Seven Wonders by Ben Mezrich Read Free Book Online Page B

But usually, those moments had quickly evaporated, replaced by pointless bickering.
    Jack couldn’t even remember much of what their last argument was concerning. He’d been excited to tell his brother about his upcoming expedition to Turkey, and then they’d gone off on some tangent about the SevenWonders of the World—and that was pretty much the end of his visit. They simply couldn’t connect, they were just too damn different.
    And now Jack would never have the chance to change that.
    Jack’s thoughts were interrupted by a whiff of antiseptic air as the glass door to the lab swung inward. Jack recognized the pathologist from his ring of wiry brown hair, now matted with sweat. He was wearing fresh scrubs and had ditched his latex gloves, but otherwise, he looked the same as he had earlier that morning, when Jack had been brought in to ID the body.
    “Ms. Whitehead, if you could give us a moment.”
    The woman gave Jack’s shoulder a carefully trained squeeze, then left the two of them alone in the lab. The pathologist pulled up a stool next to the counter where Jack was sitting and placed a plastic evidence bag on the surface between them.
    “This isn’t exactly protocol, but I’ve already checked with Detectives Murphy and Collins, and they’ve hit such a wall in their investigation, they were willing to give me a little leeway. Considering your area of expertise, I figured maybe you could help me out.”
    Jack glanced down at the plastic bag. Inside, he could make out something tiny—a sliver, or a splinter—of some sort of white material.
    “My area of expertise?”
    “I’ve read a few of your articles in Science and saw the documentary you did for Discovery a couple years back. I didn’t make the connection when we first met, but while I was working on your brother, I realized there can’t be many anthropologists who focus on ancient cultures.”
    Jack raised his eyebrows. It wasn’t surprising that the pathologist had recognized his name; doctors subscribed to Science and watched the Discovery Channel, and a few of Jack’s pieces had gotten a fair amount of attention. In particular, the video diary of the research journey he’d taken into Eskimo country in the Canadian Arctic had been one of the most downloaded series of anthropological pieces of the year—especially when on day thirty-seven,he’d nearly gotten himself buried in an ice flow and instead had uncovered evidence of an ancient Viking expedition to the area.
    Andy had gotten great enjoyment out of reading aloud the fan mail that had come in after that excursion—including at least three proposals of marriage. Jack guessed the proposals had more to do with the fact that his shirt had been shredded as he’d climbed free of the ice, rather than the pair of rusted Viking swords and the wooden remains of the ship he had handed off to the nearest Canadian Royal Museum.
    Jack could only imagine the sort of mail he would be getting after he published his work on the Temple of Artemis. If Vikings were sexy enough to get him interviewed on a handful of basic cable morning shows, Amazons would probably land him squarely in prime time.
    “How can I help?” Jack asked.
    “The autopsy confirms that your brother died from injuries sustained via sharp forced trauma; there was no tissue bridging, no signs of alternate lacerations. The wound edges remained well approximated, with very little differentiation between the entrance and exit. The projectile—for lack of a better word for it—entered the right hemithorax below the anterior aspect of the right sixth rib, and exited in the right infrascapular region below the posterior aspect of the sixth rib. These findings, along with the lack of trace evidence—hair, fibers, DNA on the victim’s body—leads me to suspect that the projectile was thrown from a distance of between four and five feet.”
    Jack looked at the man.
    “Thrown?”
    “Yes. Furthermore, from the angle of entry and the form