by Aaron Elkins
“Well, first, why would the guy just toss Maggie overboard? I mean, couldn’t he figure out she’d scream? Wouldn’t he, you know, knock her out or choke her or something?”
“Yeah, a rational person would,” John said, “but we’re talking about Cisco here. Who knows what he had in his system by that time of night?”
“Not only that,” said Gideon, “but if the guy had really just killed Scofield, Maggie’s showing up would have thrown him into a panic. And when you’re talking about panic, there’s no such thing as a rational person.”
“Okay, I can see that,” Phil allowed, “but what about the splashes?”
“What about the splashes?”
“There should have been three of them, but we only heard Maggie and Cisco hit the water. Why didn’t we hear Scofield?”
“What do you mean, ‘we?’ As far as I remember, I’m the only one who heard any of the splashes. You two were snoring away, right up to the ‘man overboard’.”
“Well, hell, we were further away,” John said. “You were right next to Maggie’s room.”
“And just one more down from Scofield’s,” Phil added. “So why didn’t you hear him go in too?”
“Phil, I was lucky to hear Maggie go in. It wasn’t the splashes that woke me up. It was that yelp when she cut her ankle. If not for that—”
John’s head came up. He sniffed once, twice. “Do I smell smoke?”
“Must be some more logging up ahead,” Phil said, as they got up to peer around the corner of the cabin block.
BUT there weren’t any logging projects along this stretch of the Javaro. The acrid smoke was coming from a charred, one-story wooden building built on the right bank above a rickety old pier that was under repair, with some jarringly clean new planks among the dark, rotten ones.
“Looks like a house,” Phil said. “What’s left of it, anyway.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Gideon said, looking at the blackened structure. “It’s pretty big for that, and that’s a fairly good-sized unloading pier down below. I think it’s some kind of commercial building. A warehouse or something.”
The fire had occurred not long before, sometime during the previous day, in all likelihood; there were no longer any flames to be seen, but curling gray wisps still rose occasionally from the burnt wood, and a few embers could be seen glowing here and there in the shadows. The flooring had buckled in places, but the walls still stood, and the corrugated metal roof had held. Fifty feet from the building was a simple, open-walled, thatch-roofed house on waist-high stilts, much like the ones they’d seen at the Ocaona village, untouched by the fire and deserted.
As the Adelita pulled up to the pier, a stricken Vargas stood gazing up from the deck like a man who’s just been told he has five minutes to live. “What am I supposed to do now?” he was saying to himself over and over in Spanish, sometimes with a desperate little hiccup of a laugh. “What in the name of God am I to do now?”
Gideon, standing not far from him, asked, in English, what was the matter.
“Is our warehouse. San José de Chiquitos. I be to unload the… the coffee beans here. Now how I do it? I don’t can!” In his extremity, his command of English had fled him again. He jerked his head to stare at Gideon. His eyes, protuberant to begin with, bulged a little more. “What I do with the coffee?”
He asked it — wailed it — as if he were really counting on Gideon to give him the answer, and Gideon didn’t know what to say. “Well, it isn’t as if it’s your fault,” he began soothingly. “Obviously, you can’t unload it here—”
“How this can happen?” Vargas muttered, barely hearing him. “Are guards, guards what live right here! How they can don’t see? And where they are now, why they don’t be here, can you tell me this?”
“Captain Vargas, however it happened, I guess you’ll just have to take it back to Iquitos. No one would expect you to—”
But Vargas, not listening at all now, was wandering dazedly away. “You don’t can understand… you don’t know…”
A few minutes later, the narrow gangplank was let down, and Vargas, some of the passengers, and most of the crew came down it and climbed the dozen or so rough steps dug out of the bank to get up to the building and look around. Although the still-smoldering structure was too hot to enter, it could be seen through gaps in the walls that the place was empty; nothing was stored there. John, who had some experience investigating arson, guessed that the fire was twelve or fifteen hours old.
While most of the others poked gingerly along the outside of the building, some with sticks they’d picked up, Gideon and John went meandering, with no real purpose, around the clearing. There were stacks of fresh lumber, corrugated metal roofing, and other building materials nearby, and lumber scraps and power tools on the ground. Under a crude little waist-high lean-to of its own stood the tools’ power source, a new-looking, gasoline-powered 5.5-horsepower Hitachi air compressor. (Gideon, not much of a hand around power tools, knew this only because John, who did know about such things, had just told him what it was.)
“Looks like there was some construction going on,” said John.
“Yup. Enlarging the place, repairing it, something.”
On top of the small lean-to were a few more power tools. “These are pretty good tools, you know?” John picked one up. “Hutchins rotary sander,” he said enviously. “Top of the line. I wish I could afford one. And this…” He hefted another. “Whoa, a Makita nail gun, also top of the line. This little baby doesn’t come cheap.” He put it down, seemingly with regret. “Doc, does it strike you as a little strange that in a place like this” — he waved vaguely about them — “way, way out in the boondocks, middle of the jungle — that they’d have expensive stuff like this? It all looks new too.”
“Not really, no,” Gideon said. “This is a warehouse, a pick-up point for other places, isn’t it? Not just some local storehouse. We don’t know how much money is behind it.” He leveled a finger at his friend. “Let me guess. You’re thinking there are drugs involved, right?”
“Yeah, I guess I got a one-track mind. But you know what the DEA people call this stretch of the Amazon Basin? The White Triangle. Sixty percent of the North American cocaine trade comes through here, either on the ground, down the river, or in the air. And here we have this falling-down little shack of a warehouse, way, way in the tules, and there’s about ten thousand dollars worth of new tools laying around.” He shrugged. “So, yeah, I’m thinking there might be more than coffee beans that come through here. You don’t agree with me?”
“I agree you’ve got a one-track mind. It’s hard to picture Vargas as a drug trafficker. The guy’s a bundle of nerves. He’d never be able to stand it.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
They walked on a little. “And here’s something else,” John said. “You know that old prof of yours, Abe Goldstein, and that theory he was always talking about, when too many things happen—”
“The Law of Interconnected Monkey Business. When too many suspicious things — too much monkey business — start happening to the same set of people in the same context, you’re going to find a connection between them.”
“Yeah, that’s the one. Well, don’t you think it maybe applies here? Yesterday Cisco goes bonkers and throws Scofield overboard, then throws Maggie overboard, then throws himself overboard… and then when we arrive at the warehouse to drop off the coffee, the warehouse has just been burnt down—”
“I see what you’re saying, John, but in this case I don’t think it applies. We know why Cisco hated Scofield, and it had nothing to do with the warehouse, or coffee, or drugs for that matter. That was between them, something personal. This is something completely different, a different context.”
“Is it? Tell me, what’s Vargas so shook up about? He looks like a balloon that somebody let all the air out of.”
“Well, he was supposed to make a delivery here. That coffee—”
“Big deal, so he can’t
deliver his coffee. So what? He brings it back with him, that’s all. Dried coffee beans’ll hold for months.” John’s relatives were in the coffee business and he knew a lot about the subject. “But Vargas goes around acting like a, like a…” But his search for another metaphor to match his deflated balloon failed and he just shook his head. “I think, I just think…”
“You think there’s more going on here than meets the eye.”
“Right, and I think there’s more than coffee in that hold.”
“I gather we’re still talking about drugs?”
“Yeah, drugs. Sometimes they put cocaine or heroin inside sacks of coffee. You ever hear that? It makes it harder for the sniffer dogs to smell it. I tell you, I’d really like to have about twenty minutes alone in that hold.”
“John,” Gideon warned, “you’re not on duty here. You’re not in America here. You have no jurisdiction—”
John held up his hand. “I know, I know, I know. Just dreaming, that’s all.”
They wandered over to look at the nearby platform house. Through the open sides they could see that there were two hammocks strung crosswise to each other in the center, and that the shelves along one side held canned food, cups and plates, and cooking utensils. A half-full sack of rice leaned against one of the poles that held up the roof. It was impossible to tell how old the house was — it could have been five years, it could have been five days — but it looked very much as if it were currently being lived in. It must have been where the construction workers, or maybe the watchmen (who were perhaps the same) were housed, they concluded, as they sat heavily down on the front step.
“Doc, there’s something else that I can’t figure out,” John said, his elbows on the step behind them. “I did take a look at Scofield’s room this morning, just before I got off the ship.”
“And?”
“It was strange. His bed hadn’t been slept in. It hadn’t even been sat on; it was tight as a drum.”
“And this is strange why?”
“Well, the thing with Cisco happened at two in the morning, right? What was he doing, if he wasn’t sleeping?”
“Who knows? He’d had all that ‘tea’ of his. Maybe it put him to sleep up on the roof, all right, but interfered with his sleep when he came down later on. The way alcohol does. Maybe he was reading, or—”
“Where?”
“Where?”
“Yeah, where?” John said. “Where was he reading? His cabin is the same size as ours. There’s nothing in the damn thing but a bed. There’s no chair. There’s no room for a chair. There’s only the bed, and he wasn’t on that. What’s more, the whole damn place was neat as a pin. Maggie heard scuffling, right? How could two guys scuffle in there without messing things up? There’s barely room for two guys to stand there.”
“Ah,” Gideon said, nodding. “I see what you mean. Maggie thought it came from his room, but it couldn’t have, could it?”
“That’s what I’m saying, right.”
“Well, it probably came from the cabin on her other side. We should—”
John was looking curiously at him.
Gideon looked back. “What?”
“You’re in the cabin on her other side. Were you doing a lot of scuffling?”
“Oh. Yeah, that’s right. Okay, maybe—”
They were interrupted by a shout from Phil, who was part of a knot of people — crew and passengers — standing in front of the warehouse’s scorched double doors.
“Hey, Gideon, come look. I think we have something in your line of work here.”
When Gideon, with John, got closer he saw that they were all peering at a round, silver-dollar sized object that appeared to be stuck or pinned to the outside of one of the doors. The crowd parted respectfully for him, then eagerly closed in again.
“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.<
br />
“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, sí!”
“—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.”
