Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

The presence of the two caretakers that had so fouled things up had probably been a surprise to both Cisco and Guapo. The warehouse, after all, had been empty at the time, and would be empty until the Adelita unloaded its cargo. Why guard it before then? Possibly it had been empty for weeks. Guapo, despite his self-professed knowledge of everything that went on in North Loreto Province, might well have been uninformed that the two men had arrived early to get started on the construction work.

And so Cisco – Frank Molina, brilliant Harvard graduate student, promising ethnobotanist – who had almost died from a poisoned blowgun dart thirty years before, had ended up in one of the world’s most remote rivers, dead from an even more bizarre weapon, his skull pierced by a two-inch roofing nail. Food for the fishes.

Little tiny teeth.

That left one critical question unanswered. If Cisco had been killed at San Jose de Chiquitos the previous afternoon, who was it that attacked Maggie on the boat that night?

It had to be Scofield, that was the consensus.

“It has to be Dr. Scofield,” Tim said in the same incredulous tone that Duayne had just said it, and before him, Mel.

“It also explains why nobody heard any more than two splashes,” Mel added. “That’s all there were. Arden never got thrown overboard by Cisco at all. How could he? Cisco wasn’t even there. First you went in, Maggie – splash one – and then Arden jumped in after you. Splash two. End of splashes. It all adds up.”

They were halfway through dinner, a fruit salad followed by a gluey mix of mashed beans, chicken, and rice that a sprightly, much-rejuvenated Vargas told them was tacu tacu, Peru’s national stew (everything they had seemed to be Peru’s national something), and they had spent the last twenty minutes working their way toward this conclusion.

Except for Maggie. She had eaten only a few forkfuls of salad and had not gone back to the buffet table for the stew, and she just kept shaking her head, refusing to accept it. “It couldn’t be. No. Not Arden. Why in God’s name would he want to kill me?”

But there simply weren’t any other possibilities, Duayne pointed out to her for the second or third time. Vargas had already told them that all the crew members were still aboard, which left only Cisco and Scofield unaccounted for. Cisco’s few remaining bones now reposed in a black plastic garbage bag in the hold – actually, two layered garbage bags, inasmuch as a developing, unwelcome odor had by now become apparent. Which left only Scofield.

“Now, wait a minute,” Maggie said. “Why couldn’t it have been one of the crew? Maybe when we turned the ship around to go looking for Arden, he got back on board. Why isn’t that possible?”

“Climbed back aboard a moving ship?” John asked. “In the dark?”

“He could have had help from the others, couldn’t he? You pulled me up.”

“The ship was stopped. It never stopped when we went back looking for Scofield.”

Maggie shook her head impatiently. “Well, I can’t explain everything that happened. All I know for sure is-”

“Maggie, how tall was the man who attacked you?” Gideon asked.

“How tall? I have no idea. I told you, it was all so quick, so shocking-”

“Was he taller than you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was he as tall as you?”

“I-” She saw where he was leading. “You’re right, Gideon, they’re all Indians, aren’t they? Smaller than I am. I would have noticed if he was only five-three or five-four. And he wasn’t.”

“Well, then-”

“Well, then, it wasn’t one of the crew,” she said stubbornly. “That hardly proves it was Arden.” She spread her hands, a gesture of frustration. “Okay, he’s a drug-runner. That’s crazy enough, but I accept it. But to say that he’s a… a murderer, that he tried to kill me… and besides, I haven’t heard anybody come up with a why – or with what he was doing out on the deck talking to himself in a… in a nightshirt or something, or what the scuffling I heard was, or-”

“I looked in Arden’s room afterward,” John said. “Nothing was disturbed. If you heard scuffling, it came from someplace else.”

“No, I’m quite positive-”

“ Are you positive? You said you were sleeping. Are you sure you didn’t dream it?”

“Well… all right, I grant you, that could be, it might have been a dream. Let’s put aside the scuffling, then. But to suggest that it was Arden that…” She folded her arms. “No, I’m sorry.”

“Maggie,” Mel said thoughtfully, “what did he smell like? The man who threw you overboard.”

The question, like most of the others, seemed to annoy her. “What did he smell like? You mean, did he smell dirty, or-”

“Uh-uh. Arden was a steady pipe smoker, though. My brother always has a pipe in his mouth too, and the smell doesn’t just soak into his clothes and his hair, it soaks into him. It comes out of his pores. Get close to him and you can’t help smelling it. Do you remember anything like that?”

Good point, Gideon thought. Smokers do smell of their tobacco – pipe smokers more than anyone else, it seemed – and he himself had noticed the sweet, coconut-and-vanilla scent that hung around Arden.

But Maggie rejected it with an impatient shake of her head. “No, I don’t-” She stopped abruptly, staring hard at nothing, her thoughts obviously turned inward. “Oh my God,” she said slowly, looking at each of them. “I did smell it. I smelled it and didn’t realize what it was. I thought it was something Cisco smoked, something familiar… marijuana… only it didn’t quite smell like marijuana. Sweetish, yes, but different. I guess I assumed it was something else like that, I don’t know, something from around here. But it wasn’t. It was Arden’s Sultan’s Blend – he gets it from England – how could I not have realized it? It just never occurred to me to think that… that…”

She was rocking her head back and forth, hands steepled in front of her mouth. “My God… it’s so unbelievable… Arden. But why?”

But why?

That was the question that absorbed them for the remainder of dinner, but no persuasive or even credible answers emerged, and the flow of ideas slowed and eventually stopped. Everybody was tired. Everybody had missed most of the previous night’s sleep. Once the rice-pudding dessert was finished, people began leaving, talking about getting to bed early. There would be no convivial gathering under the stars that night. In the morning they would reach Leticia, and nobody knew what awaited them when the police were informed of the bizarre goings-on of the last few days. John had told them that they might all very well be detained – they would certainly be interrogated – and it wouldn’t hurt to be well rested. The Colombian police did not rank among the world’s most considerate forces.

Phil went off to wash clothes, John disappeared somewhere, and Gideon went to the ship’s “library,” a two-foot shelf of fly-specked novels in German, Spanish, and English, apparently none of them less than fifty years old. He found a dusty copy of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and took it out to the salon, hoping to read for a couple of hours in the early evening breeze and calm his mind. It had been a hell of a day. But the posture he chose – sprawled back in one chair, with his feet propped on another, proved too comfortable. It wasn’t long before the book fell open on his lap and dropped to the deck.

“Hey… Doc.” John was shaking his shoulder.

He had been deeply, dreamlessly asleep. “What time is it?” he said, unwilling to open his eyes.

“What time is it? It’s seven o’clock. What difference does it make what time it is?” He was brimming with impatience and enthusiasm. “Come on, you’ve been snoozing for an hour. Open your eyes, wake up – I got something to show you. Come on. Hey.” More shaking.