Island of Bones
Page 1
PRAISE FOR ISLAND OF BONES
Publishers Weekly Book of the Year
Best Mysteries of the Year Oline Cogdill
Shamus Award finalist
"Island of Bones opens like a hurricane and blows you away through the final page. It's a major league thriller that is hard to stop reading." -- Robert B. Parker
"The tension builds to a near palpable level as the pair uncovers secrets as dark and warped as the primal landscape. World-weary, contemplative Landeta is the perfect foil for Kincaid, a true man of action. Their camaraderie, combined with Parrish's crisp dialogue and skill at stringing out the suspense, are what make this carefully constructed mystery so absorbing. Parrish's second Kincaid mystery, Dead of Winter, earned a nomination for an Edgar, and this book merits another. Anyone who has read Parrish's mysteries will undoubtedly clamor for this one." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A killer ending will have you looking forward to the next entry in the series." — Orlando Sentinel
"Because she works in the critically snubbed thicket of original mass market paperbacks, P.J. Parrish's terrific books about Florida private eye Louis Kincaid don't always get the respect they deserve. Her latest is a worthy addition to the series. There are some striking verbal pictures of the Florida coast, especially after a hurricane, and a memorable scene on the deserted island of the title where grim truths are revealed. For the price of a fast-food meal, you can have a nourishing, satisfying reading experience that will last a lot longer." —Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune
MORE PRAISE FOR THE BOOKS OF P.J. PARRISH
"Tense, thrilling...you're going to bite your nails!" —Lee Child, New York Times bestselling author
"The kind of book that grabs you and won't let go. I absolutely loved it. Nobody is writing better private eye fiction anywhere than P.J. Parrish." -- Steve Hamilton
"Powerful stuff...The quiet sadness that underpins it all really got to me, the way Ross Macdonald always does. Among my favorite Florida crime writers are Charles Willeford, John D. MacDonald and Ed McBain. I'll have to add P.J. Parrish." -— Ed Gorman, Mystery Scene magazine
"A stunner of a book. Amazingly skilled at creating a sense of place, P.J. Parrish stays true to her characters. I can't wait to see Louis's growth as he learns more about the world." --Romantic Times
"A gripping and atmospheric novel that will remind many of Dennis Lehane. The author's ability to raise goose bumps puts her in the front rank of thriller writers." — Publishers Weekly
"A wonderfully tense and atmospheric novel. Keeps the reader guessing until the end." —- Miami Herald
"A standout thriller. It is an intriguing and atmospheric story set largely on the grounds of an abandoned insane asylum, a haunting location that contains many dark and barbarous secrets. With fresh characters and plot, a suspense novel of the highest order." -- Chicago Sun-Times
"A complex, sophisticated mystery...a guaranteed can't-put-it-down book that absorbed me as much as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." -- Triage RobertaGately.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank D.P. Lyle, MD, for his kind assistance on the medical aspects of this story. And we owe a debt of gratitude to Captain Dale K. Fewell, Ret., who patiently translated passages into Latin for us. Experto Crede. Also, thanks to Dave Jensen for his help with island geography; Linda Wigginton and Alina Lambiet for help with the Spanish; Marie-Pierre Carannante for help with the French. For copy-editing help and her eternal love of commas, we salute Jean Dudley Johnson. And a big hug to Val Viglione, who knows where the bones are buried.
For my daughter Renee,
and my cave-daughter Heather
“I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark.” -- Henry David Thoreau
Island of Bones
P.J. Parrish Copyright© Kelly Nichols and Kristy Montee aka P.J. Parrish
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.
Edition: August 2013
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
HEART OF ICE PREVIEW
Books by P.J. Parrish
Meet P.J. Parrish
CHAPTER 1
Dark. It was so dark. She could see nothing.
But she could feel. She could feel the rain stinging her face, the trees tearing at her flesh. She could feel her heart hammering in her chest, feel the life beating inside her. She could still feel and that meant she was still alive.
She kept running.
The wind was blowing hard now, making the trees twist and groan above her. The wet leaves rained down, sticking black on her bare white arms. Her feet were slippery with mud and blood.
She kept running.
Something dark rose up in front of her. The fence...she had made it to the fence. She searched the dark wood, looking for a gate. Nothing, no way out. She had to climb over.
She jumped, grabbing the top of the fence. It was jagged, cutting into her fingers, but she held on. Bracing her feet on the fence, she strained to pull herself up. Her bare feet slipped on the wet wood but she was strong. She got an arm over the top and pulled herself up. The jagged wood cut into her as she jumped down, falling and rolling in the mud. There was a gash on her arm and something burned on her right foot, but she kept moving.
Mangroves...she had made it to the mangroves. But where was the dock? She stopped, her eyes raking the darkness.
The light. Where was the light? There was a light on the dock. She had seen it before. She had seen the dinghy there, too.
She pushed her wet hair back off her face and tried to get her bearings. Had she gone the wrong way? Everything looked so different at night. The storm must have knocked out the power. Where was the dock?
A sudden gust of wind knocked her back against a tree. Her knees buckled and she grabbed the rough bark, pulling herself back up.
A light. The dock light! She could see it now, faintly through the trees.
With a cry, she pushed off the tree and stumbled toward the light.
The light was moving. Jerking, swinging back and forth. It wasn’t the dock light. It was a flashlight, coming toward her.
God, not here! Don’t let me die here!
She pulled a ragged breath deep into her burning lungs, pushing down the fear that was rising in her throat. She sank back into the black mangroves, crouching in the rib cage of roots.
The beam of light grew larger and brighter. She bit down on her lip to keep from crying and tasted her own blood. A violent clap of thunder rose above the wind. She closed her eyes.
Then, suddenly, for just a moment, the wind died and it was quiet.
Her eyes shot open. A bump. In that one second of silence she had heard the bump of a boat against wood. Just a few feet away.
Get up! Run... you can make it! Run!
She could smell the water now and she moved toward it, feeling her way and stepping carefully over the high twisting mangrove roots. She could feel the cold mud covering her feet now and then the water rushing up over her ankles.
Oh, God! There it is! The dock!
And the boat was there. She could see it, a small slash of white bobbing in the churning black water.
She looked back. The flashlight was gone. Twenty feet, all she had to do was run twenty feet out in the open to the boat. Just twenty feet and she would be free.
She crept out of the mangrove cover and into the open. Her feet hit wood and she ran down the dock to the boat. She jumped inside, pulling off the lines. She pushed the boat away from the dock, grabbed the cord on the motor, and pulled hard. It jammed.
Her eyes shot to the dark shore. Through the slashing rain, she could see the flashlight. Faint but moving again, coming toward the dock.
She yanked on the cord again. Something tore in her shoulder but she kept pulling. Finally, the motor sputtered to life, its whine rising above the roar of the storm.
She looked out at the water. Nothing. No lights, no land. Just the angry swirl of the night sky and the roiling black waves spitting out whitecaps.
She took one last look back. The flashlight was coming fast.
She hit the throttle and the little boat started away.
“Bitch! Where you think you’re going, bitch!”
The rain was slicing into her like knives. A flash of lightning and for a second, she could see the huge waves, green and foaming.
Then a sharp crack of thunder so close she could feel it.
A sudden sting in her back.
A pain burning through her body like a hot sword.
She reached back to touch her back and felt something warm.
Another sharp, close crack of thunder.
She jerked as the second bullet pierced her neck.
Then it was quiet.
She couldn’t see anything. She couldn’t hear anything. She couldn’t feel anything.
The motor sputtered out and the small white boat lurched sharply. A huge wave grabbed it, heaving it up on the foaming crest and then smashing it down into the trough.
When the boat bobbed upright, it was empty.
CHAPTER 2
Her name was Alina. She was born during a sultry summer thunderstorm somewhere near Mali, a thing no one cared about in a place few had heard of. In Senegal, she inhaled the cool ocean breezes and in the Cape Verde Islands she found her fury.
By the time she reached Hispaniola she was a killer.
The first hurricane of the 1987 season turned out to be the most deadly in decades, ravaging the Caribbean, littering the beaches of Haiti with fishing boats and bodies. Then she sped through the Florida Straits, turned north and slammed into the southwest coast of Florida. Finally, Alina died, drifting away as a depression somewhere over Chesapeake Bay.
And now the shell seekers were out, celebrating her wake.
Louis watched them as they walked the beach. Every so often, someone would stoop, pick up a prize, and hold it up to the white morning sun before dropping it in a net bag. But mostly they walked, heads bowed, shoulders stooped, criss-crossing silently across the sand to the dirge-like drone of the waves.
The beach was a mess. The dunes had been eaten away almost up to his cottage, the sea oats beaten down, the sea grape trees snapped and stripped. About a hundred yards to the south, a sailboat lay heeled over in the sand, its mast bent like a straw, the halyards looped and tangled.
Louis looked back at his cottage. It was still standing, though last night he was sure it wasn’t going to survive. Around midnight, the guy on the radio was trying to sound cool as he reported the wind was up to 110 miles an hour and that Alina was coming up out of the Florida Straits on a north-northeast course aiming right at Sanibel-Captiva. The cottage’s roof was leaking, the old boards groaning. Finally, Louis put Issy in the cat carrier and ran down the street in the pelting rain to take cover in Timmy’s Nook. He had sat out the storm in the restaurant drinking warm Heinekens in the dark with Bev and Carlo, listening to the bam! pop! fizz! of electrical transmitters blowing, watching the night sky turn acid green.
His first hurricane.
Bev, who had lived in Florida all her sixty-some years, called it a “pissy little blow job, nothing like Donna back in sixty.” He didn’t tell her it had scared the living shit out of him.
But he had survived. And now...
God, had the sky ever been bluer? Like it had been stripped clean and repainted. He drew in a deep breath of sea spray, looking again at the shell seekers. They always came after a big storm, Bev had told him, a horde descending on the beach to comb through the debris kicked up from the sea.
He wondered if anyone had died in the storm. The electric and phones were still out, so there was no way to tell yet. And the two-lane road that ran the length of Sanibel-Captiva was covered in sand and downed trees.
He glanced at his watch. Eight A.M. He had been awake all night, but he wasn’t tired. There was still a charge in the air, the kind that came when something bad missed you and kept going, a bullet, a botched love affair, a speeding car.
His stomach rumbled. There was nothing to eat in the cottage and Bev had told him not to open his fridge because who knew how long the power would be out?
He decided to walk up the beach and see if anything was open.
Fish carcasses. Driftwood. Great green ropes of kelp.
Beer bottles, a broken lawn chair, rusted cans, a car tire.
A dead seagull. Milky-eyed fish. Blue-bubbled Portuguese man-of-war.
Chunks of Styrofoam, plastic flowers, a broken flip-flop.
Millions of shells. A mosaic of pink, yellow, purple, blue. All sizes and shapes. Geometric swirls, regal conchs, butterfly-winged coquinas. He had never seen so many different shells.
Louis stopped abruptly, his eyes on the wet sand.
It was big, much bigger than the other shells. That was what had made him stop. That and the color —- a mottled rust that didn’t quite look like any other shell.
He knelt and brushed away the seaweed. He drew back sharply.
It was a skull. Small, very small, maybe the size of a softball. And human. He could see that now as he carefully lifted away the last of the seaweed.
It was wedged sideways, half buried in the sand. The waves crept up, sending a gentle stream of sea foam into the nasal cavity and out again.
Louis sat back on his legs, staring at the skull. He quickly scanned the surrounding debris but saw no other bones, no clothing, no evidence of a body. Just this tiny skull.
He squinted out at the gulf water, still churning green from the storm. Damn, where had it come from? A boat? A drowning?
Voices...a couple was approaching, heads down, the man sweeping a metal detector across the sand. The beach was already crowded and more people were coming. He was too far away from his cottage and couldn’t call the cops anyway.
He looked back at the skull, then out over the gulf. He couldn’t leave the skull here for someone else to find. There was no choice. He quickly pulled off his T-shirt and spr
ead it on the sand. Picking up a stick, he wedged it carefully in the eye socket. He extracted the skull from the sand and placed it on the shirt. Wrapping it up, he stood and hurried back to the cottage.
Setting the bundled shirt on the chair near the door, he picked up the phone. Still dead.
He walked back to the chair and unwrapped the shirt, staring at the skull. Damn...there were two holes in it that he hadn’t noticed back on the beach. He squatted down to get a better look.
One hole right on the top about the size of a quarter and a second smaller one farther back. The holes were shaped like diamonds, and both were too perfectly formed to look like they had been made by accident. They reminded him of a wound profile he had seen in his police academy textbook. The wound had been made by a pickax.
With a sigh, he rose. Who would hit a baby hard enough to drive an ax through its skull? And where the hell had the skull come from?
He thought of Bev and her stories about Hurricane Donna. The storm had been so fierce, she said, that boats harbored in Pine Island Sound had been found ten miles inland, wrecked along the banks of the Caloosahatchee River. Someone had found a roulette wheel on Fort Myers Beach that was eventually traced to a casino in the Bahamas.
The skull could have come from anywhere. Louis knelt down again to stare at it. It was so small. So sad. And probably so far from home, wherever that was.
CHAPTER 3
Louis set out a bowl of water and Tender Vittles for Issy and left the cottage, heading up the sand path that wound through the other cottages. Maybe Pierre had a radio he could use to call the sheriff. Up near the office, he saw Pierre standing out in the road, staring at the “Branson’s on the Beach” sign. A slash pine had fallen across it, knocking it down.
Pierre saw him coming and pointed at the sign. “Look! C’est foutue!” He gestured wildly at the tree limbs and debris littering the grounds. “Un vrai foutoir!”