Twenty-Seven Bones (31 page)

Seven o’clock Thursday morning. Holly woke up an instant before the alarm and smacked it into preemptive silence. She sensed almost immediately that something was different, something had changed, but it took a few seconds for it to register: no rain. For the first time in three days, there was no steel drum band playing “Yellow Bird” on the roof. She sat up, saw blue sky through the ventilation screen.

Holly rolled up the mosquito net and grabbed her bathrobe off the chair. She was still using a piece of clothesline for a belt. She never had gotten the original belt back—or wanted it.

“Kids!”

She opened the door, looked in on them. They were both in Marley’s bed. Both awake, both faking sleep—even through the mosquito net she could tell the difference.

“Let’s go, school day.” Holly had kept the children home the last two days, spoiling them both rotten, and losing more income than she could afford to lose, what with three of her best clients (shudder) out of the picture. Apgard was in jail; the search party had found Phil Epp’s body late Tuesday afternoon and Emily’s after resuming the excavation yesterday morning. “C’mon, meeyain’ wan’ no poppyshow from ya dis mornin’.”

Dawn giggled, as she always did when Holly tried to talk Luke. The girl was doing pretty well. She still insisted on being accompanied to the Crapaud and back, but that seemed reasonable enough. Kids that age are amazingly resilient, everybody told Holly. Holly wasn’t taking anything for granted, though—she was already looking around for a good child psychologist. And if she couldn’t find one who’d accept massages in lieu of payment—well, all the more reason not to miss any more work.

“You guys aren’t out of bed in five minutes, you can forget about me taking you to the beach after school.”

“Beach?” Two voices speaking as one. Up went the mosquito net. GPM, thought Holly—never underestimate the power of a shameless bribe.

With the west end still being pounded by the residual storm tides, Holly was expecting the clothing optional beach at Smuggler’s Cove to be crowded that afternoon, but when she and the kids got there after school, there was only one car parked by the side of the Circle Road near the manchineel grove. Of course, it was a cop car, so that might have had something to do with it.

The kids ran ahead, as kids will. By the time Holly got the gear together and caught up, all she could see of them were their feet, the backs of their heads, and their skinny brown asses as they swam toward Dawson, snorkeling just inside the reef. Holly gathered up the clothes they’d shed and spread her beach blanket out next to Pender, who was lying on his stomach reading, wearing only a ragged-brimmed straw beachcomber’s hat over a gauze turban. Even for Holly, who’d seen every body type there was, he was quite a sight.

Like natives, they exchanged formal good afternoons. Pender quickly turned back to his book when Holly started taking off her clothes. “Whatcha reading?” she asked him.

He held it up so she could see the cover: James Joyce’s
Ulysses.

“How ambitious,” said Holly.

“I always promised myself I’d catch up on my reading once I retired,” he explained, eyes still averted. “Back in 2000, when everybody was making lists, this was voted the greatest novel of the century or the millennium or something—I figured I might as well start at the top and work my way down.”

“How’s it going?”

“One guy’s shaving—I don’t know what the hell anybody else is doing.”

The English teacher’s daughter laughed. “I think most people read it along with a key.”

“Wusses.”

“You’re starting to pink up—want some more suntan lotion?”

“If you insist,” said Pender. And as Holly began slathering the stuff on, she couldn’t help throwing in a little massage. Pender couldn’t help feeling as if he’d died and gone to beer commercial heaven. “How’re things going on your end?” he asked her.

“No problems money wouldn’t cure.”

“Marley, you mean.”

“And Daisy needs a clutch and I have to find a shrink for Dawn.” Embarrassed to find herself spilling her guts again (How
does
he do it? she wondered), Holly quickly changed the subject. “Dawson says you’re flying back to Washington Monday.”

“I left in kind of a hurry. I have some business I have to take care of.”

“You better come back.”

“I will.”

“You break that woman’s heart, I will hunt you down and slay you like a dog.”

If the threat had come from anyone but a nude woman who was firmly but tenderly kneading his shoulders at the time, Pender might have taken it more seriously. “How about if
she
breaks
my
heart?”

“It’d probably serve you right,” Holly said.

Pender had to wait a few minutes to detumesce after Holly left him to join the others in the water. Life really wasn’t very fair, he mused—with hands like that the woman should have been declared a national treasure, instead of having her kid go armless.

When he’d recovered from her ministrations, he rolled over and glanced down at the huge belly he’d been pushing around for the last couple of years. There ain’t enough suntan lotion in the world, he told himself. He pulled on his green dragon Hawaiian shirt and his shorts, slipped his feet into his flip-flops, and called to the others that he was going for a walk down by the cliffs. He needed to be alone; he needed to think. Despite his assurances to both Holly and Dawson, Pender still wasn’t sure what he was going to do. It was almost frightening, the way the future branched out ahead of him.

He missed his life in Washington, missed his friends, missed his house by the canal. But he knew that as soon as he left the island he’d find himself missing St. Luke and his A-frame nearly as much, and missing Dawson even worse. And it wasn’t the sex, he told himself. Okay, it wasn’t
just
the sex. Being with her simply felt right. A man gets to be fifty-seven, he knows what feels right.

But he couldn’t exactly ask Dawson to come back to Washington, hang out with him and his FBI buddies. The old wounds hadn’t healed up there—every couple of years the Bureau reeled in another old radical. A Weatherman here, an SLA auxiliary there, and they all ended up doing time, even the ones who’d lived exemplary lives under assumed names for the last thirty years.

And as if that weren’t enough to think about, there was the question of whether he wanted to—

A wave broke over Pender’s flip-flops. The tide was higher than the last time he’d come this way, with Dawson. He edged closer to the side of the cliff as the path continued to narrow.

—whether he wanted to go back into retirement, or accept the job of chief of detectives that Julian had offered him. Now that Apgard was cashing out everything he could sell in order to pay what was almost certainly going to amount to millions in legal fees, the airport runway expansion was all but assured. And the island economy was bound to expand as well. St. Luke was going to be dragged willy-nilly into the twenty-first century, said Julian, and if the police department didn’t get there first, there was going to be hell to pay.

Pender wasn’t sure he wanted the job, though, wasn’t sure he was up to it. His hunch about Apgard and the Epps had been on the money, but his handling of the rest of it was pretty wretched, by his standards. He’d set out to spook the suspects, but neglected to make any contingency plans in the event he succeeded. Nearly cost an innocent little girl her life.

The path continued to narrow before taking a hairpin bend around a salient in the cliff, then widening out to the rocky, hollowed-out ledge where Wanger’s and Schaller’s bodies had been found. Pender sniffed, caught the unmistakable stink of week-old death just before he turned the corner and came upon two bodies lying together on the rocks in almost exactly the same spot as the photographs of Wanger and Schaller that Julian had showed him his first day on the job.

Holding his handkerchief to his mouth, Pender approached. The bodies were entwined like ghastly lovers. Arena’s face was in pretty bad shape, but Pender was able to identify him by the Jimmy Buffett parrot-head tattoo on his left bicep. Bennie’s corpse was still half-dressed, though his jeans had been sliced to ribbons.

As Pender circled the heap, he saw why the two were so tangled up. The drawstring of the waterproof bag tied to Bennie’s ankle had somehow also wound itself around Arena’s leg, cutting deeply into the putrefying flesh.

Even if the search party hadn’t found Bennie’s knapsack propped up against the stone well formation, having read the Epp manuscript, Pender would have been able to guess how Bennie had begun his journey. And soon the coroner would be able to tell them how it had ended, whether Bennie had drowned in fresh water, suffocated, fallen to his death, or drowned in salt water.

But what had happened along the way, between the beginning and the end of the journey, whether Bennie got himself tangled up with the corpse before or after he died, for instance—would probably never be known.

Still, Pender was immensely curious to learn what was in the stuff bag. I’ll just take a little peek, he promised the law enforcement gods. He knew better than to disturb a crime scene, of course—but at the moment, it was still his crime scene. So what harm could a little peek do?

Answer: none.

And what was the first rule he’d learned in the real world after leaving the FBI Academy thirty years ago?

Answer: better to ask forgiveness than permission. He opened the bag, tilted it toward the light, peered inside, and took a quick inventory: one fat paperback book with the covers torn off, three plastic freezer bags stuffed with hundred-dollar bills, one bag containing two severed human hands, and four more bags filled with bones.

Dawson began to worry when Pender hadn’t returned after fifteen or twenty minutes. He’d had two dizzy spells since being released from the hospital the previous morning and laughed them off. But a dizzy spell on those rocks would be no laughing matter. She gave Holly her mask and snorkel, waded ashore, pulled on her tank suit, and began picking her way along the rocky path at the base of the cliffs, barefooted, surefooted, calling Pender’s name and growing more and more alarmed, until suddenly there he was, looming in front of her, blocking the path.

“What is it?” he asked brusquely. Under the ludicrous beachcomber’s hat his face was reddened either with sunburn or exertion, and he seemed to be hiding something behind his back.

“Nuh-nothing.” He’d never snapped at her like that before. “I was afraid you’d had another dizzy spell—I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Fine, I’m fine.” He must have seen how he’d startled her—he softened his voice and pasted on a grimace that was meant to be a smile. “I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to be…Listen—there are two more bodies back there. I’m pretty sure one of them is Arena, and the other is definitely Bennie. I want you to go back to the Core with Holly and the kids—they don’t need to get mixed up in this.”

“I’ll tell them, then I’ll come back to—”

“You of all people don’t need to get mixed up in it either,” he said pointedly, stooping to her eye level and peering at her from under the ragged straw of his hat brim. “Please, trust me on this?”

Trust a cop, thought Dawson. For someone who’d been a fugitive for thirty years, it was quite a concept.

Forty-five minutes after finding the bodies, Pender called the Chief from his cruiser.

Coffee was furious. It wasn’t that anybody thought Bennie had a chance of getting out of the cave complex alive. Julian had seen the postmortem battering the first two corpses had been subjected to on their way from the Oubliette to the sea. And while they hadn’t found the outlet yet (and wouldn’t until one of their officers rappelled down the cliff on Friday) they knew it had to be pretty high up there—unless Bennie had somehow turned into Spider-Man, even if he’d survived the watery crawl, he would have been facing quite a fall.

But having read the Epp manuscript, Julian was all too aware of how lucky the department had been. If the Oubliette hadn’t communicated with the sea, they’d never have found the first two bodies, never have known they’d had a serial killer on their hands until…Well, until a lot more people had died.

And he didn’t even want to think about what might have happened if it hadn’t been for Pender’s hunch. That was the only good move Julian felt he’d made in the entire investigation—bringing Pender in—and now it was Pender who’d come up with the last remaining piece of the puzzle.

After dispatching Layla and her crime scene van, Julian hurried to his car. He met Henry Hamilton in the lobby, grabbed him by the lapels. “I thought I told you I wanted the cliffs checked out on a regular basis, until further notice.”

“I took cyare of it m’self, Chief,” replied Hamilton, in a wounded tone of voice. “Every day on my way home, I drive by dot way, look over de cliff. What could be more regular?”

“Henry, have I demoted you lately?”

“Not since last wintah, Chief.”

“Good. You’re busted down to uniform, me son—if you can find one to fit dot belly.”

Layla’s van was parked behind Pender’s cruiser. It was just past high tide; the rocks were still wet. Julian took off his shoes and socks, rolled his uniform trousers up to midcalf, and picked his way up the slippery path to the honeycombed ledge.

Layla was still photographing the scene. Julian, Pender, and two uniforms waited until she had finished before separating the bodies and untying the drawstring tied to Bennie’s ankle. Layla handed the bag to Pender. “You do the honors.”

The others gathered round. Pender donned a fresh pair of gloves, unzipped the bag, reached in, pulled out a coverless copy of
Moby-Dick,
and five plastic freezer bags, four of which contained loose bones, and the fifth, two severed hands. “That’s all there is, there ain’t no more,” he said. “Elvis has left the building.”

He handed the last bag to Julian, who held it out at arm’s length. “Think he made it across the bridge to the other side?” asked Julian, who besides Pender was the only one present to have read the Epp manuscript.

“I hope not,” said Pender. “I hope the son of a bitch is still falling.”