Little Tiny Teeth

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.”

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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.

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***

THAT left one critical question unanswered. If Cisco had been killed at San Jose de Chiquitos the previous afternoon, who was it that attacked Maggie on the boat that night?

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TWENTY

IThad 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

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shaking 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?”