Murder in the Queen's Armes by Aaron Elkins Page A

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