Twenty-Seven Bones

by Jonathan Nasaw

  “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.

  Chapter Five

  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.”

&nbs
p; “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.

  2

  “Mistah Lewis?”

  Apgard opened his eyes, threw up his arm to shield them from the white glare of the sun. He started to sit up, but fell back with a groan. Apparently he’d passed out the night before, because when he looked around he found himself lying on the chaise, on the patio. Johnny Rankin was standing over him holding a tray with, God bless him, a Bloody Mary Ann (white rum and tomato juice) and an open bottle of aspirin.

  “T’ought ya might be needin’ de hair of de hound, sah,” Johnny told him, then added that Dr. Vogler was waiting for him in the drawing room.

  Lewis shook a handful of aspirin out onto his palm, popped them, washed them down. His body felt the rum first and shivered with gratitude. “What time is it?”

  Johnny set the tray down on the patio table, consulted his watch. “Half past noon.”

  The last thing Lewis remembered was getting felt up by Emily Epp. He glanced under the towel and was relieved to find he still had his shorts on. An alcoholic blackout is a frightening thing—the night before looms behind you like a great black pit. “When you got here this morning, was I…Was anyone else here?”

  Johnny shook his head. “It do look like ya had some comp’ny, sah.” His characteristically solemn expression was, as always, unreadable. “I took de liberty of tidyin’ up. Ya wan’ me get rid of de doctah?”

  “No—give him some coffee or something, tell him I’ll be there in a few minutes. And Johnny?”

  “Sah?”

  “Don’t say anything to…Oh.” For just an instant there, just a moment of inattention, it had slipped his mind that Hokey was dead. Weird sensation, like starting to introduce yourself and forgetting your own name.

  Johnny realized what had happened. He told Lewis not to fret himself, that the wound was still mighty fresh.

  Later, in Lewis’s study, Vogler too tried to reassure Lewis about his momentary lapse. “The mind tries to protect itself—it’s a temporary state of dissociation. I’m more concerned with your alcoholic intake.”

  “It won’t happen again. It was just—the sense of guilt overwhelmed me.”

  “What you have to understand, Lewis, is that what you’re feeling is survivor’s guilt. It’s part of the grieving process—but not the healthy part. So when you start feeling that way, you need to remind yourself that you didn’t kill your wife, you didn’t contribute to her death in any way, shape, or form, and there was nothing you could have done to prevent it.

  “Now unfortunately, since you kept me waiting for half an hour, our time is up for today. I’ll write you a prescription for Valium, in case you start feeling overwhelmed again, but you’ll have to promise to lay off the booze—the two don’t mix. And you do understand I’ll have to charge you for the full hour.”

  “You mean the full fifty minutes.” But Lewis was glad to be rid of the man so soon. He wondered, now that Hokey was dead, whether he still had to stay with the therapy. He’d only agreed to it because Hokey had insisted—it had seemed to reassure her.

  But if anybody needed reassuring now, it was Lewis. He was the one who owed the Epps an alibi at least as good as the one they’d given him. And since they were taking the hydrofoil ferry to San Juan that afternoon, spending the weekend, and taking the ferry back Sunday afternoon, it was within that window of opportunity that the Machete Man would have to strike again. Only this time, of course, he would be wearing Lewis’s skin.

  But did he have the balls for it? Lewis wondered. And what could the Epps do to him if he did renege? They couldn’t implicate him without implicating themselves.

  Then he remembered Bennie. A little man with a sharp machete, who could move as silently as a gecko and strike as quickly as a mongoose. Lewis looked down, found himself clenching and unclenching his right hand as if to assure himself it was still there. Did he have the balls to be the Machete Man? Cheese-an’-bread, mon, he certainly hoped so.

  3

  The Carib cliffs were limestone, sheared off cleanly eons ago. The sea had carved out hollows at their base. Standing on the wide rocky ledge where the bodies had been found, Pender heard the breakers booming and watched the surf boiling and foaming through the holes in the honeycombed rock at his feet, then draining away again, leaving behind bubbles of dirty, cream-colored froth and slimy tendrils of seaweed.

  The recessed hole in the side of the cliff from which the two bodies had fallen was not visible either from the ledge or from the top of the cliff, so like the investigators before him, Pender had a hard time figuring out how two bodies, murdered at least six months apart, could have come to rest, one atop the other, on this ledge. And like those investigators, Pender settled for the scenario Julian had suggested: that the two bodies had been buried together in the same hole or neighboring holes somewhere along the coast, and the storm tides had exhumed them from their sandy grave, then deposited them here.

  Bad break for the bad guy, good break for the good guys, thought Pender, so deep in contemplation that he was momentarily oblivious both to his dramatic surroundings and the attractive woman who had led him there.

  What he was contemplating was degree of concealment, an important factor in assessing a serial killer’s state of mind. In this case, it was a negative progression. First known victim, buried deep in the forest. Second and third known victims buried shallowly enough to be washed up by the first hurricane. Fourth known victim left for the police to find.

  Despite the savagery of his characteristic method of execution, the Machete Man had started out as a careful, organized killer, thought Pender. But all that was beginning to shift. Contacting the police, leaving bodies around to taunt them with, signaled that the Machete Man was moving into a new phase of his career. But whether the killer was ratcheting up or winding down was something only time would—

  “Watch your step, there.” Dawson, now dressed in a tie-dyed T-shirt and hiking shorts, had grabbed his arm again, this time to tug him away from the water, as an incoming wave crashed against the rocks below and sent the foam boiling up around his feet.

  “Whoops—that’s the second time you’ve saved me today,” said Pender, whose salt-stiffened clothes w
ere already dry from the midday heat.

  “Next time I’ll have to charge you,” she joked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “You seem so familiar—are you sure we’ve never met?”

  “I’m sure I’d remember,” said Dawson, turning away, leaning over the edge of the rock to gauge the incoming tide. “Guess I just have that kind of face. Listen, if we don’t start back soon, we’ll have to swim for it.”

  As they made their way back to Smuggler’s Cove, Pender found himself thinking seriously about asking Dawson for a date. He certainly liked what he’d seen of her so far, which was of course everything except the soles of her feet, and he’d always been an adherent of the nothing ventured, nothing gained school of courtship.

  With this beauty, though, he felt oddly shy. He knew himself well enough to recognize that that was not a good sign. The last thing he needed at this stage of his life was to fall in love, get his heart broken again.

  Back at the manchineel grove, Dawson helped Pender wipe the corrosive sap off the seat of the Vespa. “Manchineel apples are supposed to be the original forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden. A few years ago, some college kids down on spring break pitched tents on the beach and made a campfire from manchineel wood. Only one of them survived.”

  When they were done, Dawson hauled a heavy backpack filled with round bumpy objects the size of human heads (calabash, of course) out of the sea grape bushes. Pender helped her put it on, then she accompanied him as far as the cracked white pavement of the Circle Road.

  “Thanks again for your help,” said Pender. “If I tell you something I shouldn’t tell you, will you promise me you’ll keep it to yourself?”

  “Sure.”

  “Remember how you said there were no dangerous animals on St. Luke?”

  “Yes?”