Little Tiny Teeth

“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.

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“Well, first of all, nobody cut this thing out of his skull,” Gideon said. “Secondly, nobody nailed it to the wall.”

“Nobody nailed it to the wall!” Mel exclaimed, almost angrily. “Nobody— What the hell are you talking about?”

“Nobody nailed it to the wall in the sense you’re thinking,” Gideon amended. “I’d guess it wound up there accidentally.”

After a few moments of blank stares all around, John spoke up. “Oh, well, now that we’ve had that explained . . .”

Gideon couldn’t help laughing. In spite of himself, in spite of the grisly situation, he enjoyed these public moments of seeming wizardry. They were as close to fun as anything in the forensic business came. “Wait a second,” he said and walked back to the lean-to that had the tools on it. He came back with the Makita nail gun. “Now,” he said, scanning the ground, “anybody see the nail I pulled out of the door?”

“Here it is.” Vargas bent, picked it up, and handed it to Gideon.

“See these spiral grooves in it?” Gideon said.

“It’s a roofing nail,” John said. “The grooves help anchor it.”

“Fine, a roofing nail,” Gideon said. “Now look at the nails that are still left in the cartridge of the nail gun.”

“They’re the same!” Tim exclaimed.

“Yes.”

“So that means . . .” Maggie began, then frowned and shook her head incredulously. “What does it mean?”

“It means,” said Gideon, “that someone almost certainly killed him with this nail gun. Or let’s just say he was killed with the nail gun. Possibly he did it to himself by accident—or not by accident. People have tried committing suicide with them, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.”

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“Yuck,” said Tim.

“You’ve lost me, Doc,” John said. “Okay, this piece of bone, this ring of bone, was maybe nailed up with a nail gun—this nail gun right here, it looks like—but how does that translate to the guy was killed with it? How do you know what killed him?”

“And I still want to know how they made this,” said Phil, who had finally taken the bone from Gideon and was peering at the smooth, circular border of the hole in the center. “It’s like it was made with a, with a . . .”

“It was made with the nail gun,” Gideon said, “which also nailed it to the wall—and on its way from doing the first to accomplishing the second, it made a hash of his brain.”

His open-mouthed audience waited for more.

“Well, first of all, you have to remember that a good nail gun can generate a fantastic velocity; around fourteen hundred feet per second, if I remember correctly.”

“You’re kidding me. That’s faster than the muzzle velocity on my old Detective Special,” John said. “And that could sure do a lot of damage.”

“And so can a two-inch steel nail, especially with a flat, round head, although more often than not, it just makes a hole in the skull and merely gets embedded in the brain.”

Duayne winced. “ ‘Merely,’ the man says.”

“But once in a while, especially with a powerful gun driving it, it doesn’t happen that way. It happens the way it happened here.”

The sequence would have been like this: The point of the nail would have easily perforated the skull, making a small, circular hole— smaller than the one now visible in the bone—but a millisecond later the round, flat head of the nail would have struck the skull as well, cre

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ating a larger opening. It would have driven partway through, then gotten wedged in the hole it had made, which would have transferred its energy to the immediately surrounding bony tissue, breaking away the ring of bone he now held in his hand. The nail would then have continued plowing through the brain, dragging the ring along with it and doing dreadful destruction, then exploded out the back of the head, bony ring and all, and then kept going a few feet—it couldn’t have been far, because so much of its energy would have dissipated, which would have been why it wasn’t embedded very deeply in the door.

“And that’s how it happened,” he finished. “I think.”

They had listened to this virtuoso analysis, part enthralled, part horrified, and for a moment it almost seemed as if they were going to break into applause, but they only shook their heads, or clucked, or softly whistled.

Except for Duayne, who murmured, “Amazing, just amazing.”