He picked up a few of the individual stones. Granite. Granite, if he remembered right, had an acidic pH, and an acidic environment was one more thing that made bones weather faster. So maybe eight years was pretty close after all. “Between five and fifteen years,” he announced to himself, mentally preparing the on-the-safe-side report he’d turn in to Caravale afterward.
He went back to the car and returned with his hat, a crumpled, tan canvas tennis hat with a brim all the way around (it was the back of the neck that got broiled in work like this), and with his tools. He’d brought no equipment with him to Italy, and it had been too late last night, and too early this morning, to buy anything, so he had borrowed a teaspoon, a tablespoon, and a ladle from the hotel kitchen, a ruler from the desk clerk, and a toothbrush from himself. It was hardly the recommended assemblage for forensic exhumation, but since Caravale had told him the remains were in gravel, he hoped there wouldn’t be any stubborn roots to be pruned, or hard, compacted soil to dig through, or fragile bones to free from a soil environment that could bond with them almost like concrete. As for containers, cameras, tape, etc., he knew the crime-scene van would be stocked with plenty of those; shovels too, if it turned out that he needed them.
He didn’t. The gravel, as expected, was loosely packed, and he was able to scoop it away mostly with his bare hands, putting each handful into ten-gallon buckets, also provided by the van, for later screening by the technicians. He started at the exposed hip joint and slowly began to work his way outward, moving both up and down the body. As he worked, he concentrated on exposing the bones without damaging or moving them, rather than on examining them. That would be the interesting part, of course, and he preferred to save it for later, after he’d cleaned them up, in a morgue or laboratory that had good lighting and room to work standing up, instead of on his knees. Besides, he’d already made all the preliminary conclusions he was likely to come up with on-site. The remains, in addition to being human and having been buried about ten years ago, plus or minus five years, were those of an adult male, and an older one at that; at least in his fifties, probably more.
The sexing had been simple and sure. The pelvic girdle, the one part of the skeleton from which you could make a nearly one hundred percent certain sexual determination, was masculine in every indicator, from the narrow sciatic notch to the oval obturator foramen. That the remains were those of an adult was equally clear from his first quick look at the pelvic girdle and femur. The epiphyses, the separate sites of bone growth that appear at the ends of the long bones and along the edges of the innominate in infancy, and then ossify and attach to the body of the bone as the skeleton matures, were all fully attached. And that process didn’t finish up until the twenties.
As for the specific age, his estimate of fifty-plus had come from running his fingers over the fifth lumbar vertebra. The vertebral “lipping” that goes along with degenerative arthritis-unfortunately, a normal accompaniment of aging-was well advanced, and the surface of the bone showed mild but visible signs of osteoporosis and thinning, also age-related phenomena. There were diseases that could mimic these changes, so it was always possible he was off-base, but once he got to the lab, there would be other indicators to check; the pubic symphyses in particular. With luck, he’d be able to narrow down the age quite a bit more.
Work proceeded rapidly and relatively comfortably-Caravale had thoughtfully provided a knee pad from the van-although there were frequent pauses to allow for photographs and sketches by the crime-scene team, and for one of the techs to help out as the few remnants of clothing turned up: the nylon cuffs and tab (the strip down the front with the buttons) of a jacket, a few of the buttons themselves, the soles and a little bit of the uppers of a pair of canvas deck shoes, a leather belt, and the zipper from the trousers, with a little of the fabric attached. These the rubber-gloved tech removed with tweezers and tongs, and carried them off to the van. Caravale popped in and out for updates, but was more interested in the work of his men than in the bones.
The whole process took two and a half hours, at the end of which Gideon got up, stretched, and walked up and down the road a little, working his cramped neck and shoulder muscles. He chatted with Caravale awhile. Then he came back for another look at what he had, before doing the bagging and labeling for the trip to the lab.
The remains were wholly uncovered now, and for once he seemed to be looking at a complete skeleton, right down to the hyoid, the terminal phalanges of the fingers and toes, and the irregular, pebble-like wrist and ankle bones-probably even the six tiny ossicles of the inner ear; all two hundred six bones of the human body (more or less: it depended on age-the older you got, the fewer you had, because certain adjacent bones tended to fuse together with time; on the individual-some people had thirteen thoracic vertebrae instead of twelve, some people had twenty-five or twenty-six ribs instead of twenty-four; and on how you defined “bone”).
Either there weren’t any bone-stealing carnivores around, or the gravel had been a barrier to them. As he’d thought, the body had been buried on its back, with the legs flexed and turned to the left. The skull was also half-turned to the left, the mandible agape in a typical skeleton grin and a little awry. The right arm lay across the chest-that is, across the collapsed ribs-and the left arm was extended, palm up, alongside the body.
Although the remains appeared to have been unmoved since the burial, the skeleton had suffered some damage. In addition to the broken innominate, the vault of the skull was caved in on the right side, with several big pieces of parietal bone now lying inside the skull along with a lot of gravel and a shrunken, dried-up lump that was what remained of the brain. And the face-the maxillary bone-had suffered too. The right side of the maxilla was crushed from palate to orbit, and the strange, flimsy, curling bones inside the nasal cavity-the conchae, the vomer, the ethmoid-were pulverized beyond the possibility of reconstruction.
It struck him, not for the first time, how peculiarly fragile the human face was, considering the critical environmental monitoring devices it had to protect-sight, smell, and taste. The maxilla was one of the thinnest bones in the body, and hollowed out besides, by the big maxillary sinuses. If you held it up in front of a lamp, it was like eggshell; you could see the light right through it. Generally speaking, Gideon marveled at the astounding engineering of the human skeleton. But the face-that, as he sometimes told his students, he would have designed differently. Maybe left a little more hard, bony snout, just to be on the safe side, had he been in charge of human evolution.
The facial damage was unfortunate-who knew what evidence it might obscure?-but not significant in itself. It was clearly the result of repetitive, long-lasting compression, not of sudden blunt-force trauma; truck or heavy equipment pressure over time, in other words. The burial had put the skull a little higher than the rest of the body, and just where the right-side tires of a truck would roll over it on the way from the road to the parking area, and the left-side tires on the way back. Eight or ten years of that were more than it could stand.