Read Twenty-Seven Bones Online
Authors: Jonathan Nasaw
Tags: #Caribbean Area, #Fiction, #Women Sleuths, #Murder, #True Crime, #Mystery fiction, #Serial Killers, #Suspense, #Americans - Caribbean Area, #Mystery, #Mystery & Detective - General, #Police Procedural, #Thrillers, #Detective, #Serial murders, #Mystery & Detective, #American Mystery & Suspense Fiction, #Fiction - Mystery, #General, #Fantasy, #Americans, #Mystery & Detective - Police Procedural
Twenty-Seven Bones (13 page)
“Pearl and I had just split up,” said Holly. “She had a chance to be an executive chef at a fancy ski resort in Banff, and I wasn’t about to move to Canada—I hate cold, I hate snow. That’s why I moved from New York to California in the first place. So I had this whole big house to myself. The plan, of course, was that I was going to wrap up Laurel’s affairs and bring the kids back to Big Sur with me.” Holly threw up her hands and laughed. “So much for plans.”
She and Pender were sitting on a split log at the very top of the clearing, the only vantage point in the Core from which to view the short but spectacular tropical sunset in its entirety. Holly was in the process of telling Pender her life story—a development that had come as a complete surprise to her. All she’d intended to do was keep an eye on him, make sure he didn’t steal any of Andy’s stuff.
But the big
bulvon
was surprisingly graceful on his Hush Puppies as he explored the A-frame, meticulous about replacing every
tchatchke
and objet he picked up, including Andy’s bong, remarkably perceptive in his running monologue, and nowhere near as dumb as he looked—but then, he couldn’t have been, could he? Not and breathe.
He was looking for anything to indicate what Andy was up to before he left, Pender told her. What was the last thing he did, did he appear to have packed, did he leave any perishables around? And most importantly in a search like this one, Pender had added, he was looking for the hardest thing to find: what wasn’t there that should have been.
C. B. Dawson, Arena’s ex-girlfriend, would probably be able to answer that last question when she returned from her latest rain forest trek, Holly informed Pender. But she
was
able to tell him that if the unopened carton of Half & Half in the knee-high refrigerator, the new loaf of store-bought bread, and the ripe bananas were any indication, Andy didn’t appear to have been planning an extended absence.
How Holly segued from there to telling Pender her life story was something she wasn’t quite clear on. (The beauty part of an affective interview, Pender used to tell his students, was that if it was done right, the interviewee never even had to know it was taking place.)
“But you did know about Marley’s…condition before you moved down,” he prompted her. He didn’t want to use the term handicap or disability, lest she go off on him again.
“Yes—and I’d seen pictures. But it was still a shock, seeing him in person for the first time. That’s why I’m so sorry for tearing into you yesterday—I know what a…disconcerting experience it can be.”
“No, I’m sorry,” said Pender. “I expect better of myself.”
“Oh.” No arguing with that. “Anyway, I knew Dawnie would be okay in Big Sur—she’d be okay anywhere. But to take Marley away from St. Luke, where everybody’s known him since birth, where his handicap is hardly even noticed anymore, where he knows all the kids and they all know him—not to mention the fact that he almost never has to wear shoes here—for him wearing shoes is like us wearing boxing gloves. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
“Did you ever look into prosthetics?”
“Just long enough to find out how much they cost.”
“How much?”
“For what he’d need, between thirty and fifty thousand dollars apiece.”
Pender whistled low. “That’s a lot of massages.”
“Tell me about it,” said Holly, as the setting sun lit up the rain tree in the meadow on the other side of the lane like a great pink Japanese lantern.
After the formal identification of Hokey’s body, Lewis accompanied Chief Coffee back to headquarters, where he allowed the lovely Layla to take a DNA sample. If she hadn’t been the chief’s daughter, Lewis would have suggested a few more interesting ways for her to extract her sample. As it was, he settled for having the inside of his cheek swabbed for epithelial cells.
There was of course no danger of Lewis’s DNA betraying him. The test could only bear out his story: that the widower had made love to his wife on the last night of her life. Poor chappie.
Chief Coffee himself drove Lewis home afterward, though it was out of his way. Lewis expected to find the Great House torn apart, but the police had been unusually considerate, and Johnny Rankin had taken it upon himself to call in an extra housekeeper, so by the time Lewis returned, things were more or less back to normal.
Lewis didn’t think he was hungry, but when Johnny brought him a plate of sandwiches in the study, he surprised himself by absentmindedly gobbling them down, crusts and all, while he pored over the latest statements from his brokerage. What remained of his portfolio had taken a few more hits in the last several days. But now that the airport project would be going ahead, the losses weren’t nearly as painful.
It was a little like exploring a bad tooth with your tongue on the way to the dentist, Lewis thought as he washed down the last of the sandwiches with the last of the Red Stripe beer Johnny had poured out for him: knowing it would soon be over made the pain sort of enjoyable. And kept his mind off Hokey.
When Johnny returned to clear the tray, he asked Lewis if he wanted him to spen’ night. “It bein’ ya firs’ one alone, an’ all.”
“No, you go on home,” Lewis told him. “I think I’d
rather
be alone.”
“Good night, den, Mistah Lewis. An’ m’say again, sah, fa boat of us, how terrible, terrible sorry we boat are for ya loss. Dissa terrible, terrible t’ing, what hoppen. Sally, she say—”
Lewis cut him off. “Thank you, Johnny. See you tomorrow.”
“T’ank ya, sah. Dis a terrible—”
“A terrible, terrible t’ing—yes, I know. Good night, Johnny.”
Lewis felt Hokey’s absence more acutely when the Great House was empty. Struggle to suppress them as he might, the good memories started to flood his mind once he was alone. The honeymoon, the early years when the sex was still good, winning the mixed doubles tennis tournament at Blue Valley and dancing in the moonlight at the Champion’s Ball afterward.
And while Lewis was not superstitious, he did find himself looking around nervously as he wandered through the big empty mansion clutching a bottle of St. Luke Reserve by the neck and taking a slug every now and then. It wasn’t that he believed in ghosts—just a nagging what-if, a reluctance to enter a dark room, and a little voice in his ear whispering
don’t turn around.
If Hokey did come back, she was going to be extremely pissed, thought Lewis, trying to josh himself out of his funk. And what a vengeful-looking spirit she’d make, that small head floating above that long neck, that whitish blond hair, that rabbity nose, and those buggedy eyes. And of course she’d be waving her stump and looking for her hand and—
What was that? Sounded like footsteps, out back by the patio.
Eh, eh, well me gad, and what poppyshow are you frettin’ yer-self over, me son? Ain’ no ghos’, ain’ no jumbies. A deadah is a deadah an’ dey don’ come back, Lewis reminded himself as he hurried into his bedroom.
The police had thoughtfully replaced his revolver in the nightstand drawer. Keeping a firearm by one’s pillow was both a right and a time-honored tradition among the Twelve Danish Families, and had been ever since the slave uprising that led to the emancipation of 1848. Lewis, dressed in the same rugby shirt and shorts he’d been wearing all day, checked the cylinder to make sure there was a round in the firing chamber, clicked off the safety, and crept softly out of the bedroom and down the back stairs.
The Epps were out by the pool, in bathing suits. The little Indonesian was nowhere to be seen—which didn’t mean he wasn’t hiding in the bushes someplace. If Lewis had learned one thing last night, it was never to take Bennie’s absence for granted.
“What are you two doing here?” he whispered, though the next nearest occupied dwellings after the overseer’s house were half a mile across the pasture to the north, where the ranch foreman and his family lived. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“It’s the most natural thing in the world,” said Emily, dipping a toe into the water lapping the top step at the shallow end of the pool. “We came over to pay a consolation call to our nearest neighbor—it would have been unnatural if we hadn’t. How’s your head?”
“A little sore.”
“Did you remember to smear some blood out here for the cops to find?”
“I did, they did.”
“Everything go smoothly?”
“Like guava jelly. How about you?”
“Five-minute interview with a Detective Hamilton. I’ve known more intelligent carp.” Emily started down the steps. When she was in the pool up to her waist, she turned, stooped, stretched out the neck of her black tank suit to splash water down her bosom, then glanced up sharply. “What are you staring at, Lew-Lew? Didn’t you get a good enough look when you were spying on us, you perv?”
But there was no heat to her words—in fact, she pulled the neck of her suit out even farther and bent over to give him a better look, though he couldn’t have seen much in the darkness.
“Put the zeppelins away, honey cakes.” Phil was climbing the ladder to the five-meter board Hokey’d had installed a few years ago. “The man has just lost his wife.”
“All the more reason,” replied Emily, chuckling.
Lewis was thoroughly disconcerted. He didn’t know how to take it—in its own way, this moment was as weird as all the weird moments that had preceded it in the course of the previous twenty-four hours.
“What’s the matter with you people?” he whispered urgently, wishing he’d gone a little easier on the Reserve. “My wife is dead, cops are all over the fucking place, you come over here for a swim, flash your titis, and crack jokes? You must be insane.”
“At the risk of sounding petty,” said Emily, “you should have invited us over for a swim a long time ago. It would have have been the neighborly thing to do.”
“Look, you’re going to get your money—it’s just going to take a few weeks, until I get—”
“Didn’t come for the money.” Emily dived forward, breast-stroked fifteen feet to the side of the pool, came up blowing like a porpoise. “Say, Lew, would you mind turning on the pool lights?”
Exhausted after a near-sleepless night in the hospital and a stressful day with the police, Lewis decided that the path of least resistance was the only path for him.
“Sure, what the fuck,” he said, slipping the pistol into the waistband of his shorts with one hand and holding out the half-empty bottle in the other. “Care for a drink?”
Lewis might have been an exception to the St. Luke saying that white folks shouldn’t drink white rum—after all, he bahn deh—but the Epps were certainly not. By ten o’clock Phil was stretched out high above the turquoise glow of the illuminated pool, snoring through his beard—how he’d gotten back up on the high board in the first place, nobody could say—while Emily appeared to Lewis to have reached that stage of alcoholic clarity and bonhomie that customarily precedes either a blackout, a bar fight, or a drunken screw.
“Em?” said Lewis. They were reclining side by side on chaises, protected from mosquitos by a subsonic pulser from the Sharper Image catalog, and from the slight evening chill by plush pool towels the size of bedsheets, embossed with the Apgard crest—two royal palms superimposed over the red field and white cross of the Danish flag. Lewis hadn’t gone into the water on account of his stitches.
“Emily?”
“Lewis?”
“Tell me.”
“About what?”
“You know.”
She sighed. Her head lolled toward him. Her wet hair was brushed straight back from her rounded, somewhat bulbous forehead. Reflections from the underwater lights, silver-blue Tinkerbell flashes, played across her homely features. “No.”
“I want to know.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Was it quick? Did she suffer?”
“Did you want her to?” Emily reached under Lewis’s towel, patted his thigh.
He removed her hand before it could creep any farther, gave it a firm but gentle squeeze, and let it fall between the chaises. “No.”
“Then she didn’t.”
“What’s it like?”
“Dying?”
“Killing somebody.”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
“Hunh?”
“Our deal,” she said sharply—so sharply that Lewis found himself wondering just how drunk she really was. “It’s changed. We don’t want the money.”
“You don’t?”
Emily reached under the towel again, but this time she didn’t bother patting his thigh. Instead she went straight for his package, gave it a friendly squeeze under his shorts. “No, we don’t. Not the money.”
“Then what
do
you want?”
“An alibi as good as yours for the Machete Man’s next murder. And you want to give us one.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
The squeeze turned into a caress. “Because you’re in this as deeply as we are. Because leaving us without an alibi is tantamount to leaving yourself without one. Because if they nail us, they nail you.”
Lewis felt himself sobering up fast. “Let me get this straight: you want
me
to chop off somebody’s hand? I’m sorry, Emily, I don’t think I can—”
“Lewis!” Her voice was sharp, the hand creeping under his shorts was gentle, knowing. “Remember what Ben Franklin said: if we don’t hang together, we shall all hang separately.”
Lewis shuddered, partly because she now had his balls cupped in her palm, and partly because up to that moment he had never thought of that particular old saw as applying to himself—and literally, at that.
1
Pender’s travel alarm woke him at seven o’clock on Friday morning. “Island time, my ass,” he muttered to the gecko on the nightstand. The autopsy of the Machete Man’s most recent known victim was scheduled for eight o’clock. (That
known
was a caveat Pender employed almost automatically; after a quarter century of chasing serial killers, he never took a victim count for granted.) “I think I’ll skip breakfast,” he told the gecko. “Autopsies generally go better on an empty stomach.”
The lizard rolled its eyes—independently of each other—in commiseration.
Over coffee on the patio twenty minutes later, Pender asked Sigrid Coffee why the gecko was at his bedside every morning.
“A mosquito net is the gecko equivalent of an all-night, all-you-can-eat buffet,” explained Ziggy, a slender and apparently ageless blond. She also told him that according to island legend, the little lizards were possessed of a group mind, like ants or bees in a hive, only more so. “In the vernacular: ‘What one see, dey all see, what one know, dey all know.’ ”
After coffee, Pender decided to take the Vespa rather than ride into town with Julian. There was something about the warm breeze in his face, the palm trees, the Caribbean that…well, that had him humming “Born to Be Wild” again.
The autopsy itself was uneventful. Pender had seen Y-cut torsos before, had seen the human body with all its secrets revealed often enough that although his stomach still lurched occasionally, his mind no longer went drifting off on eschatological tangents at the sight of somebody’s various internal organs being removed, inspected, weighed, and described in detail.
As it turned out, Lindsay Hokansson Apgard’s internal organs were all in tiptop shape, while her outer organ, her epidermis, was intact and unmarked except of course for the missing hand. If the preliminary tox screens held up, the provisional cause of death—exsanguination due to traumatic amputation of the right hand—would become the official one.
The police would not, however, release even the official cause of death to the public, much less tell them about the Machete Man, Chief Coffee had decreed. It would have been a different story if they had information that might help potential victims protect themselves, said Julian—if they had identified a target population, for instance, or had at least a vague description of the killer.
But until such time as they did, Julian insisted, releasing the information could only cause widespread panic, draw unwanted attention and publicity to the investigation, and possibly wreck the upcoming tourist season, which was almost entirely dependent on the big cruise liners that in two weeks would begin docking at the end of the long pier extending from the eastern tip of Frederikshavn Harbor.
Pender agreed with Julian, reluctantly and provisionally. He spent the rest of the morning in his office, catching up on all the reports filed yesterday. But paper could only tell you so much—after lunch Pender decided that he needed to take a firsthand look at the site where the first two bodies had been discovered. Julian offered to put an officer and a squad car at his disposal, but Pender said if it was all the same to him, he’d just as soon stick with the unmarked Vespa.
“Go wit’ God, but drive cyareful,” Chief Coffee replied in dialect. “Dem nort’ end road ain’ fa the fain’ of heart, me son.”
Pender might not have been faint of heart, but he was definitely a little weak in the knees after negotiating the steep switchbacks of the descent from the top of the Carib cliffs to the picturesque lagoon known as Smuggler’s Cove. Julian’s instructions had been to walk the motorbike around the grove of manchineel trees and park it in the sea grape bushes that ringed the beach. Instead, Pender walked it through the grove and parked it in the shade of the manchineels.
As he started to chain the Vespa to one of the gray-barked trees, Pender saw someone swimming in the lagoon, and realized that the swimmer was, in the following order: white; a white woman; a nude white woman. He quickly looked away, glanced back, then turned his back and finished chaining the Vespa—a gentleman may peek, but he never stares.
But when the woman called to him—or so he assumed: there was nobody else in sight—he turned and saw her waving her arms over her head. She was in obvious distress, though whether for him or for herself, Pender couldn’t tell. “What? What is it, what’s wrong?”
“The wood, the manchineel, it’s poison,” she called. “Corrosive, like acid. You have to wash it off—hurry. And whatever you do, don’t rub your eyes.”
Pender didn’t need to be told twice—he toed off his Hush Puppies and ran for the water, tossing his wallet onto the sand en route. He fancied he could already feel the back of his right forearm burning where he’d rubbed it against the manchineel trunk. He waded in; when the water reached his waist he dived forward and submerged himself.
When he surfaced, chest deep, the woman was beside him, telling him to undress. He stripped down to the buff, and together they scrubbed his clothes in the salt water until the caustic sap had been washed off.
“Thanks,” he told her. “I owe you one.” With an effort that would have earned him a knighthood if he’d been a subject of the queen, Pender kept his eyes trained on hers. “I’m Ed Pender. I normally introduce myself before I get naked with a woman.”
“I’m Dawson.”
“C. B. Dawson?”
“Unh-hunh,” she said, surprised.
“Holly Gold mentioned your name—I was up at the Core yesterday investigating a missing persons report on your ex-boyfriend.”
“You’re a cop?”
“FBI. Retired. Miss Gold didn’t tell you?”
“I haven’t been home since yesterday.” Tourist season was coming up, she explained—time to harvest calabash. “If you girdle the gourds with wire when they’re green, you can distort them into all kinds of shapes. Then I hollow them out and carve them into bowls, vases—whatever their shapes tell me they want to become.”
And afterward, she told Pender, she’d slung her hammock between two stout calabash trees and spent the night in the forest.
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Perfectly safe, I do it all the time. No dangerous animals, and the mongoose wiped out the snakes a hundred years ago. Now, of course, there’s a mongoose problem.”
“Do you want me to turn my back while you go ashore and get dressed?” Pender asked her.
“It’s a clothing optional beach,” replied Dawson, more than a little charmed by his courtliness—it was not a quality with which most of the men she’d met on St. Luke were overendowed. “If you don’t mind, I don’t mind.”
She still had a hell of a figure for a middle-aged woman, Pender couldn’t help but notice as they waded out of the water together. Gorgeous face, too, with a generous mouth and dark eyes set wide apart. And strangely familiar-looking, as if he’d seen her before someplace, or known her when she was younger. When they were both younger.
Of course, Pender had had the same feeling about Diane, his last girlfriend but one, he reminded himself, and it had taken him several weeks to puzzle out where he’d seen Diane before: she’d starred in a porn movie twenty years earlier.