“Oh Lord, another surprise,” Jamie said. “I don’t know if we can handle another surprise.”
“What is it, Gideon?” Marmolejo asked. “Is that the skull from the museum?”
“That it is.”
“And is it an ancient Zapotec skull?”
“That it is not.”
A couple of beats passed, and then Julie said. “And are you planning to tell us what it is anytime soon?”
“Well…”
With a sigh, Marmolejo addressed the others. “You see how we have to tease it out of him, how he lets it out one tantalizing morsel at a time? It’s always this way. I believe he’s doing it primarily for my benefit. Professor Oliver finds happiness in baffling the mind of the simple, hardworking policeman.”
“Hey, this is pretty grim stuff I do,” Gideon said. “I have to find happiness where I can.”
“Well, you better tell us pretty soon,” Julie warned, “or I guarantee you’re not going to be happy very long.”
Gideon laughed, but whatever they might think, he was not merely grandstanding, or at least not only grandstanding. What he had to tell them was going to knock them for a loop in any case-especially Annie, Jamie, and Carl-but he wanted to prepare them, to present it in the right way, and not simply dump it in their laps.
“Okay,” he said, “but first let me make sure I have my facts straight. Tony came back and took over the Hacienda in 1979, is that right?”
“Right,” Carl and Jamie said together, and then Carl added, “But it wasn’t the Hacienda then. It was still a horse ranch.”
“Okay. And he would have been how old at the time? Mid-twenties somewhere?”
“Twenty-five,” said Jamie. He was born in 1954.”
“Fine. And when he left home as a kid, he was how old?”
“Somebody tell me what this has to do with the price of tea in China,” Annie grumbled.
“He was sixteen,” Jamie said. “I was six or seven.”
“So that was in 1970.”
Jamie thought for a moment. “Yes. Sixty-nine or seventy.”
“All right, that’s what I thought. Let me get on with it then.”
“God be praised,” Marmolejo murmured, pleasantly enough.
“The reason this skull was thought to be very old,” Gideon said, “was the condition of the teeth.” He tipped it back for them to see the blackened, tarnished, cracked remnants of the dentition.
Annie winced. “Yuck, it hurts just to look at that.”
“Believe me, it would have hurt more if you had them in your mouth. Now, until fairly recently, the only times you saw teeth like these were in people whose diet included a lot of stone-ground foods. So Dr. Ybarra, the local forensic examiner at the time, concluded reasonably enough that that’s what it was.”
“But,” said Carl.
“Yes, but. Nowadays-for the last few decades-there’s been another likely explanation for something like this, especially if you find it in a young person, and this guy is fairly young. And that is an addiction to methamphetamine, which is what we’ve got here; one hell of a case of ‘meth mouth.’ ”
Meth mouth, he explained, went along with heavy methamphetamine use. There were plenty of reasons for it. First, the caustic, acidic mix of the drug itself corroded tooth enamel and gum tissue. It also decreased the production of saliva, which made things even worse because saliva both neutralized acids and inhibited the growth of cavity-causing bacteria. Also, the resulting thirst that went along with “dry mouth” often resulted in the consumption of sugary drinks that did their own nasty damage. Add to that the near constant teeth-grinding that was part of the addiction (this was the reason that meth addicts were called “tweakers”) and the result was a toxic stew that could turn the teeth into horrors that looked just like what they had in front of them. Meth mouth. “Well, okay, but how can you be sure that’s really what it is, and not an ancient skull?” Jamie asked. “I mean, if they look the same.”
“Well, they don’t look exactly the same, Gideon said. “With meth mouth, you get a distinctive pattern of cavities that aren’t related to ordinary wear: on the buccal sides of the teeth, for example, and also between the anterior-”
“I think I see where Gideon’s going with this,” Carl said, frowning down at his coffee mug. “The other night, remember, Tony was talking about how he used to have a pal who had a worse problem with meth than he did-”
“Huicho something,” Jamie said.
“And how they got into trouble,” Carl continued. “ A whole lot of trouble was the way he put it.” He put a hand on the skull. “Is this him? Huicho? Is that where you’re going?”
“No, it’s not Huicho,” Gideon said. “You’re close, but not quite there. Look at the teeth again.” He held the skull completely upside down for them. “Count them.”
“Fourteen,” Jamie said after a few seconds, and others murmured their agreement.
“But if he had them all, there’d be sixteen,” Julie said. “And another sixteen in the lower jaw.”
“Right. He’s missing two teeth from his upper jaw. And if we had his mandible, I’d be guessing there were another two missing from that.”
At that an almost visible current of uneasiness passed around the table. They had some dawning sense of where he was going, but couldn’t quite see it clearly yet. Or couldn’t believe it.
“Gideon, are you saying…” Julie said slowly, then gazed quizzically at him. “What are you saying?”
“The missing teeth are the second premolars. They appear to be congenitally missing. This, as you know, is an extremely rare condition… that happens to run in the Gallagher family. Blaze-Tony’s sister-had it. Annie-Blaze’s daughter-you have it. Jamie-Tony’s brother-you have it. Only Tony, or rather the man you’ve been calling Tony for thirty years-didn’t have it. But this man-” He tapped the skull. “He did.”
For a long time they just sat there and stared at him, stared at the skull. None of them could bring themselves to say it, so finally Gideon said it for them.
“This,” he said, his hand resting on the skull, “is Tony Gallagher.”
“No, that’s impossible,” Jamie said with a nervous little laugh. “This is not Tony.”
“This is Tony,” Gideon said.
TWENTY-FOUR
He gave it a little more time to sink in and then continued. “The missing premolars alone would have been enough to convince me-I mean, the chances of a man with that particular syndrome turning up in the vicinity of this particular little village, who wasn’t a Gallagher relation, are minuscule to say the least. But throw that in with the methamphetamine addiction-which your ‘Tony’ didn’t show any signs of-and then throw that in with the fact that Blaze was murdered, and that Manolo was murdered, and that-”
“ Manolo was murdered?” Annie screeched. “What… how…?”
Gideon had forgotten that they didn’t yet know that part of it. “Okay, forget Manolo, I’ll explain about that later, but there’s also the fact that this guy here didn’t just die; he was murdered too, and his skull was found within a few hundred yards of Blaze’s, and those happen to be the only murders-literally, the only three murders- that have happened around here in the last fifty years, so-”
“No, Gideon, I just can’t buy this,” Carl said. “Look, I’ve been here on the Hacienda for almost forty years. I was here before Tony came back. And there is no doubt in my mind that the Tony who died yesterday was the same Tony who came back and took over in 1979. Believe me.”
“I do believe you,” Gideon said. “But you see, I don’t think he was really Tony in 1979 any more than he was Tony yesterday.”
“But… no, but…”
“Carl’s right,” Jamie insisted, his face flushed. “Look, Tony was my big brother. When I was growing up he looked out for me; I loved him. Are you saying I didn’t know my own brother?”
“Look at it this way, Jamie. When Tony-the guy we’ve been calling Tony-came back here in 1979 he was a
