Dying on the Vine (4 page)

When questioning followed, additional details came to light. The deceased had each sustained a single gunshot wound to the head. The shootings occurred on a mountainside trail. The bodies then fell some sixty meters to a rocky area below. The weapon involved was a Beretta M1935 semiautomatic pistol, using .32 ACP ammunition. This pistol, which was originally produced for the military, had been in signor Cubbiddu’s possession for many years, and was found under his remains. Signora Cubbiddu, who was also born in Sardinia, had been Cubbiddu’s second wife. They had been married for twenty-five years.

The Cubbiddu family declined to be interviewed but issued the following joint statement through their Arezzo attorney, Severo Quadrelli: “We appreciate the professionalism shown by the
Carabinieri
and the public prosecutor in their investigation, and find no fault with their efforts. However, we maintain the unshakable conviction that our beloved father, Pietro Cubbiddu, did not commit these horrible acts.” Cesare Baccaredda Cubbiddu, Nola’s son from her prior marriage, had no comment.

Motive for the tragedy remained in doubt.

Well, yes, but in Rocco’s opinion, not a whole lot of doubt. Interviews with the family had made it clear that Pietro suspected Nola of having an affair. For an old-school Roman Catholic Sard like Pietro, what further motive was needed? Being cuckolded would have been unendurable; the most humiliating fate imaginable. And divorce was out of the question. Thus . . .

But where was the good in pursuing it now, or even making it known? With the killer dead, what difference could it make? Where could it lead, except to more anguish for the family? It was Deputy Prosecutor Migliorini’s decision to bury these details, and for once Rocco agreed with him.

FOUR

The following week, Tuesday, September 6, 2011

THE
church of Santa Maria Novella is one of the great treasures of Florence. Built in the fourteenth century, this immense basilica boasts tranquil Romanesque cloisters, venerable statuary, and works of art by Renaissance masters like Vasari, Giotto, and Masaccio. No travel guide to Italy fails to rave about it, and it is an obligatory stop for even the most sore-footed, art-weary tourist.

But there is one wing of the church—a monumental wing, half the complex, in fact—that tourists do not see and that guide books either ignore altogether, or sidle by with no more than a curt “Closed to visitors.” This is the aptly named Great Cloister, the most ancient and historic part of the church. For two centuries now, in one of history’s more peculiar marriages of church and state (courtesy of Napoleon Bonaparte), this tranquil quadrangle, along with the four low buildings that enclose it with their gracefully arched and frescoed porticos, has been the property of Italy’s national gendarmerie, the
Arma dei Carabinieri
. For the last two decades it has been their Warrant Officer and Brigadier Training School.

During this particular September, it was more or less on loan, serving as the venue for the Fourteenth International Symposium on Science and Detection, a week of seminars for mid-level law-enforcement personnel from all over the world: Indian sub-inspectors, Russian
militsiya
majors, Japanese NPA
keishi-sei
, Romanian commissars. In the vaulted, richly frescoed “Pope’s Room” a lecture was currently in progress that would have singed the ears of the fifteenth-century Pope Eugenius IV when he administered the papacy from this very space. (No doubt the lecturer would have found himself more thoroughly singed soon afterward.)

The subject was human evolution, and the lecturer was Gideon Oliver, known throughout the world of forensic science as the Skeleton Detective. But in his own mind, he was first and foremost a professor (currently the Abraham Goldstein Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington), and at this moment he was in his element: a full classroom, a lectern to lean on, and a captive audience.

“What you have to remember,” he was saying, “is that ‘survival of the fittest’ doesn’t mean survival of the biggest, or strongest, or cleverest, or any other such thing. No, natural selection simply favors those best adapted to the existing local conditions, by weeding out those
least
able to adapt to them. For example, sometimes being large—and therefore intimidating and powerful—is obviously a survival advantage; but at other times—as when food has become hard to come by or speed is more valuable than strength—it can be a disadvantage. You know that old joke about the two hikers and the bear?” he asked, shutting down the laptop he’d used for his PowerPoint presentation on post-cranial blunt-force trauma.

Only the two Americans in his audience indicated they’d heard it, responding with groans. Strictly a New World joke, apparently.

“Okay. Two hikers are out in the woods when, fifty feet down the path, a huge grizzly bear rears up on its hind legs and roars at them. Ralph immediately starts to struggle out of his backpack, getting ready to run for it. ‘Thank God I wore my running shoes,’ he says. Rodney stands there, frozen stiff. ‘What’s the point of running?’ he groans. ‘You can’t outrun a bear!’ ‘I don’t have to outrun the bear,’ Ralph yells back, already thirty feet down the path. ‘I just have to outrun
you
.’”

There was an obligatory murmur of laughter. Gideon waited, and then, as expected, a louder, longer wave followed. This was one of the things you had to get used to when giving lectures to multilingual audiences. English was the official language of the conference, so anyone attending was required to have a grasp of it. But grasps varied, and many attendees took a little time to process what they heard. Humor apparently took more processing than most things. It was unsettling at first—your immediate reaction was that your jokes fell flat, but eventually you got used to it and learned to wait.

He continued as the chuckling died away. “Well, to me that’s a great metaphor for the way natural selection works. Ralph didn’t have to be the fastest man alive, he just had to be fast enough to be the one to survive on that particular day. Now . . . fast-forward fifty years, and there’s Ralph, the faster one, sitting there at a family barbecue—well, a family dinner. He’s a white-haired old grandfather now, and he’s surrounded by his family—say he had two children and each of them had two children—he’d have six descendants, and all six would be carrying his genes, including, perhaps, whatever genes might have made him a little faster than Rodney that fateful day.

“And what about Rodney? Ah, poor Rodney’s but a dim memory. He’s been gone these fifty years now, and his genes with him. So in the gene pool as a whole, the ones he was carrying are a little less well represented than they used to be, while Ralph’s now have a bigger share—those six descendants. Well, assuming that those ‘fast’ genes keep providing a survival advantage—however slight—every generation will have more people carrying them and fewer and fewer of the ‘slow gene’ people. The genetic makeup of the population as a whole would change.
But . . .
they wouldn’t necessarily become as fast as it was humanly possible to become, they’d just need to be fast enough to get away from the bears. Well, that’s the way natural selection works. The results don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be good enough to get by.”

One of Gideon’s many admirable traits was his ability to deliver a coherent, fully formed lecture on the spur of the moment. One of his less attractive ones was his tendency to deliver them at the drop of a hat. Like most good professors, he was convinced that the subject matter that fascinated him must likewise fascinate everyone else. He was, of course, more often wrong than right, and this was one of those times. It took a while, but eventually the glazed, concussed look on a growing number of the sixteen faces in front of him got through to him. He’d done it again, slipped right off their radar.

And no wonder
, he thought guiltily. They were there to learn how knowing something about bones might help them solve homicides. The subtle, slow-moving machinery of natural selection was not a high priority, or any priority at all. He cut himself off in the middle of a sentence. “We seem to have wandered a bit off the subject here. Clive,” he said with mock severity, “kindly try not to take us off-course again.”

This was directed to Clive Devlin, a scholarly, well-spoken chief inspector from Gibraltar, whose innocent, half-joking remark had started Gideon off. “Here’s what I wonder,” the chief inspector had said. “If natural selection is as wonderful as it’s cracked up to be, and it’s been working away to weed out the weakest among us all these millions of years, how is it that we still have so many diseases? One would think our bodies would have been perfected by now.”

“Please accept my apology, Professor Oliver,” Devlin said smoothly now. “I promise not do it again.”

“Apology accepted.” Gideon smiled back, stalling for time.
Now
, he thought,
where the hell were we?
“Umm . . .”

He was saved by Lieutenant Rocco Gardella, one of five Italian
Carabinieri
officers in the class, who, easily reading his expression, supplied the answer. “So, you were asking if anybody here might have some skeletal materials the class could use for, like, a case study.” The cocky, outgoing Gardella was a compact, oily-haired guy in a black leather bomber jacket who reminded Gideon of a young Mafia wannabe from a 1950s teenage gang movie—a Gino or a Guido, say. Well, or a Rocco, for that matter. And his brand of perfectly fluent English went along with the image, singing more of Manhattan’s Little Italy than of Mother Italy. “I think I got one for you,” he went on. “The one I was talking about yesterday? The murder-suicide that laid out in the snow and rain and everything all year? Well, the husband’s already been cremated, but the wife—that is, the wife’s bones—should still be available.”

“That’d be great,” Gideon said, “could you bring them in?”

“No, that I can’t do. Technically, they’re not ours anymore. They’ve been released to the family. But they’re still in a funeral home down in Figline, this little town I used to live in. Not far.”

“Where?”

“Fee . . glyee . . . neh,” Rocco repeated, stressing each syllable, thinking Gideon had been stumped by the Italian pronunciation, typically not so easy on American tongues.

“I know the place,” Gideon said. “Figline Valdarno. I’ve been there.”

“You been to Figline?” Gardella’s thick black eyebrows—
eyebrow
would be more accurate—rose.
“Why?”

“Oh, come on, it’s not such a bad place, Rocco. Look, are you saying it’d be all right to have a look at them if we went to the funeral home? If Figline Valdarno’s the place I’m thinking of, it’s just twenty kilometers or so south of Florence.”

“Yeah, that’s the place. I could call my cousin; he owns the funeral home—well, he’s almost my cousin, and he doesn’t exactly
own
it yet—and we could probably do it right now, if you want.”

Gideon looked at his watch. One ten. The seminar ran till four. Time enough, if they got going right then. He addressed the class as a whole. “Okay, let’s do it. How many cars do we have?”

Four hands went up: enough room for everybody. Gideon motioned the group up out of their seats. “Let’s pile in.”

Rocco pulled out his cell phone. “I’ll tell Alberto we’re coming.”

FIVE

BUT
the lieutenant had been unable to get through to almost-cousin Alberto, the almost-proprietor of the funeral establishment. As a result, Alberto Cippollini was understandably startled when three imposing midnight-blue
Carabinieri
vehicles—two Alfa Romeo 159 compact executives and one Iveco VM 90 van, plus one not- so-imposing two-seater, an aptly nicknamed
ovetti
(little egg) that looked like the cockpit of a helicopter (minus the helicopter)—pulled screeching into the parking area of Onoranze Funebri Cippollini and fourteen burly men (and two burly women) piled out of them. A tentative, nervous little man in a too-tight black suit and tie, he came to the glass doors looking a little sick.

Blinking, he opened one of the doors enough to stick his head through. “
Che . . . che cosa . . . ?
”

“It’s all right, Alberto,” Rocco yelled back to him in Italian, his hands lifted placatingly. “This is nothing official. We just want to look at that skeleton you got the other day. It’s for our school.”

“You mean right now? But . . . but there is a memorial service in progress in the chapel,” he whispered. “I can’t have you . . . marching through . . .” His hands were fluttering in front of his chest. Gideon expected him to start wringing them, and a second later he did. “The mourners . . .”

“Well, let us into the workroom through the back door, then. We won’t go anywhere near the chapel. They’ll never know we’re here.”

“You’re not going to take the, the remains away, are you? The cremation is tomorrow. It’s all been arranged by the son, and I don’t want—”

“I’m Professor Oliver,” Gideon interrupted in Italian. His command of the language was good enough to put together grammatically correct sentences (as long as they were in the present tense), and to comprehend a good deal more. “I’m in charge of the class, and I promise you that we won’t disturb the remains in any way. All we need is an hour, and we’ll leave everything as we find it.”

“Of course, yes, I see. Now, I . . . I haven’t done anything with them, you understand. That is to say, I haven’t prepared them, other than to clean them up a little—”

Rocco laughed. “Alberto, they’re bones. I don’t think anybody expected you to embalm them.”

“Well, that’s certainly so, ha-ha.” He cleared his throat and lowered his voice even more. “Come around to the back then. I’ll get them out for you.” He hesitated. “And Rocco—perhaps you could see to it that these police cars are moved out of sight to the parking area in back? It doesn’t look so good to visitors, you know?”

• • •

AS
forensic scientists went, Gideon Oliver was a celebrated wuss. He didn’t like working with dead bodies, and the more violent the manner of death or the fresher the bodies, the queasier they made him. What he did like working with, what intrigued and motivated him, were skeletons: the cleaner, and drier, and older, the better. Early Pleistocene remains were about right, and they constituted his main area of scholarly research. He didn’t like autopsy rooms, he didn’t like dissection labs, and he didn’t like mortuary embalming rooms. As a result, the preparation room at Onoranze Funebri Cippollini came as a pleasant surprise. When the door was opened and signor Cippollini stepped out of the way to let them in, Gideon steeled himself for the expected odor (a combination of innards and formaldehyde, like a high-school lab where frogs and fetal pigs are dissected, only worse). Instead, what greeted him was a welcome wisp of lavender. And the room itself was almost jolly, with multicolored wall tiles randomly placed among the white ones. Even the bases of the two work tables were faced with colorful tile mosaics.

And no bidet-like conveniences for flushing away the bodily flu- ids and other nastinesses that came out of corpses. None of the other medieval-torture-chamber implements he’d expected either—the tongs, the knives, the alarming hypodermics. Of course—he’d forgotten: Italians by and large didn’t practice embalming. Rooms like this were used for little more than a washup, a little cosmetic work if necessary, and a proper fitting-out for viewing at the memorial, which usually took place within a couple of days, for obvious reasons.

There were two standard zinc work tables in the room, though, on one of which Cippollini placed the remains, enclosed in a three-foot-long box of heavy cardboard; a child’s cremation container, Gideon assumed.

“Let’s get at it,” he said when Cippollini reluctantly left them to it. “Rocco, this is your treat, so if you’ll remove the bones one by one, I’d like everyone to work together getting them laid out as near as possible to their anatomical relationship. And I’ll just watch from back here and keep my mouth shut.”

“Don’t bet on it,” muttered a big Hawaiian with an affable, easy laugh.

“Hey, when I say something, you can take it straight to the bank,” Gideon said, smiling back.

John Lau was his closest friend, an FBI special agent out of the Seattle field office. They had worked together more than once, and the two of them with their wives got together regularly back home. John had taken a similar seminar from Gideon years ago, when the symposium had convened in St. Malo, France, but science, as does everything else, changes with time, and he, like two of the other attendees, was back for a refresher. Gideon and John had both come with their wives and had been seeing Florence together in their off-time, so it had been as much pleasure as work. And then when the seminar ended the following day, the four of them were off to a winery out in the Tuscan countryside, where the two women had signed up for a five-day cooking class.

Rocco had barely gotten the skull out of the box when John was proved right. “Whoa, hold it, what do we have here?” Gideon exclaimed.

“Ha,” observed John in quiet triumph.

Rocco handed over the skull, and Gideon peered hard at the frontal bone, running his fingers over an area in the center of the forehead, where the hairline would be on a living person. “Well, this is something you don’t see every day,” he murmured.

“Oh, I can tell you what that is,” Rocco said. “We figured that out pretty fast.”

“I’m sure you can, but let’s see what the rest of us come up with, okay? Anybody got a flashlight?”

Someone handed over a penlight attached to a key chain, and Gideon stuck it in the opening at the base of the skull to light up the interior. “Huh,” he said, “that’s what I thought. Interesting.” He handed back the penlight, turned the skull right side up, and held it in both hands just above the tabletop so that the area he’d been so interested in was uppermost. At that spot there was a sort of escarpment; an inch-long ridge of bone rising from the flat, curving plateau of the skull, looking for all the world as if there had been an eruption below the surface.

“Ideas, anybody? What do you suppose this could be?”

“Would it be a genetic thing?” someone asked.

“Nope.”

“Some kind of bone disease?

“Nope.”

“Brain disease?” This from John.

“Uh-uh.”

“Some kind of trauma?”

“Good man. Trauma it is; blunt trauma. What we have here, you see, is an unusual kind of depressed fracture—what I think of as a
reverse
depressed fracture.” He explained that a depressed fracture was a fairly common kind of cranial injury that jams a segment of bone inward, so there is (usually) a sharply defined indentation in the bone. For example, a blow with a ball-peen hammer can leave a dent the exact shape and size of the hammer’s ball, sometimes even reproducing its irregularities closely enough to permit identification of the specific weapon. The area on the underside of the dent, of course, is necessarily forced inward, frequently causing grave damage to the brain.

“You’re losing me, professor,” someone said. “This part here”—the speaker fingered the ridge—“isn’t dented
in
, it’s sticking
up
.”

“Exactly,” Gideon replied. “Which is why I call it a depressed fracture in reverse—the force came from inside the head and pushed
outward
.”

This produced the expected murmurs of incredulity. “How can that be?” someone said.

“Ah,” said Gideon, “that is for me to know and you to find out—shut up, Rocco—which I have no doubt that you will do in the next few minutes. But for the moment, go ahead and continue laying out the bones. I’ll just stand here and keep perfectly quiet.” He leveled a quick forefinger at John as his friend opened his mouth to speak. “Watch it.”

John raised both hands to profess innocence of intent, and Rocco got back to work unloading and laying out the bones.

The two-and-a-half-day forensic anthropology seminar was midway through its second day, so there had been time for only a few hours of training in the basics of bone identification. Nevertheless, they did pretty well. Gideon was pleased; apparently they’d been paying attention, and perhaps had even gone so far as to study the handout materials in the evenings. Inside of fifteen minutes, they had what was left of the skeleton laid out on its back: skull, mandible, pelvis, scapulas, vertebral column, arm and leg bones, one collarbone, and most of the ribs. The hands, right foot, left collarbone, and some of the vertebrae were missing, probably carried off by carnivores, and the facial skeleton, mandible, and leg bones had been gnawed. The bones of the left foot—un-gnawed—were in a clasp envelope, with “bones found in left shoe” written on it in Italian. Gideon told them not to worry about identifying those individually. (Distinguishing between the five metatarsals and fourteen phalanges of the human foot—let alone telling left from right, and distinguishing the metatarsals of the foot from the metacarpals of the hand—took a lot more than a few hours’ training.) There were also a lot of broken fragments, most of which the group had correctly identified as crumbling chunks of vertebrae.

“How’d we do?” they wanted to know.

“You did a good job,” Gideon said, surveying the result.

“You mean we even got the ribs right? Amazing.”

“Don’t be amazed. I said ‘good,’ not ‘perfect.’ You didn’t get them all.” He did some deft, rapid rearranging while he spoke. “This goes here, this goes here, this goes . . . here. And you got the clavicle upside down and backward—and on the wrong side. It goes here, like this. And the fibulas are on the wrong sides too. But look,” he said, responding to the grumbles and the accusatory
Didn’t I tell you that
s that fluttered around the group, “you’re cops, not anthropologists. No reason for you to know all that. I don’t care if you can’t tell a right clavicle from a left clavicle or which side goes up, I’d just like you to be able to say that’s what it is when you see one lying out in the woods—a clavicle, a human clavicle, and not some bone from a rabbit or a fox. The forensic specialists can take it from there. So I’m telling you: you did well.”

A final look at the arrangement and a nod of approval. “Okay, we know this is a female because Rocco told us so yesterday. But you should be able to tell even without that. Anyone care to tell me how? We talked about it in yesterday’s session.”

Among others, John raised his hand, but Gideon called on a ruddy-cheeked Swiss
oberstleutnant
whose hand had shot up before the question had been finished. Helmut Waldbaum was a good, eager student, but his English, while more than sufficient for him to understand things, was close to impenetrable.

He grinned when Gideon called on him. “Za ghrule oaff tzoom,” he said proudly.

Gideon, who had gotten used to the accent, nodded. “Right. The rule of thumb.”

This referred to the fastest and simplest approach to sexing a skeleton, and a fairly reliable one, although not so reliable as was once thought. What you did was to place your thumb—or imagine placing your thumb—into the sciatic notch, the indentation that separated the ilium of the pelvis from the pubis (the upper from the lower half). If it was so narrow that the fit was snug, then it was a male you were looking at. But a female’s sciatic notch was wider, with plenty of wiggle room. Often you could fit two fingers into the notch.

“Now here’s something interesting to think about: why would this particular difference between the sexes exist? And once again, natural selection provides the answer. Since childbearing requires more of a bowl-shaped container for the growing fetus, the biomechanical forces of evolutionary development . . .” He caught himself with a laugh. “There I go again. Strike that from the record. Let’s move on.”

He turned the skull upside down again so the bottom faced up. They found themselves looking at a caved-in skull base. A good third of it—much of the rear half—had been thrust a half inch inward (upward in a person standing erect), cracking a ragged-edged disk of bone two to three inches in diameter. In the center of the disk, as in the center of a CD, was a smooth-rimmed hole, the foramen magnum, the opening through which the spinal cord emerges from the brain.

“Is this another depressed fracture?” someone asked, fingering the collapsed bone. “Only this one goes the right way, pushed in, not out.”

“Right,” Gideon said.

“But that’s huge,” Rocco said. “What the hell caused that?”

“You don’t know?” Gideon asked.

“No, I don’t,” Rocco said defensively. “Look, I never actually saw the skull before, all cleaned up like this.”

“But your
medico’s
report didn’t say?”