Twenty-Seven Bones elp-3

by Jonathan Nasaw

  And serial killer or no serial killer, Busy Hands was probably one of the safest places on the island-Mrs. Ishigawa had an armed bouncer on the premises every night, two on weekends. But when Holly left work that night, she found herself locking all of Daisy’s doors, which she’d never done before, and her Mysterian prayers for Daisy’s clutch to hold out were more heartfelt than usual.

  Holly made it home without incident. After parking Daisy just inside the gate, which no one had bothered to lock-it wasn’t like the killer was going to come driving up the lane-she climbed the hillside and let herself into the darkened cabin. She checked on the kids first, standing in the doorway for a few moments listening to them breathing in their sleep. Dawnie sounded a little nasal; Holly hoped she wasn’t coming down with a cold.

  She tiptoed into her own bedroom. Dawson was asleep under the covers, facing the wall. Holly undressed quietly, so as not to wake her strictly platonic friend, and changed into her bathrobe, which was hanging as usual on the bedside chair (also her desk chair, given the dimensions of the room).

  On her way out, Holly grabbed the string shower bag containing toothpaste, toothbrush, a towel, a bath brush, bottles of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Soap, shampoo and conditioner, a box of Cobra brand mosquito coils, a lighter, and the old Sucrets tin in which she kept her roaches-she’d smoked the last of the chronic two nights earlier.

  But she’d only gone a few steps when it suddenly occurred to her that perhaps waltzing blithely into the night wasn’t the brightest move in the world, with a serial killer on the loose. She hurried back to the cabin, tiptoed into the kids’ room, and rummaged through the shoebox containing Marley’s miscellaneous treasures-marbles, foreign coins, stones, seashells, empty shell casings, etc.-until she found his silver referee’s whistle, which she slipped into her bathrobe pocket.

  The Crapaud was an echoing, tin-roofed, cinder-block building with a sloping cement floor for drainage, sinks and shower stalls on one side, and a row of toilet stalls behind swinging green wooden doors on the other.

  Holly closed the door quickly to keep the mosquitos out. She shined her flashlight around-the Crapaud was empty. She settled into her favorite stall, smoked a good-sized roach, and browsed an old Rolling Stone by flashlight (each stall boasted a magazine rack) while sitting on one of the thrones. No flush plumbing-the toilet seats were mounted over holes above a deep black stinking pit into which lime was thrown at irregular intervals.

  By this time, Holly was used to the pit, but she’d never really gotten used to the cold showers. She entered the stall, hung her bathrobe on the peg, balanced her flashlight on the window ledge, pointing down, turned the tap, and was dancing furiously under the resulting flow of cold water when she heard the creaky Crapaud door being opened.

  “Help me.” A man’s voice, barely audible.

  Holly turned the water off. “Who’s there?”

  “Help me, please God, help me.”

  She put on her bathrobe, wrapped the towel around her hair, grabbed her flashlight, and opened the stall door.

  They heard the whistle from one end of the Core to the other. Ruford Shea, dressed only in high-rise bikini underpants, was the first to reach the Crapaud; by then Holly was sitting on the floor with Fran Bendt’s head in her lap. She had wrapped the belt of her bathrobe around Fran’s right forearm, which had been severed at the wrist. Ruford helped her twist a tourniquet using the handle of her bath brush; by the time they’d stopped the bleeding they were covered with blood, and the cement floor was slippery with it.

  Fran had gone into shock; his skin felt cold even to Holly, who had just emerged from a cold shower. It didn’t seem possible that he could live after losing so much blood. She cradled his head, stroked his brow, murmured to him as he lost consciousness, and only noticed that the back of his skull had been cracked open when the blood began to soak through the lap of her bathrobe.

  For a bunch of flakes, the Corefolk responded to the emergency with surprising efficiency. While Miami Mark jumped into his old flatbed sheep truck and backed it carefully up the hill to the end of the Crapaud path, two search parties were formed, one to check the Core to be sure the killer had left and the other to look for Fran’s hand, which they found in the ivy by the side of the Crapaud.

  Three men carried Fran out to the truck; another kept his injured arm elevated. Holly followed, clutching her beltless bathrobe closed with both hands, and watched helplessly as they loaded Fran onto a thin foam egg-carton mattress in the wooden bed of the truck.

  Molly Blessingdon, a practical nurse who worked at Missionary, put Fran’s hand in a plastic bag filled with ice. She rode with Fran, along with two men to keep him steady; Miami Mark drove. There was nothing Holly could do, other than return to the Crapaud and take another cold shower to wash the blood off. Dawson brought her a dry towel and a change of clothes, and she went back to the cabin to wait for the police.

  Marley was still asleep-that boy could sleep through anything-but Dawn was awake. Holly told her Fran had had an accident and they were taking him to the hospital. Dawn asked if he was going to be okay. We all hope so, but it was a very bad accident, Holly told her. She didn’t know how long the lie would fly, but was determined to shield the little girl from the horror as long as she could.

  Because really, when you thought about it, what business did any adult have, telling a little kid the bogeyman was real?

  Chapter Six

  1

  The murder scene-Bendt had breathed his last on the sheep truck on the way to the hospital, without regaining consciousness-was as compromised as an old hooker by the time Pender and Coffee arrived. After clearing the area around the outhouse building, Coffee gave orders that no one was to leave the Core, then dispatched a uniform for someone named Silent Sam.

  Silent Sam, who arrived just before dawn, turned out to be a lanky, knock-kneed bloodhound with doleful, expressive eyes and a mournful countenance even for a bloodhound. According to his owner/handler, Burt Reibach (who was also tall and knock-kneed, but less mournful, and wore a tan Stetson and a tan gabardine zippered jacket and slacks outfit like his fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson used to wear on the ranch), Sam owed his prodigious scenting abilities to the fact that he was a deaf-mute.

  They arrived just before dawn. On their way up to the Crapaud, Coffee congratulated Reibach on finding a missing girl in Puerto Rico a few weeks earlier.

  “Them P.R. dawgs are purty good with drugs and bombs, but they couldn’t track a skunk crost a railroad trestle,” Reibach grumbled, by way of deflecting the compliment. “Wasn’t nothin’ fer Sam, though.”

  “This one might be a challenge even for Sam,” said Julian, when they reached the outhouse. “The scene’s been badly trampled.”

  “Cain’t track in a buffalo herd,” agreed Reibach, as Julian led him around the side of the building, where they believed the attack to have taken place.

  “See those screens under the eaves?” said Julian. “Those are above the shower stalls on the inside. A woman was inside taking a shower-either the victim or the killer stood on that log to spy on her.” He pointed to a fat log resting against the base of the wall; there were drag marks in the dirt-it wasn’t hard to figure out how or why it had gotten there. “Maybe the victim came upon the killer, maybe vice versa. The bloodstains over there”-he nodded toward the brownish spatter marks at the base of the wall, three feet beyond the log-“show the victim was already on the ground when he was attacked with what we believe to be a machete.

  “After the attack, the victim regained consciousness and staggered into the building-you can see the blood trail. The question for Sam, of course, is which way did the killer go?”

  “Lessee if we cain’t answer your other question first, about which one was the peeper.” Reibach unclipped Sam’s lead from his collar, pointed to the log, then gave him a hand signal. Sam sniffed the log, then trotted, nose down and snuffling, back around the side of the building to the door, where he turned and gave h
is owner a baleful stare, as if to say, now give me a hard one.

  “Okay, that’s your victim standin’ on the log, then goin’ inside. But the only way we’re gonna isolate the killer’s trail among all these others is if he was lyin’ in wait. I’m gonna ask Sam to fan out, tell us where he finds the strongest scent, where somebody’s been hangin’ around the longest.”

  More hand signals; the dog began loping back and forth along the path, then ducked into the underbrush on the high side of the trail. The men followed, found Silent Sam standing at the edge of a trampled patch of ground, his head raised and his lower jaw, jowls, and chest quivering-he looked as if he were trying to balance an invisible ball on the end of his nose while having an epileptic seizure.

  “He thinks he’s baying,” Reibach explained. “Somebody was here, and for a while. Lessee where he went.” Another hand signal. Sam loped out to the trail, straight back to the log, then raised his head again, sniffed the air, and took off back down the path toward the clearing. He waited for the others to catch up, then zigzagged diagonally across the clearing, toward the misty, dawn-gray forest.

  “Why he zigzag so, mon?” called Detective Hamilton, bringing up the rear as Coffee and Pender followed Sam and Reibach into the woods.

  “Bloodhound on the trail is picking up scent particles down to the mo-lecular level,” Reibach called over his shoulder. “Molecules drift from side to side on the wind, he tracks from side to side.”

  They caught up with Reibach just as Silent Sam veered through the undergrowth to the left, snuffling head down. A moment later he came loping back, shaking his heavy head furiously from side to side, jowls and saliva flying, as if he’d been skunked, or gotten a faceful of porcupine quills. Only there were no skunks or porcupines on St. Luke.

  “Son of a bitch,” yelled Reibach. He scooped the huge dog into his arms and stood up, staggering from the weight of the load. “Help me get him under one of those showers, quick.”

  “What happened?” asked Pender.

  “Son of a bitch run him into a manchineel tree.”

  2

  With a first murder, as with a first marriage, there are bound to be surprises. The biggest surprise for Lewis Apgard, waking up the morning after the murder, was how much it had changed him. Simply lying in wait, watching the Corefolk coming and going, and knowing in a very deep and real sense that he held the power of life and death over them, was in itself a transforming experience; the murder itself only enhanced the transformation.

  The second biggest surprise for Lewis was how gifted he was at it. Things hadn’t looked any too promising at first: no singletons. A parade of potential victims marching to and from the outhouse, but always by twos and threes. Cheese-an’-bread, thought Lewis, can’t any of these people take a crap by themselves? It was almost as if they’d been forewarned.

  But if his experience as a practicing voyeur had taught Lewis anything, it was the value of patience. Waiting sucked, but sometimes, indeed most of the time, you had to wait for the good stuff. You had to be very still, you had to put yourself into sort of a trance where time passed in jerks-it was now, then it was later, then it was later still, but with no real sense of transition-until the gotcha! moment arrived.

  The previous night, it had arrived around two in the morning. Lewis had been about ready to give up when he saw Holly Gold coming up the path carrying a flashlight. She was wearing a bathrobe, and best of all, she was alone. Lewis’s legs were stiff from sitting on the damp ivy-she was past him before he could get to his feet. But she’d be coming back, he told himself, and he’d be ready.

  As he was squatting there in the bushes, hefting the sap experimentally, his excitement mounting as he waited for Holly to return (it felt a lot like voyeurism, Lewis couldn’t help but notice, only better, because he was both observer and participant), he heard someone else coming up the path. He ducked deeper into the bushes and watched, frustrated and incredulous, as Fran Bendt glided past him in a sort of deep-kneed Groucho crouch, and with a practiced motion dragged a log out of the underbrush and up to the side of the building, then stood upon it to peer over the window ledge.

  Of all the luck, thought Lewis. Then, an instant later: of all the luck! It was as if the only man who could link Lewis to a premature knowledge of the Machete Man was presenting himself for Lewis’s convenience. Turning his back-here, take me.

  Lewis drew the machete from his belt, crept up behind Bendt, who had his right hand on the ledge and his left down the front of his pants, and swung the sap hard against the back of his skull.

  Bendt fell backward off the log in a jackknifed position, landing hard on his tailbone, then toppling sideways, his right arm conveniently outstretched. Lewis closed his eyes as he swung the machete. When he opened them again he saw Bendt’s hand lying in the ivy, palm up, fingers curled. He couldn’t bring himself to pick it up, as the Epps had requested.

  Instead, thanks to some sixth sense he hadn’t known he possessed-that’s what he meant about being gifted-Lewis had turned tail and raced diagonally across the clearing and into the rain forest. Moments later he heard a whistle shrilling loud enough to wake the dead; if he’d hung around much longer, he’d have been busted for sure.

  And it was that same sixth sense that told Lewis to find a manchineel, to rub crushed leaves on the soles of his shoes (the runaway slaves had known about manchineel, how it made it impossible for hounds to track you) as well as wipe down the machete, the sap, and the helmet before returning them to the overseer’s house, then bury his clothes beneath the well-trodden dirt of a vacant sheep pen.

  So perhaps the Epps were right, thought Lewis, upon awakening Saturday morning and reviewing the events of the previous night-perhaps it truly was the hand of destiny that the three of them had come together at that point in their lives.

  3

  Not even Marley could have slept through the police search of the Core. Both kids ended up in Holly’s bed. It was a tight fit, but that morning a tight fit was good.

  Shortly after seven o’clock there came a soft knock at the door. Holly raised the mosquito net and crawled out of bed, careful not to disturb the kids. She started to reach for her bathrobe, then remembered it was up in the Crapaud, soaking in a sink. She pulled a sweatshirt and sweatpants over the cotton Lady Jockey briefs and tanktop she’d been not-sleeping in, and padded barefoot into the next room to answer the door.

  It was the FBI man, Pender. “Go away,” she told him, her green eyes blazing.

  “What are you mad at me for?” asked Pender. Though she was in the doorway and he was two steps below her, they were almost eye to eye.

  “Just when the hell were you planning to warn us there was a serial killer running around?”

  “I’m sorry about that,” said Pender. “It’s always problematic, trying to balance-”

  “Problematic? My kids’ lives are problematic?” She slammed the door as emphatically as she could without waking the kids.

  “Knock, knock,” said Pender, through the closed door.

  Holly couldn’t help herself. “Who’s there?”

  “Anita.”

  “Anita who?”

  “Anita talk to you about last night. I was hoping to do it informally, over a cup of coffee…”

  Pender stopped short of adding …but if you’d prefer, we can do it downtown. He hated cliches even more than he hated threatening witnesses into cooperating, a technique that was usually counter-effective as well as counteraffective.

  The interview began on the steps behind the cabin. The two sat side by side, sipping instant coffee out of brown Yuban mugs.

  “Were you that aware that Mr. Bendt was a voyeur?” asked Pender.

  “Sure-that’s why we called him Peeping Fran. Dave Sample caught him spying on Mary Ann outside the shower a year and a half ago, beat the living crap out of him. He said he learned his lesson, and we voted not to turn him in, and to let him stay as long as he behaved himself. He’s been behaving himself since t
hen-we thought.”

  “So you weren’t aware of his presence last night?”

  “Of course not-I’m not an exhibitionist, Agent Pender.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply-”

  “I didn’t know anything until I heard him open the door,” she said. Just thinking about it gave her the shivers; she wrapped both hands around her coffee mug for warmth, though the temperature that time of the morning was seventy degrees and climbing. “You probably won’t answer this, but is that what happened to Hokey Apgard, too?”

  Pender thought it over. It was becoming obvious that with the entire population of the Core in on the secret, that particular hold-back (information known only to the killer and the cops, which the investigators could use to differentiate the true killer from the phonies, the crazies, and the publicity seekers who always seemed to pop up in this sort of case) was useless by now. He was about to nod when he heard a soft noise behind him. He looked over his shoulder, glimpsed a featureless face in bas-relief pushing against the plastic screening under the rust-flecked overhang of the tin roof.

  “I think we have an eavesdropper,” he whispered. They carried their coffee up the hill and reconvened sitting side by side on the same split log they’d sat on to watch Thursday’s sunset. “Now where were we?” He remembered of course, but he was hoping she’d forgotten.

  She hadn’t. “Hokey Apgard-was her hand chopped off, too?”

  “I’m afraid so. And now I have to ask you to do something that’s kind of unpleasant, but absolutely necessary.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I need you to take me back to last night, run through it again, everything you saw or heard.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “It would help.”