He shrugged and smiled cynically. “Au contraire, mon ami. I approve completely. And gratefully.” He swept his arm in a wide, encompassing arc. “I owe my career to the popes. They and their faithful flocks—pious, hardworking sheep—created the world’s greatest art and architecture. I would be foolish and ungrateful if I did not approve.”
Miranda was right; once he got wound up, it was tough to wind him down, and I was fast approaching my limit. “I’m thinking you didn’t bring me here just to talk about the glory and the greed of the medieval popes,” I said. “So cut to the chase. What the hell is going on here? And why all the cloak-and-dagger stuff?”
“Come,” he said, and walked toward the center of the treasure chamber. As I followed him into the darkness, my eyes gradually adjusted, and I saw that a makeshift screen had been rigged between two of the pillars by hanging a blue plastic tarp, a jarring contrast with the ancient stonework. Stefan held one end of the curtain aside for me, and I stepped behind it into the blackness.
Stefan flipped another switch on an electrical cord, and a pair of halogen work lights flashed on. My eyes squinted shut against the blinding glare; when they opened, I saw that part of the room’s back wall had collapsed—a roughly semicircular section, head high and an arm span wide. The stones had been stacked in the corner of the room, the rubble excavated, and the opening shored up with rough timber framing. “I thought you were an archaeologist,” I quipped. “This looks like a job for a stonemason.”
Stefan pointed to the right. Along the side wall was a long table covered by a white sheet. On the white sheet was a complete human skeleton, laid out in anatomical order.
The bones looked old; their color was a cross between gray putty and red-orange caramel, with darker, greasy stains here and there. Wordlessly Stefan offered me a pair of latex gloves. I put them on and picked up the skull, my favorite place to start.
The bones were definitely a man’s—the strong brow ridge above the eyes told me that, as did the big bump at the base of the skull, the external occipital protuberance: small and subtle in women, prominent in men. The nasal opening was broad, but the face itself was comparatively narrow, framed by prominent zygomatics—cheekbones—that gave it an angular, aristocratic appearance.
Cradling the skull upside down in my left palm, I studied the upper teeth and the roof of the mouth. Two molars and a canine tooth were missing, and several others had cavities. The presence of all four wisdom teeth, plus the complete fusion of the sutures—the seams—in the upper palate, confirmed that the man was an adult. Turning the skull right side up, I examined the cranial sutures, the zigzag joints in the top of the skull. In young adults, the sutures are dark and prominent, almost like irregular zipper teeth. This man’s, by contrast, were smooth and fading, almost obliterated. Although cranial sutures can give only a rough indication of age, the smoothness of these suggested that this man was my age, mid-fifties, or older—maybe a decade or more older. The spine seemed to bear this out, too; the vertebrae were beginning to develop the ragged bony fringe known as osteoarthritic lipping, which is one of the skeletal signs of aging. This man’s spine, I realized with an unexpected, ironic smile, probably looked a lot like my own.
It was when I looked at the ribs that I felt a familiar spike of adrenaline, the rush that always came when I got hooked on a forensic case. On the right side of the rib cage, everything was normal, but on the left side, the eleventh and twelfth ribs—the lowermost, “floating” ribs, which attach to the spine but not to the sternum—looked slightly truncated. I picked them up and inspected their distal ends, which curve around the sides of the lower chest but don’t wrap all the way to the front. Normally they’re tipped with cartilage, though these were too old and clean for that. But when I compared them with the matching ribs from the right side, the difference between them was dramatic. The tips of the right ribs were smooth and rounded, but the ends of the left ribs were flat and jagged. The ends of these two ribs appeared to have been sheared off by a sharp blade.
I looked up at Miranda and Stefan. “Unless this guy fell on his own sword, I’d say he was stabbed to death.”
“But wait, there’s more,” Miranda said, eyes shining. “Look at the extremities.”
I scanned the right arm, the one closest to me. I noticed nothing amiss until I got to the distal end of the forearm. Near the wrist both bones, the radius and the ulna, were gouged on their medial surfaces, as if a knife had been forced between them. I felt a slight tingling, which intensified when I inspected the left forearm and found similar gouges there.
“Now the feet,” she said. I almost missed it: more gouge marks, these between the metatarsals, the bones at mid foot.
Wheels were turning in my mind, but they were turning slowly—bogged down partly by fatigue but also by disbelief at what I was seeing, or what it meant. “Okay, so what’s the story? Where’d this guy come from? And why all the secrecy about a skeleton that’s six or seven centuries old?”
She looked at Stefan. “Now?”