Nellie shook his head. “Nope, but you’re getting warmer.”
Gideon sighed. “Nellie, how about just-all!”
Inconspicuous as it was, it seemed to leap out and catch his eye. On the sixth cervical vertebra, located just below the level of the Adam’s apple-a minuscule break zigzagging its way across the front of the right transverse process, one of two small, winglike spurs jutting out from the body of the vertebra.
Gideon leaned closer, nudged the bone with a forefinger. The crack was perhaps a quarter of an inch long. “Hinge fracture,” he said, using the conventional term for a break that went only partway through the bone, something like what happened when you snapped a fresh twig.
“Exactly,” Nellie said with enthusiasm. “Precisely. And you’ll also notice, on the posterior root-”
“Another fracture,” Gideon said. “Hairline. And as for the adjacent vertebrae…” One by one he lifted them and carefully examined the convoluted surfaces.
Nellie nodded vigorously, urging him along.
“…nothing,” Gideon said. “No sign of trauma.” Another crisp nod from Nellie. He paused in lighting his pipe. “So? What’s your conclusion, doctor?”
Gideon leaned against a lab stool. There wasn’t much room for doubt. Injuries like these, in these particular places, meant that enormous squeezing force had been applied to the neck. One saw them in hangings, or even in manual strangulations if the killer happened to be built along the lines of King Kong. But in such cases, the wholesale wrenching of the neck muscles generally produced injuries to more than one vertebra, often to four or five. To have only a single vertebra cracked, and that one in two places, meant that the constriction had been extraordinarily localized.
It wasn’t something one came across often; in Gideon’s experience only twice. And each time it had been caused by the same thing.
“Garrote,” he said.
“Aye, mate,” Nellie said with satisfaction as he got his pipe going. “The old Spanish windlass.”
The technique dated back at least to the time of Christ. In its basic version a cord-in ancient times it had been made of animal sinew-was looped twice around the neck, and a stick or other firm object inserted between the loops. Rotating the stick would then twist the cord, much like a tourniquet, and create terrific pressure, first closing the windpipe and then, with a few more twists, snapping the spinal column; thus combining the virtues, so to speak, of strangling and hanging. When applied at the level of the sixth cervical vertebra, it would also compress the carotid sheath, thereby shutting off blood flow to and from the brain. Just for good measure.
The Spanish Inquisitors, who used the method as a merciful alternative to the stake, claimed that it was painless, but there was a lack of definitive data on this point. What it demonstrably was, however, was simple, efficient, and silent. And, if the cord was knotted at close intervals, bloodless.
Gideon touched the crack in the skull. “You think he was knocked out by a fall, then garroted?”
“Let’s hope so,” Nellie said, “for his sake.”
Gideon hoped so too. He stood looking down at the table in an odd reverie. What an enormous difference there was between the livid, flagrant corpses a pathologist had to work with and this, the anthropologist’s quiet and unassuming skeleton. This man’s life had ended horrifically, yet the bones gave no signs of upset or fright. Or even of pain. Just two clean, inconsequential-looking little cracks in one tiny, inessential-looking bone. The skull grinned like any other skull, no different from that of a man who had died peacefully in his bed. There were no bulging eyeballs, no purple and protruding tongue, no cruelly bruised and swollen flesh.
A good thing too, or he’d have been out of this business a long time ago.
Nellie smacked his hands together. “Well, then, if that’s settled, let’s lock up and get out of here. If you’ve got time, let’s stop by Honeyman’s office and give him the good news.”
He took off the lab apron he’d been wearing and tossed it onto a coat hook. Today’s T-shirt was a bright and cheerful blue. “Our day begins when yours ends,” it said. “Dallas PD, Homicide Unit.”
“So,” a sweating, shirt-sleeved Honeyman said bleakly, turning the stub of a pencil end-over-end on the big old desk that took up a full third of his tiny office. “It’s definitely homicide. There’s no doubt about it anymore.”
“Was there ever?” Nellie asked. “Or did you seriously consider that he might have buried himself?”
Honeyman glared at him, then permitted himself a baggy smile. “I could always hope.”
“What about you?” Gideon asked. “Making any progress?” “Progress!” Honeyman said with a snort. “The budget meeting was a total disaster! They actually expect us-” “I meant on the burial,” Gideon said.
“Oh, the burial. Well, there are these.” From an ink-stained shirt pocket bulging with half a dozen pens he pried out a small yellow envelope, which he opened and upended on the desk. A quarter and two nickels rolled out. “These came out of the grave after you finished. Right under the body, about an inch below.”
“Must have rotted out of his pocket,” Nellie said.
“Yes, or somebody dropped them while they were burying him. Same difference.”
Gideon turned the coins over to read the dates: “1981, 1972, 1978.” He looked up. “So at least you know something you didn’t know before. He couldn’t have been buried before 1981.”
“No, or after, either. Not that I know what that does for us.
“Or after?” Nellie repeated. “Why the devil not? Just because a 1981 coin-”
“Well, it’s not the coin,” Honeyman said, “it’s the shed.” “The shed,” Nellie said.
“Yes, the shed.”
Gideon tried helping things along. “The shed that used to stand where we found the grave?”
“Sure, what else are we talking about? I talked with the management, and they said part of it blew down in a huge windstorm we had in October 1981, and they bulldozed away what was left of it a few days later. So there you are. That body was buried in 1981. Before October.”
“Where are we?” Nellie demanded. “So the shed blew down in October. Who’s to say the body wasn’t buried later?”
Surprisingly, Honeyman was ready for him. “It’s always possible, but what would be the point? It would have been right out in the open, only a few feet from some of the guest cottages. And you can see it from the road. You’d have to be crazy to try to bury a body there.”
“Well, yes…”
“But…” Honeyman said, and Gideon began to think he might actually be enjoying himself. Not many people got a chance to lecture Nelson Hobert. “But while the shed was still standing, it was perfect. Easy to get into, a nice dirt floor to dig in, plenty of junk in it to hide the grave-and with the open side facing away from the cottages and the road. What more could you ask? The chances of that grave ever being found were just about zero.”
Gideon nodded his agreement. If Honeyman ever decided to get out of administration and into detective work, he just might do all right.
“Not quite zero,” Nellie pointed out. “It did get found.”
“Oh, certainly,” Honeyman said with another of his sad-eyed smiles, “but only because our poor, dumb perp never bothered to calculate the probability of a convention full of forensic anthropologists showing up and crawling all over the place ten years later. Just goes to show the limitations of the criminal mind.”
“Nineteen eighty-one,” Gideon said slowly. “Wasn’t that the year of the first WAFA meeting?”
“WAFA?” Honeyman said.
“Western Association of Forensic Anthropologists. Their first meeting was at Whitebark Lodge. In 1981.” Honeyman laid down his pencil. For the first time a flicker of real interest showed in his eyes. “Is that so? All these same people?”
“Well, just a few of us,” Nellie said. “We’ve grown quite a bit since then, you know. Back in 1981 there were only…”
He stopped in mid-sentence, forgetting to close his mouth, his head tilted as if he were listening for something.