EIGHT

   WORKING alone suited Gideon, who depended more than most on intuition. To have to explain or defend what he was doing as he went along could throw him off the track or make him lose a glimmer of insight that might flash only once.

Alone, he went quickly over the skeletal system with a probe and gloved fingertips, looking for anything that might catch his attention. He had fought down his initial queasy reaction and was able to work objectively, if not quite with Merrill’s zest. The trick was to "unfocus" on the mutilated body that seemed to be rotting before his eyes, and think in terms of a series of bony condyles, fossae, foramina, and diaphyses to be dispassionately examined one at a time.

On the torso the only thing even moderately interesting was the existence of osteophytic growths—the bony excrescences of arthritis—on three of the five lumbar vertebrae, just above the hips. This was not rheumatoid arthritis, which can strike at any time, but the "normal" degeneration of bone surfaces that came to everyone with age. That was what made it odd. You’d expect vertebrae like these in a man of seventy, not one half that age.

Strange, too, that only three vertebrae should be affected. That suggested the growths and lipping were the results of localized trauma—of which he could find no other sign—or of some sort of long-term stress on the lower back. Gideon studied them for a while, finally gave up, and tucked the problem into a corner of his mind.

On the right forearm, masked by swollen, blackened soft tissue, he found something he did understand. Both bones, the ulna and the radius, were shattered, the only signs of antemortem injury other than the fractured hyoid and thyroid. The direction of the splintering and the way the lower parts of the shafts had ridden up over the upper made it clear that they had been broken by a single blow on the outside (the little-finger side) of the forearm. It was precisely the kind of damage done when a victim instinctively flings his arm up over his face to protect it against a club-wielding assailant—the so-called nightstick fracture.

It was also a serviceable explanation of how someone had managed to stand in front of a big, presumably healthy man like this one and choke him to death. Assuming that the blow had come before the strangling (there was no way to be sure, but why would it be afterward?), the big man would have been sick with pain and shock. And he would have had only one useful arm.

Something else had caught Gideon’s eye while he was laying back the mess of putrefying muscles and nerves over the forearm fractures: a pierced olecranon fossa. This is a hollow at the elbow end of the humerus—the bone of the upper arm. It serves as a socket in which the top of the ulna rocks back and forth like a hinge when the elbow is opened or closed. Every now and then—about five per cent of the time in Caucasians—the fossa will have a little, smooth, round hole right through it, and this was such a case.

A tiny bell in his mind began to jangle. He wasn’t sure why, but he’d heard it enough times to know better than to ignore it. There was something to be learned here. He pushed the probe slowly into and out of the hole.

Think. A pierced olecranon fossa was usually congenital, but some anthropologists believed it might also result from wear and tear. Gideon leaned over the body and opened up the other elbow joint, quickly cutting down to the bone. The fossa was unperforated. Since this kind of congenital condition was usually bilateral, that was a strong indication that the hole in the right fossa had indeed been caused by friction.

All right, assume the bone’s been worn through, then. Next question: What might have done it? What kind of movement, endlessly repeated, would grind the end of the ulna slowly through the back of the humerus? Gideon flexed and extended his own arm to feel the pull of tendons, to visualize the play of articulating bone surfaces. Lifting wouldn’t do it, no matter how strenuous, nor pulling either. No, what it would take was the full, snapping extension of the elbow joint.

Push-ups? Not unless you did five hundred a day for a year or two. Throwing something, maybe. Throwing hard, over and over again.

Pitching a baseball.

Randy Alexander, the southpaw who had—literally, it would appear—worn out his arm. A perforated olecranon fossa hardly proved it, but it was certainly starting to look that way. By now Gideon’s squeamishness had vanished completely. He was totally absorbed, making progress. And he had found something else.

While working on the arms, he had seen that the man had had powerful deltoids, the big shield-shaped muscles that flesh out the shoulder. It was, of course, impossible to tell this from the pulpy, rotted muscle tissue itself, but strong muscles needed strong tendons, and strong tendons sculpted ridges and crests into the bones that anchored them. And those bony ridges and crests didn’t rot. On this man’s humeri, the deltoid-pull areas were as rough and pronounced as mountain ranges on a relief map.

No particular surprise there. What was unusual was that only the deltoids had been particularly massive. Again Gideon stood quietly, thinking. What sort of activity would develop the deltoids—which rotate, flex, and raise the arms—yet not enlarge the other muscles of the shoulder girdle? Somewhere, in some recess of his mind, he already had the answer. It wouldn’t be the pitching….

Of course. The big deltoids tied right in with those three arthritic vertebrae. There was just one more thing to check. He turned the stiff, heavy body on its side so that he could get at the back of the thigh, then cut through the hamstring muscles and peeled them away. The femur, the body’s longest, strongest bone, lay exposed. Running down the back of its shaft was a well-defined muscle ridge, the linea aspera. "Rough line," it meant in Latin, and on this body it was extremely rough indeed.

It was precisely what Gideon had expected to find, and that settled it. As far as he was concerned, the examination was done. Accentuated linea aspera, enlarged deltoid pull, and premature arthritis of the lumbar vertebrae. He had seen the combination three times before, and he knew of only one thing that caused it—longtime riding of the elongated, low-slung motorcycles called "choppers."

It was the muscle strains brought on by the unnatural posture that did it; that, the bumping, and the increased buffeting by the wind that came from riding while leaning far back. This was Alexander’s body all right; coincidence was so improbable as to be out of the question. That "typical four-weeker" business was puzzling, but it would be up to Merrill to figure that out.

So Nate had been wrong after all. Randy was dead— murdered—and Gideon was more disturbed than he should have been. It was utterly irrational for him to feel any responsibility for the death, and he knew it, but there it was all the same. What if he hadn’t put Randy off? What if he’d listened to what he’d had to say, there on the hillside….

Abruptly, he stripped off the gloves and went to the sink to scrub his hands twice over with plenty of soap, and water as hot as he could stand it. Putting blame on himself made no sense at all, and he wouldn’t let himself do it. Besides, he’d just done a first-rate piece of skeletal detective work, and he had every right to be pleased with it. He sat down at an old steel desk against the wall, his back to the body, and began to write his report.