Little Tiny Teeth (32 page)

“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.

“ 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 firmly. “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.”

“So she came on the trip planning to kill him,” Julie murmured.

“I doubt it,” Gideon said. “If she had killing him in mind, I don’t think she’d have been so free in telling us about the Iowa situation – practically handing us a motive. No, I think the opportunity simply presented itself, and she took it.”

“ Carpe diem,” observed Marti, expertly using chopsticks to insert a bit of vegetarian sushi – rice, tofu, and shaved ginger rolled in seaweed – between her lips. “Well, you two certainly had an exciting time of it.”

“What about you?” Gideon asked. “How was Cabo?”

“Great. We slept in the morning, we did a lot of swimming and snorkeling, we ate like horses, we got a few massages. Or at least I did.”

“But mostly,” Julie said, “we just relaxed, and read junky novels, and sat on the beach, and baked the Northwest chill out of our bones. That felt good. It must sound pretty boring compared to your trip, though,” she added wistfully. “What an adventure the two of you had!”

“Yeah, it was,” said John, pushing back from his now-empty pizza tray and clasping his hands on his belly, a man well contented, happy to be back in a world where pizza could be had for the asking. “To tell you the truth, though, next time something like this comes around… no offense to you, Doc… but I think I’ll opt for the crushed turnip wrap.”