Twenty-Seven Bones (10 page)

So far as he knew, Pender had no children. Sometimes he regretted it.

Other times, though, like when he was interviewing the parent of a murdered kid, he didn’t regret being childless at all. There was so much pain, and it didn’t matter how long after the event you encountered them, every time they spoke about it the wound reopened. Sometimes, oddly enough, it was easier to interview them right away, when they were still in shock.

One hour and two cups of chicory coffee after entering the one-room shack, Pender hadn’t picked up any information pertaining to the investigation, but he had learned a little more about Hettie. He’d seen her favorite dress and the bed she’d slept in and the raggedy old doll propped up on her pillow. At twelve she’d considered herself a little old for dolls, but she never slept without it, even took it on sleepovers. Spen’ nights, Mrs. Jenkuns called them.

He also knew a little more about Hettie’s mother, about life in Sugar Town, a third-world city at the eastern edge of the great American empire, and especially about Julian Coffee, who had grown up only a few alleys away. Pender had always suspected Julian of having partially invented himself; now he understood why, and from what material.

From Sugar Town to the Danish quarter quadrangle known as Government Yard was an uphill walk of fifteen minutes’ duration. Pender had to stop twice to rest. He wasn’t so much ashamed of himself as he was angry at how badly he’d let himself go to seed—for the first time, it dawned on him that all the weight he’d put on and all the Jim Beam he’d put down in the last year or so might have been his own way of eating his gun.

Screw retirement, he told himself: when this was over, he’d get himself a job in law enforcement—private sector, at his age.

Over lunch at the King Christian, Julian told Pender they had either a suspect or another potential victim on their hands: an itinerant sailor named Robert Brack, who’d hadn’t been seen on the island for some time, but whose post office box had apparently been used as a drop by the killer as late as July. That was the box number on the advertisement Tex Wanger had circled in the back of that month’s
Soldier of Fortune.

The postmistress had no idea who’d been picking up Brack’s mail, if not Brack—the glass-and-brass wall of post office boxes was around the corner from the counter. But she had agreed to let the police set up a still camera on the wall above the boxes, that would be triggered when anyone inserted a key into the box in question.

“All we need now is a camera and someone knowledgeable enough to set up the triggering device,” said Julian.

“Don’t look at me,” said Pender. “I can’t even program a VCR.”

After lunch, Julian walked Pender across Government Yard’s slanting cobblestone courtyard to the morgue in the basement of the courthouse to view the two dead bodies on hand before Mr. Wanger was shipped back to Miami. The corpses were in airtight body bags, on roll-out slabs in refrigerated drawers. Even so, the coroner handed out cigars.

The female’s body was in an advanced state of decay—the only trauma still visible was the severed wrist. Wanger’s body, six weeks dead, showed signs of severe battering, but the worst of the injuries were postmortem, the coroner explained, save for a few bruises, some rope burns at the wrists and ankles (no fiber evidence remained, unfortunately), and of course the missing right hand.

Pender expressed surprise at how cleanly both victims’ right hands had been severed.

Not surprising at all, Julian informed him—not on an island where machetes (machet’ in the vernacular) were as common as pocketknives stateside, and their owners kept their blades stropped sharp enough to harvest cane, chop kindling, or skewer fish in the shallows.

Pender spent the rest of the afternoon familiarizing himself with the paperwork generated thus far in the investigation—autopsies, forensics, interviews, photos of the bodies at the base of the cliffs, and of Hettie Jenkuns’s makeshift grave.

He left headquarters with Julian around five. They stopped by Apgard Elementary School to pick up Julian’s grandson Marcus at soccer practice on the way home. Julian parked the Mercedes in the yellow zone at the bottom of the school steps. Pender followed him around the back. Julian crossed the field to chat up the coach, while Pender joined a clump of adults watching over by the chain-link fence as the team went through a complex, weaving, passing drill.

When Pender first noticed the handsome, shirtless mixed-race boy in the center of the drill, through whom every pass was routed, it took his mind a moment to grasp what his eyes were seeing. All he registered at first was a sort of what’s-wrong-with-this-picture? feeling.

Then the knot of boys parted and it became obvious: the boy had no arms. Nothing at all depended from his shoulders to mar the smooth brown dolphinlike curve from neck to waist.

“Would you look at that poor little bastard?” muttered Pender, to no one in particular.

The woman standing in front of him—pretty Jewish- or Italian-looking gal in her thirties, with curly, close-cropped black hair—turned around, her green eyes flashing angrily. “That poor little bastard, as you refer to him, is my nephew. Not only that, he’s the best under-eleven soccer player this island has ever seen. So frankly, mister, why don’t you take your goddamn pity and stick it where the sun don’t shine?”

After her morning with the old folks at the Governors Clifford B. Apgard Rest Home, and her afternoon round at Blue Valley (she was preparing for the women’s match play tournament this coming weekend), Hokey drove straight home for a long, hot, and most importantly, private shower. She had always been shy about locker room nudity, a residual effect of her prep school days in the states. Hokey had been the last girl in her crowd to reach puberty; the other rich girls had teased her unmercifully.

Hokey had the last laugh in the end. Puberty worked out just fine, and she ended up marrying the first man she set her cap for. Lewis Apgard was considered quite a catch among the Blue Valley set on St. Luke, as much for his golden blond good looks as for his name and money.

But even as an adult Hokey still preferred to shower at home. This afternoon she was both surprised and pleased when Lewis asked if he and Clark could join her in the shower. She decided to permit him that treat—he’d been an absolute lamb all week, and she hadn’t smelled rum on his breath even once.

“Mmm, that’s nice.” He’d begun soaping her back and buttocks.

“Did you win your match today?”

“Mmm-hmmm. Oh, that’s nice, too. Wait, I don’t have my diaphragm in.”

“Let’s take our chances.” Lewis was powerful ready, as the men say on St. Luke—he’d been watching Hokey through the semiopaque glass of the shower enclosure for several minutes, fantasizing that he was peeping on a stranger.

“Easy for
you
to say, me son.”

“I mean it, let’s take our chances.”

She turned to face him, squinting against the hot cascade. “Do you know what you’re saying, Lewis? Because this isn’t the sort of thing that—”

His arms had snaked around her. He grabbed a buttock in each hand, pulled her body tight against him, kissed her tenderly on the lips. “Yes, I know what I’m saying,” he said over the roar of the hot water. “I’m aware of how the process works.”

Hokey felt like crying. After all these years of wanting a child and being denied by her child of a husband, she’d all but given up hope, so to hear this at last was almost more than she could bear.

For Lewis, what had begun in the shower as an improvisation designed to get himself laid, ended in the bedroom in a deadly earnest missionary position orgasm. The more time he spent with Hokey, he was beginning to find, the more he found himself thinking about ways to kill her, and the more he thought about killing her, the hotter it made him.

Until he solved the Bendt problem, though, his recent brainstorm about copycatting the serial killer was still unworkable. And certainly the last thing on earth he wanted to do was raise a motherless child.

But reasoning with the single-mindedness of a man with an erection, in a shower with a naked woman, it had dawned on Lewis that Hokey wasn’t going to be around long enough to bear any child they might conceive. And whatever plan he eventually adopted, it could only be furthered by winning her over, keeping her off guard.

So let her last days be happy ones, Lewis thought—it’s no skin off my bumsie. And accordingly, after another hard-earned orgasm, he turned to his wife, lying beside him in their two-hundred-year-old bed. “Hoke?”

“Mmm?” Her attention had been focused inward: she fancied she could feel those millions upon millions of Apgard sperm swimming determinedly upstream, their tiny little tails flagellating earnestly.

“I’ve been thinking.”

“About what?”

“That property by the airport.”

“Please, Lewis, please please please please
pleeeeaze
don’t start that again. Not now, not when everything’s so sweet.”

“You don’t understand. I was thinking you’re right, that you’ve been right all along. This baby we’re making? I was thinking I’d be proud to take him—or her—up there, show him those trees, tell him how at a time when people were destroying the rain forests all over the world at a rate of hundreds of acres a day—”

“Thousands.”

“Okay, thousands of acres a day—that on the day he was conceived, his mommy and daddy agreed to protect the forest land they owned for as long as they both drew breath.”

Hokey felt a fluttering so deep inside it had to have been her womb. “Lewis, I don’t know what you and Dr. Vogler have been talking about,” she said softly, “but if this is the upshot after two days, I can’t wait to see what you’re going to be like after a few months.”

“Me either, Hoke—me either.”

Wednesday was cook’s night off. Lewis took it upon himself to go down to the kitchen and fix sandwiches. But he never made it as far as the refrigerator—the newspaper on the kitchen table caught his eye. It was that morning’s
Sentinel,
which he hadn’t seen yet. The photograph of the missing Floridian in his high-crowned white cowboy hat, captioned
Have You Seen This Man?,
was on the front page.

“Cheese-an’-bread,” Lewis muttered aloud. He grabbed the table for support and lowered himself carefully into the broad-bottomed, spindle-legged kitchen chair. “Bloody cheese and bloody bread.”

Because he had—he had seen that man, back in August, while crouched behind an oleander bush, peering into the living room of the overseer’s house. At the time, he’d been disappointed—there’d been nothing of any interest going on. Everybody was fully dressed. Bennie, Phil Epp, even Emily, who often went around topless.

And the fourth person Lewis had seen in the overseer’s house that night, the man who according to Fran Bendt had been brutally murdered not long afterward, had also been fully dressed, from his well-worn cowboy boots to his big, white, ten-gallon hat. There was no question in Lewis’s mind that this same man was looking up at him from the newspaper.

As soon as he had his legs under him again, Lewis found the bottle of St. Luke Reserve Sally, the cook, liked to keep in the freezer. He poured himself a shot, tossed it back, reread the story under the photograph, poured and tossed another, reread the story again. By the third shot he had convinced himself that one or both of his tenants in the overseer’s house had to be the killer or killers. The fourth shot was for inspiration, as he hatched a plan born as much of white rum as reason. Contact the Epps, let them know that he knew, offer them a substantial sum to help him with the Hokey problem.

But did he really want to get mixed up with people like that? Lewis asked himself. Well, yeah, came the answer. You’re looking for somebody to kill your wife, that sort of rules out the Eagle Scouts.

The fifth shot was for courage.

Husband-and-wife teams of anthropologists are not uncommon. What was unusual about the Epps was that Phil was primarily a cultural anthropologist, while Emily was a physical anthropologist specializing in osteology—dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, she liked to say.

After leaving Indonesia, Emily had studied very dry bones indeed—precontact ancestral remains of Northern California Original Peoples, eight hundred to two thousand years old, brownish fragments to complete skeletons, that had been disturbed by construction projects.

She was good at it, too. Give Emily a pubic symphysis, and she could age and sex an individual with the best of them, while Phil had earned acclaim with a study of the population of a prehistoric village in Santa Clara, extrapolated from Emily’s osteological data.

They both sucked at the politics associated with the job, however. In California you could hardly stick a trowel in the ground anymore without some clam digger Indians screaming about somebody disrespecting their ancestors, the Epps used to tell anybody who’d listen.

Understandably, this attitude had not endeared them to the Most Likely Descendants. So when Emily’s father died and left her a tidy sum, they decided upon the move to St. Luke, where the Carib population had been wiped out to the last descendant four hundred years earlier.

This evening, though, the Epps weren’t thinking about Indians, Californian or Caribbean. Instead, another home movie was being screened and cataloged.

Different Niassian village, but the broad plaza with its great stone paving tiles looks much the same, as do the narrow, ski-jump-roofed houses flanking it. Wedding of a wealthy man’s daughter. Dressed in her golden marriage raiment, which will be returned to her village after the wedding, she is being borne around the plaza on a wooden throne mounted on poles, weeping copiously to mourn her symbolic lineage death. After the wedding she will be “dead” to her birth clan and it to her.

“
I
cried at
our
wedding,” said Emily, seated next to her husband on a low rattan armchair, making notes while he operated the projector.

“I
wanted
to,” replied Phil. Emily gave him a sharp, under-the-eyebrows glare. “Just-kidding-it-was-the-happiest-day-of-my-life,” he added quickly.

“That’s better,” she admonished, then reached around the projector, which was on a low rattan table between them, and patted his shoulder affectionately, to show him she was only clowning.

They were both startled by the knock on their front door—they weren’t expecting any late visitors. Phil switched off the projector and turned on the light. Emily, who was wearing only a comfortable wraparound cotton skirt, hurried into the bedroom and donned a smocklike batik overblouse while Phil answered the door.

Twenty minutes later Lewis Apgard, Emily, and Phil were seated side by side by side in matching rattan chairs in the living room. They had just finished watching the last reel of the Niassian wedding. Phil switched off the projector. The room went dark, and the overseer’s house grew so quiet Lewis could hear the wind rustling through the slender leaves of the bay rum trees his great-great-grandfather had planted during slavery days. He patted the butt of the .38 revolver in the inside pocket of his linen sport jacket for reassurance, then withdrew his hand as Emily switched on the light.

“Where was that again?” he asked.

“Pulau Nias, Indonesia,” said Emily. “An island west of Sumatra.”

“Fascinating stuff.”

“Yes, isn’t it? Now what can we do for you, Mr. Apgard?”

“You can call me Lewis, for one.”

“What can we do for you,
Lewis?
Not that we’re not always pleased to see our landlord, but it is getting rather late.”

Courage, Lewis told himself. Apgard courage. He wished he’d brought a flask with him. Earlier, when he was drunker, and the notion entirely hypothetical, it had seemed so easy. Go over there, tell them what you know, tell them what you want. “I’ll get to the point, then—did either of you see the paper this morning?”

“The
Sentinel?”
asked Phil.

“Yes.”

“No.”

Lewis took the clipping out of his pocket and handed it to Emily. Her fingers brushed his, lingering just a little too long. He had the feeling, not for the first time, that she was coming on to him. If her husband hadn’t been present, he might have tested the hypothesis. “Recognize anybody?” he asked her.

“Not that I recall. How about you, honey?” She passed the clipping to Phil, who muttered something in a language Lewis didn’t recognize, then shook his head and returned the clipping to his wife.

“Well
that’s
odd,” said Lewis. “Because about six weeks ago, I was looking through that window there”—Lewis pointed to one of two windows flanking the four-by-six pull-up movie screen—“and I saw
that
man, in
this
room, sitting in one of
these
chairs, with one of you seated on either side of him, showing him a map or something. What do you have to say about that?”

“Too long,” said Emily.

“What’s too long?”

“Too long,” she repeated, even more loudly. “Too long, too long, too long.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” asked Lewis, just before his world exploded into pain and glorious white fireworks.

“
Tolong:
it’s Indonesian for
help,”
Emily said quietly, as Lewis slumped forward in his chair, blood beginning to well from a jagged wound at the back of his scalp.
“Terima kasih
(thank you), Ama Bene.”

“Kembali
(you’re welcome), Ina Emily,” replied the little man from Nias, slipping his nontraditional, short-handled, high-impact rubber sap back into the waist of his traditional gilt-threaded Niassian
sarung.

Lewis regained consciousness a few minutes later. His head was throbbing, he was tied to his chair with a continuous coil of nylon clothesline, and when he looked up he saw the black hole at the end of the barrel of a gun staring back at him. His own .38, in Phil Epp’s hand. He tried to pull his head back, but Bennie was behind him, pressing a towel against his bleeding scalp.

“My wife knows where I am,” he said softly.

“Then you’ve signed her death warrant, too,” said Phil.

“Yes,” said Lewis. “That’s it—that’s it exactly.”

“That’s
what,
exactly?”

“That’s what I’m
doing
here—that’s what I
came
for.”

The Epps adjourned to their bedroom while Bennie tended to Apgard’s head injury. They were both shaken by their landlord’s revelations. Nor was Apgard’s having seen them with Tex the worst of their problems—it was what he’d told them afterward, about the two bodies washed up under the cliffs, that had them close to panic.

Phil recognized immediately what had happened. The moment the bedroom door closed behind them, he told Emily about hearing the splash when they dumped Arena’s body into the Oubliette.

It was probably something they should have foreseen, he said in a whisper. They’d been careless. In their relief at having solved the disposal problem that had plagued serial killers since time immemorial, they’d forgotten their basic geology. Underground rivers—that’s what had carved out the caverns in the first place, after the Pleistocene era. And even underground rivers have outlets and run eventually to the sea, don’t they? Or at least they do on a tiny island like St. Luke.

Obviously the rising water from the most recent hurricane had somehow floated the bodies up and out to sea, which meant their most important line of defense had been breached. The surest way to escape detection, they’d learned over the years, was to ensure that the deed itself went undetected.

Too late now. Neither the Jenkuns girl’s disappearance nor her reappearance had sparked the kind of intense investigation that had probably begun as soon as the police discovered that they had a serial killer on their island. Now anybody without an alibi could be considered a suspect—the cops might be showing up at the door of the overseer’s house anytime.

So although they had of course been somewhat offended by Apgard’s initial offer—they weren’t contract killers, for the love of God—on another level, a counteroffer wasn’t entirely out of the question. “Tit for tat, quid pro quo, strangers on a train and all that,” Emily whispered to her husband.

“Or maybe we should just kill them both, seal the cave, and get the hell off the island.”

“That’s certainly another possibility,” said Emily. “But we’re the nearest neighbors—there are bound to be questions if they both disappear simultaneously. And you have to admit we’ve been awfully blessed so far. Perhaps Apgard showing up like this is
lalu’a tonua.” Lalu’a tonua
—the hand of destiny, in Niassian.

“You think so?” said Phil.

“I feel it,” replied Emily. “In here.” She took Phil’s big, bony, hairy-knuckled hand and pressed it against her pudgy lower belly, above her womb.

And although some might have seen it as contradictory for trained scientists like the Epps to be swayed by so unscientific an argument, for a scientist, a true scientist, data always trumps theory. If something is true, it’s true, whether you can explain it or not. Emily’s womb had never been wrong before: that was good enough for both of them.

But even with accurate data, there was still room left for interpretation. Don’t make the counteroffer, Phil suggested—just accept Apgard’s initial offer, and wait until after the deed was done to let him know what it was really going to cost him.

Because when it came to murder, Lewis Apgard was about to learn, you paid the piper what he asked, and you danced to his tune until he said you were done.