“Silver, silver,” Kaz agreed. “Of bone.”
“Oh, yes, sliver,” Gideon said. “It does look like that, Kaz, as if a sliver, a splinter, has popped out. But that’s not why the crack is wider. It’s wider because-”
“Because the sides of it are all eaten away,” Fausto said, peering at it. “The other crack, it’s got these clean edges. You could fit the two sides right back together. But this one, you couldn’t. The sides are all, like, eroded.”
“Exactly,” Gideon said.
“Which means?”
“Well, let’s look at a little more of it before I go out on a limb. I want to see the whole length of the cracks. Kaz, would you mind removing the soft tissue around the base of the skull?” he asked brightly. “I’d do it myself, but I’m sure you’d be better at it.”
A snort from Fausto, and a contemptuous “Yeah, right.” Meanwhile, he himself had now returned to his spot a good five feet away.
“And be really careful with it, will you, Kaz? We don’t want to damage it any more than it already is.”
Kaz’s mobile features pulled together and darkened. “I will try my best,” he mumbled, believing his professional competence had been called into question.
“Sorry, Kaz,” Gideon said quickly. “I didn’t mean you had damaged it. I can see what a good job you’ve done with it so far. I know you’ll be careful. I don’t know what made me say that.”
He knew what had made him say it, all right. He knew that pathologists, with their natural focus on organs and soft tissue, could be downright careless about bone. Many a nick or scratch on a skeleton that had first been taken to be a sign of foul play had turned out in the end to be nothing more than the slip of a pathologist’s knife during the autopsy. And many a genuine sign of antemortem trauma had been obliterated or made unusable as evidence in the same way.
But Kaz was a meticulous dissector, his long, deft fingers slicing, tugging, and delicately scraping away with skill and control. In a few minutes the lower right-hand side of the skull was as clean as a scalpel could get it.
“Nicely done,” Gideon said truthfully, which mollified Kaz, assuming that his re-reddening ears could be taken as an indication.
Gideon leaned over the broken skull, breathing as shallowly as he could. Kaz’s scalpel had released a fresh puff of barbecue-grill aroma. But one quick look made him forget all about the odor. He’d come up with something, something crucial. A familiar and irrepressible feeling of satisfaction, almost of triumph, ran through him.
“All right, men, we’ve got something here. Look at the fracture, the one we’ve been talking about, where it runs into the unburned bone, where the muscle was covering it before you cut it away, Kaz.”
“Okay, we’re looking,” Fausto said, growing impatient. “Come on, my attention span isn’t that great. Why don’t you just tell us what we’re supposed to see?”
“Because I’m a professor. This is what I do. Come on, look at the crack. What happens to it?”
Fausto sighed. “Nothing happens to it. The damn thing goes down into the, what do you call it, the ear-hole thing.”
“The auditory meatus.”
“Whatever. And it disappears in there.”
“Very good. Now compare it to the other fracture, where it runs into the unburned bone that was under the muscle.”
Kaz’s brows knit. “I don’t-”
“There’s nothing to compare, dammit,” Fausto said through clenched teeth. “The other crack doesn’t run down that far.”
Gideon straightened, stripped off his gloves, and tossed them on the tray. “Bingo,” he said.
FIFTEEN
For almost two hundred years the Alameda Botanical Gardens have been a peaceful, restorative haven where the people of Gibraltar could go to get away from the congestion, dust, and bustle of the city. Lovers – moony teenagers and shuffling old married folk – still stroll hand in hand among its lush plantings, stately civic memorials, and nineteenth-century cannons, planning their futures and recalling their pasts.
Strolling there hand in hand, Gideon told Julie about the burned body in the morgue.
“So he was murdered,” she said thoughtfully.
“I’m pretty sure.”
“And does Fausto go along with you?”
“Oh, yes. He was setting up some interviews when I left him. Rowley’s at the top of the list.”
“He suspects Rowley?”
“No, but Rowley drove Ivan home that night. He’s probably the last one who saw him alive before the killer. He probably knows Ivan better than anyone else too.”
“Does Fausto have anybody he suspects? Do you?”
“No. Do you?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m trying to imagine a reason any of these people would want to kill him, and I can’t come up with one.”
“I know. I would have thought he didn’t have an enemy in the world. I’m sorry you didn’t know him before; he was impossible to dislike. But then, we know next to nothing about his outside life. There’s more to him than archaeology. Family, acquaintances, old enemies, maybe…”
“I know. But if you add in the attacks on you, and Sheila Chan’s ‘accident,’ it just has to have something to do with Gibraltar Boy and all that – which means something to do with these people – your friends.”
“Julie, we have no compelling reason to think what happened to Sheila wasn’t an accident, and as for the supposed attacks on me, the jury’s still out, right? There’s no hard evidence anyone really attacked me.”
“Yeah, right,” Julie said, which, in reality, pretty much summed up Gideon’s sentiments too.
They walked a few more steps. “You could really tell he was murdered by comparing the cracks in his skull?” Julie asked.
“More or less.”
“That’s remarkable. Every time I think I know all your tricks you come up with another one.”
“But unlike most magicians, I always tell how I did it.”
“Whether I want to know or not.” She dug him in the ribs with her elbow. “You know I’m kidding. Tell me.”
“What do you say we sit down?”
They chose a lichened stone bench in a grove of small but ancient oaks, poplars, and spiky palms, with the clean, white facade of the Rock Hotel, and the immense Rock itself, looming above them through the foliage.
“There were two keys,” he said. The first had been the form of the fractures. One was narrow, with sharp, clean-cut margins. As Fausto had said, if there hadn’t been any warping of the surrounding temporal bone, the edges would have fit together perfectly. That was fairly typical of thermally induced fracturing.
“The skull just splits open from the heat?” Julie said.
“No, not exactly. It happens primarily because the organic content of the bone is destroyed, which delaminates it – the external table separates from the diploe and shrinks and cracks. Continue the heat, and the same thing happens to the internal table, so then you get a fracture all the way through.”
She frowned. “Isn’t that what I just said?”
He laughed. “I suppose so, yes. In any case, there’s nothing suspicious about that one. But the second crack, the anterior one, ah, that one was wide open, with margins so worn and eroded – so burned – that they no longer came close to matching each other.”
Long used to this kind of conversation, Julie was characteristically quick on the uptake. “Meaning that the second crack was exposed to the heat for a longer time, so it must have come first,” she said.
“Right. Presumably it was there before the fire started.”
“But how do you know it wasn’t just a question of the way he was lying?”
“The way he was lying?”
“Sure. He was lying on the bed, right? Which was where the fire started. Maybe that part of his head – the part that had the eroded crack – was against the mattress, so it took more of the heat for a longer time. Couldn’t that be the reason for the difference?”
“Well, it could, yes – although the two cracks were awfully close together for a differential rate of burning. But, yeah, you could be right, it’s possible. Fortunately, there was another key. And this one was the clincher.”