by Aaron Elkins
“You’re telling me,” she said. “Well, I just came down to refill my water…” She paused awkwardly. “Uh, Gideon, I, uh, just want to thank you again.” It was one of the few things he’d heard her say with no tinge whatever of sarcasm or irony. “You saved my life. You risked yours to do it. I couldn’t have lasted two minutes.”
“Oh, heck—”
“And” — she offered a crooked grin — “I’m really sorry I socked you. How’s the lip?”
He laughed. “Forget it, Maggie, the lip’s fine. However,” and he leveled a finger at her, “you still owe me that beer.”
When she went into the dining room, Gideon sank into a pensive silence while Phil and John continued to toss around ideas. A grotesque thought, almost too bizarre to consider seriously, had begun noodling away at him. Was it possible that they had it wrong, that everybody had it wrong?
He got up, went to the railing without a word — “Have we offended the fellow in some way?” Phil asked John — and gazed outward toward the wall of darkening green, his hands trailing abstractedly back and forth over the ebony-stained teak rail, warm and smooth against his palms. The steaming, still rain forest, so much closer here on the Javaro than it had been on the Amazon, slid monotonously by. Below him, the brown river whispered against the metal side of the ship. Gideon didn’t see the jungle, didn’t hear the water. His mind was absorbed in poking like a prodding finger at this not yet wholly formed idea of his, probing for flaws, testing for soundness, searching for a place to put the piece that didn’t fit… .
Only yards from his face, a brilliant red macaw suddenly fluttered up from a branch with an indignant squawk and flapped away into the dimness of the interior. It startled him enough that his mind jumped from the unproductive rut it had dug itself into, and the final piece fell into place.
He thumped his fist gently against his palm — an unconscious gesture of self-satisfaction — and turned to face the others. “We got it backwards,” he said softly, urgently. “Sonofagun. Everybody got it backwards.”
“What are we talking about now?” Phil wondered.
“Got what backwards?” asked John.
“The way it happened. The order of events. First we assumed Maggie was thrown overboard after Arden. Then we assumed—”
“Still talking about me, I see,” Maggie said, coming from the dining room with her refilled bottle. She put her hand to her heart and wiggled her fingers. “Flutter, flutter.” Her left eyebrow was characteristically arched, her mouth ironically set, her voice typically mocking, but there was something unmistakably wary in her expression, in her taut shoulders.
Damn, Gideon thought. Why did I burst out with it like that? Why couldn’t I shut up until she was gone? Surely she’d heard enough to guess where he was going, and it was too late to start waffling now. Maggie was too smart for that, too quick on the uptake. There was but one way to go. He took in a breath and went there.
“Maggie,” he said, “you killed Arden. You threw him overboard.”
In the charged silence that fell on them John and Phil goggled at him in mute amazement.
Maggie, however, was up to the challenge. “Oh, really?” she said sardonically, her eyebrow arching even higher, her voice falling even lower. “Was that before or after he threw me overboard?”
“Arden never threw you overboard.”
“If this is your idea of a joke, I have to say—”
“No joke.”
She faltered. Her composure began to disintegrate. A tic jerked beside her right eye. “Gideon, I don’t know what you’ve been smoking, but you’re on dangerous ground here. Arden did throw me over, or at least somebody did, but you keep changing your mind about who, and after that he—”
“Uh-uh, Maggie, that whole thing about him, what happened there on the deck — it was all a lie.”
Her face had stiffened. Her words spattered out like bullets. “I don’t know just who the hell you think you are, mister, but if you think for one minute—”
“We were just up on the roof, Maggie. You left some blood up there. We collected it. What do you want to bet that a lab test doesn’t show that it’s yours?”
“Hers?” he heard John murmur in astonishment.
Her face eased. Her hunched shoulders relaxed a little. “Oh, I see where you’re coming from. My ankle… you think…” She shook her head and laughed. “I should be angry as all get-out, but it’s funny, really. Well, luckily for me, I can prove what I said. Give me a minute, let me get something from my room.” She walked to the stairs, then stopped and turned as she reached them. “You guys,” she said with a crooked grin. “If you don’t take the cake.” She shook her head as if in wonder and trotted up the steps. “Don’t go anywhere,” she called.
“Are you serious?”
“Are you crazy?”
John and Phil had both exclaimed at the same time, and Gideon wasn’t sure who had said what. Still standing at the rail, his elbows leaning on it behind him, he said, “Serious, yes. Crazy, I’m not sure. I don’t know what kind of proof she thinks she has, but I’m damn near certain I’m right. She threw Scofield off, not the other way around.”
John shook his head. “How the hell do you come up with that?”
“It’s the cut on her ankle,” Gideon said. “She said she got it when she hit her foot on the railing upstairs, in front of Scofield’s cabin.”
They nodded. “So?” Phil said.
“So take a look at the railing. It’s the same down here as it is up there. Smooth, rounded, polished wood.” He slid his hand along the surface to illustrate his point. “You want to tell me how you can cut your ankle on that? You could bruise it, break it, sure, but cut it? Uh-uh.”
“Well, wait up a minute, Doc,” John said. “I’ve seen plenty of cases where something blunt like that — a bat, a hammer — can cause a cut, and a damn big cut at that. So have you.”
“No those aren’t cuts, those are lacerations, and they’re not the same.”
A laceration was typically a wound from a blunt object, he explained, and was really a rupture, usually from the skin’s being stretched over the underlying bone and split open by the impact of the object — an example would be the way a boxer can get a “cut” on his brow from an opponent’s soft, padded, twelve-ounce glove. As a result, a blunt-object wound was usually pretty obviously torn, rather than cut, with ragged, irregular, abraded edges. And of course, the area around it would be bruised from the crushing of blood vessels under the skin. A cut, on the other hand (more properly, an incised wound), resulted directly from a sharp edge being drawn along the skin. The edges of the wound were themselves sharp, not messy, and, more important, there was no damage to the surrounding tissue, no bruising.
“And that’s what the cut on Maggie’s ankle looks like,” Phil said, nodding. “Yeah.”
“Yes. It looked like a mess before, with all the blood. But now you could see it was clean. And it’s been almost twenty hours. If there was going to be any bruising, it would have shown up by now.”
“So what you’re saying,” John said, swallowing the last of his tangerine, “is that she cut herself — lacerated herself — on… what, the stanchion?”
“More likely the cut end of the guy wire. Did you see what those wires are like? They’re made of — I don’t know what you call them — a whole lot of thin, stiff wires twisted around each other and then around a core.”
“Wire rope,” John said. “Real strong stuff.”
“Yes. And the ends are sharp as hell when they’re cut off on the bias. Like a hundred little scalpels. That’s why they’re usually covered with tape or with some kind of sleeve, if there’s going to be any traffic around them. But not up there.”
“So Maggie dumped Scofield in the river, that’s what you’re telling us?” Phil said, obviously confused. “And cut herself while she was getting him over the side?”
“That’s what I’m telling you. You caught your foot on the wire yourself, and you
weren’t trying to wrestle anybody overboard.”
“But then who threw Maggie in the river? What’d she do, toss herself overboard?”
“I believe so, yes.”
He came back to the table, sat down, and resumed pulling the white, citrusy wadding out of the cucumberlike fruit. It was like eating a pomegranate. You ignored the bean-like seeds and just ate the sweet packing around them.
Phil shook his head, scowling. “Aw, no. Aside from its being ridiculous, it’s impossible, Gideon. It doesn’t add up. Listen, there were only two splashes, right? It’s like Mel said; the second one came after Maggie was already in the water, so how—”
“No, I don’t think it did.”
“Sure, it did. Think back, right to the beginning. What was the first thing you heard?”
“That little yelp. Ai!”
“From Maggie, right?”
Gideon nodded.
“Okay, a little yelp,” Phil went on. “And then a splash — that’s Maggie hitting the water — and then she yells for help: ‘Help, save me, I’m drowning.’ And then there’s the second splash — no? What am I not getting?” he said in response to the slow shaking of Gideon’s head.
“What if it didn’t happen that way? What if it happened this way? What if—”
“Three what ifs in a row,” John grumbled. “Oh, that’s a great start.” He was still attached to his own theory. But he was paying keen attention.
“What if,” Gideon continued, “Maggie, knowing that Scofield is likely to still be up there in a stupor after everybody else leaves, goes up with the idea of doing just what she did — pushing him off the back of the ship. But while getting him over the edge, she catches her ankle on the end of the wire—”
“And yelps, which is what wakes you up,” Phil put in.
“Correct. And a half second later I hear Scofield hit the water, although I don’t know it’s Scofield at the time. That’s splash number one. So I shoot out of bed and yell that somebody’s overboard at the top of my lungs.”
“Which she hears,” said John slowly. Gideon could see that he was getting it, that he was coming over to Gideon’s side.
“Right. At which point, thinking fast, still standing on the roof, she yells ‘Help, help, I’m drowning, I can’t swim!’ and then jumps into the water herself. Splash number two. End of splashes.”
“I’m getting it, I’m getting it,” Phil said. “That’s pretty smart!”
“So when I come out on deck,” Gideon went on, “she’s in the water thrashing around, and in I go to get her.”
“Wait, maybe I’m not getting it,” Phil said. “What was that business with her screaming ‘Get him, he’s getting away!’?”
“That,” John supplied, out ahead of Gideon now, “was supposed to explain that second splash. The first one — Scofield hitting the water — was supposed to be her hitting the water. The second one — which was really her hitting the water — was supposed to be Cisco.”
“Wow, that’s fast thinking,” Phil said. “But how could she take a chance on accusing Cisco? At that point everybody thought Cisco was still aboard.”
“Not everybody,” Gideon said. “Do you remember Tim’s telling us that Cisco said that he’d be leaving the ship and maybe wouldn’t be back?”
“That’s right!” Phil exclaimed. “And Maggie was there when he said it — she told us so. So…”
“So all she had to do was double-check Cisco’s room first and see if he was there or not. If not, she had a clear field. If yes — well, I don’t know, maybe come up with another plan. But he wasn’t there.”
“Yeah…” began Phil, but then vigorously shook his head. “Nope, nope. She couldn’t know she was going to cut her foot, she couldn’t know she was going to have to jump in the water herself. So why would she check his room first?”
The question hadn’t occurred to Gideon, but after a moment he came up with a reasonable, or at least a credible, answer. “Because she probably planned for the blame to fall on Cisco for Scofield’s disappearance — and presumed death — in any case. I mean, who else? And if Cisco wasn’t there any more, if he’d fled the ship, that would cinch it. Or so she thought. And then, even if he did come back, he’d still be the logical suspect, being as loopy as he was.”
Phil was nodding now. “Yeah, okay, I see.”
“And then,” Gideon went on, “when Tim came up with the old history between them — who Cisco really was — she must have thought it was Christmas: a ready-made motive. At any rate, no one was going to think Maggie had anything to do with it.” He paused. “And we didn’t.”
They all sat there cogitating the scenario he’d put forth. Even to Gideon, it was sounding a little rococo by now, and more than a little fanciful.
“So that scuffling she says she heard,” Phil said. “She just made that up? And the guy in the nightshirt, the mumbling to himself? That too? Just made it up on the spot to make it seem more believable? She’s that quick on her feet?”
“I believe so,” Gideon said.
“And nothing really happened on the deck outside her cabin? It all happened up on the roof?”
“That’s what I think. And I’m in the rearmost cabin, remember, practically right under where Scofield was sitting, which is probably why I’m the one who heard it.”
Phil scratched at his pepper-and-salt beard, which was growing in even less neatly than usual. “But why get rid of that chair? I doubt if blood from her ankle would have gotten on the chair.”
“Because pulling him out of the chair and wrestling him overboard would have been harder than just sliding the chair over the edge with him in it,” Gideon said. “That’d be my guess.”
John, who hadn’t participated for the last minute or so, was looking at his watch. “She’s been gone over ten minutes. That’s a long time to get to her room and back.”
“You don’t think she jumped ship?” Phil asked. “No, what am I saying? She can’t swim.”
“She says she can’t swim,” Gideon said. “But never mind jumping ship. She might have… what if she…”
They exchanged a look, and before Gideon could get the whole sentence out, they were running for the stairs. At her cabin they pounded on the door. There was no answer. Without waiting any longer, John flung it wide open.
“Aw, jeez,” Phil said, turning away.
TWENTY-THREE
“SHE committed suicide?” Julie whispered, horrified.
“Apparently, she couldn’t face what she knew was coming,” Gideon said, “and it would have been easy enough to do herself in. She had a whole pharmacy full of weird plant compounds in her cabin.”
“We’d need an autopsy to make it definite,” John said. “The body went to Bogota and they told us they’d do one there, but who knows? And even if they do, whether we’ll ever hear about it…” He finished with a shrug.
“I suspect we won’t,” Gideon said. “My guess is the Colombian police aren’t going to waste their time doing a full-scale investigation. Why should they get involved in a case involving all US nationals? Besides, Maggie’s dead, Scofield’s dead, Cisco’s dead. There’s no one to prosecute. It’s all pretty much taken care of itself. I think they’ll just write it up, stamp it ‘Case closed,’ and file it away.”
“You said she was alone for only ten minutes?” Marti Lau said. “That was one fast-acting poison.”
“It was quick,” Gideon agreed, “but you have to remember she’d boiled or dried most of the plants down to very concentrated extracts and, besides, she had stuff in there that—” He barely stopped himself from saying, “that science doesn’t begin to understand,” and finished instead with “that we’ve never heard of. Whatever it was, it promptly sent her into anaphylactic shock. She was probably dead in five minutes. When we got there, her skin was blue, her tongue was practically… well, you don’t want to hear the gruesome details.”
“Yes, we do!” Marti said.
“No, we don’t,” Julie said fir
mly. “John, I think your pizza’s ready.”
“Good, I’m starving.”
They had arrived at Seattle’s Sea-Tac Airport within two hours of each other, Julie and Marti fresh off a five-and-a-half-hour trip from Los Cabos, Gideon, John, and Phil not so fresh off a flight that was even more grueling than the one down: Leticia to Bogota to Mexico City to Houston to Seattle — thirty hours, including the stopovers. Phil had left Sea-Tac almost immediately to catch an Airporter bus home to Anacortes, but the others had gone to Pacific Marketplace, the terminal’s dramatic, new, upscale food court — fronted by a forty-foot-tall, 350-foot-long, curving window that looked out onto the runways — where each could indulge his or her own desires for a late-evening dinner. Marti had gotten a sushi plate from Maki of Japan, and Gideon and Julie had both gotten chowder and fish and chips from Ivar’s Seafood Bar. John, after giving serious thought to a couple of Wendy’s hamburgers, had ordered a pepperoni-and-mushroom pizza from an Italian bistro, despite their warning that it would take fifteen minutes. (For John, a week was a long time to go without a pizza.)
“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.”