Little Tiny Teeth (23 page)

“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.