Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

“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.”