Little Tiny Teeth

SIXTEEN

The fact that Cisco and Scofield had wound up on the same ship after thirty years, Tim continued, was just an unlucky fluke, not anything that Cisco had worked out ahead of time.

“Hold it right there,” John said. “It’s not that I don’t believe in coincidences, but that’s a little too much to swallow.”

“I’m just telling you what he told me,” Tim said, chewing vigorously. His appetite had caught up with him, and although the picarones were now cold and getting soggy, he was stuffing them in.

“It’s true, what he says,” Vargas said, having just returned from the river search for Scofield and Cisco, which had been fruitless. There was no sign of them. “I could think of no one else who could be a guide for such a group as this. I went to him and offered him the job, and he took it.”

“You’re saying he didn’t even know Scofield would be aboard?” John asked. “So we’re supposed to think he just carries around a giant spider and a shrunken head in case they come in handy? And a spear?”

Vargas offered a supplicatory shrug. “No, no, of course not. I’m sure I mentioned to him the name, so yes, he knew Professor Scofield would be here. Still, it was I who went to Cisco, not Cisco who came to me.”

“No, it’s too much of a coincidence,” John repeated, shaking his head.

“I don’t know, John,” Gideon said. “Coincidence, yes. Too much of a coincidence? Maybe not. Look at it this way. Cisco’s been hanging around Iquitos on and off for thirty years. He knows more about ethnobotany – he practically has a Harvard doctorate in it – than anybody else in the area, and he’s familiar with the local shamans and what they do – plenty of experience in that regard. Well, those things are just what Scofield was interested in, right? And, if I understand it correctly, this was Scofield’s first Amazon expedition-”

“Yes, that’s so,” Maggie said. “Until now, he’d held them down in the Huallaga Valley.”

“So he needed someone knowledgeable to guide them. He asked Captain Vargas to find someone-”

“Exactly right, exactly right,” Vargas said, nodding along.

“And Captain Vargas quite naturally came up with Cisco.”

“Exactly! Naturally!”

“Okay,” John said, “I’m not convinced, but okay.” He turned to Maggie. “Maggie, you said you heard scuffling-”

“I think I heard scuffling.”

“-coming from Scofield’s cabin.”

“I think it was from Arden’s cabin.”

“All right, fine,” John said, showing some impatience. “But I don’t remember you saying you heard a splash. Do you think you heard a splash?”

She looked blank. “A splash?”

“If he threw Arden in, there would have been a splash, wouldn’t there? Right outside his cabin. Pretty much right outside your cabin.”

Maggie frowned. “I’m not certain. Now that you’ve asked the question, it seems to me, maybe I did. But I can’t really say… no, I’m sorry, John, I can’t say for sure that I did.”

Duayne lifted his head, sensing something in the air. “What’s happening? Are we turning around again? Why are we going back?”

“No, we’re not going back,” Vargas said. “The river here, it’s making a big loop, a big bend. That’s what the Javaro is like.”

“Tim, you got anything else to tell us?” John asked.

Tim mutely shook his head.

“Captain Vargas,” John said, “I think we need to turn this over to the police.”

“The Colombian police?”

“Well, it happened in Colombia, so obviously, yes.”

“You want to go back to the checkpoint? You want to report a murder on my ship to Colonel Malagga?” Vargas was horrified.

“Not a murder, we don’t know that yet,” John said. “A missing person for sure, a homicide, maybe-”

“And an attempted homicide – on me,” Maggie said. “Let’s not forget that delightful little incident.”

“Absolutely,” John said. “But yeah, I see your point about Malagga, Captain. What do you suggest?”

“That we continue to Leticia. It’s not much farther ahead than the border is back. We’ll be there tomorrow night or Friday morning. There you will find a much more professional, more competent headquarters of police. Real policemen, not scoundrels like Malagga.”

John nodded his approval. “Sounds good.”

Captain Vargas was once again in a dither, and once again the cause was Arden Scofield, who was as much a source of trepidation and self-recrimination dead as he’d been alive. For the hundredth time, Vargas cursed himself for ever getting involved with the vile man. The problem was, what the hell was he supposed to do now? He knew next to nothing about the arrangements for the contraband coffee at the San Jose de Chiquitos warehouse. The plan had been for Vargas to unload the shipment of coffee as if it was no different than usual. Scofield would take it from there. But with Scofield no longer in the picture, how would it work? Were the sacks with the coca paste in them supposed to be treated differently in some way? He supposed so, but how? Would there be people there to receive them? If so, would they be in on what was in them? Acceding to Vargas’s own wishes, Scofield had kept him out of the loop on almost everything.

Beyond that, he was unsure of whether to unload the coffee at all. Was there supposed to be some signal sent to the drug boss in Cali to the effect that it had been deposited? Undoubtedly, yes, but the identity of the boss was another thing he had foolishly not wanted to know and therefore didn’t know. Should he simply leave the coffee and let whoever else was involved worry about it? Should he not unload it, but rather take it back to Iquitos with him? And then do what with it? Did the Colombian boss know who he was? If so, what would be his reaction when he learned the paste was not at the warehouse but still in Vargas’s possession? He wouldn’t be pleased, that was certain. Had he already paid money to Scofield? Vargas didn’t know that either, but he imagined so, since he himself had already received money from Scofield.

These were serious questions, life-and-death questions. The people in the cocaine trade were brutal in the extreme. When they were crossed, their vengeance was a terrible thing: death, certainly, but death in the most horrible ways imaginable. He himself had a cousin whose wife’s brother had been fed to ravening pigs – alive – because he had skimmed some trifling amount from the boss’s profits.

He came to a decision. Not unloading the coffee was out of the question. Somebody would come after him; there was too much money involved, and he had no wish to be fed to the pigs. He would simply unload everything, let events take care of themselves, and hope for the best.

He closed his eyes and crossed himself. God would protect him. He was not a gangster, a criminal; he was weak, that was all – the most human of failings. He had been led down the garden path by a clever, deceptive man. Only let him get out of this with his skin intact, and on his mother’s grave, he would never – never – again…

“So what do we think happened, exactly?” Phil asked. “I’m a little confused. Somebody go over the sequence for me.”

Phil, John, and Gideon were sitting in a nook at the rear of the upper deck, aft of the cabins. It was four-thirty and the first pale pink smears of the day were just beginning to show up ahead on the eastern horizon, although high in the sky, a single, torn shred of cloud was lit a flaming orange. The meeting in the dining room had broken up half an hour earlier, and the three had come up here to talk things over on their own.

“All right,” John said. “Apparently Cisco came after Scofield and-”

“When?”

“Well, it would have to have been right before Maggie came out of her cabin.”

“Where?”

“Where?”

“ Where did he come after Scofield?”

“In his cabin,” said Gideon. “Maggie heard them scuffling, remember? And Scofield’s room is right next to hers.”

Phil nodded. “Okay, so he walks in on Scofield, who is not only asleep, but pretty much gaga from that crap he drinks, and drags him out of bed, and flops him over the side, is that it?”

“Probably something like that,” John said. “Could be, he slugged him or… You know, I should take a look at the room, see if there’s any blood or anything.”

“Okay, and then what happens?” Phil asked.

“Then Maggie wakes up, goes outside, sees Cisco standing at the rail admiring his handiwork, and he turns around and sees her, and over the side she goes too, letting out a yell that Doc here hears.”

Gideon nodded.

“And then?” Phil persisted.

“And then,” said Gideon, “after I yell ‘Man overboard’ – and probably make a racket falling all over myself trying to get to the door in the dark – Cisco bids us good-bye too.”

“Uh-huh.” Phil was plainly doubtful. “And that’s it?”

“As far as we know,” John said. “What’s the problem?”

“Well, first, why would the guy just toss Maggie overboard? I mean, couldn’t he figure out she’d scream? Wouldn’t he, you know, knock her out or choke her or something?”

“Yeah, a rational person would,” John said, “but we’re talking about Cisco here. Who knows what he had in his system by that time of night?”

“Not only that,” said Gideon, “but if the guy had really just killed Scofield, Maggie’s showing up would have thrown him into a panic. And when you’re talking about panic, there’s no such thing as a rational person.”

“Okay, I can see that,” Phil allowed, “but what about the splashes?”

“What about the splashes?”

“There should have been three of them, but we only heard Maggie and Cisco hit the water. Why didn’t we hear Scofield?”

“What do you mean, ‘we?’ As far as I remember, I’m the only one who heard any of the splashes. You two were snoring away, right up to the ‘man overboard’.”

“Well, hell, we were further away,” John said. “You were right next to Maggie’s room.”

“And just one more down from Scofield’s,” Phil added. “So why didn’t you hear him go in too?”

“Phil, I was lucky to hear Maggie go in. It wasn’t the splashes that woke me up. It was that yelp when she cut her ankle. If not for that-”

John’s head came up. He sniffed once, twice. “Do I smell smoke?”

“Must be some more logging up ahead,” Phil said, as they got up to peer around the corner of the cabin block.

But there weren’t any logging projects along this stretch of the Javaro. The acrid smoke was coming from a charred, one-story wooden building built on the right bank above a rickety old pier that was under repair, with some jarringly clean new planks among the dark, rotten ones.

“Looks like a house,” Phil said. “What’s left of it, anyway.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Gideon said, looking at the blackened structure. “It’s pretty big for that, and that’s a fairly good-sized unloading pier down below. I think it’s some kind of commercial building. A warehouse or something.”

The fire had occurred not long before, sometime during the previous day, in all likelihood; there were no longer any flames to be seen, but curling gray wisps still rose occasionally from the burnt wood, and a few embers could be seen glowing here and there in the shadows. The flooring had buckled in places, but the walls still stood, and the corrugated metal roof had held. Fifty feet from the building was a simple, open-walled, thatch-roofed house on waist-high stilts, much like the ones they’d seen at the Ocaona village, untouched by the fire and deserted.

As the Adelita pulled up to the pier, a stricken Vargas stood gazing up from the deck like a man who’s just been told he has five minutes to live. “What am I supposed to do now?” he was saying to himself over and over in Spanish, sometimes with a desperate little hiccup of a laugh. “What in the name of God am I to do now?”

Gideon, standing not far from him, asked, in English, what was the matter.

“Is our warehouse. San Jose de Chiquitos. I be to unload the… the coffee beans here. Now how I do it? I don’t can!” In his extremity, his command of English had fled him again. He jerked his head to stare at Gideon. His eyes, protuberant to begin with, bulged a little more. “What I do with the coffee?”

He asked it – wailed it – as if he were really counting on Gideon to give him the answer, and Gideon didn’t know what to say. “Well, it isn’t as if it’s your fault,” he began soothingly. “Obviously, you can’t unload it here-”

“How this can happen?” Vargas muttered, barely hearing him. “Are guards, guards what live right here! How they can don’t see? And where they are now, why they don’t be here, can you tell me this?”

“Captain Vargas, however it happened, I guess you’ll just have to take it back to Iquitos. No one would expect you to-”

But Vargas, not listening at all now, was wandering dazedly away. “You don’t can understand… you don’t know…”

A few minutes later, the narrow gangplank was let down, and Vargas, some of the passengers, and most of the crew came down it and climbed the dozen or so rough steps dug out of the bank to get up to the building and look around. Although the still-smoldering structure was too hot to enter, it could be seen through gaps in the walls that the place was empty; nothing was stored there. John, who had some experience investigating arson, guessed that the fire was twelve or fifteen hours old.

While most of the others poked gingerly along the outside of the building, some with sticks they’d picked up, Gideon and John went meandering, with no real purpose, around the clearing. There were stacks of fresh lumber, corrugated metal roofing, and other building materials nearby, and lumber scraps and power tools on the ground. Under a crude little waist-high lean-to of its own stood the tools’ power source, a new-looking, gasoline-powered 5.5-horsepower Hitachi air compressor. (Gideon, not much of a hand around power tools, knew this only because John, who did know about such things, had just told him what it was.)

“Looks like there was some construction going on,” said John.

“Yup. Enlarging the place, repairing it, something.”

On top of the small lean-to were a few more power tools. “These are pretty good tools, you know?” John picked one up. “Hutchins rotary sander,” he said enviously. “Top of the line. I wish I could afford one. And this…” He hefted another. “Whoa, a Makita nail gun, also top of the line. This little baby doesn’t come cheap.” He put it down, seemingly with regret. “Doc, does it strike you as a little strange that in a place like this” – he waved vaguely about them – “way, way out in the boondocks, middle of the jungle – that they’d have expensive stuff like this? It all looks new too.”

“Not really, no,” Gideon said. “This is a warehouse, a pick-up point for other places, isn’t it? Not just some local storehouse. We don’t know how much money is behind it.” He leveled a finger at his friend. “Let me guess. You’re thinking there are drugs involved, right?”

“Yeah, I guess I got a one-track mind. But you know what the DEA people call this stretch of the Amazon Basin? The White Triangle. Sixty percent of the North American cocaine trade comes through here, either on the ground, down the river, or in the air. And here we have this falling-down little shack of a warehouse, way, way in the tules, and there’s about ten thousand dollars worth of new tools laying around.” He shrugged. “So, yeah, I’m thinking there might be more than coffee beans that come through here. You don’t agree with me?”

“I agree you’ve got a one-track mind. It’s hard to picture Vargas as a drug trafficker. The guy’s a bundle of nerves. He’d never be able to stand it.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

They walked on a little. “And here’s something else,” John said. “You know that old prof of yours, Abe Goldstein, and that theory he was always talking about, when too many things happen-”

“The Law of Interconnected Monkey Business. When too many suspicious things – too much monkey business – start happening to the same set of people in the same context, you’re going to find a connection between them.”

“Yeah, that’s the one. Well, don’t you think it maybe applies here? Yesterday Cisco goes bonkers and throws Scofield overboard, then throws Maggie overboard, then throws himself overboard… and then when we arrive at the warehouse to drop off the coffee, the warehouse has just been burnt down-”

“I see what you’re saying, John, but in this case I don’t think it applies. We know why Cisco hated Scofield, and it had nothing to do with the warehouse, or coffee, or drugs for that matter. That was between them, something personal. This is something completely different, a different context.”

“Is it? Tell me, what’s Vargas so shook up about? He looks like a balloon that somebody let all the air out of.”

“Well, he was supposed to make a delivery here. That coffee-”

“Big deal, so he can’t deliver his coffee. So what? He brings it back with him, that’s all. Dried coffee beans’ll hold for months.” John’s relatives were in the coffee business and he knew a lot about the subject. “But Vargas goes around acting like a, like a…” But his search for another metaphor to match his deflated balloon failed and he just shook his head. “I think, I just think…”

“You think there’s more going on here than meets the eye.”

“Right, and I think there’s more than coffee in that hold.”

“I gather we’re still talking about drugs?”

“Yeah, drugs. Sometimes they put cocaine or heroin inside sacks of coffee. You ever hear that? It makes it harder for the sniffer dogs to smell it. I tell you, I’d really like to have about twenty minutes alone in that hold.”

“John,” Gideon warned, “you’re not on duty here. You’re not in America here. You have no jurisdiction-”

John held up his hand. “I know, I know, I know. Just dreaming, that’s all.”

They wandered over to look at the nearby platform house. Through the open sides they could see that there were two hammocks strung crosswise to each other in the center, and that the shelves along one side held canned food, cups and plates, and cooking utensils. A half-full sack of rice leaned against one of the poles that held up the roof. It was impossible to tell how old the house was – it could have been five years, it could have been five days – but it looked very much as if it were currently being lived in. It must have been where the construction workers, or maybe the watchmen (who were perhaps the same) were housed, they concluded, as they sat heavily down on the front step.

“Doc, there’s something else that I can’t figure out,” John said, his elbows on the step behind them. “I did take a look at Scofield’s room this morning, just before I got off the ship.”

“And?”

“It was strange. His bed hadn’t been slept in. It hadn’t even been sat on; it was tight as a drum.”

“And this is strange why?”

“Well, the thing with Cisco happened at two in the morning, right? What was he doing, if he wasn’t sleeping?”

“Who knows? He’d had all that ‘tea’ of his. Maybe it put him to sleep up on the roof, all right, but interfered with his sleep when he came down later on. The way alcohol does. Maybe he was reading, or-”

“Where?”

“Where?”

“Yeah, where?” John said. “Where was he reading? His cabin is the same size as ours. There’s nothing in the damn thing but a bed. There’s no chair. There’s no room for a chair. There’s only the bed, and he wasn’t on that. What’s more, the whole damn place was neat as a pin. Maggie heard scuffling, right? How could two guys scuffle in there without messing things up? There’s barely room for two guys to stand there.”

“Ah,” Gideon said, nodding. “I see what you mean. Maggie thought it came from his room, but it couldn’t have, could it?”

“That’s what I’m saying, right.”

“Well, it probably came from the cabin on her other side. We should-”

John was looking curiously at him.

Gideon looked back. “What?”

“ You’re in the cabin on her other side. Were you doing a lot of scuffling?”

“Oh. Yeah, that’s right. Okay, maybe-”

They were interrupted by a shout from Phil, who was part of a knot of people – crew and passengers – standing in front of the warehouse’s scorched double doors.

“Hey, Gideon, come look. I think we have something in your line of work here.”

When Gideon, with John, got closer he saw that they were all peering at a round, silver-dollar sized object that appeared to be stuck or pinned to the outside of one of the doors. The crowd parted respectfully for him, then eagerly closed in again.

“It is bone, isn’t it?” Tim asked.

“Well, let’s see…”

It was a glistening, perfect disk of – yes, bone – a little less than an inch in diameter, with a quarter-inch hole at its center; essentially, a ring of bone. It had been nailed to the wall through the hole in the middle. There was a very slight convexity to it, with the concave side pressed up against the wall. He ran a finger gently over it.

“Hmm,” said John, smiling.

“Hmm,” said Gideon.

“It could be an ornament of some kind,” Maggie declared when she grew tired of waiting for something from him beyond “hmm.” “A pendant, perhaps; part of a necklace.”

“Meneo says he thinks it must be another sign,” Tim offered excitedly. “From the Chayacuro again.”

Meneo, the tiny cook, nodded energetically. “ Si, Chayacuros. Muy malo.” Very bad.

“He thinks they burned down the warehouse and left this as a warning.”

“A warning to whom?” a wide-eyed Duayne asked. “About what?”

“About everything, about every damned thing you can name,” Vargas mumbled.

“Is it human?” Mel asked Gideon. “Can you tell?”

“I don’t know,” Gideon said slowly. “Let’s get it off.” He tried to slide the ring off the nail, but the hole in the center wasn’t quite large enough to slip over the nail’s head. The nail itself, about two inches long, wasn’t deeply embedded in the wood, however, and with a twist of his hand he was able to jerk it out. The bone fell gently into the cupped palm of his other hand.

He turned it over, studied it, fingered it, turned it over again. And again.

The ring, he saw now, wasn’t as perfect as he’d thought. For one thing its rim beveled slightly outward from the convex surface to the concave one. And while superficially circular enough, it showed rough edges and some excrescences, as if it had been drilled from the surrounding bone, but never finished, never sanded or polished. But the quarter-inch opening in the center, about a quarter of an inch across, was indeed perfectly circular, as smooth as the hole in a Life Saver, although its rim also beveled outward from the convex surface to the concave one.

“ Well?” Maggie demanded when her patience ran out again.

Phil laughed. “Forget it, Maggie; it’s hopeless. When the Skeleton Detective is engaged in examining a skeleton or any part thereof, he is not to be distracted. He is no longer really with us.”

Gideon, as if to prove the point, continued his examination, hearing neither of them. More fingering, more up-close scrutiny, even a little sniffing.

“Okay,” he said at last. “First of all, it’s from a skull; a piece of cranium. These brownish streaks are dried blood. From its thinness and its convexity, I’d say it’s from the frontal bone – the squamous portion, the left or right frontal eminence.” He tapped his own forehead. “Could be parietal, however. Not temporal, though, and certainly not occipital, which is thicker and not as-”

“But is it human?” Maggie ground out through clenched teeth. “For God’s sake, Gideon!”

“Ah, well, that I can’t be sure of. There’s nothing to suggest it isn’t human, and if you want my guess, I’d say that it is. I can’t think of any animals that you’d find around here that would have a skull both as globular and as large as the one that this must have come from. Oh, and I can also tell you something else. It’s fresh. See, you can feel how slippery, how greasy, it is.” He proffered it for them to see for themselves.

“We’ll take your word on it,” Phil said.

“Also,” Gideon continued, turning it over so that the concave side was up, “see this sort of skin, this membrane on the inside? That’s meningeal tissue – brain tissue – that’s still adhering to the bone. And it’s hardly dried out at all. So… definitely fresh, yes.”

“‘Fresh,’ meaning like yesterday?” John asked.

“Yesterday would be a good bet,” Gideon said.

“So it could be connected with the fire?”

“Could well be,” said Gideon, who was beginning to think that John might have a point after all; there had been an awful lot of strange things going on in the last day or so.

“Wait a minute,” Mel said. “You’re losing me. A hole like that in your head – you’d be dead, wouldn’t you?”

“Interestingly enough, not necessarily. Many people have survived a trephining operation that removed this large a chunk of skull. But in this case, I think so, yes. He would have been dead. This would have done him in.”

“So what you’re telling us is that Meneo probably got it right? The Chayacuro-”

“ Si, si, los Chayacuros!” Meneo loudly agreed.

“-burned the place down and killed somebody-”

“The watchman, probably,” Duayne supplied eagerly. “There must have been a watchman.”

“-and… and cut a piece out of his head and nailed it up on the wall to… to… what?”

“Take it easy, Mel,” John said. “Don’t get carried away. That’s not what he’s telling us. He’s telling us… well, what the hell are you telling us, Doc?”

“Only that somebody was killed in the last day or so, and this piece of his skull wound up nailed to the wall. The rest – the Chayacuro-”

“Los Chayacuros, si!”

“-the burning down of the place on purpose – is strictly conjecture. No evidence one way or the other, at least that I can see.”

“But who else would do something like this?” Duayne asked, his lips curled in disgust. “Maybe not that particular tribe, but some band of primitive… savages. I mean, cut a piece out of a skull and nail it-” He shuddered. “Ugh.”

“I wonder how they did it,” Phil mused. “Look at how clean that hole in the middle is. You couldn’t do that with a knife, let alone a machete. It’s as if someone did it on a drill press in a factory. How could they bore a hole like that?”

“Oh, I know exactly how it was done,” Gideon said. “I’ve seen this before. Only once, but it’s not the kind of thing you forget.”

They fell silent, waiting. Even the non-English-speaking Meneo, staring expectantly at Gideon’s lips, seemed to be waiting for an explanation to emerge.

“Well, first of all, nobody cut this thing out of his skull,” Gideon said. “Secondly, nobody nailed it to the wall.”

“Nobody nailed it to the wall!” Mel exclaimed, almost angrily. “Nobody – What the hell are you talking about?”

“Nobody nailed it to the wall in the sense you’re thinking,” Gideon amended. “I’d guess it wound up there accidentally.”

After a few moments of blank stares all around, John spoke up. “Oh, well, now that we’ve had that explained…”

Gideon couldn’t help laughing. In spite of himself, in spite of the grisly situation, he enjoyed these public moments of seeming wizardry. They were as close to fun as anything in the forensic business came. “Wait a second,” he said and walked back to the lean-to that had the tools on it. He came back with the Makita nail gun. “Now,” he said, scanning the ground, “anybody see the nail I pulled out of the door?”

“Here it is.” Vargas bent, picked it up, and handed it to Gideon.

“See these spiral grooves in it?” Gideon said.

“It’s a roofing nail,” John said. “The grooves help anchor it.”

“Fine, a roofing nail,” Gideon said. “Now look at the nails that are still left in the cartridge of the nail gun.”

“They’re the same!” Tim exclaimed.

“Yes.”

“So that means…” Maggie began, then frowned and shook her head incredulously. “ What does it mean?”

“It means,” said Gideon, “that someone almost certainly killed him with this nail gun. Or let’s just say he was killed with the nail gun. Possibly he did it to himself by accident – or not by accident. People have tried committing suicide with them, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.”

“Yuck,” said Tim.

“You’ve lost me, Doc,” John said. “Okay, this piece of bone, this ring of bone, was maybe nailed up with a nail gun – this nail gun right here, it looks like – but how does that translate to the guy was killed with it? How do you know what killed him?”

“And I still want to know how they made this,” said Phil, who had finally taken the bone from Gideon and was peering at the smooth, circular border of the hole in the center. “It’s like it was made with a, with a…”

“It was made with the nail gun,” Gideon said, “which also nailed it to the wall – and on its way from doing the first to accomplishing the second, it made a hash of his brain.”

His open-mouthed audience waited for more.

“Well, first of all, you have to remember that a good nail gun can generate a fantastic velocity; around fourteen hundred feet per second, if I remember correctly.”

“You’re kidding me. That’s faster than the muzzle velocity on my old Detective Special,” John said. “And that could sure do a lot of damage.”

“And so can a two-inch steel nail, especially with a flat, round head, although more often than not, it just makes a hole in the skull and merely gets embedded in the brain.”

Duayne winced. “‘Merely,’ the man says.”

“But once in a while, especially with a powerful gun driving it, it doesn’t happen that way. It happens the way it happened here.”

The sequence would have been like this: The point of the nail would have easily perforated the skull, making a small, circular hole – smaller than the one now visible in the bone – but a millisecond later the round, flat head of the nail would have struck the skull as well, creating a larger opening. It would have driven partway through, then gotten wedged in the hole it had made, which would have transferred its energy to the immediately surrounding bony tissue, breaking away the ring of bone he now held in his hand. The nail would then have continued plowing through the brain, dragging the ring along with it and doing dreadful destruction, then exploded out the back of the head, bony ring and all, and then kept going a few feet – it couldn’t have been far, because so much of its energy would have dissipated, which would have been why it wasn’t embedded very deeply in the door.

“And that’s how it happened,” he finished. “I think.”

They had listened to this virtuoso analysis, part enthralled, part horrified, and for a moment it almost seemed as if they were going to break into applause, but they only shook their heads, or clucked, or softly whistled.

Except for Duayne, who murmured, “Amazing, just amazing.”

“Question,” Mel said. “Where’s the rest of him?”

“Very good question,” said Gideon. “Obviously, the body’s not here.”

“Burned up inside, perhaps?” suggested Maggie. “In fact, maybe they set the fire to cover it.”

“Oh no, I don’t think so. You can see this wasn’t an especially hot fire – apparently no accelerants involved, no gasoline or anything like that. A fire like this, or an ordinary house fire – it’s not nearly hot enough to consume a body. If he was inside, we’d be able to spot him.”

“Well, if it worked the way you said, Doc,” John said, “then he would have been standing a few feet in front of the door, just about where we are right now, when he got shot. We’re only ten or fifteen feet from the edge, and there’s no beach right below. It would have been easy enough to roll him over the edge and into the river.”

“That’s true, but whatever happened, there’s probably some of him – blood, brain tissue, hair, pieces of his head – left around where he was shot. Which, as John says, was probably right where we’re standing.”

“And which we’d better get off of,” John added. “The police aren’t going to appreciate our stomping around a crime scene.”

“What police?” Vargas said with a guttural laugh. “Malagga? You think he’ll care enough to get his fat rear end all the way over here? Why should he?”

All the same, Vargas moved off six or seven steps, as did everybody else except Gideon, who had dropped to his hands and knees to have a better look at the ground.

“You mean Malagga would be responsible for investigating this?” John asked Vargas, as most of the others somewhat uncomfortably checked the soles of their shoes for any human residue that might be sticking to them. From the relief on their faces, it was obvious that none was found.

Vargas shrugged. “We’re still closer to the checkpoint than we are to Leticia, and there can’t be any police stations between them… there’s nothing between them except a few Indian villages… so, yes, I think it would fall to Malagga – if it fell to anybody.”

“Well, all the same, the cops have to be told. We’ll add that to what we tell them when we get to Leticia and let them decide what to do.”

“I’ve found something,” Gideon called. In the variegated red, yellow, and brown forest litter it would have taken more than the naked eye to spot blood spatter or brain tissue, but bone was different. He held up a roughly triangular chunk of bone an inch across at its widest point.

“This is a piece of the occipital – the rear of the skull, way down low. I can see some of the superior nuchal line and just the start of the occipital protuberance, and here on the inside, what I think is the transverse sinus… the left transverse sinus.” He hefted the piece. “This would have happened when the nail blasted out the back of his head. There are probably some more pieces around.”

For the next twenty minutes he continued crawling around the general area, coming up with another chunk of occipital, and five more pieces – no more than crumbs, really – that he recognized as bone but were too small to identify. By that time, everybody but Phil, John, and Vargas had grown bored and gone back to the ship. Vargas had gone to sit on the steps of the nearby shack and shake his head and mumble to himself, and John and Phil were idly watching Gideon.

“So what are you going to do with the pieces?” Phil asked.

“Turn them over to the police in Leticia, I guess. As John said, tell them about all this, and leave it up to them. Although I’m hoping I’m able to keep that ring of bone from the frontal. It’d make a hell of an addition to my study collection.”

Phil grimaced. “Jesus, you’re as bad as Duayne with his bugs. How come Julie hasn’t divorced you?”

“I’m referring to the collection in the forensic lab at the U,” said Gideon. “I don’t keep the damn things in my living room.”

“So what do we have here?” John was musing. “Can’t be a suicide.”

“Why can’t it be a suicide?” Phil asked him.

“Because where’s the body? Suicides don’t get up and walk away. And from what Doc said, this would have been pretty much an instant death, am I right? He would have dropped right here.”

“You’re right,” Gideon said, still on his knees. “Something as big as that bone ring, with the nail attached, tearing through the brain? He was dead before he hit the ground.”

“Well, maybe he committed suicide and somebody else moved him,” Phil suggested. “Buried him, or threw him in the river.”

“Yeah, it could be,” John said agreeably. “There isn’t exactly a lot to go on.”

“One thing we can assume,” said Gideon, getting slowly to his feet, “is that this wasn’t a premeditated homicide.”

“You mean because of the weapon,” John said. “Nobody with murder in his mind plans on doing it with a nail gun.”

“Right, a weapon of impulse, of opportunity.” Gideon brushed leaves and soil from his knees and got up. “One thing, though, John. I have to say I’m starting to agree with you.”

“About the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business?”

“Uh-huh. There’s just too much going on. All that craziness last night on the boat, and now the warehouse burning down and somebody getting killed… What do you think, Phil?”

The question caught Phil in the middle of a vast yawn. “What do I think?” he said before it had quite finished. “I think I need a nap. I’m going back to the ship. See you guys later.”

“Why don’t you have a talk with Vargas, Doc?” John suggested. “Maybe you can get something out of him about what’s going on.”

“Me?” cried Gideon, who had no taste, and not much talent, for the guileful subtleties of interrogation. “Why me – why not you? You’re the cop.”

“That’s why; I’m a cop. I’ll scare him. And this isn’t my jurisdiction, you’re right about that. But you, you’re just a private citizen being friendly. Besides, he likes you.”

“He likes you too,” Gideon said lamely.

“No, he doesn’t. I make him nervous. Come on, look at the poor guy.” He tilted his chin toward the house, where Vargas was sitting forlornly on the steps, his elbows on his knees. “Aside from everything else, he looks like he can use a friendly ear to talk into. I mean, I’m not saying he’s guilty of anything, but something’s going on, and he knows more about it than he’s been telling us.”

“Okay,” Gideon said with a sigh, “I’ll give it a try. Um, how do I start?”

John shrugged. “Any way you want. Ask him when he expects us to leave. After that, just play it by ear.”

“Oh, thanks, that’s a huge help. They must teach you that stuff at the academy.”

“See you back on the boat, Doc.”

“Captain Vargas,” Gideon said, approaching the house, “I was wondering when you think we might be getting the Adelita going again.”

Vargas raised his head and made an attempt to smile. “Very soon, professor. I was hoping that the workmen who live here would come back. Surely they will, soon? Perhaps I give them one more half hour, no more.” He brightened at a rustling at the edge of the jungle a few yards away. “Ah, you see? Here they…” He leaped to his feet, eyes practically popping from his head as the newcomers emerged from the bush. “ Madre de Dios!”