Little Tiny Teeth (31 page)

“The blood’s all dry,” Phil said. “How do you collect dried blood?”

“Not a problem,” John said. “Watch and learn.”

From the manila envelope he took some things he had gotten from Vargas: a single-edged razor blade, several sheets of white paper, and a few letter-size envelopes, the latter items bearing an impressive, thickly embossed Amazonia Cruise Lines logo.

With the razor he scraped the crusty brown spots near the stanchion onto one of the sheets, and the ones near the edge of the roof onto another. Both sheets were then folded and refolded to keep the material inside, and put into the smaller envelopes, which were then placed in the larger manila one.

“You’ll notice that I didn’t seal the envelopes yet,” he explained for Phil’s benefit. “I’ll use some water from the sink instead of licking them. I don’t want to take a chance of contaminating them with my DNA.”

“I knew that,” Phil said.

The manila envelope and its contents were deposited on one of the alcove shelves in John’s cabin. His air-conditioner, which the heat-loving John had previously set at mid-range, was now turned up to maximo. “The cops better appreciate this,” he said. “I’m gonna freeze tonight.”

“Yeah,” Gideon said, “the temperature might plummet all the way down to ninety. Maybe Vargas can get you a couple of blankets.”

“I’m still having trouble with the pipe tobacco,” Phil said. “Maggie seemed pretty sure she smelled it.”

“After someone suggested it to her,” Gideon pointed out.

They had gone from John’s cabin, barely big enough to hold the three of them, to the deserted salon, first stopping at the dining room buffet table to bring out glasses of water and a basket of fruit to snack on – bananas, tangerines, and some objects that looked like cucumbers, but which Phil said had fluffy insides that tasted like lemon-flavored cotton candy, which they did.

“Yeah, someone,” John said, and looked meaningfully up at them from the tangerine he’d been peeling. “Mel.”

“But she even knew the brand,” Phil said.

“Sure, that’s what she thinks now. But you have to remember, she was in a state of shock at the time. She didn’t remember any smell until Mel brought it up.”

“So you’re voting for Mel?” Gideon said.

“No, but I wouldn’t rule him out either. He was pretty ticked off at him over the book, don’t forget that.”

“Tell me someone who wasn’t ticked off at him,” Phil said. “What about the screwing over he was giving Tim on his dissertation?”

“That’s true,” John agreed. “And Duayne had something against him too.”

“He did?” said Phil.

“Oh, sure, you could see it right off,” Gideon said. “When Scofield started talking about his daughter – Duayne’s daughter – Duayne looked as if he wanted to kill him then and there.”

“Oh yeah, you guys mentioned that before. I never noticed it.”

Gideon smiled. That was the way Phil was, quick to see the good side of people, unobservant to the point of obtuseness about seeing the other. “I assume she told her father some things about Scofield’s behavior that got him upset.”

“Not too hard to imagine what,” John said. “Okay, so if they all had it in for Scofield-”

“Yes, but who had it in for Maggie?” Gideon asked. “That’s the problem I’m having with this. Why try to get rid of her too? What was that all about? When we all thought it was Cisco, it made some sense because Cisco was batty enough to do anything. But now we know it wasn’t Cisco, and if your hypothesis is correct John – about Scofield’s having been dumped off the boat from the roof – then that means that whoever did it then came downstairs to the cabin deck and stood around making some kind of noise until Maggie came out of her room, at which point he grabbed her and tossed her in the river. Why? What kind of sense does that make? Now if Maggie-”

“The three best-looking guys on the ship talking about me?” said Maggie, who had come downstairs with her empty liter bottle of water. “Be still, my heart.”

John laughed. “How’s the ankle doing, Maggie? I see you took off the bandage.”

“Oh, that. It’s fine, not nearly as bad as it looked. See?” She put her foot up for inspection on a chair and indeed, with the blood wiped away, it could be seen to be a nice, clean gash, as gashes went: no abraded, torn edges, no nasty, radiating pink tentacles of infection, no deepening, blue-brown bruising of the surrounding skin.

“Looks good,” Gideon agreed. “But I’d still keep it covered, if I were you. It’s open, and a lot of strange things grow down here.”

“You’re telling me,” she said. “Well, I just came down to refill my water…” She paused awkwardly. “Uh, Gideon, I, uh, just want to thank you again.” It was one of the few things he’d heard her say with no tinge whatever of sarcasm or irony. “You saved my life. You risked yours to do it. I couldn’t have lasted two minutes.”

“Oh, heck-”

“And” – she offered a crooked grin – “I’m really sorry I socked you. How’s the lip?”

He laughed. “Forget it, Maggie, the lip’s fine. However,” and he leveled a finger at her, “you still owe me that beer.”

When she went into the dining room, Gideon sank into a pensive silence while Phil and John continued to toss around ideas. A grotesque thought, almost too bizarre to consider seriously, had begun noodling away at him. Was it possible that they had it wrong, that everybody had it wrong?

He got up, went to the railing without a word – “Have we offended the fellow in some way?” Phil asked John – and gazed outward toward the wall of darkening green, his hands trailing abstractedly back and forth over the ebony-stained teak rail, warm and smooth against his palms. The steaming, still rain forest, so much closer here on the Javaro than it had been on the Amazon, slid monotonously by. Below him, the brown river whispered against the metal side of the ship. Gideon didn’t see the jungle, didn’t hear the water. His mind was absorbed in poking like a prodding finger at this not yet wholly formed idea of his, probing for flaws, testing for soundness, searching for a place to put the piece that didn’t fit…

Only yards from his face, a brilliant red macaw suddenly fluttered up from a branch with an indignant squawk and flapped away into the dimness of the interior. It startled him enough that his mind jumped from the unproductive rut it had dug itself into, and the final piece fell into place.

He thumped his fist gently against his palm – an unconscious gesture of self-satisfaction – and turned to face the others. “We got it backwards,” he said softly, urgently. “Sonofagun. Everybody got it backwards.”

“What are we talking about now?” Phil wondered.

“Got what backwards?” asked John.

“The way it happened. The order of events. First we assumed Maggie was thrown overboard after Arden. Then we assumed-”

“Still talking about me, I see,” Maggie said, coming from the dining room with her refilled bottle. She put her hand to her heart and wiggled her fingers. “Flutter, flutter.” Her left eyebrow was characteristically arched, her mouth ironically set, her voice typically mocking, but there was something unmistakably wary in her expression, in her taut shoulders.

Damn, Gideon thought. Why did I burst out with it like that? Why couldn’t I shut up until she was gone? Surely she’d heard enough to guess where he was going, and it was too late to start waffling now. Maggie was too smart for that, too quick on the uptake. There was but one way to go. He took in a breath and went there.

“Maggie,” he said, “you killed Arden. You threw him overboard.”

In the charged silence that fell on them John and Phil goggled at him in mute amazement.

Maggie, however, was up to the challenge. “Oh, really?” she said sardonically, her eyebrow arching even higher, her voice falling even lower. “Was that before or after he threw me overboard?”

“Arden never threw you overboard.”

“If this is your idea of a joke, I have to say-”

“No joke.”

She faltered. Her composure began to disintegrate. A tic jerked beside her right eye. “Gideon, I don’t know what you’ve been smoking, but you’re on dangerous ground here. Arden did throw me over, or at least some body did, but you keep changing your mind about who, and after that he-”

“Uh-uh, Maggie, that whole thing about him, what happened there on the deck – it was all a lie.”

Her face had stiffened. Her words spattered out like bullets. “I don’t know just who the hell you think you are, mister, but if you think for one minute-”

“We were just up on the roof, Maggie. You left some blood up there. We collected it. What do you want to bet that a lab test doesn’t show that it’s yours?”

“ Hers?” he heard John murmur in astonishment.

Her face eased. Her hunched shoulders relaxed a little. “Oh, I see where you’re coming from. My ankle… you think…” She shook her head and laughed. “I should be angry as all get-out, but it’s funny, really. Well, luckily for me, I can prove what I said. Give me a minute, let me get something from my room.” She walked to the stairs, then stopped and turned as she reached them. “You guys,” she said with a crooked grin. “If you don’t take the cake.” She shook her head as if in wonder and trotted up the steps. “Don’t go anywhere,” she called.

“Are you serious?”

“Are you crazy?”

John and Phil had both exclaimed at the same time, and Gideon wasn’t sure who had said what. Still standing at the rail, his elbows leaning on it behind him, he said, “Serious, yes. Crazy, I’m not sure. I don’t know what kind of proof she thinks she has, but I’m damn near certain I’m right. She threw Scofield off, not the other way around.”

John shook his head. “How the hell do you come up with that?”

“It’s the cut on her ankle,” Gideon said. “She said she got it when she hit her foot on the railing upstairs, in front of Scofield’s cabin.”

They nodded. “So?” Phil said.

“So take a look at the railing. It’s the same down here as it is up there. Smooth, rounded, polished wood.” He slid his hand along the surface to illustrate his point. “You want to tell me how you can cut your ankle on that? You could bruise it, break it, sure, but cut it? Uh-uh.”

“Well, wait up a minute, Doc,” John said. “I’ve seen plenty of cases where something blunt like that – a bat, a hammer – can cause a cut, and a damn big cut at that. So have you.”

“No those aren’t cuts, those are lacerations, and they’re not the same.”

A laceration was typically a wound from a blunt object, he explained, and was really a rupture, usually from the skin’s being stretched over the underlying bone and split open by the impact of the object – an example would be the way a boxer can get a “cut” on his brow from an opponent’s soft, padded, twelve-ounce glove. As a result, a blunt-object wound was usually pretty obviously torn, rather than cut, with ragged, irregular, abraded edges. And of course, the area around it would be bruised from the crushing of blood vessels under the skin. A cut, on the other hand (more properly, an incised wound), resulted directly from a sharp edge being drawn along the skin. The edges of the wound were themselves sharp, not messy, and, more important, there was no damage to the surrounding tissue, no bruising.

“And that’s what the cut on Maggie’s ankle looks like,” Phil said, nodding. “Yeah.”

“Yes. It looked like a mess before, with all the blood. But now you could see it was clean. And it’s been almost twenty hours. If there was going to be any bruising, it would have shown up by now.”

“So what you’re saying,” John said, swallowing the last of his tangerine, “is that she cut herself – lacerated herself – on… what, the stanchion?”

“More likely the cut end of the guy wire. Did you see what those wires are like? They’re made of – I don’t know what you call them – a whole lot of thin, stiff wires twisted around each other and then around a core.”

“Wire rope,” John said. “Real strong stuff.”

“Yes. And the ends are sharp as hell when they’re cut off on the bias. Like a hundred little scalpels. That’s why they’re usually covered with tape or with some kind of sleeve, if there’s going to be any traffic around them. But not up there.”

“So Maggie dumped Scofield in the river, that’s what you’re telling us?” Phil said, obviously confused. “And cut herself while she was getting him over the side?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. You caught your foot on the wire yourself, and you weren’t trying to wrestle anybody overboard.”

“But then who threw Maggie in the river? What’d she do, toss herself overboard?”

“I believe so, yes.”

He came back to the table, sat down, and resumed pulling the white, citrusy wadding out of the cucumberlike fruit. It was like eating a pomegranate. You ignored the bean-like seeds and just ate the sweet packing around them.

Phil shook his head, scowling. “Aw, no. Aside from its being ridiculous, it’s impossible, Gideon. It doesn’t add up. Listen, there were only two splashes, right? It’s like Mel said; the second one came after Maggie was already in the water, so how-”

“No, I don’t think it did.”

“Sure, it did. Think back, right to the beginning. What was the first thing you heard?”

“That little yelp. Ai!”

“From Maggie, right?”

Gideon nodded.

“Okay, a little yelp,” Phil went on. “And then a splash – that’s Maggie hitting the water – and then she yells for help: ‘Help, save me, I’m drowning.’ And then there’s the second splash – no? What am I not getting?” he said in response to the slow shaking of Gideon’s head.

“What if it didn’t happen that way? What if it happened this way? What if-”

“Three what ifs in a row,” John grumbled. “Oh, that’s a great start.” He was still attached to his own theory. But he was paying keen attention.

“What if,” Gideon continued, “Maggie, knowing that Scofield is likely to still be up there in a stupor after everybody else leaves, goes up with the idea of doing just what she did – pushing him off the back of the ship. But while getting him over the edge, she catches her ankle on the end of the wire-”