by Aaron Elkins
“What do they mean, ‘little’? How big is ‘little’? How many cows?”
“Gideon, what the hell does this have to do with anything?”
“Just ask them, Phil.”
Phil shrugged and asked. “Maybe a dozen, they say. Maybe less. Little.” Another shrug. “Which proves?”
“Which suggests that it wasn’t big enough to make milking machines worthwhile. The cows would have been milked by hand, the old-fashioned way.”
“Which proves?” This time it was John.
“Plenty. In fact, that about settles it.” He went back to where the bones lay, picked up the skull, and gazed with extreme attentiveness into the face that was no longer there.
“‘Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio,’” Phil intoned as the crewmen, increasingly uneasy, quietly went back to the ship.
With a half smile, Gideon slowly looked up. “I did know him, Phil. So did you two.”
Phil and John stared mutely at him.
“It’s Cisco,” he said quietly.
NINETEEN
THE crushed cervical vertebrae, he explained, were part of a syndrome known to forensic anthropologists as “milker’s neck.”
When a cow was milked by hand, the milker sat on a low stool beside it and leaned his head at a somewhat awkward angle against the animal’s flank while he reached underneath to do the milking. So far, no problem. But a cow does not stand perfectly still while being milked. It shuffles its feet. It shifts its weight. And when it shifts its considerable mass sideways against the milker, he is more or less pinned between the cow and the stool… with his neck sharply bent — that is, flexed. When this happens, the vertebral column can “give” at its most stressed point, the junction of neck and torso, where the flexion occurs. In other words, the already flexed neck is hyperflexed, and pressure is focused on the lowest two cervical vertebrae, C-6 and C-7. The result — by no means always, but often enough — is a crushing of their cervical bodies.
“Like these,” he finished, holding the two vertebrae up again for their inspection. “Remember Cisco’s headaches? And the way he held his head, kind of on the side? Well, you’re looking at the reason.”
John looked at them with a puzzled frown. “Yeah, sure, well, that’s all great stuff, Doc, but how could it be Cisco? It can’t be. This guy here was killed in the middle of setting the fire. That would have been yesterday afternoon some time. Cisco was still on the boat yesterday afternoon. He didn’t jump off till almost two this morning.”
“Did he? Maggie wasn’t that positive it was him. And I’d say that what we’ve got here pretty strongly suggests it wasn’t.”
“Well, if it wasn’t Cisco, who was it?” Phil asked. “I mean, whoever did it jumped ship, right? So he should be missing. But who’s missing? Everybody’s still there.” He paused, his eyebrows lifted. “Well, everybody but Scofield, of course.”
This thought occupied them for a few seconds of concentrated reflection, but none of them could find a way of making sense of it.
“Maybe it was another crewman,” Phil suggested. “We need to check with Vargas and find out if one of them is gone. Let’s get back to the boat.”
But Gideon was now in full professional throttle, more interested in dead bones than in live conundrums. “Whoever it was then, this is Cisco now, and the interesting question is—”
“Are we really that sure?” Phil asked. “Okay, I buy the milker’s neck thing, that’s interesting, but couldn’t there be other milkmen?”
“Phil’s right,” John said. “Even if that’s the only dairy anywhere around here — which we don’t know for a fact — there must have been other people doing the milking too, since Cisco only worked there once in a while. You have to milk cows every day, you can’t just do it when you feel like it.”
“And what’s the likelihood of running into two cow-milkers on this trip?” Gideon said. “But forget about the milker’s neck thing for a minute.” He bent to put down the vertebrae and pick up the skull. “What about this gold-foil work? How do you explain that? With Cisco, it’s easy. He would have lived in the Boston area when he was at Harvard thirty years ago. Plenty of good dentists — and in the seventies gold foils would still have been popular. How many other Amazonian dairy workers would have this kind of work in their mouths?”
“Okay, that part of it makes sense,” Phil said. “We’re not about to argue forensics with you. But the timing doesn’t. There’s no way Cisco would have been able to get here in time to set the fire.”
“Well, let’s think about that,” Gideon said. “Tell me, when was the last time anybody saw him for sure?”
“That would have been yesterday afternoon, as far as I know,” John answered after a moment’s thought. “Remember? He called off the trek and went back to his cabin. And he didn’t show up for dinner.”
“And he wasn’t up on the roof later on,” Phil added. “I remember, Tim looked kind of let down because his buddy didn’t show up. He was wondering if anybody knew where he was. Nobody did.”
“Right. So if no one saw him all that time, nobody can say for sure he was in his cabin — or even still on the boat. How do we know he didn’t just take off into the jungle while we were still moored? That would have been well before the fire.”
“And do what?” asked Phil. “Shoot right up here and get himself killed?”
“Why not?”
“Nah, Doc, you’re not thinking,” John said. “That hike in the jungle broiled your brains a little. Now look: when Cisco called off yesterday’s trek and disappeared on us, it was maybe three in the afternoon, right?”
“Right.”
“And the fire here at the warehouse happened around five o’clock, two hours later.”
“Right.”
“And the Adelita got going again yesterday at what time?”
“Just after dinner, a little after six,” Gideon said. “We were still having coffee.”
“Okay. And we didn’t get here till around five this morning, so it took us eleven hours to make it, and we were doing six or seven knots all the way — well, except for an hour or two when we were looking for Scofield, so say the distance had to be a minimum of fifty miles, am I right?”
“Yeah…” Oh, jeez, he thought as he finally, belatedly grasped the point that Phil and John were making. Maybe his brains had been a little scrambled. They were absolutely right; how could it be Cisco? Whatever the bones said, it was impossible. He would have had to be in two places at the same time.
“I see—” he began, but stopped himself before the words were out of his mouth. John didn’t very often get to win a Socratic argument with him, and Gideon didn’t want to deprive him of the experience.
“So,” declared John exultantly, “you want to tell me how Cisco could beat the boat here? How he could cover fifty miles in two hours? There aren’t any roads out there. What’d he do, run?”
Frowning, honestly mystified, Gideon shook his head. “You’re right, it doesn’t compute, does it? And yet I can’t make myself believe… I mean the odds against—” His face lit up. “Wait a minute. Maybe, just maybe, it does compute. Maybe he did beat the Adelita here!”
Now it was their turn to look confused. “‘Splain yourself, Lucy,’” Phil said.
“Come on back to the boat,” Gideon said. “We need to check something out.”
THEY carried the bones back to the Adelita on the plywood square, left them on the bed in Gideon’s cabin, and went looking for Vargas. They found him in the wheelhouse with Chato, apparently preparing to get underway again for Leticia, but before they opened the door he slipped somewhat furtively out to meet them, closing the door behind him. The trip had begun a mere five days ago, but the captain looked as if he’d aged twenty years.
“Professor, you told them” — he indicated John and Phil — “what happened?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Everything?”
“Yes.”
His face fell. “D
id you… did you told anyone else?” He was still shaky, and so was his English.
All three shook their heads no.
“I got a big favor to ask.” He chewed on his lip and gazed beseechingly at them. “I never done nothing like this before. I never going to do it again, I swear! Was all Dr. Scofield. Please, don’t tell no one else.”
“Yeah, but didn’t the others already see you throwing the coffee overboard?” Phil asked.
“Yes, sure, and I explained them everything.”
Not quite everything, it turned out. He had faithfully given them the essential details of all that had happened — the “rocks” hidden in the coffee bags, the runners who were to pick it up at the warehouse, the forced meeting with Guapo, the reason the bags were being chucked in the river, and so forth. All he had omitted was the little fact that he had known anything about it before being informed by Guapo (to Vargas’s horror and amazement) that the Adelita was carrying coca paste. It had all been Scofield’s doing, accomplished without Vargas’s knowledge. Vargas was merely an innocent, victimized by a cunning criminal.
“And they believed that?” asked John.
Vargas shrugged pitifully. “I hope.” He awaited their response as if his life was in their hands, which wasn’t that much of an exaggeration. “I don’t want to go to jail!” he blurted.
“Up to you, John,” Gideon said, and Phil signaled his agreement with a nod.
Gideon was willing to believe Vargas when he said that this was his first experience with drug transporting and that he’d been scared enough by Guapo never to do it again. His inclination was to go along with him, to let the poor guy put it all behind him, and he knew that Phil, being Phil, would feel the same way, only more strongly. But John was the arbiter in such matters, and Gideon honestly didn’t know what he would do. He could be unbending when it came to breaking the law, especially concerning drug-trafficking, but he was also a genuinely nice guy with a lot of sympathy for people in trouble.
“I’ll take everything into consideration, Captain,” he said magisterially. “For the moment we’ll keep it to ourselves. In the long run, we’ll have to see.”
Vargas’s eyes closed in relief. Obviously, he took it (as did Gideon) as meaning that he was off the hook.
“But I’ll tell you this: if I ever hear your name in connection with the drug trade again — even a suspicion of connection — and I have my contacts — I will get in touch with the Peruvian authorities instantly. You understand?”
Vargas’s eyes misted. “God bless you, Juan.” He looked as if he might kiss John’s hand if given the chance. “God bless you all.”
“There was something we wanted to ask you,” Gideon said, embarrassed. “Do you have a chart of the river that we could look at?”
“A chart? You mean, a nautical chart? Of the Rio Javaro? There isn’t no such thing. All there is is a map.”
“That’ll do fine.”
“Come, is inside.”
A narrow, four-foot-long strip map that followed the snakelike river, from where it left the Amazon to where it rejoined it at Leticia, had been tacked to the back wall of the wheelhouse. It had been folded and unfolded so many times that it was coming apart at the creases despite several yellowing layers of transparent tape laid along them.
“Can you show us where it was that we stopped yesterday afternoon?”
“Mmm…” Calculating, Vargas moved his finger in little circles and brought it down on a spot. “Here.”
Gideon laid his right forefinger on it and left it there. “And the warehouse, where was that?”
A painful little wince wrinkled Vargas’s forehead at the hated word, but he pointed to another spot. “Here. San José de Chiquitos.”
Gideon realized he had been holding his breath. Now he exhaled with satisfaction. There. He’d been right. He laid his left forefinger down on the spot and smiled. “See?”
“Wow,” said John.
“Whoa,” said Phil.
IT was so obvious that no explanation was necessary. Gideon’s fore-fingers were only an inch apart, approximately two miles. Because the Javaro was a giant series of undulating, incurving loops, it doubled back on itself in places, creating slender necks of land that were only two or three miles wide. The warehouse and the place they had stopped yesterday — the place where Cisco had last been seen — were on either side of one of these necks, directly opposite each other. Thus, while the Adelita had to negotiate a wide, fifty- or sixty-mile arc to get from one to the other, Cisco had only to cross a two-mile strip of land. Sweltering, brutal, unforgiving jungle land, to be sure, but Cisco was no stranger to that. Two hours would have given him ample time to reach the warehouse and start the fire. And get himself punctured by a nail gun in the doing.
The question was: Why? Guapo had said that “my man” had started the fire. But surely Cisco — poor crack-brained, strung-out Cisco — couldn’t have been tied in with El Guapo?
“Ah, but he could, he could!” Vargas cried. “He used to run errands for some of those people — dirty little jobs they didn’t want to do for themselves.” Now that the worst was presumably over, his easy command of English was back. “Sure, they probably paid him a few soles to set it. That’s the answer.”
A few minutes’ further discussion laid out a probable scenario: Guapo or his representative had gotten in touch with Cisco when he’d learned that Cisco would be on the Adelita — or possibly Cisco had gotten in touch with Guapo to see if there was any little paid service he could perform. And Guapo had taken him up on it. The plan, and it was a good one, seemed evident now. When they stopped for their trek the previous day — and, tellingly, it was Cisco who’d chosen the place to moor — Cisco would call off the hike to the shaman’s village and say he was going back to the boat. Instead, he would head on foot for the warehouse and set it afire. When the Adelita showed up the next morning and the passengers got off to look around, he would get back on the boat when they did. No one would be likely to notice that he hadn’t gotten off there. Why would they?
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 José de Chiquitos the previous afternoon, who was it that attacked Maggie on the boat that night?
TWENTY
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 sha
king 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—”