Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

He jumped up. “They’ve found some bones.”

“ More bones?” John said, getting up too. “What is it about you, Doc? Do you bring this on yourself?”

“That’s what Julie thinks,” Gideon said, laughing, as they made their way down the bank. “And remember your weird friend Hedwig, in Hawaii? She thinks it’s because of my aura.”

The three Indians were on a narrow, muddy, log-littered beach, and one of them, in the act of tossing a cigarillo into the water, had spotted what he was sure was a human skull, caught by an eddy and lodged in a pool formed by a tangle of downed tree branches.

“It’s him!” Phil exclaimed the moment he saw it, gazing placidly back up at him from empty eye sockets, through twelve inches of brownish water. “The nail-gun guy.”

“Looks like it,” Gideon said. It was a human skull, all right. There was the expected round hole in the forehead, just right of center – no radiating or spiral cracks, just a clean hole – and a jagged-edged empty space where the back of the head should have been. No mandible was visible. “Should be easy enough to confirm, though.”

He leaned down, and grasping a branch for support, dipped into the water with his other hand and brought up the broken skull. The Indians, whom he half expected to quietly back away and leave, sat down and watched avidly. The perforated disk of bone from the warehouse door was still in his fanny pack. He took it out, wrinkling his nose a little – the fanny pack would have to go; it was getting nasty in there, what with the heat and humidity making the still-fresh bone fragment reek – and fitted it to the circular hole in the skull, which had to be done from the inside because the beveling of both the hole and the disk made it impossible to do from the front. This was no problem, however, what with the fist-sized hole in the back of the skull. He adjusted the disk until he had its irregularities matched to those of the hole and gently pressed it in. It slipped in with a solid little click, and held. A perfect fit.

“Consider it confirmed,” he said. For a while he held the skull up to his face, turning it this way and that. “Amazing,” he murmured.

“What is?” John asked, after it became clear that further elucidation wasn’t on its way.

“Well, look at it,” Gideon said. “This guy was killed yesterday afternoon, not even twenty-four hours ago, and look at this thing! It’s perfectly clean… okay, a little crud clinging to the inside of the brain case and the nasal aperture, and in the orbits, and so on – back of the palate, auditory meatuses, hard-to-reach places – but no muscles, no ligaments, and just a few shreds of tendon. In the lab, it’d take a colony of Dermestid beetles weeks to get it this clean.”

“Piranhas?” said John.

“ Si, piranhas,” the three crewmen agreed in sober unison.

Gideon nodded. “I really didn’t believe they were as fast as this, though. And all these tiny scratches over every square millimeter of it… as if it’s been… well, scoured with a pad of heavy-duty steel wool.” He shook his head. “Amazing,” he said again. “If you look closely, you can see that most of the scratches are really nicks, kind of triangular in cross section.”

“Little… tiny… teeth,” John said.

“Little tiny pointy teeth,” Gideon amended.

“Gideon, did I just hear you say you used beetles to clean your skeletons?” Phil asked.

“Uh-huh,” he said abstractedly. “Dermestids. You get them from biological supply houses. There’s nothing like them for corpses. They love to eat dead flesh.”

“Big deal, so do I,” John said.

“Mmm,” said Gideon. He had sat down on a log with the skull and was slowly turning it in his hands again, studying it from various angles, running his fingers over eminences and concavities, gently inserting them into the nasal aperture, stroking the teeth.

“I always thought you boiled the bodies or used some kind of caustic or something. You just put them in a tank with a bunch of beetles?” Phil persisted. He was fascinated with the idea. “Gideon? Are you there? I think we’ve lost him again,” he said to John.

“He’ll be back,” John said. “You just have to be patient.” They seated themselves on a log to await his return.

It took him another minute to surface again. “Well,” he murmured, “it’s a male, all right; not much doubt about that. The rugged muscle-attachment sites, and these rounded orbital margins, and the bilobate mental eminences-”

“That means he’s got a square chin,” John said for Phil’s benefit. Over the years of his association with Gideon, he had picked up the occasional bit of forensic jargon. “That’s just the way these people talk, you see. It’s to make sure no one else can understand them.”

“I know, I’m very familiar with the language myself.”

“-all those things yell ‘male.’” Gideon continued, more or less talking to himself. “And he’s a grown man, in his thirties at least, and probably not more than, oh, fifty or so. All we have to go on there are the cranial and palatine sutures. None of them are still anywhere near open, but none of them have been obliterated yet either, inside or out. Now, as to race…”

Another period of intense, silent examination and palpation before he looked up again.

“Well, I’m pretty sure he’s not an Indian, at any rate. The nasal aperture is too narrow, the nasal sill is too sharp, there’s no prognathism to speak of, the malars aren’t very prominent at all; if anything, they’re reduced. And you can see that the interorbital projection is pretty high…”

“True, true,” said John, as if he still knew what Gideon was talking about.

“… and the palatine suture… well, see? It’s really jagged, not at all straight, and the mastoid processes” – he fingered the rough, cone-shaped eminences to which the large muscles of the neck attached – “see how narrow they are? Almost pointed, not stubby. And no sign of shovel-shaping on the incisors. No, there’s nothing about this guy that makes me think ‘Native American.’ And definitely not one of the local Indians. He’s way too big.”

“What then?” Phil asked.

“White, I’d say. Everything points to Caucasian.”

He had the skull upside down on his lap, so that the palate and the teeth were uppermost. John and Phil leaned forward to see. So did the crewmen, from a distance.

“Guy could use a dentist,” John said. “It hurts just to look at those teeth.”

“Most of them, yes. They’re crumbly and discolored and full of caries, and two of them are missing and, ugh, here’s an abscess well underway. He’s let his teeth go for years, maybe decades. The poor guy must have been in some pain, and if he’d lived, it was going to get a lot worse. But it’s these two that are really interesting.” With his ballpoint pen, he tapped the two right bicuspids.

“Oh, yeah, look at that,” said Phil. “Fillings. He’s had a little dental work done.”

“But not just any dental work,” Gideon said, “excellent, expensive dental work. This is gold, gold foil, and beautifully applied. You don’t see this type of work anymore. It sure as hell isn’t the kind of work you ever would have seen down here.”

“So the guy’s not from around here, that’s what you’re saying?” Phil said.

“Well, yes, but it suggests a little more than that. When you find this kind of dentistry on a down-and-outer, a guy whose teeth haven’t seen a dentist in twenty years, it usually tells you one of two things. Either he’s somebody who once had money, but who’s seen a change in fortune, or else, more likely-”

“Or else,” John said, “he spent some time in prison, where they took better care of his teeth than he could get for himself on the outside.”