Aaron Elkins: Little Tiny Teeth

“I don’t really understand why she would kill herself,” Julie was saying when John returned with his pizza. “Dr. Scofield’s body was never found, was it? There’s no real proof that he’s dead, so how could she be convicted of murder?”

“That doesn’t matter under Colombian law any more than it does under ours,” John said around his first ecstatic, closed-eyed bite. “There would have been more than enough circumstantial evidence to convict her two times over. Especially the blood from upstairs. She knew it’d turn out to be hers. And then there are the lies she told, and the motive.”

“What motive?” asked Marti. “Didn’t they get along? I thought he was helping her out, getting her a job down in Peru.”

“He was,” Gideon said, “but she wanted to stay in Iowa City.”

“Why, in God’s name?” Marti muttered.

“Iowa City’s nice,” Gideon said, laughing. “But the thing is, with Arden Scofield in the running, her chances of getting the one remaining ethnobotany position were zip. But with Arden out of the picture, everything changes. It’s already June, way too late for the department to try to recruit somebody from the outside, so the job would almost certainly fall to her. And with the Great Man no longer overshadowing everything she did, her future there – so she must have thought – was going to be a lot brighter. Her whole life would be different.”

“So she came on the trip planning to kill him,” Julie murmured.

“I doubt it,” Gideon said. “If she had killing him in mind, I don’t think she’d have been so free in telling us about the Iowa situation – practically handing us a motive. No, I think the opportunity simply presented itself, and she took it.”

“ Carpe diem,” observed Marti, expertly using chopsticks to insert a bit of vegetarian sushi – rice, tofu, and shaved ginger rolled in seaweed – between her lips. “Well, you two certainly had an exciting time of it.”

“What about you?” Gideon asked. “How was Cabo?”

“Great. We slept in the morning, we did a lot of swimming and snorkeling, we ate like horses, we got a few massages. Or at least I did.”

“But mostly,” Julie said, “we just relaxed, and read junky novels, and sat on the beach, and baked the Northwest chill out of our bones. That felt good. It must sound pretty boring compared to your trip, though,” she added wistfully. “What an adventure the two of you had!”

“Yeah, it was,” said John, pushing back from his now-empty pizza tray and clasping his hands on his belly, a man well contented, happy to be back in a world where pizza could be had for the asking. “To tell you the truth, though, next time something like this comes around… no offense to you, Doc… but I think I’ll opt for the crushed turnip wrap.”