Kaz was on the other side of it, watching expectantly. Fausto was leaning back against a stainless steel sink four or five feet away, his arms folded. Gideon doubted that this tough little cop was worried about his stomach. More likely, he didn’t want to chance getting anything nasty on his pale blue, nubby linen suit or the soft, immaculate French cuffs of his buff-colored silk shirt. Gideon wished he could work from five feet away too.
“Tell me what you know so far, Kaz,” Gideon said.
“Well, we establish already that he is alive at time of fire-”
“How do you know that?”
“Elevated carbon monoxide level in blood. He is still breathing when fire started, for sure.”
Gideon looked down at the dried, crusted remains. “You were able to get blood?”
“Blood, yes, even urine. There was congealed mass of soft tissue in pelvic cavity – liver, colon…”
“And you already have the results?”
Fausto answered for him. “Told you, there isn’t too much going on here. Getting lab results in a hurry isn’t a problem.”
“What was the level?” Gideon asked.
“Fifty-five percent,” said Kaz.
“Enough to kill a man his age,” Gideon said.
“Oh, yes, for sure.”
“So is that your best guess? He died of smoke inhalation?”
“Oh, yes. For sure.”
“Okay, what else?” Gideon edged a step closer to the table. He liked to approach these things in stages, working his way up to the corpse. For him, it made it easier to take, like getting into cold water a few inches at a time, getting used to the shock, and then going in deeper.
“Else?” Kaz scratched his head. “Not so much, really. Uh, he was lying on back, in bed, during fire – I find pieces of melted, what do you call it, springs from bed, buried in soft tissue on back of hips and shoulders. And, well…”
“How sure are you that it’s him – Gunderson?” Gideon asked, looking down at the body, his hands still in back of him. It wasn’t that unusual for unrecognizable remains to turn out to belong to other people than were first assumed. While the fact that he had been found in Gunderson’s bed made it likely that he was indeed Ivan Gunderson, it wasn’t exactly proof. And nobody had identified this body by looking at it, that was for sure.
“One hundred percent,” Fausto answered for Kaz. “That’s one thing we’re sure about.”
“Was his teeth,” Kaz said. “Mostly broken or gone, yes, but two back ones, upper molar threes, are still okay, and we bring his dentist here first thing this morning to see them. A positive identification.”
Gideon shook his head admiringly. “You guys do work fast,” he said. Another step closer to the table.
“Wasn’t that hard,” Fausto said. “Total of twenty-four dentists in Gib. Took about fifteen minutes to find Gunderson’s. And he wasn’t doing anything else this morning.”
“So where you go from here?” Kaz asked. “You can do something with
… with this small remains?”
“It doesn’t look good, does it?” Gideon said with a sigh. “Is this it, then, Kaz? They didn’t come up with any more pieces of him?”
“No more pieces, but I got some of his liver and other organs” – another gesture of invitation toward the refrigerator – “if you want-”
Gideon fended him off with upraised hands. “ No! I mean, I wouldn’t know what to do with them. I meant bones. Especially pieces of the skull.”
Kaz shook his head. “I’m sorry, they find only this.”
“The cottage was a mess,” Fausto said. “Hardly anything standing. Roof collapsed, debris everywhere, all as burned up as he is, tons of water sloshed all over everything. Take you a year to try to find any bone at all, let alone from his skull. This is it, I’m afraid.”
Gideon nodded. He had made it all the way up to the table now. “Well, let’s see what we can see,” he said, not very hopefully.
“You would like lab coat?” Kaz asked. “Pair gloves?”
“I would love a pair of gloves, Kaz.”
Kaz gave him two pairs – since the advent of AIDS, wearing two sets instead of one had become common – which Gideon slipped on, not that the remains of Ivan Gunderson would be likely to pose any threat in that regard. Beside the table was a steel tray in which Kaz’s simple autopsy tools lay on a cloth: probes, scalpels, and the ubiquitous, wicked-looking, foot-long knife known familiarly as the “bread knife.” All the classic old instruments. Scissors, favored by most young pathologists nowadays, were not present. Gideon selected a dental pick, spatula-shaped at one end, hooked and pointed at the other, and bent over the ruins of the skull. Fausto stayed where he was, back a few feet, leaning against the sink. Kaz, anticipating edification, leaned keenly over the table from the other side. Gideon, for his part, would have been happy to edify, but the pickings looked slim; he might well be wasting everyone’s time.
He turned his attention to what was left of the skull, gently probing with the pick end of the probe. “So what we’ve got here is the base of the cranium from about the superior nuchal line on down,” he mused aloud, “with some of the heavy musculature – sternocleidomastoideus, masseter, trapezius – still adhering to the lower portions…”
Gingerly, he touched the gray-white, exposed bone with the tip of the probe. Bits of it crumbled away. “Upper parts are deeply burned, heavily calcined in places, graduating inferiorly to singed, buff-colored bone, and then to-” With the spatula end of the probe he prodded the surface of the burned musculature. The crusty top layer flaked off at the first touch, exposing a deeper stratum of red meat, much like – he couldn’t help thinking it – the middle of a rare, charcoal-broiled steak. When a bit of that too was picked and prodded away, fresh, ivory-colored, unharmed bone showed through. “-to muscle-protected, unburned bony tissue from about the zygomatic process and the 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.