Twenty-Seven Bones elp-3

by Jonathan Nasaw

  Two years ago, when Holly took on the role of single mother, she’d felt so utterly unprepared that she’d decided there was no point even trying to bluff her way through it. So when she realized she’d blown a call, deciding arbitrarily to enforce bedtime by the clock instead of the sun, for instance, or insisting upon helping Marley perform some everyday task instead of letting him do it himself, regardless of how long it took or how uncomfortable it was to watch, she had no problem apologizing, declaring a BPM-Bad Parenting Move-and reversing her own ruling.

  “Unh-unh.” Dawn shook her head doubtfully.

  “Unh-hunh,” said Holly. “When something scares you or makes you sad, it’s always better to talk about it instead of keeping it bottled up-even when you’re a grown-up.”

  “You go first, then.” Dawn rolled over to face Holly. Her eyes were startlingly bright and blue, and her skin was the color of medium toast, just a shade darker than her tawny hair in its tight cornrows. Plaiting West Indian style was another skill Holly had had to learn on the job. A shaneh yid, Holly’s late rabbi grandfather would have said of his little brown great-granddaughter-he’d have been speaking ironically, of course.

  “Okay.” Holly took a deep breath, blew it out slowly, to demonstrate to her niece that this wasn’t easy for her, either. “I was working at Blue Valley, and one of my clients said something very nasty to me and really hurt my feelings.”

  “Did you tell him sticks and stones?”

  Holly laughed-if you didn’t find that kids had as much to teach you as you had to teach them, you just weren’t paying attention. “No, but I should have. I should have told myself, too. Instead I ran away. Your turn, now.”

  “I was thinking about something bad that could happen.”

  “What’s that, baby doll?”

  “I was thinking what if you, well, you know.”

  “Not really.”

  “What if you…you know, like Mommy.”

  “What if I died, you mean?”

  Dawn covered her ears; her hands are still so tiny, thought Holly. “Don’t say that, Auntie.” Doan say dot, Ahntie-what her grandfather would have made of the West Indian accents the kids slipped in and out of so easily, Holly couldn’t begin to imagine.

  Her first instinct was to explain that death was nothing to fear, that it was just part of life, but that would have been another BPM. It wasn’t death the child feared, it was abandonment. “Tell you what, baby doll. I give you my solemn promise, I’ll live to dance at your wedding.”

  “That means if I don’t ever get married, you have to live forever,” said Dawn.

  “Very funny,” said Holly. “Now go to sleep.”

  9

  The torchlight flickered, sending oily black smoke drifting across the cavern ceiling. Emily Epp staggered away from the lifeless body on the horizontal cross. Her knees buckled; her eyes were rolled up into her head, only the whites showing. Phil caught her, steadied her; he and Bennie helped her back to the chamber they called the white room.

  All three wore ceremonial gilt-threaded sarungs; all three were bare to the waist. Emily fell heavily to her knees on the nearest rattan mat. As Phil and Bennie helped her lie down, the men’s eyes met across her body. Phil rolled his briefly toward the corner of the ceiling-what a drama queen, said the look. Bennie’s creased face was impassive as always. You could read anything you wanted into it. Phil read affectionate agreement.

  “You going to be okay, Em?” he asked his wife.

  “I just need some time to integrate,” she said weakly, but it did not escape Phil’s notice that as she lay back and crossed her hands over her belly, she did not fail to press her elbows and arms against her sides to push her bazooms together. Vanity, thy name is woman, thought Phil.

  But Emily’s men had work to do. Leaving Emily to her integration, they returned to the cavern they called the cross chamber and unstrapped the body. Phil, the stronger of the two men, took the shoulders. Bennie, more agile, took the feet and led the way, walking backward. Phil used the beam from his helmet lamp to guide them down a sort of natural winding staircase carved into the limestone by an underground stream that no longer existed.

  After thirty or forty feet, the path forked. To the left was the stinking chamber they called the Bat Cave, for obvious reasons. The bats were the size of large crows; the males had testicles like Ping-Pong balls. Phil guided Bennie to the right, through an archway to the Oubliette, which appeared to be a hollowed-out lava chute, an upcropping of the hundred-million-year-old volcanic bedrock upon which the limestone caprock had gradually accrued over the past two million years.

  In a way, the Oubliette was the reason the Epps were conducting their rites belowground in the first place. When they first settled on St. Luke, several years earlier, they’d conducted the sacrifices at home and buried the bodies in the rain forest.

  But when that little Jenkuns girl surfaced two years ago under a baobab tree-a Judas Bag tree, the natives called it-in the old slave burying ground, they realized they had to find a more secure place to dispose of the bodies. While searching the forest for a suitable location, they had discovered the cave complex mentioned by the early Spaniards.

  The entrance had been plugged by a boulder, but removing it had been an easy task for Phil and Bennie, and it had taken them only two days of unchallenging caving to find the apparently bottomless dry well formation they named the Oubliette. From that day forward, they’d never had to worry about where to dump bodies again.

  Together Phil and Bennie laid their burden on the ledge, perpendicular to the edge of the hole. Bennie chanted a Niassian prayer that translated roughly as: Let he who travels the sea return within a cycle of the moon; let he who travels to the grave be seen no more on earth. Then they dropped the body feetfirst down the hole. A few seconds later there was a splash-the men turned to each other in surprise, each momentarily blinding the other with his helmet lamp. Apparently the bottomless dry well wasn’t bottomless after all-or dry.

  “Must have been this last hurricane,” said Phil, blinking. “Groundwater seepage or something.”

  Bennie shrugged. Dry grave, watery grave, all the same to him, so long as the traveler never returned.

  Chapter Two

  1

  Sometimes Pender only knew what he was feeling by the song lyrics running through his mind-he had more songs stored in there than Napster in its heyday.

  The first one he found himself humming, as he tossed his empty suitcase on the bed to begin packing early Tuesday morning, was an old country favorite, “You Don’t Miss Your Water (’Til Your Well Runs Dry”), which segued into Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” with its lyric about not knowing what you got ’til it’s gone.

  But the well had somehow miraculously refilled itself. Pender had work to do, a serial killer to catch. And while his professional discipline wouldn’t allow him to think of it as fun, there had been a good deal of truth in what he’d told Julian about golf and retirement. The sport had been a marvelous hobby, had given Pender something to look forward to on the weekends, something to take his mind off the endless progression of monsters and serial killers it had been his duty, his burden, and his honor to remove from the general population.

  But when you’ve spent your entire adult life performing a job that fulfilling and important, and then it’s taken away from you because of something as arbitrary as your age, after a surprisingly short number of go-rounds on the old links, you realize with a sinking heart, standing there on the first tee, that it just doesn’t matter to you anymore whether the fucking ball goes fucking left or fucking right.

  And the next thing Pender knew, he was fifty pounds over-weight, cracking a new bottle of Jim Beam every few days instead of once a week. Although he was not yet so far gone that he was seriously considering eating his Glock, he did find himself thinking a good deal less harshly of the retired agents he’d known who’d done just that.

  None of those were good signs, Pender realized, tak
ing his white Panama out of the closet to wear on the plane. It was the one he’d purchased in Carmel with a woman named Dorie Bell, whom he’d rescued from the clutches of a man known as the Phobia Killer two years earlier.

  That romance was already deader than Kelsy’s balls, Pender reminded himself with a sigh. Although he’d known going into it that white knight/damsel-in-distress relationships rarely lasted, the end of the affair had shaken him up. He hadn’t dated anyone else, much less got laid since the breakup-those eighteen months were the longest period of celibacy in Pender’s adult life, not counting the last few years of his marriage.

  But that might change, too. Wasn’t the Caribbean where everybody went to find romance?

  As Pender began rummaging through his closet looking for the Hawaiian shirts he’d also bought in Carmel, with Dorie, the phone rang. It was Julian Coffee, notifying him of a slight change of plans-a stopover in Miami.

  “My criminalist, who also happens to be my eldest daughter Layla, lifted and restored prints from the left hand of the male vic,” said Julian. “She ran them through AFIS yesterday, spent all night winnowing down the possibles, and came up with a twelve-point match with one William Wanger, Miami, Florida. No criminal record, but his military prints were on file. I know how you feel about interviewing at the source, so we got the address for you-I thought you might want to drop by and have a word with Mrs. Wanger.”

  “Does she know yet?” asked Pender, after jotting down the address and the new flight information.

  “I can’t see how-she filed a Missing Persons with the Miami PD a couple weeks ago, but we haven’t notified them yet.”

  “I have to tell you, Julian-I’m not exactly crazy about the idea of being the one who has to tell a woman that she’s now a widow.”

  “You’re right, Edgar-I should probably find someone who’d really, really enjoy it.”

  “I don’t mean-”

  “See you late this afternoon, then. And don’t forget to bring plenty of sunblock-our nude beaches are world famous.”

  “Nice change of subject there, Julian.”

  “Thank you, Edgar-we do what we can.”

  2

  “How was that, Miss Brown? Are you feeling better?”

  “Heavenly.” The toothless ancient glanced over her shoulder at Holly, who had just finished deep-massaging her withered glutes, and gave her a blue-black, gummy grin. “Gyirl, nobody ain’ touch me like dot in go’ on forty year, y’know?”

  Holly’s Tuesday/Thursday morning gigs at the Governors Clifford B. Apgard Rest Home were simultaneously her most rewarding and her least remunerative. It would take her three hours of hard work to earn what she could make in a single hour elsewhere, but the head nurse had told Holly privately that the incidence of decubitus ulcers, commonly known as bedsores, had decreased 25 percent since Holly had begun working there.

  Some of the improvement, of course, was the direct result of therapeutic massage bringing increased blood flow and muscle tone, but the most important benefits, Holly suspected, were indirect. When your body feels better, you move around more; when you move around more, you get fewer bedsores.

  After the rest home, Holly drove by Busy Hands, located in a sprawling single-story cinder-block building situated directly across the Circle Road from the Sunset Bar, to pick up her messages and maybe a little work-after paying her rent, she’d be closer to broke than she had been all year.

  The front room, which looked more like the waiting room of a seedy transmission repair shop, was empty. Mrs. Ishigawa was at her desk in the front office, behind the counter, cooking the books for lunch.

  “I just dropped by to see if there are any extra shifts available this week.”

  “Nope.” As always, Mrs. Ishigawa looked like the world’s oldest geisha, dressed in kimono, obi, split-toed ankle socks, and split-toed sandals, with a chopstick through her upswept, improbably black hair. As always, she was holding a lit cigarette between the ring and pinky fingers of her left hand. “But you got two terephone corrs, one woman, one man,” added the old woman, in her mincing, West Indian-flavored Japanese accent. “Man was Apgard-I terr him, shoot, mon, you run terephone rine up to Core, you cheap bassard, you don’t gotta bodda me ev’y five second.”

  “And the woman?”

  “I don’ ’membah name. You check burretin board.” Mrs. Ishigawa waved her cigarette in the direction of the corkboard next to the pay phone on the cinder-block wall behind her.

  The woman turned out to be Emily Epp, half of a nice couple who’d been among Holly’s earliest non-Busy Hands clientele. Holly called her back first, set up an appointment, then returned her landlord’s call.

  “Apgard here.”

  “Mr. Apgard, it’s Holly Gold.”

  “Miss Holly! Good to hear from you, thanks for calling me back. I find myself in desperate need of your services. What’s your schedule like this afternoon?”

  “Conveniently enough, I just made an appointment with your tenants at the overseer’s house. I should be done around two.”

  “How about two-thirty at the Great House, then? We’ll set up your table by the pool. Be a lot more comfortable, and you can take a dip afterward.”

  Holly thought about it for a moment. She’d never been out to the Great House before-she rarely paid home visits to single male “happy ending” clients like Apgard. But the Great House was supposed to be quite a place-not to mention she’d get to keep everything she made instead of turning half of it over to Mrs. Ishigawa. “Two o’clock it is.”

  “I’ll be looking forward to seeing you,” said Apgard warmly.

  There was something in his tone of voice that Holly found faintly disturbing-it set off what she thought of as her uh-oh alarm. She would have called him back to reschedule at the Busy Hands, house cut or no house cut, but she couldn’t think of an excuse. The man was her landlord: piss him off, and she and the kids might end up living under a green plastic roof in Sugar Town.

  3

  Some wit had once described Washington, DC, as a city of northern charm and southern efficiency. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, thought Pender, this was largely true of Miami as well.

  The taxi dropped him off at a whitewashed bungalow in a neighborhood that looked as if it had seen better days. As have I, Pender mused as he shambled up the walkway in his garish Hawaiian shirt and gaudy white Panama-as have I.

  The woman who answered the door looked to be in her mid-sixties, but lean and tan, dried as jerky. The vee of skin at her neck was creped, but her face was eerily unlined and immobile. Botox, thought Pender, and plenty of it.

  “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Wanger?”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Ed Pender, I’m with the FBI, I need to ask you a few questions about the missing persons report you filed recently with the Miami PD. May I come in?”

  She looked up-and up; she was a tiny thing. “Do you have some identification?”

  Pender still carried his old Department of Justice shield in his wallet, next to his driver’s license. Couldn’t hurt, he figured, and it might even save him a speeding ticket someday. He tinned her; she stepped aside and ushered him into a tiny, foyerless, and blessedly air-conditioned living room.

  “Can I offer you something to drink?” she asked him. “How about a nice cold glass of lemonade?”

  “Sounds great.”

  Alone in the living room, Pender took the opportunity to look around. Spotless white carpet, two small sofas facing each other across a driftwood coffee table. The armchair at the head of the grouping almost certainly belonged to the master of the house, whose picture-broad-faced man in a white cowboy hat-was featured prominently on the mantel and the coffee table.

  When Mrs. Wanger returned, Pender was still standing. “After you,” he said, as if he were the type of gentleman who could never sit in the presence of a standing lady. Not true-he just needed to see where she was going to light first, so he could set up his interview spa
ce accordingly. As he could have predicted, she sat on one of the sofas; he took the armchair so as to be at the optimum interviewing angle of forty-five degrees.

  Pender balanced his hat on the arm of the chair and took a sip of his lemonade, which looked delicious-tall, frosty glass, sprig of mint-but tasted like heavily sweetened fusel oil. Some powdered mix: no doubt the only lemon involved in the manufacture of this beverage was the painted one on the label. He smacked his lips and forced a smile. “Just like Grandma used to make,” he said.

  “How very awful for Grandpa,” she replied drily.

  Sharper than she looks, thought Pender. “I guess my first question is, do you have any idea where your husband might have gone?”

  “As I told the officer who took the missing persons report, treasure hunting is Tex’s hobby. Since he retired, it’s become more like an obsession. This trip was different, though. He was very secretive about the destination-said he was sworn to secrecy. Wouldn’t even give me a hint-just said he’d be back in three weeks at the latest.”

  “This was when?”

  He started to put his glass down on the coffee table; she quickly slid a coaster under it. “Six weeks ago-middle of August.”

  “Did he tell you anything at all about the expedition-whom he was meeting, how they contacted him or vice versa?”

  “I told you, he said he was sworn to secrecy. I think he enjoyed that part of it-Tex is such a romantic.”

  “Take a guess for me, then: how would you say your husband might have hooked up with whoever it was he was going to be treasure hunting with?”

  She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “Probably one of his Soldier of Fortune magazines.”