“With the bones is fine. I have a little more to do anyway. And hey-I’m glad the de Grazia boy’s all right,” he called, but Caravale was already in the car, leaning over the wheel and gunning the engine.
By 11 A.M. the bones had been bagged, labeled, and boxed, ready for their trip to the morgue, which was in the hospital in Stresa, which turned out to be located on Via de Martini, only two blocks from the Hotel Primavera. Gideon, going along with them in the van, saw them safely delivered, took a break to clean up at the hotel and have lunch among the living and breathing at one of the hotel restaurants on the Corso Italia, shopped for the few forensic supplies that would be needed, and walked back to the hospital.
There he found Corporal Fasoli waiting for him. One of the youngest of the officers, he seemed genuinely interested in the bones and paid close attention as Gideon demonstrated, with some of the metacarpals, how it was to be done. Each bone was to be cleaned with nothing more than the fingers and the small paint brush or soft toothbrush that Gideon had provided, using water or acetone if necessary, to get the dried glop off. If any of the adhering tissue was stubborn, it was to be left for Gideon to deal with. The stains were not to be worried about. The most important thing, aside from taking care not to clean too vigorously, especially where there had been abrasion or breakage, was to be careful not to lose anything. If bones were washed in the sink, it was to be done over the screen-bottomed tray he’d brought. When the cleanup was finished, the bones were to be laid out on paper toweling on one of the autopsy tables to dry overnight, and in the morning Gideon would position them in anatomical order and get to work.
Fasoli, who had already rolled up his sleeves, nodded crisply, eager to begin. He understood perfectly. It was a privilege to assist the famous detective delle ossa. Would the professor like him to try to place the bones in the proper anatomical positions himself? He could surely find an anatomy book here at the hospital, and it was a task he would like to try.
In the face of Fasoli’s natural enthusiasm, Gideon felt no guilt whatever about leaving him to the cleanup, and at one-thirty in the afternoon he was sitting happily on the grass in the sunshine, eating mortadella and tomato-and-cheese panini with Phil and Julie (by his reckoning, having had no breakfast entitled him to two lunches) at Camping Costa Azzurra, a giant camping village on the lake near Fondotoce, between Stresa and Ghiffa. As scheduled, the Pedal and Paddle group had pulled in early to allow for a visit to the little stone Oratorio of Saint Giacomo, said to be from Roman times, and to take it easy for an afternoon before embarking on the two-day bicycling excursion to Lake Orta the next morning.
“Leave it to you,” Julie said in mock wonderment when he had finished telling them about the events of the last few hours. “Come to Italy for a vacation and wind up digging a skeleton out of a shallow grave in the woods. Amazing.”
“Just another knack, I guess,” Gideon said.
“But that’s really great news about Achille,” Phil said. “I was starting to get worried when he didn’t show up.”
“So was everybody else. Caravale looked as if someone just took a hundred-pound load off his shoulders when they told him.”
“Speak of the devil,” said Phil, pointing with his chin.
Gideon, following his gaze toward the parking area, was surprised to see Caravale himself climb out of his black Fiat and look around, shading his eyes with his hand, obviously searching for someone. As to who that might be, there wasn’t any doubt. Gideon had given him the group’s itinerary in case there was any reason to find him. “I’ll be damned,” he said and got up on one knee to wave. “Tullio-over here!”
Phil and Julie looked at him. “‘Tullio?’” Phil said. “My, my.”
Caravale, not seeing them, headed off toward the camp-ground office, creating a rolling wave of concerned looks from the campers who saw him. He had changed into his uniform, which didn’t surprise Gideon. At the excavation site, he’d had the impression that Caravale felt anything but at home in jeans and polo shirt. And with reason: A spiffy, well-tailored uniform-especially one with shoulder boards-did a lot for a pudding-shouldered, dumpy type like Caravale.
They caught up with him on the steps of the log cabin office, but a noisily idling diesel-powered tour bus a few yards away drove them back to the lawn to talk.
“How’s Achille doing?” Phil asked at once.
“About the way you’d expect. Shaken up, filthy, but that’s about all, except for the drugging. They treated him fairly well, apparently.”
“Was he able to tell you anything?”
“Not a great deal. He was in a tent the entire time; they never let him out.”
“A tent?” Julie asked. “You mean they kept him outside?”
“No, he’s sure it was indoors. A tent inside a building of some kind. But he has no idea where.”
“What about descriptions?” Gideon asked. “Did he get a look at them?”
Caravale shook his head. “One of the men didn’t have a mask on when they kidnapped him, but he was too terrified by all the shooting to have a clear memory of him. He was ‘big,’ that’s all he can remember. It doesn’t help much.”
“Who wouldn’t have been terrified?” Julie asked. “Poor kid.”
“What about later?” Gideon asked. “He never saw them?”
“Later, whenever they came in, they made him put a blindfold over his head first-some kind of elastic bandage. He thinks there were two of them, both men, but maybe three. I’m starting to wonder if he might not have been drugged-sedated, at any rate-for the whole time. He says he doesn’t think so, but I’m not so sure.”
“So you don’t have much to go on, do you?”
“Much?” Caravale laughed. “You must be seeing something I missed. I didn’t think I had anything to go on.”
“Well, the main thing is, he’s out and he’s all right,” Phil said, as usual pointing out the bright side. “Is he home now?”
“Oh, sure, with his papa and his loving family. They’re all making a fuss over him, he’s very happy. All is well on Isola de Grazia.” He rocked back and forth on his feet, his thumbs hooked in the waistband of his Sam Browne belt.
Something’s funny here, Gideon thought. Caravale was looking too pleased with himself. No doubt he was relieved that Achille had come out of it alive, but at the same time he was now a cop with a big, unclosed case on his hands and nowhere to go with it; not a lead in sight. In Gideon’s experience, that usually made cops cranky.
“Is there something else on your mind, Tullio?” Gideon asked.
“Something else?” He pretended to think. “Oh, yes, that’s right, I almost forgot. Those remains you were kind enough to help out with this morning? We have a positive ID on them.”
Gideon was astounded. “But… I left Fasoli with them not even two hours ago. They can’t even be clean yet. How did you-”
“Why, I did what you told me. I got a dental identification.”
“But how, how did you-”
“We found his dentist and asked him.”
“I understand, but how could you possibly-I never made any charts, we didn’t-”
He stopped in mid-sentence. Caravale was grinning at him, revealing a surprisingly perfect row of small, square, brown teeth. It was the first full smile that Gideon had seen on his face, and it made him look like a wicked Cupid. Obviously, he wasn’t above taking pleasure in a little mind-boggling of his own.
Fair enough, a little tit for tat. “Okay, I give up,” he said. “I’m completely mystified. How about letting me in on how you managed that?”
“It wasn’t so hard. I decided not to wait for your charts. I simply had our digital photography person photograph the jawbone from a lot of different angles and e-mailed them to the dentist-his office is in Milan-and a little later he called back with a hundred-percent positive ID. Nothing to it. The whole thing took… oh, twenty minutes.”