Dr. Kazimir Figlewski was waiting for them in the anteroom. Instead of the roomy hospital scrubs favored nowadays by most pathologists, he was wearing an old-fashioned black rubber apron over a sleeveless undershirt. He was a skinny, smiling scarecrow of a kid with a wild thatch of stiff, blond hair that sat on the top of his head like a nest, and big, round, flaming red ears that stuck out like a pair of mug handles. His pale, bare, unmuscled arms were covered in light brown freckles.
Gideon was visited by one of those intimations of his own advancing age that had begun popping up lately. When did they start making doctors this young? Fausto had told him Figlewski was somewhere in his late twenties, but since when were people in their late twenties as young as this?
“I am greatly happy to meet you, professor,” Figlewski said. His accent was what you might expect from someone named Kazimir Figlewski, throaty and Slavic, with long, broad, gliding vowels. He grinned and thrust out his hand.
Gideon, somewhat fastidious (many a small-minded colleague would say squeamish) around fresh remains (less than five hundred years old, say), couldn’t help sneaking a look at the proffered hand. Shaking hands with a man – a boy – who had just finished poking around inside a dead body didn’t appeal to him (some pathologists still worked without gloves part of the time, after all), but the hand looked clean and white enough. He took it.
“Thanks, Dr. Figlewski, same here.”
“Please, you call me Kaz.”
“And I’m Gideon. I hope you don’t think I’m horning in, Kaz.”
“Oh, no, please. Fausto warns me you are coming.” He laughed. “I mean he tells me you are coming, that you think maybe we got some foul play here. That’s great – I mean, I am wery interested to see what you do, how you do this. Is a great honor to meet you. I read your papers wery much in journals. ‘The Bone Doctor.’ ” He grinned.
“Close enough,” said Gideon, smiling.
“We don’t never have a real forensic scientist come here before, you know. No reason for it. Last murder we have is two years ago. This is before I start working with police.”
This is before you finished medical school, Gideon thought. “Yes, Fausto told me,” he said.
Fausto had also told him that Figlewski wasn’t really an ME in the American sense of the word. While his formal title was “forensic medical examiner,” he was simply a local pediatrician who had a part-time contract with the Territory of Gibraltar; what might be called a police surgeon in a small American town. He spent a great deal more time clucking over infected ears than he did in the autopsy suite. Fausto thought highly of him, though, and with reason. He had emigrated from Poland to England as a fifteen-year-old speaking no English. Despite this language handicap, thirteen years later he had a medical degree from the University of East Anglia, and last year he had come to Gibraltar, answering the call for doctors to work in the new hospital.
“But I already do some traffic fatalities,” he said, lest Gideon should think him inexperienced.”
“Your first burn case, though?”
“On dead body, you mean? Because peoples, especially so many kids, always coming in-”
“On a dead body, yes,” Gideon said. “An autopsy.”
“Well… yes, this is true, but thermal injuries, they are covered in forensic course they send me to in London. But if I miss something, or if you have tip for me, I am standing all ears.”
Probably not the best metaphor in the world for you, Gideon thought with the slightest of smiles, but he had already taken a liking to this chatty, earnest, slightly goofy young Pole. At least he had the right attitude for a forensic pathologist. In Gideon’s experience, medical examiners and pathologists, unlike their police and prosecutorial brethren (to say nothing of the defense side), had little sense of turf, little desire to protect their jurisdictions. This wasn’t the first autopsy he’d horned in on, and almost always he’d been warmly welcomed. They were scientists, not advocates, that was the difference. Nothing to support, or justify, or protect. They were more interested in teaching – and learning – than in proving or vindicating.
“Well, I don’t know how many tips I can give you,” he said. “I’ve never actually performed an autopsy myself, you know.” (And with luck I never will, he added silently.) “I generally work with skeletal remains.”
“Sure, you bet, the Bone Doctor.”
Twice was too much for the irascible Fausto. “ Skeleton Detective. For Christ’s sake, Kaz.”
“Skeleton Detective, Skeleton Detective,” Kaz repeated, slapping himself on the side of the head to drive it in.
Continuing to bat himself on the temple – “Skeleton Detective, Skeleton Detective” – he led them out of the pleasant, fabric-walled anteroom, through a small, plain room lined with metal file cabinets, and with a large scale that took up most of the room implanted in the linoleum-covered floor; here, gurneys with bodies on them would be weighed and measured before being autopsied. A door on the far wall led into the tile-walled autopsy room itself – “Welcome to my world” said Figlewski – and the moment it opened Gideon was reminded of why he hated fire fatalities so much; maybe even more than decomps (although it was a close call).
The thing was, badly charred bodies smelled wonderful – walking into an autopsy room with one of them on the table was like walking into a weirdly sterile-looking steakhouse. And then you got up to the table and had to face the thing that lay on it. For Gideon, the war between the appetizing smell and his notoriously hair-trigger gag reflex made for a queasy and unsettling time of it.
“I told you,” said Fausto, referring to the paucity of remains lying on the slanting, zinc-topped table.
Gideon nodded, trying to quiet the churning in his midsection. Once he got down to work, it would pass, but for the moment, what was left of Ivan Gunderson was pretty off-putting. As Fausto had said, the body, lying on its back, looked more like a charred chunk of wood – a piece of driftwood that had been used more than once as part of a campfire on the beach – than what had once been a human being. That was the bad part. It was also the good part, in that there was nothing at all in this blackened, desiccated hulk to make him think of Ivan. It might have been anybody. It might almost have been anything.
As Fausto had told him, there was nothing that anyone could call a face. Only the back parts of the palate and mandible were left, with a few heat-shattered molars. This was a common result in fires. The human face and cranial vault are “protected” only by some of the thinnest muscles in the entire body. Lower down, along the sides of the head and in back, where the heavier musculature of the jaw and the neck do afford some protection, both soft and skeletal tissue generally fare somewhat better. And this was the case here. The base of the cranium, thick to begin with, and shielded by dense muscles as well, was still present, but only as an empty, bowl-shaped basin with some blackened soft tissue – not soft anymore – still left on the outside. If there had been any brain tissue left inside, which was unlikely, Kaz had removed it during the autopsy.
As for the rest of the body, Fausto had been right about that too. There wasn’t much to see. One of his more lyrical anthropologist friends, Stan Rhine, had likened the appearance of a body as badly burned as this one to a derelict old sailing ship, dismasted and cast up on a beach somewhere, its curved, broken old ribs jutting up from the sands. The image had stuck with Gideon, and in Ivan’s case, it was particularly apt. “The body was burned beyond recognition” would have been putting it mildly.
“Well,” Gideon said, steeling himself. He stood a couple of feet from the table, looking down at it.