“Looks like it,” Gideon agreed. As they’d thought, it had been these fractures that had emptied blood into the orbital sockets and caused the massive black eyes.
Then, to a specimen jar on the nearby counter in which Joey’s brain was already suspended in formalin to solidify the tissue (the natural consistency of the human brain, as one of Gideon’s early anatomy professors had accurately but unfortunately pointed out, wasn’t all that different from that of Jell-O) so that it could later be sectioned.
“As you can plainly see,” Merrill said, “the frontal lobe shows the effects of those same forces. Massive trauma. Pulped right up to and beyond the anterior ascending rami of the lateral cerebral fissures. But in the back, we find that the direct impact of whatever caused the depressed fracture also resulted in severe, if less extensive, coup damage, the contused area involving the left superior parietal lobule and extending partway into the occipital lobe. So we have both contrecoup and coup injuries resulting from the same event. Not usual, but hardly unheard of. The result of brain ‘bounce-back, ’ generally speaking, but not, I believe, in this case.”
He cleared his throat, a long process heralding the coming of the windup. “My working conclusion is as follows: death from massive trauma to the brain resulting from a fall onto the back of the head, complicated by the intrusion of a relatively sharp object that had been lying on the paving-a wayward stone would be as good a guess as any. That’s all clear enough, isn’t it? Shall I take it out of the jar?”
Gideon’s answer was quick. “No, thank you, not necessary.”
Truth be told, he was having a hard time telling which end of the brain in the jar was the front and which was the back, let alone remembering what or where the anterior ascending ramus of the lateral cerebral fissure was. This, he thought, was a good lesson to him. All week he had been explaining away the ignorance of physicians in regard to bones, and although he had gone out of his way to be charitable, in his heart he’d been feeling mightily superior. Well, now he knew that what was true for them was true for him: even the most qualified experts knew only so much. They knew what they were familiar with, what interested them, what they worked with day to day. And to Gideon, who hadn’t held a human brain in his hands since graduate school, and who hoped never to do it again, that most definitely did not include the soft and squishy organs of the human interior.
But if Merrill said the brain injuries were thus and so, and covered such and such a surface area, he was certainly willing to accept it. What he was not willing to accept was the pathologist’s conclusion.
“I don’t think so, Wilson.”
Merrill scowled. “Don’t think what?”
“I don’t think that’s the way it happened.”
There were a few-a very few-forensic pathologists who enjoyed having their minds boggled, and their hypotheses overturned, and Wilson Merrill was one of them. Apparently, Gideon had lived up to expectations, and he was delighted. “I knew you’d say that! I was hoping you’d say that! Rajiv, didn’t I tell you he’d say that? All right, tell me, what have I gotten wrong?”
Gideon gestured at the skullcap, which he’d placed, still on its towel, exterior side up, on a corner of the instrument table. “There are two separate injuries here, not one.”
“Two?” Intrigued, Merrill peered down at it. “Good Lord, with all that disruption, how can you possibly tell? It all looks like one big mess to me.”
“No, if you look carefully, you can see two separate loci. There’s the depressed fracture, of course, here on the left parietal.”
“Yes, naturally. I see that.”
“And here, across the sagittal suture, on the right parietal, about three inches away, is another, separate point of impact with its own set of fracture lines. You see how the bone here broke up in a rough pattern of concentric circles: one, two, three rings”-he traced their shapes with his ballpoint-“in the center of which would be the impact point. And then there are all these linear fractures radiating every which way out of the rings, which is what complicates things.”
“By George, yes, I do see,” Merrill said. He mused, frowning. “ Two impact points. Two separate traumatic incidents. Well, then… well, then…” He looked up into the fluorescent lights for inspiration. “Might he not have somehow struck his head on that broken pipe on the way down-that would be the depressed fracture-and then struck it again when he hit the flat pavement below? Is that what happened, do you think?”
“No.”
“No,” Merrill echoed. “I didn’t think so. You believe, then, that he was struck and then fell. That this is a homicide after all. A murder.”
“I believe it’s a murder, all right, but it was the other way around.”
“The other way around,” Merrill repeated, enchanted. “Whatever can that mean, I wonder.”
“First he fell,” Gideon said. “Then he was struck.”
“And you know this… how?”
“Look at the cracks,” Gideon said. “Look at the way they intersect.”
Merrill looked, then jerked his head. “What about the cracks?” he asked, but a bit testily. He’d had his fill of befuddlement, Gideon thought, and was impatient to be enlightened.
“The cracks from the injury on the right, the one with the concentric pattern, go every which way, until they peter out on their own.
“Yes, yes, as you said before.”
“But the cracks radiating from the depressed fracture…” He paused, wanting to give Merrill a chance to work it out himself, and the pathologist came through with flying colors.
“-are arrested wherever they run into a crack coming from the other fracture!” he cried. “They never continue across them. Of course! A crack can’t cross another crack; the energy is dissipated. That means that the other fracture was there first. The depressed fracture came afterward!”
Gideon nodded, as pleased as Merrill was. “Right. He fell from the catwalk-was pushed, would be a pretty good guess at this point-and whoever pushed him came down, found him still alive, or at least thought that he might be, and smashed him in the head again to make sure the job was done.”
Merrill nodded, suddenly solemn. “Do you know, I’ve always hated blunt-force homicides,” he said thoughtfully. “A gun, a knife, will kill quickly, but blows-they usually take more than one, sometimes many, many more than one, demonstrating, to me, at least, a horrible, brutal tenacity in the human psyche that I don’t like thinking about.”
“But in this case there was only the one blow.”
“Yes, only one, but imagine what it was like. Young Joey Dillard, lying on the stone, helpless, terribly injured, his head already shattered, and the killer… the killer cold-bloodedly…”
“I too hate these things,” Rajiv declared with feeling.
“I’m not too crazy about them myself,” said Gideon, doing his best to block out the picture that Merrill had conjured up for him.
TWENTY-ONE
Despite Merrill’s promise, he did not arrive back by teatime. It was 5:50 P.M. by the time the helicopter set him down on Holgate’s Green, and he immediately telephoned Clapper’s private number to bring him up to date on the autopsy, but it was Anna at the answering service that picked up, and she had a message waiting for him.
“Hello, love, the sergeant’s just gone out for dinner with his lady-friend, but he said if you get back by six or six-thirty, why don’t you come and join him, and bring your wife, if you like? They’ve gone to the Atlantic Inn. Do you know where it is, love, or do you require directions?”
Gideon did not require directions. He had passed it several times on his way to his morning pasties and coffee at the Kavorna Cafe: a pleasant-looking old hotel and pub on the main street, right at the foot of the pier. He put in a call to Julie, who was at the nightly cocktail hour in the castle dungeon-it had been canceled the night before on account of Joey’s death, but Kozlov had now reinstituted it-and passed along the invitation.