The bones had been discovered late the previous afternoon, by workmen from Aurora Costruzioni, Vincenzo de Grazia’s company, which had acquired the land twenty years ago and was responsible for the nearby developments. One of the workers, using a spade to dig a channel for a second culvert pipe, had jammed it against something under the surface, had jerked the spade out, and had partly plucked out a human pelvis-or so the police physician who had been called to the site had determined. Gideon, remembering Caravale’s earlier story about the bone-identification skills of local physicians, was reserving judgment but hoping it was a different physician. At the moment, the remains in question were out of sight, at the far edge of the turnoff, where the gravel slanted down and away.
“I see you have your men working everyplace but in the gravel itself. Have they already gone over that?”
“No,” Caravale said. “Not where the remains are. I thought it would be best to leave that untouched for you.”
It was the answer he’d wanted. “Good.”
“I looked you up on the Web,” Caravale said abruptly. “I entered your name in Google.”
“And?”
“And I found one hundred forty-four references. Your friend was right, you are well known. And highly regarded.”
Gideon smiled. “Well…”
“Look, I know I was pretty rude the other day,” Caravale said, speaking fast, “and I feel bad about it. It was only that I had a lot on my mind, and besides, I didn’t think you were really… Well, the thing is, I really appreciate your agreeing to help us out here.” He hesitated a second, then offered his hand.
Handsomely done, thought Gideon. “There’s absolutely nothing to apologize for,” he said, taking Caravale’s hand. “I guess I was a little brusque myself. And believe me, Colonel, you have no idea how glad I am to be here.”
“Well, good. Where are you from, Professor?”
“The Seattle area, Colonel.”
“Good, what do you say we dispense with the Colonel-Professor routine? I don’t know about Seattle, but in New Haven we’re pretty informal. My name’s Tullio.”
The remains were at the upstream end of the culvert, in a depression that had been gouged out of the gravel slope angling down from the leveled surface of the turnoff to the floor of the ditch. All that was visible was the pelvic girdle-the hip joint-and half of the right femur, the thigh bone. The body was apparently lying on its back, with the legs bent and twisted sharply to the left, so that the right hip and femur were closest to the surface. The rest of the body-assuming there was a “rest”-was lying on its left side, still covered by more than a foot of gravel.
With an “it’s all yours” wave, Caravale went to check on his crew, for which Gideon, who preferred to work without an audience, was grateful. He believed himself to be disciplined and objective when it came to drawing conclusions, but he knew that his manner of working-the process by which he found his way to his conclusions-was often intuitive and based on hard-to-quantify judgments, which made it cumbersome and sometimes impossible to explain to a lay observer what it was he was doing and why.
That was one reason he was disposed toward working in private. The other was that he liked to talk to himself when he examined a skeleton, and the things he muttered tended to be pretty pedestrian: “Hmm, what’s this?” Or “Now what do you suppose could have caused that?” Or “Say now, look at this.” So with people around he kept his mouth shut, which cramped his style.
“Well, now, let’s see what we have here,” he said, settling down to his first cursory survey. He didn’t touch the bones, but simply squatted on his haunches to look at them.
The right innominate bone-that is, the right half of the pelvis-had apparently been the piece that had gotten caught by the spade, so that the rest of the pelvis had been tugged out of position, pulling the adjacent bones with them. Thus, the upper ends of both femurs, the sacrum, the coccyx, and the lowest two lumbar vertebrae were also partly exposed. Except for some scraps of dried ligament at the articular surfaces, there was no soft tissue to be seen. This, as far as Gideon was concerned, was a welcome sign. It meant that there was unlikely to be soft tissue-flesh, fat, decomposing organs-to contend with anywhere else on the body. The sacroiliac and sacrolumbar ligaments were just about the hardiest tissues in the body, other than the bones themselves. If they were dried up and essentially gone, he probably wasn’t going to have to be scraping nasty stuff off the bones anywhere else.
That, he told himself, would save time, always a consideration to a professional. But he knew full well that time wasn’t the main issue for him. As forensic anthropologists went, Gideon was among the more squeamish. After all these years, “wet” remains could still make his stomach churn. He hated handling them; the looks, the stench, the greasy feel of them. The older, the drier, and the less smelly a skeleton, the happier he was. In his opinion, hundred-thousand-year-old burials were perfect, but that wasn’t a luxury that often came his way in forensic cases.
He leaned a little closer to the bones. The right iliac blade-the thinnest part-of the innominate had been snapped clear through at its narrowest point, through the base of the sciatic notch, just above the acetabulum, the socket into which the head of the femur inserts, but that had obviously happened only a short time ago, long, long after the body had been interred. Most of the skeleton was an ashy gray (bones eventually took on the color of their environment), with ugly black and rust-colored stains and splotches on it. If the fracture had occurred at or before the time of death, its edges would have looked like the rest of the skeleton. Instead, they were a fresh yellow-white, the normal color of bones that haven’t been subjected to the bursting and decomposition of organs and blood vessels, or exposed to the weathering of time. So: no forensic significance.
A ragged, stained ribbon of fabric about an inch wide lay across the sacrum, apparently circling around under it. This, he was fairly certain, was the waistband of a pair of underpants. Cotton underwear on a decomposing corpse was quickly soaked through with body fluids and decayed rapidly, soon disappearing completely in most cases. But waistbands, usually being made of synthetic elastomers, didn’t. There were also some shreds of faded blue cotton fabric-trousers or shorts, probably-mixed in with the bones and, in places, stuck to them.
After a couple of minutes of just looking, he reached out and ran his finger gently over the rim of the fifth lumbar-the lowest and largest vertebra in the spinal column, the one just above the sacrum-and then straightened up, wincing at the increasingly familiar creaks and pops in his knees. His own articular surfaces were beginning to show their age.
“Well,” he murmured, “it’s not a rabbit, that’s for sure.”
It also wasn’t Achille de Grazia.
The bones were not only essentially bare, they were heavily flaked, pitted, and abraded, and that wouldn’t have happened in eight months, let alone eight days. Eight years, maybe, but fifteen or twenty was more like it.
On the other hand, he did have to allow for their being buried in gravel, not soil. That meant that there would be more extreme ups and downs in temperature as the weather aboveground changed, and that the moisture level would fluctuate more. When it rained, they would be soaked faster than if they’d been in soil; when the rain stopped, they would dry faster. All of that would hasten the processes of decay and weathering, as would the easy access that bugs would have. And then the gravel itself was composed of angular pieces, not rounded pebbles. Since there would necessarily have been some shifting and compression when vehicles rolled over them, the bones would have suffered more abrasion than they would have in ordinary soil.