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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