Little Tiny Teeth

“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

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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

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yesterday’s trek and disappeared on us, it was maybe three in the af

ternoon, 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.

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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