Island of Bones

by P J Parrish

  “You knew?” Louis asked.

  “I had a suspicion so I started watching and realized he was missing stuff he shouldn’t,” Horton said. “This is a cop who had great instincts, who could find evidence fibers on a gnat’s ass.” Horton let out a sigh. “I don’t know what happened.”

  “There’s rumors he’s an alcoholic.”

  “He’s been off the sauce for years.”

  “I saw him take a drink at O’Sullivan’s.”

  Horton looked back at Louis. “Shit,” he said softly. “I don’t suppose it matters much now. This case is about done.”

  “Done?” Louis asked.

  Horton nodded. “Woods is our killer. Not being able to prove it doesn’t change anything. I wish we had more than that ring to link Woods to Shelly Umber, but we don’t. And I don’t have the manpower or money to keep looking. We’ll just have to call it closed with what we got.”

  Louis looked over toward Landeta and Frank Woods’s body. “I think I’ll stay with this awhile longer,” he said.

  Horton squinted at Louis, the sun in his face. “Louis, this case hasn’t been one of your best pieces of work. You’re not looking just to redeem yourself, are you?”

  Louis glanced out at the water. “I just want to be sure.”

  Horton nodded. “Well, I can’t stop you, but do me a favor. Work with Mel. I don’t want him fumbling around for weeks trying to close this thing down.”

  Louis gave him a look of disgust.

  Horton leaned close. “Look, Louis, you’re a PI. Most PI’s don’t even get within smelling distance of a homicide, let alone allowed access to the things I’ve given you. I do it because I like and respect you. But don’t think I don’t take shit for it among my own.”

  Louis was silent.

  “I can’t force you to do anything,” Horton said. “But I’m asking.”

  “Then what?” Louis asked.

  Horton let out a big breath. “Then I think Mel is going to have to resign.”

  Horton heard Landeta coming up behind him and he threw Louis a pleading look. Landeta stopped near them, pulled out a handkerchief, and wiped his head. “It looks like Woods but no beard,” he said.

  “He shaved it,” Louis said. “And he was wearing that red shirt at the restaurant.”

  Landeta stared at Louis, as if he had just noticed he was there. Then he turned his back on Louis to face Horton.

  “We’ll need an ID,” Landeta said, taking off his glasses to clean them. “I’ll call his daughter and get her in —-”

  “No,” Horton interrupted. “Let Louis do that.”

  Landeta’s hands froze and he lifted his gaze to Horton. His eyes looked bugged, glassy, and red. Louis wondered if he had been drinking again.

  Horton waited for a reply and Landeta finally replaced his glasses, his neck twitching. “Yes, sir.”

  “I want this whole thing wrapped up real quick, Mel,” Horton said. “I’d like something stronger between Woods and Shelly Umber, but if we don’t get it, we wrap it up by the end of the month.”

  Landeta inhaled slowly, his eyes focused hard on Horton’s face. “What about the other women?”

  “There’s no evidence Frank Woods had anything to do with them except cutting their pictures out of a newspaper,” Horton said. “Just concentrate on Umber.”

  “What about him?” Landeta asked nodding toward Louis.

  Horton glanced between Louis and Landeta. “Nothing’s changed in spite of your comments on TV yesterday. Work with him, Mel. That’s an order.”

  Landeta watched Horton move into the crowd then looked out at the bay. He said nothing but there was an emptiness in his gaze, a slight slump to the shoulders. Louis wondered if Landeta knew about the talk behind his back. He wondered if Landeta knew how close he was to not being a cop anymore.

  He remembered suddenly what Landeta had said back in his office that day he had come in to pick up the baby skull.

  So how long did it take before you didn't miss it anymore? And his thought at the time: Try a lifetime.

  Louis drew in a breath. “Look,” he said “if it makes you feel any better, I agree with you on the other women. If you want —-”

  Landeta’s head jerked back to Louis. “You think I need your shit-ass opinion to make me feel better?”

  Louis tightened. “I only meant I understand how you must feel, with the chief shutting you down like that, that’s all.”

  “You don’t understand shit.”

  “Okay. You’re right,” Louis said. “I don’t understand you or him. But how can you not pursue the other women? Or maybe you’re just not seeing the connection. Is that it?”

  “I see more than you think,” Landeta said “I see a hot- shot private eye who doesn’t have the guts to even try to put on a badge again.”

  Louis leaned into him. “And I see a burn-out playing it easy just to keep his job.”

  Landeta curled a fist, his body rigid. “You sonofabitch.”

  Louis stared at him for a second, then stepped back. “I’m out of here,” Louis said, turning away.

  “Where you going?” Landeta called out.

  “To the morgue with Woods,” Louis shot back over his shoulder.

  “Make sure he doesn’t get away from you this time,” Landeta yelled.

  CHAPTER 29

  “He couldn’t swim.”

  Vince Carissimi looked up at Louis but then the medical examiner just shrugged and went back to weighing Frank Woods’s heart. Louis was staring at Frank’s body lying on the stainless steel table.

  “Louis, he committed suicide. He wanted to die,” Vince said. “You didn’t kill him, for crissake.”

  “I didn’t save him either.” Louis shook his head slowly. “How in hell does a person drown himself?”

  “Easy,” Vince said. “You just take a deep breath and give up. It’s more common than you think. People drown themselves all the time —- bathtubs, lakes, pools. Hart Crane jumped off a steamship. Virginia Woolf walked into a river. Tchaikovsky, Ophelia, Jerry Baskin.”

  “Who’s Jerry Baskin?”

  “The bum in that movie ‘Down and Out in Beverly Hills.’ Tried to off himself in Richard Dreyfuss’s pool.”

  “This isn’t funny, Vince.”

  “It rarely is. Nemo ante mortem beatus.”

  Louis just stared at him, waiting.

  “Nobody is happy before his death,” Vince translated. He put his earphones back on and returned to his work. Louis was close enough to Vince to hear Janis Joplin singing “Summertime.” He moved away, going up to stand at the head of the table.

  It struck him again how different Frank looked from the first time he had seen him in the library. Then, with his salt- and-pepper beard, bad haircut, pale skin, and stooped posture, Frank Woods had looked every inch the hermit bookworm he had been. But the three weeks he had spent as a murder suspect and then a hunted man had changed him. His hair was longer, his skin made leathery by the sun. His body looked almost sinewy, and even in death his face wore an odd expression of what -—puzzlement? Confusion over what had happened to his life?

  Why had he done it? Guilt over killing those women? Fear of facing his daughter? Nobody is happy before his death. That was certainly true of Frank.

  Louis glanced down at Frank’s left hand, at his gold wedding band. For the life of him, he just couldn’t see this man killing six women. But why had he confessed?

  And those strange foreign words Frank had said in the restaurant. What was that all about?

  Shit, what had he said? Something about hicks loot... hicks looties?

  Louis was thinking about all the books in Frank’s house, all those language books, but he couldn’t recall seeing books on any one particular language. Linguistics, language origins, that kind of stuff.

  Hicks looty ... was it Latin?

  “Hey, Vince,” Louis called out.

  Vince’s head was bobbing rhythmically. Louis picked up a towel and tossed it across the table,
hitting Vince in the chest.

  Vince snatched off the earphones. “What?”

  “Vince, Frank Woods said something to me in a foreign language. It might have been Latin. What does this sound like to you —- hicks looty?”

  Vince grimaced. “You sure you heard him right?”

  “I don’t know, man. It sounded like hicks and then looty.” Louis paused. “No, it was lootio. And then es, like the letter S.”

  Vince repeated the phrase several times under his breath, then shook his head. "Lapsus linguae, Louis. You must have heard him wrong.”

  The sound of a door made Louis turn. It was Octavius, the diener.

  “Vince, the guy’s daughter is outside,” he said.

  “His daughter? What does she want?”

  “Says the cops told her to come over and identify her father.”

  “Identify him?” Vince said. “I thought they already did that.” He glanced at Louis. “Don’t tell me somebody screwed this up.”

  Louis glanced at the door. “I don’t know, Vince. I tried to call her at her school but they told me she wasn’t available. I don’t know who told her to come here.”

  “Damn it,” Vince said. He went over and glanced at a clipboard, holding his bloody-gloved hands aloft. “This says he has already been ID’d and released.”

  He came back to stand by the body. “If I had known this, I wouldn’t have cut him. How does this shit happen?”

  Louis didn’t respond. He wondered if Landeta had screwed up somehow. Or had he done an end-around and contacted Diane Woods after Horton had told him to let Louis handle it?

  “Octo, get him covered up,” Vince said, snapping off his gloves and tossing them in the trash. “I’ll go out and talk to her.”

  “Let me do it,” Louis said.

  “Why?”

  “I need to.”

  “Be my guest. Give me five and then you can bring her in.”

  Louis went out into the hallway. Diane was standing by the receptionist’s desk. She was dressed like she had just come from school. She was biting her nails. She stiffened when she saw him.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “Diane, I have to talk to you.”

  Her eyes went to the double doors. “Is he in there?”

  “Yes, but —-”

  She started to go by him and Louis caught her arm. “Wait, Diane.”

  She pulled away, glaring at him. “Stay away from me.”

  She hurried through the doors. Louis followed, catching up to her before she got to the autopsy room. He caught her by both arms and spun her away from the door’s window.

  “Diane, listen to me.”

  “Let go of me,” she said. It came out as a whimper and Louis realized she was shaking. She bowed her head, her body growing heavy in his hands. He backed her up and gently lowered her onto a bench. She covered her face with her hands.

  He thought she was going to cry, but when she lowered her hands, her face was dry, her eyes empty.

  “I can’t do it,” she said.

  “It’s all right,” Louis said. “He looks...asleep.”

  She didn’t seem to hear him. “You don’t know what it’s like,” she said quietly. “You don’t know what it’s like to get the calls from the parents, the school board. Or to go in there every day and hear them whispering, knowing they are talking about it, and then you walk into the lounge and they shut up.” She looked up at Louis. “My car, when I went out to the parking lot today, my car, there was red paint on the windshield. I think one of the kids...”

  Her voice trailed off and she shook her head. “I can’t do it. I just can’t...do...it.”

  Louis leaned back against the cold tile wall, looking down at Diane Woods. Any pity he had felt for her was fading fast. Her father —- her only living relative —- was lying in there dead and the only thing she could mourn was her own reputation.

  “They need an ID,” he said.

  She looked up at him and then the door. She rose, smoothed her hair and followed Louis into the autopsy room.

  She stopped when she saw the body, her eyes going up to Vince and then back to the table. Vince had taken off his bloodied apron and was standing at the top of the stainless steel table. A plastic sheet had been draped over the gaping Y-shaped incision in the chest. Louis was relieved to see that Frank Woods did, in fact, look asleep.

  Diane hadn’t moved. She was just standing there, maybe five feet away from the table, her eyes locked on Frank’s face.

  “Yes, it’s him,” she whispered. She looked at Vince. “Can I go now?”

  Vince came forward and held out his hand. “I thought you might want his wedding ring back,” he said.

  Diane looked down at the gold band and then took it from Vince. She looked at it blankly for a moment, putting it on the tip of her right ring finger, just above her mother’s wedding band. Then she slipped off Frank’s ring and balled it up in her fist. She turned quickly and pushed open the doors, almost running down the hallway.

  Louis followed, catching up with her in the lobby. She was fumbling in her purse. She pulled out her keys with shaking hands, dropping them and the wedding band. The ring rolled away on the tile. Louis bent to retrieve it.

  Diane had picked up her keys and was just standing there, a hand over her eyes. She took in several deep breaths and looked at Louis.

  “You dropped this,” he said, holding out the ring.

  She took it and put it in her purse. “Is there anything else?” she asked. “Do I have to sign something, do anything else?”

  Louis shook his head.

  “I guess I have to call a funeral home,” she said. It came out almost like a question.

  “Diane,” Louis began. “I’m not convinced your father killed anybody.”

  She just stared at him.

  “Maybe it’s just a feeling, I don’t know,” Louis went on. “But I’m going to try to keep this case open and find out who did kill those women.”

  Louis could tell from the look in her eyes that Diane Woods didn’t share his feeling. She had already accepted the fact that her father was a murderer and all she wanted to do was to bury him and find a way to live with his ghost.

  “Help me clear his name, Diane.”

  Her eyes flicked to the hallway. “The other day,” she said quietly, “when you came to my school and you said that thing, you know, about my father not having a past before I was born?”

  Louis waited. When she looked back at him there was something in her expression that he had never seen before. It was as if the principal, the professional woman, the careful daughter who drank her gin from crystal goblets suddenly didn’t have the faintest idea who she was.

  “You have something you want to tell me?” Louis asked.

  She hesitated. “I found my birth certificate,” she said. “There was no hospital listed. It said I was born at home.”

  “So?”

  “That’s strange, don’t you think? Like...primitive.”

  Louis didn’t tell her what he was thinking —- that he had been born at home. But home was a shack in Black Pool, Mississippi, something Diane surely would have no empathy for.

  “Lots of people are born at home,” he said. “Did your birth certificate list your mother’s name?”

  When she didn’t answer, Louis went on. “Look, Diane. If you know the name, give it to me. If I can track down something about your father’s past, maybe I can clear him.” He paused. “And you.”

  She pulled in a deep breath. “Sophie Reardon. I think she was from St. James City.”

  She quickly dug in her purse, pulled out sunglasses and put them on. “I have to get back to school,” she said tightly and started to the door.

  “Thanks,” Louis said.

  She didn’t answer him or look back as she hurried out into the sunlight.

  CHAPTER 30

  Louis paused on the porch of Frank’s house. He looked back out at the empty street then reached up
into the planter for the key. He unlocked the front door and slipped inside.

  The house was hot and smelled bad. It had been closed up since Horton’s men had finished and Louis doubted Diane had been here since her father’s death.

  He switched on a lamp and the room came to gloomy life. He stood, hands on hips, looking around but not at all sure what he was looking for.

  Some sign of Sophie Reardon maybe? Diane had told him her mother had died when she was seven. Maybe that was why this place had the feeling that no woman —- no wife —- had ever cared for it.

  He went to the bedroom, switching on the overhead light. The place was such a mess he wasn’t even sure where to start.

  At the dresser, he opened the top drawer. That is where he kept his own cache of personal stuff —- the pictures of his brother and sister he hadn’t seen since he was seven, and the blurry snapshot of the man who had abandoned them. But there was nothing in Frank’s drawer but a tangle of socks and underwear.

  The other three drawers were the same —- faded pajamas, T-shirts, and shorts, a couple of old cardigans. Louis closed the bottom drawer and stood up, surveying the room.

  He went over to the bookcase. It was a cheap, assemble-it-yourself job, and its particleboard shelves were sagging under the weight of all the books. But as messy as it was, there seemed to be a logic to the arrangement of the books.

  The top shelf was all books on language origins and etymology, along with a huge two-volume set of the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

  Louis’s eyes paused on the second shelf. New Latin Grammar, Wheelock’s Latin, Grote’s Study Guide to Latin, Aeneas to Augustus: A Beginning Latin Reader for College Students. There were more than twenty textbooks and dictionaries, some of them with little flags of colored paper sticking out, marking certain pages.

  Louis extracted a well-worn paperback called Teach Yourself Latin and flipped through the pages. He put it back with a sigh.

  He could barely read college French. What in the hell did he expect to find here? A word-for-word translation of what Frank had said back in the restaurant?

  He bent to look at the third shelf. Copies of The Iliad and The Odyssey. The Early History of Rome by Titus Livy. Our Roman Roots: A Student’s Guide to Latin Grammar and Civilization. He pulled out one well-worn paperback. It was another copy of The Iliad, this one a Latin translation.