Twenty-Seven Bones Read online

  Holly wasn’t a large woman—five-four, 122 pounds, BMI (body mass index) of 21, smack in the middle of the healthy range. But having been a massage therapist for fifteen years, her arms and hands, especially her hands, were disproportionately strong. She thought seriously about cupping the little bald orphan’s two little round friends in her palm and squeezing. Instead, she walked out on her fee as well as her tip.

  No big deal, she told herself, it’s no big deal. But at the end of the long double row of stately royal palms that lined the driveway between the Blue Valley gate and the Blue Valley clubhouse, she had to pull the minibus over because her vision was blurred with angry tears.

  Nobody had ever treated her like a whore at Esalen, she told herself. But maybe that was because she’d never acted like one. She remembered how they’d laughed back in California at Bill Clinton’s contention that a blow job didn’t count as sexual relations. Yet here she was staking her self-respect on the proposition that a hand job was morally superior to a hummer.

  California. Esalen—what she wouldn’t give to have her old job and her old clientele back. And the bitch of the thing was, they’d have welcomed her back anytime she wanted. But that would mean either leaving the kids behind—unthinkable—or bringing them along with her. Dawn would be fine—with her intelligence and her exotic beauty, she’d thrive anywhere. But to uproot Marley—that would be cruel. Selfish and cruel.

  Besides, there was a difference between her and Bill, her and Monica, Holly reminded herself, wiping her eyes and wrestling Daisy into gear again. She traded happy endings for her children’s survival, not for thrills or power.

  And furthermore (Holly was still working up a head of steam as she rolled past the gatehouse; getting her Jewish up, her friend Dawson called it), anybody who didn’t think there was a difference between a hand job and a blow job ought to try cleaning their toilet with their tongue.

  6

  Pender stuffed his notes into his old briefcase as the room cleared, then turned his back on the auditorium to wipe off the white board beside the lectern, scrubbing away diligently at phrases like filter factor and floating-point strategies as if they were top secret code. Every year he returned to Quantico to give his lecture, and every year the class seemed to get younger, until by now even the experienced National Academy students looked like kids to him, while the kids, the blue-shirted FBI trainees, looked as if they should have been attending summer camp in the Catskills.

  Clap…Clap…Clap…Clap…

  Pender turned. The auditorium was empty save for a silver-haired black man standing in the back row, applauding slowly and deliberately. Pender stepped to the edge of the platform and shaded his eyes from the recessed lights overhead, his half glasses dangling from a ribbon around his neck. “Julian?”

  “Good afternoon, Edgar! Mahvelous lecture. Just caught the last few minutes.” Fastidious as ever in a shimmering, meticulously tailored two-piece gray suit, white shirt, red silk tie knotted in an impeccable Windsor, and black wing tips shined to a fare-thee-well, Julian Coffee strode down the aisle with his laminated photo-ID visitor’s pass dangling from a cord around his neck. Coffee was the only man in the last thirty years who’d been permitted to call Pender by his given name, and then only because his lilting West Indian accent made it sound almost musical: Ed-Gah, both syllables equally stressed.

  “Thanks.” Pender started to hop down from the platform, then thought better of it and took the steps. At six-four, 279, with a BMI of 34, nine points past healthy, four points past dangerously obese, Pender was well beyond hopping weight.

  The men shook hands, embraced, and clapped each other’s shoulders.

  “Did you get it?” asked Pender. He’d last seen Coffee two months earlier—as the chief of police on the island of St. Luke, a U.S. territory in the eastern Caribbean, Pender’s old friend had come to Washington seeking a federal law enforcement grant for his department.

  By way of answer, Coffee stepped back and assumed the classic staged handshake pose, right arm stretched across his body, left arm thrown around an imaginary shoulder, teeth bared in a frozen grin.

  “They made you come all this way for a photo op?”

  “I’m afraid the attorney general insisted.”

  “How long are you in town for?”

  “Flying back in a few hours. I’m glad I was able to catch you—are you free for a drink?”

  “A drink? I’m free for the rest of my life—I’m retired.”

  “And how is that going for you?”

  “When I retired, all I could think about was that I could play as much golf as I wanted to. Within six months, I had.”

  “How about the book—how did that do?” Pender’s ghostwritten autobiography had been published three months earlier. A warts-and-all undertaking, it detailed the checkered career of the man once known as the worst-dressed agent in the history of the FBI, from his early years as a field agent in Arkansas and New York, through the glory years hunting serial killers for the prestigious Liaison Support Unit, and the dark years, when drinking and philandering had cost him his marriage and very nearly his job, to his final, improbable incarnation as the hero agent who’d personally taken down two of the most vicious serial killers of recent times.

  “To quote my editor: ‘The Bundys and Dahmers of the world live on in the public’s memory, but the guy who cracked the case is forgotten by the next full moon.’ The good news is, I get to keep the advance.”

  “Assuming then that you have nothing else of importance on your plate,” said Coffee, “what would you say to an all-expense-paid vacation in the beautiful Caribbean, in exchange for your services for a few weeks?”

  “I’d probably say, ‘Helloooo, all-expense-paid vacation in the beautiful Caribbean!’ ” Pender replied. “But what do you need an old fart like me for?”

  “We have a live one.”

  “A serial killer, you mean?”

  “Three victims so far.”

  “The question remains: why me?”

  “One, you’re the man when it comes to serial killers. Two, you’re available. Three, you can keep your mouth shut—if word of this gets out, it’s going to be another body blow to our tourist industry, which frankly can’t take many more shots and survive. And four, who else am I going to find who’ll work for free?”

  “You could have stopped at ‘you’re the man,’ ” said Pender.

  “The only good thing about airports is that there’s a bar every ninety feet or so. Salud.” Pender, bald and homely as a boiled potato, wearing a baby blue Pebble Beach golf cap and a green plaid sport jacket over plum-colored polyester Sansabelt slacks, raised his glass just high enough to qualify as a toast before bringing it to his lips. Experienced drinkers are like veteran baseball pitchers—they try to avoid unnecessary arm movements.

  Julian Coffee, on the stool next to him, returned the gesture, sipped at his bar Scotch, and winced at the taste. “On St. Luke, me son, there’s a bar on every street corner, and liquor is duty-free: a man can drink single malt for less than this swill costs.”

  “Great,” said Pender. “Cheap booze and an island of alcoholics—just what I need.”

  “Actually, by our definition there are very few alcoholics on St. Luke.”

  “What’s your definition?”

  “Someone under the age of sixty who ends up facedown in the gutter more than twice a week.”

  “Why under sixty?”

  “We’re brought up to respect our elders.”

  That fetched a chuckle. One of the things Pender liked best about Coffee (or about anybody, for that matter) was his sense of humor. And Julian had certainly needed one when Pender first met him back in the early seventies. The Bureau, not without a sense of humor of its own, had assigned Coffee, raised on an island where over 90 percent of the population were people of color and where racial prejudice, at least of the overt Dixie variety, was largely unknown, to its Little Rock field office.

  Pender looked down
at his glass, which had somehow emptied itself, and signaled to the bartender for a refill. Chuckle time was over. “So what can you tell me about our serial killer?”

  “Not much. If it hadn’t been for the hurricane last week, we wouldn’t even know he was out there.”

  “Yeah, I saw that on the news,” said Pender. “You got hit pretty hard, huh?”

  “We’ve had worse. But the storm tide washed up two bodies, one male, one female, both in bad shape, both unidentified as yet. Yet according to the coroner, even though they washed up together, one corpse was between six months and a year older than the other—I mean time of death, not age. We’ve managed to keep both bodies under wraps so far, but—”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “One of Ziggy’s brothers owns the only newspaper on the island.”

  “You really think you can continue to keep something like this quiet?”

  “So far, so good.” Julian rapped the bar top for luck. “Now as I was saying, the two vics died months apart…”

  “But the bodies were found together.”

  “On top of each other.”

  “Well, that’s something in common.”

  “That’s not all. When I said the victims had nothing in common, I meant when they were alive. The bodies—”

  “What?” said Pender eagerly.

  “I ga’ tell ya, buoy, doan be hasty so.” Coffee could no more keep from breaking into dialect every so often than a bird could keep from breaking into song. “The two that washed up last week were victims two and three. Vic number one, Hettie Jenkuns, aged twelve, disappeared in broad daylight on her way home from school four years ago. Two years ago a mushroom hunter saw her femur sticking up out of the ground—somebody’d buried her in a shallow grave in the old slave burying ground in the forest.

  “After two years there wasn’t much left other than the skeleton, but that was intact, except for the right hand, which was missing. As were the right hands of both the corpses that washed up last week. Chopped clean off at the wrist—probably by a machete. Which is what my people have started calling him, by the way—the Machete Man.”

  “Catchy,” said Pender.

  “An old St. Luke bogeyman. ‘Machete Mon a get ya if ya doan watch out.’ ” Coffee glanced at his watch and tossed back the last of the nasty Scotch. “Listen, Edgar, I’d better get in line for the security screening. Do you want to make your own arrangements for flying down, or should I have my travel agents call you?”

  “Are they any good?”

  “No, but one of Ziggy’s cousins owns the business, and if it fails, she’ll make me put him on the force.”

  7

  I’m ready to hear the long version now, thought Andy Arena, salvaging one last scrap of humor from the wreckage of his life. His old life, that is, his life outside this cave—it already seemed so distant it might as well have been a dream.

  If so, he’d gone from a dream to a nightmare. Emily Epp’s kiss had been unexpected enough, but finding himself halfway down the tunnel leading to the cave only seconds later, with tingling lips and absolutely no memory of having begun the crawl, had been downright disconcerting.

  Then there was the cave itself. Andy had kicked around the Caribbean for fifteen years prior to washing up on St. Luke’s indolent shores, and had seen many of the great limestone caverns of the West Indies—Harrison’s Cave on Barbados, Bermuda’s Crystal Cave, the Peace Cave in Jamaica. This one seemed like it might rank right up there with its more celebrated cousins, if not for size, then for beauty and eeriness.

  The first chamber had a sandy floor, black walls that reflected the light from the helmet lamps, and a ceiling covered with short, in-curved dragon’s-tooth stalactites that looked sharp enough to tear flesh from bone. With Bennie bringing up the rear, Andy had followed the Epps down a winding passageway to the second chamber, where they’d had to pick their way around conical stalagmites jutting from the cave floor like giant purple traffic cones.

  Another passageway, same low height but not quite as wide or long, led to the third chamber, one of the brightest, but somehow also one of the eeriest caves Andy’d ever seen. Not only were its floor, walls, and ceiling made of pure dolomite, a magnesium-rich limestone as white as a wedding cake, but once the Epps had set up mirror-amplified, superwhite LED lanterns, shadows were effectively wiped out, and the enveloping whiteness leached the vitality from even the brightest colors. It was like living in the perpetual glare of a photographer’s flash.

  The floor of this third chamber had been partly covered with rattan mats, which had seemed odd to Andy. The kiss, the cave, the lights, the mats: things were getting a little weird around the edges, he remembered thinking. But then, the edges were where the action was.

  “So where do we start digging?” he’d asked, switching off his superfluous miner’s lamp.

  “We don’t,” Phil Epp had replied, pulling a pistol out from under his safari jacket—a serious-looking .38 or .40 caliber semiautomatic, judging by the slide and the size of the hole in the barrel.

  “What the fuck is going on?”

  “You want the short version or the long version?”

  “Start with the short version.”

  “There’s no treasure. Take your clothes off.”

  At first he thought it was a joke. After Emily, too, had stripped off her clothes (the temperature in the cave was an ambient seventy-four degrees, day or night), knelt in front of him, taken his flaccid member in her wide mouth, and brought him to attention, he decided it was some sort of sex game. With gazongas like that, he’d thought, she didn’t need the goddamn gun. But then Phil, to Andy’s growing horror, had handed the pistol to Bennie and stripped off his own clothes.

  For the next several hours Andy had been abused in ways he’d never imagined, at least in relation to his own body, then abandoned, left to lie in the darkness for several more hours, gagged, with his hands and feet bound. Upon the return of his tormentors, he had been abused again, with renewed vigor, by both Epps. Bennie had continued to hold the gun, but had neither undressed nor shown much interest in the proceedings.

  When he made his little private joke about being ready to hear the long version, Andy understood that they did not mean for him to leave this cave alive. Up to a certain point, he had been able to argue that they didn’t have to be afraid of him turning them in for kidnap and rape if they let him go. “Jesus H. Christ, who am I going to tell? You think I want anybody hearing about this?”

  Now, though, that argument was no longer salable. In the intense heat of their sadomasochistic tango, a fierce bonding had occurred. The three of them could read each other’s eyes as well as each other’s bodies by then, and the Epps had to have known as well as Andy that it was no longer a question of his merely turning them in if they set him free. He wanted them dead, vanished from the planet along with the memory of what they had done to him, and would gladly have killed them himself, with his bare hands, if given the chance.

  But the chance never came. Instead, Phil Epp took Andy’s shoulders and Bennie took his feet, and with Emily leading the way holding a kerosene-soaked torch, carried him down another passageway, higher and narrower than the others, and into a fourth chamber, smaller than the rest, with a wooden cross made of heavy timbers fitted together and laid out horizontally on the smooth limestone floor.

  “Is there going to be much pain?” Andy asked as they laid him down upon the cross.

  “Not much,” replied Phil, moving briefly out of Andy’s line of sight and reappearing above his head. “Hold still.” And with that wide leather belt that Andy had come to know so well over the last however-long-it-had-been, Phil strapped Andy’s head to the top of the long axis.

  “Please,” said Andy.

  “Please what?” Emily, who with Bennie’s help was in the process of strapping Andy’s outstretched arms to the crosspieces with nylon rope, sounded more surprised than annoyed, as if once he’d been strapped down, she’d forgotten
Andy could still speak.

  “Please…don’t?”

  Which was obviously not worthy of a reply. Andy closed his eyes as Emily and Bennie tied his ankles. When he opened them again, Emily’s face was floating above him, just off to his left, while Phil stood at his feet, holding the torch in one hand and a Polaroid camera in the other. Bennie was over to Andy’s right, wearing a gilt-threaded sarung around his waist and holding a machete.

  All that was left to Andy by then were a few stray thoughts and a few physical sensations that would not have time to become sense memories. He heard the other three chanting in a language he did not recognize, saw the flare of the torchlight reflected like a silver sun in the blade of the machete as Bennie raised it high, then brought it down hard on his wrist. He felt a cold dull blow, and then, as the blood began to spurt and the pain pulsed up through his arm to the very center of his being, Emily’s face floated sideways over Andy’s. Her mouth with its chipped front tooth was astonishingly wide-open, like one of those throw the beanbag through the clown’s mouth cutouts. It came closer and closer and closer until it filled Andy’s world.

  Don’t go down there, Andy thought again, as she pinched his nostrils closed and covered his mouth with hers.

  8

  Holly had rules. She didn’t drive stoned, she didn’t work stoned, and she didn’t get stoned around the kids, which meant that it wasn’t until nearly ten o’clock that night that she finally got a chance to sample her new purchase. She rolled the world’s thinnest joint in her room and took it outside to smoke.

  It was a quiet night. There was no moon, but the stars were bright enough to read by. The temperature was perfect—if there’d been an outdoor thermostat, this was where she’d have set it—and the air smelled of the rain forest. It was a scent that was hard to describe and even harder to forget, all undertones, sweet and earthy, ripe and rotten, a rose garden planted over a shallow grave. Most of the cabins and Quonsets dotting the cleared hillside were dark, but Holly could see Peeping Fran, her nearest uphill neighbor, lying on a chaise longue on the screened-in veranda behind his cabin, writing by the blue-white light of a Coleman lantern. He looked up and waved; she held up the joint by way of invitation; Fran shook his head.