Free Skull Duggery by Aaron Elkins Page B

more!” Then, deciding the situation required more decorum, he gravely added: “A terrible, unfortunate, fatal fall, the poor man.”
    “Oh, it would have been fatal, all right, enough to kill him twice over.” He had pulled the chest slab off the rib and laid it aside while they’d been talking, and was again peering into the chest cavity, with the body still on its side.
    “What are you looking for now?” Sandoval asked a little nervously.
    “Nothing in particular,” Gideon said truthfully. “But I’ve hardly looked at him. As long as I’m here, I ought to see what else I might be able to come up with. You never know.”
    “Oh, I don’t think there’s anything else that’s necessary, do you? Perhaps you would permit me to buy you a cup of coffee now? We have an excellent coffeehouse here, yes, right here in Teotitlan, the American tourists kept asking for it, you see, and now I myself have developed a taste for cappuccinos, ha-ha…” On he nattered, arching his body backward, trying to manifest enough psychic force to draw Gideon away from the table. He didn’t like the idea of Gideon continuing to poke around and coming up with God knows what.
    Sandoval’s psychic force had no effect on Gideon whatever. “Well…” He was probing gently with his fingers at the cervical vertebrae, or rather at the dried ligaments and intervertebral fibrocartilage that held them together. “Most of the time, people killed in falls-falls from heights-die because they fracture their spines up here in the neck, which tears apart their aortas, so I just wanted to see if… ah, indeed, that’s what we have here. The first cervical vertebra-the atlas-has been completely separated from the second one, the axis. The ligaments and fibrocartilage are torn clear through. In the absence of anything else, that’s a pretty good cause of death right there.”
    “So, that’s that, then,” Sandoval said joyously. “A job well done! Muchisimas gracias, profesor, I am so grateful-”
    “Hold on, now,” Gideon murmured, mostly to himself. “What have we here?”
    Something had caught his eye, toward the back of the rib cage; he rubbed away a bit of dried, tarry black matter, impossible to identify (crud was the technical term usually employed), that was stuck to the interior surface of one of the ribs, and bent to take a closer look. “I’m afraid we might have something worth looking into after all,” he said softly.
    Sandoval’s shoulders sagged. The faintest, saddest of sighs escaped his lips. He’d known it was too good to be true. “What?” he asked in a grim monotone, a voice of doom.
    “Well, I’m not really sure,” Gideon said. “It looks like… it almost looks like…”
    What it almost looked like-what it very much looked like-was a bullet hole. In the ventral surface-the inside surface-of the seventh rib on the right side. Like many of the other ribs, this one had snapped about halfway back, the front piece still connected via the costal cartilages to the sternum, the rearward piece still attached by ligaments to the vertebral column. The hole was in the rearward segment, about three inches from the vertebral column, so that it faced diagonally forward. Much smaller than the wound in Garcia’s chest, almost perfectly round even when seen from a few inches away, and penetrating only partway through the body of the rib, it might have served as a textbook illustration of the not-uncommon situation in which a bullet, having expended almost the last of its energy in getting most of the way through the body, had just enough oomph left to penetrate the surface of the rib but not enough to make it all the way through.
    Now it was Gideon who was perplexed. If this was a bullet hole, then where was the original entrance wound? There was only one possibility: the chest wound that Gideon had so confidently, so magisterially, declared to be an exit wound and not even a ballistic exit wound at that. Could a bullet have