in fact. Seemingly a hard place to reach with a knife, but not, he had learned in these last few years, an uncommon site for a stab wound. The victim throws up his hand to ward off a thrust or a blow, the delicate, vulnerable axilla is left unprotected, and the knife strikes home. There was almost no other way to open the armpit to attack. That meant, of course, that there had been a struggle involved here, or at least that the victim had tried to fend off his attacker.
He folded a piece of paper and inserted the sharply creased edge into the cut in the bone. Judging from the downward, slightly forward angle, the blade would have entered at the tangle of nerves and veins that made up the brachial plexus and then sliced through the thin, ineffective barriers of the serratus anterior and intercostal muscles, nicking the rib on the way. Then into the left lung and through the tough pericardium.
And finally, inescapably, deep into the pulsing, muscular sac that drove the entire circulatory system: the left ventricle of the heart. Death, certain and immediate.
He turned again to the brown rib on the table and grazed his thumb delicately along it. Three inches farther forward, on the same surface, there was something else: a tiny burr, so inconspicuous he’d missed it before. Once more he leaned over the bone with the magnifying glass.
"So? Is it as fascinating as all that?"
Gideon started. Absorbed, he had forgotten that lunchtime had come and gone, forgotten to be repulsed by the grisly scenario he was constructing, forgotten pretty much where he was, and he hadn’t noticed Joly come downstairs, walk across the room, and stand for some time observing him. Looking up, he was startled to see that Denis had returned too, and the workmen were busy digging again.
Joly’s head was tilted slightly back as usual, the better to stare down his nose.
"Well, I’ve been able to come up with a little," Gideon said.
"Ah?" Joly’s raised eyebrow was a terse expression of skepticism. Restrained, polite, even tolerant, but skepticism all the same.
"He was murdered-"
The smallest of smiles from Joly. "Ah," he said again, and took off his glasses to polish them with a crisply folded handkerchief.
"Stabbed to death," Gideon said. "By a right-handed assailant. During a struggle." He hesitated, then finished up: "With a kitchen knife," he said confidently. In for a dime, in for a dollar.
Joly slowly refolded his handkerchief, as if it were very important that it be done along the original crease, and put it back in his pocket. "All this from a single rib?"
"That’s right, Inspector." Well, more or less. Some of it was a little on the speculative side, but Joly’s air of amused superiority was getting under his skin a little, and he thought a show of strength was called for.
Joly lit a cigarette and sucked in a long pull, studying him all the while. "Perhaps we might go over it one point at a time?" he asked nasally, while ropes of blue smoke poured from his nostrils. "Stabbed, you say. The rib shows some sort of scratch?"
Gideon showed him the nick. Joly looked at it for a long time, using the magnifying lens. Unlike Gideon, he didn’t hunch over it, but stood rigidly erect, head lifted, and gazed down his nose at it as he did at all things. Then he went on to examine the rest of the rib and some of the other bones as well. The cigarette was a third of the way burned down before he said anything.
"I see many nicks and cuts…"
"Mice."
Joly looked up at him in that long, slow way Jack Benny used to eye Rochester or Phil Harris after they’d nailed him with a zinger. Only the inspector had more nose to stare down, which made it all the more effective. "All of them? Every single one but this one alone?"
"That’s right."
"But this one alone is from a knife and nothing else."
Gideon explained about the U-shaped incisors of rodents and the V-shaped cross-section of knives.
Joly nodded economically, listening with his head tilted to one side, and looked through the lens again. He touched the gouge with a cleanly manicured thumbnail. "Why not another animal? A dog that might have got at the bones, perhaps, or a cat? Or," he said with a smile, "do they too have scoop-shaped incisors?"
"No, cone-shaped. Or rather the canines are cone-shaped, and since carnivores bite with their canines, they leave a set of cone-shaped holes. Ragged ones, very recognizable. No, this is definitely from a knife. Look." He handed the bone to Joly. "Run your finger along the back of the cut-that is, the part on the inside of the rib. Feel the roughness?"
Joly did as instructed and nodded.
"When a knife-or an axe-cuts through bone," Gideon said, "it drives the compact bone before it so that there’s some chipping at the exit. It’s like sawing through a block of wood; you get a splintering at the back."