Twenty-Seven Bones

by Jonathan Nasaw

  Roger the Dodger, for instance, a gentle-hearted former Vietnam War draft evader, now a sandal maker with a hillbilly beard long enough to hide a family of birds, contributed the cooking oil. Dave and Mary Sample, who had three kids with a fourth on the way, and kept chickens behind their cabin, provided eggs for the batter. Holly provided flour. Molly Blessingdon, a nurse at Missionary Hospital, kicked in a whole chicken, as did Billy Porter, who played guitar for the house band at the King Christian. Everybody else brought veggies, and the Core kids picked mangos, sugar apples, and soursops for dessert.

  All contributions were welcome, but the person voted most valuable scrounger at the October tempura party was Ruford Shea, a diminutive down-islander from St. Vincent who’d contributed all the fresh-caught shrimp the capacious pockets of his work pants could hold.

  Ruford was also the one who reported seeing Andy Arena’s old yellow Beetle parked across the street from the harbormaster’s shed. It was there when he went to sea in the morning, crewing on a shrimper, Ruford reported, and still there when he returned late this afternoon.

  After the last crumb in the Core had been battered, fried, and eaten, Holly and Dawson talked it over. Dawson and Arena had had a brief, passionate affair a few years back—all Dawson’s affairs were brief and passionate.

  “It’s not like him,” said Dawson.

  “Maybe he’s having a midlife crisis,” Holly suggested.

  “Horseshit,” said Dawson. “That’s something men invent when they want to get—Hey, watch it, there!”

  A sports car or a teeny-bopper girlfriend, she’d been about to say, but a soccer ball had just whizzed past her head, missing her by inches, and when she caught sight of Holly’s nephew racing after it as if he hadn’t a care in the world, she didn’t feel much like bitching. Which was not an unusual response: Marley had that effect on a lot of people. “Never mind, skip it.”

  “You think we should file a missing person’s report?” asked Holly.

  “You do it.”

  “Why don’t you do it? You know him better than I do, you can give them a lot more—”

  Dawson cut her off. “I just don’t like to get messed up with the police. Avoid authority, the Buddhists say.”

  “Since when are you a Buddhist?”

  Dawson lay back on the blanket, looking up at the stars, which were pretty spectacular at this latitude, this far from city lights. “Us Mysterians say that, too,” she replied.

  “What’s a Mysterian?” asked Marley, dribbling his soccer ball over to Holly, stopping it on a dime, plopping himself down into her lap, leaning back.

  “It’s a religion Dawson and I made up,” Holly explained, putting her arms around him and pulling him tightly against her. “After that Iris Dement song—you know, the one I’m always playing about let the mystery be? Mysterians aren’t atheists, or even agnostics. They know there’s some big mystery out there, but for the most part—”

  “Never mind. I thought it was like some kind of Star Trek thing—Klingons, Mysterions. Can I stay up an hour late tonight? Mr. Bendt says there’s gonna be a meteor shower, and he’s gonna set up the telescope.”

  “As long as he keeps it pointed at the sky,” said Holly—they didn’t call their neighbor Peeping Fran for nothing.

  10

  Hokey went to bed early—tomorrow was her morning to volunteer at the rest home named for Lewis’s father and grandfather. Lewis watched Lou Dobbs on the TV in his study. Hokey was a member of the St. Luke Historical Preservation Society, so the satellite dish was mounted on the roof in the back of the stable/garage, where it couldn’t be seen from the drive.

  The financial news was not good. Lewis made a few notes, then switched to a soft porn channel. But soft porn wasn’t making it either. Absent any of his other drugs, he needed something harder, so he went online, surfing his favorite voyeur-themed sites, of which there were dozens available. Most of it was pretty tame stuff, though: guys using peephole and minidigital cameras to take up-skirts or down-blouses, or capture their wives or girlfriends sleeping, peeing, bathing, or stepping out of the shower. Before the Net, Lewis wouldn’t have believed how sick so many people were.

  Some of the sites, however, had membership areas, where for a premium Lewis could download jpegs and mpegs of real people having sex—real people who hadn’t known they were being spied upon. That had been Lewis’s secret passion (he didn’t really think of it as a vice) since he was a boy, even before puberty. (And wouldn’t Dr. Vogler have loved to hear about that; fat chance, Doc.)

  It had gotten him in trouble more than once, but even nowadays, when thousands upon thousands of images were available on the Web for less than it cost to buy binoculars, he still found himself going out on the prowl occasionally.

  Because it wasn’t only the images that Lewis craved, it was also the risk, the uncertainty, the thrill of the hunt. And unlike the stereotypical Peeping Tom of movies and literature, who stalks only the prettiest of young women, looks were not of paramount concern to Lewis. In fact, one of his more memorable strikes in recent years had involved his tenants in the overseer’s house, the Drs. Epp. And their so-called houseman Bennie—Lewis knew a thing or two about that household they wouldn’t have wanted broadcast to the general public.

  Just thinking about the time he’d seen the three of them together gave Lewis more of a rise than any of the digital images he was accessing. One of these nights he’d have to check in on the old reprobates again, he promised himself as he logged on to yet another disappointing site. One of these nights soon.

  11

  If Lewis had gone peeping at the overseer’s house Tuesday night, he wouldn’t have found any hanky-panky going on.

  Bennie was alone in his room, rereading Moby-Dick, which for reasons the Epps had never been able to ascertain, he read like some Christians read their Bible, or Muslims their Koran. When he reached Finis he’d turn to the beginning and start over again at Call Me Ishmael.

  Phil and Emily were watching home movies in the living room. They were in the process of cataloging Phil’s old collection, from his first tour of duty on Nias, twenty-five years before he met Emily, prior to having it digitized. The colors were already badly faded, and the images flickered and jumped, but much of the footage was priceless nonetheless.

  The film currently spooling through the projector was labeled Fahombe Ceremony, South Pulau Nias, 8/57. Two pillars of stone stood at the end of a broad plaza paved with great stone tiles and flanked by tall, narrow houses with fantastically pitched ski-jump roofs and hooded, overhanging gables. The nearer pillar was about a yard high, the farther one twice as tall, with wooden spikes embedded in the top.

  A brown-skinned Niassian boy of sixteen or so, dressed only in a loincloth, leapt sideways into the frame, brandishing a sword and a torch over his head. He danced around for a few seconds, bouncing from one bare foot to the other and grimacing fiercely, then turned and ran away from the camera, straight down the middle of the plaza toward the first of the two stone pillars, which he used as if it were a springboard to propel himself feetfirst over the top of the second pillar. And no matter how many times Emily had seen the film, she still gasped as the boy twisted and turned in midair, torch and sword waving above his head: there seemed to be no way for him to avoid being impaled on the sharpened spikes.

  But as always, he drew his feet up at the last second to clear the spikes by the barest fraction of an inch before disappearing behind the second pillar.

  The screen went white; the last frames of brittle old celluloid slid through the gate and flipflipflipflipflipped around the uptake reel until Phil reached over to turn off the motor.

  “I hear a hundred and fifty thousand roops will buy you a private performance,” he told Emily as he rethreaded the film the short way for rewinding. He’d recently learned from a correspondent that the Fahombe, once used to train young warriors to jump over the walls of enemy villages, had been terribly commercialized in recent years. “Minus th
e spikes, of course.”

  “Of course. What’s that nowadays?”

  “Hard to say—twenty, twenty-five bucks?—the rupiah’s pretty volatile.”

  “So’s the dollar, for that matter,” said Emily, over the whirr of the reversed projector motor. She switched on the lamp next to her armchair and made some notes while Phil relabeled the film canister numerically for transfer to disk. “Have you given any thought about whom you want to get for the next sacrifice?” It was Phil’s turn next.

  “I’m not sure yet. I did plant a seed with Miss Holly this afternoon.”

  “Treasure?”

  “Yes. I think there’s a good chance she’ll go for it.”

  “Be a shame to chop off one of those wonderful hands, though.”

  “I know,” said Phil. “I’ve also been thinking about another virgin—it’s been a long time.”

  “You and your virgins—you just want a young girl, you perv,” said Emily, almost affectionately. She didn’t mind the little girls—it was the high-bosomed young ladies that sometimes gave her a twinge of jealousy.

  “And what if I do? You have to admit they’re a lot easier to handle than these big bruisers you’re always choosing.”

  “I didn’t hear any complaints from you yesterday.” Not only were the Epps both highly sexed individuals (the big four-oh had scarcely slowed Emily down, and if there was such a thing as male menopause, it hadn’t hit Phil yet—he still got hard at the drop of a hat, and the age or sex of the person who’d dropped it didn’t much matter to him), but according to their way of thinking, they had long since transcended any culturally based sexual mores.

  This transcendence they thought of as an occupational hazard, or benefit, depending on how you looked at it. Because to an anthropologist—or at least to a good anthropologist, in their opinion—every culture, society, and religion had its taboos and proscriptions. None were universal, and none had a place above or below any of the others on an objective moral scale, for the simple reason that there was no objective moral scale.

  That’s how they saw it, anyway. A psychiatrist would probably have disagreed, diagnosing them instead with primary Antisocial Personality Disorder, and secondary Delusional Disorder, Subtype Grandiose, which is to say, they were both psychopaths with literal delusions of grandeur. In their case, they believed that they had stumbled upon—or had been fated to stumble upon—an important discovery, with potentially earthshaking implications.

  But even if they’d received their diagnosis from the lips of Freud himself, they’d have been unconvinced and unimpressed. Psychopaths consider themselves superior to psychiatrists. Nothing personal there: for the most part, psychopaths consider themselves superior to everybody. They also believe in their hearts that none of the rules that hold other people’s wills in check apply to them—even those that believe in God, believe in a God that thinks and feels as they do.

  Phil took another film out of its canister, slipped the reel onto the projector, and began threading it. The truth was, until he said it out loud, he didn’t even know he was thinking about another virgin. The last one had been the Jenkuns girl, whose untimely reappearance had spurred them to find the caves and the Oubliette. A virgin, yes, but at twelve she’d already had a few coils of soft curly black hairs at the pubis, and swollen little bubbies.

  This time he was thinking of something younger—like that little mixed-race girl he’d seen with Holly in August, at the strip mall. Prettiest little thing he’d ever set eyes on. Phil had been loitering around the phone booth outside the supermarket, waiting for a call from Tex Wanger at the time, so he hadn’t approached them, but he’d asked Holly about the girl at their next session. Her niece, she said; six years old, she said. Which meant the child was a virgin for sure—how sweet that would be, Phil told himself. And there was yet another advantage to choosing the niece: when it was all over, the aunt would still be around to give him one of her marvelous massages.

  Chapter Three

  1

  In Pender’s dream, it was the Machete Man who was missing a hand. His dreams, as they often did during investigations, took the form of a pursuit reversed. Early on, Pender was chasing the killer; just before he woke up, he realized the tables had been turned, and he was now the prey.

  He awoke and found himself in the Coffees’ guest bedroom. Warm air enveloped him like a second skin; the sensation was far from unpleasant. But he also had the disconcerting feeling that he was being watched. He turned his head and saw a green gecko staring goggle-eyed from the bedside table on the other side of the mosquito netting. It was four inches in length, two of that tail, and so close he could see the delicate bones of its rib cage expanding and contracting.

  He sat up, pulled the cord dangling over his head to roll up the mesh canopy, then padded barefoot, in his boxers and strap under-shirt, across the wooden floor to the unglazed window. He leaned way out to push open the shutters—the sill was two feet deep. The Ginger Thomas tree outside his second-story window was in bloom. The flowers were shaped like trumpets, yellow as the sun in a child’s drawing. He breathed in the perfume and smiled—he couldn’t remember when he’d last felt this good, this early in the day.

  And no wonder: it had been love at first sight, man meets island, man falls head over heels for island, since he’d stepped off the plane yesterday.

  This had come as a surprise to Pender—he’d never thought of himself as a tropical kind of guy. But the limpid blue skies and the bright surrounding sea, the embracing heat and the unhurried pace, the swaying palm trees and the vibrant colors of the riotous flora, were only part of the island’s charm. There was also a constant, lively juxtaposition of the strange and familiar, the North American and the West Indian, summed up for Pender by the Kentucky Fried Chicken shack located next to the open-air fish market in Sugar Town.

  Julian hadn’t been exaggerating about the plethora of establishments selling alcohol by the drink, either—at least not much. One of the featured stops on the Coffee tour had been the Rum Shack, a wooden shed by the side of the Circle Road on the south coast of the island that sold dipperfuls of rum out of a wide-mouthed twenty-gallon jar with a pickled octopus floating in the bottom. Every night, the Puerto Rican bartender had explained, he’d refill the jar to the top, but the same octopus had been in there since 1976.

  “What for?” asked Pender

  “Por sabor, señor,” the bartender had replied—for the taste.

  Breakfast at the Coffees was served on the patio, weather permitting, as it did most of the year. Julian and his wife Sigrid—Ziggy—were seated at the glass-topped wrought-iron table when Pender came down. As they exchanged good mornings (yesterday Julian had explained to Pender the importance the islanders placed on the formal greeting), Pender noticed that the two were holding hands. Apparently their twenty-five-year marriage—three children, three grandchildren so far—had somehow failed to quench their romance.

  Julian had been single when Pender first met him in Little Rock. The Bureau had sent him back to his home island a few years later, after the hurricane of ’75, to set up a resident agency charged with investigating the riots. Within a few months he had fallen in love with Sigrid Faartoft. The Faartofts, like the Hokanssons and the Apgards, were among the Twelve Danish Families (actually closer to two dozen families, not all of them of Danish descent) who still owned or controlled much of the island’s real estate.

  On St. Luke, with its long history of racial mixing, the marriage had been less of a problem than it would have been in, say, Arkansas, where Coffee had last been stationed, or Atlanta, where, unaccountably, the Bureau decided to transfer him in ’82, when they closed down the R.A. in a cost-cutting move.

  Julian had immediately resigned to join the St. Luke Police Department. Within five years he was chief; fifteen years later, he was The Chief, and if there were islanders whom he didn’t know by name, or who didn’t know him on sight, Pender hadn’t run into any of them in the course of yesterday’s t
our.

  Along with breakfast, the down-island maid brought the morning paper, with its page one picture of William “Tex” Wanger. The text beneath the picture said only that Wanger, a resident of Miami, Florida, had failed to return home after a trip to St. Luke in mid-August, and asked anyone who’d seen him on the island to contact the police department.

  No mention of his body having washed up beneath the Carib cliffs, or of the other body that had washed up with him, no connection drawn to the death of Hettie Jenkuns, the only victim of the Machete Man to have already appeared in the paper, and of course nothing at all about the Machete Man himself.

  Pender could only shake his head in wonder and admiration. St. Luke was indeed paradise, at least for old serial killer hunters accustomed to spending an inordinate amount of time and energy wrestling with the media, trying to manage the flow of information and control potentially damaging leaks.

  After breakfast, Julian drove Pender to police headquarters, a nineteenth-century stone fortress on Frederikshavn’s Dansker Hill, anchoring one side of the Government Yard quadrangle. He introduced Pender to his daughter Layla and the two detectives, Felix and Hamilton, then led him down to the basement room he’d be using as an office. The room had been a jail cell until Hurricane Eloise, Julian explained; the three dank stone walls showed the high-water mark through their dark green paint, and the cell door had never been replaced.

  At ten o’clock, the entire department assembled in a windowless briefing room on the second floor. (So who’s minding the store? wondered Pender). A lazy ceiling fan stirred the air ineffectually as he delivered the set piece he called Serial Killer 101. A little history, a little psychology, a description of the two types of serial killers, organized and disorganized, a few instructive anecdotes as examples of how both types of killers could be caught.