Jonathan Nasaw - Twenty-Seven Bones

By then Pender could sense he was losing his audience’s attention, so he closed with his customary pep talk. “Getting a serial killer off the streets is the most demanding and rewarding task in all of law enforcement. What we do here, how many hours we put in, how hard and how smart we work, how well and how quickly we do our job, will have a direct effect on how many people live and how many people die. Yeah, luck has a lot to do with it, but it’s always been my experience that the harder I work and the more prepared I am, the luckier I get.

“I’m not asking you to neglect your families, mind you, and of course Chief Coffee will have the final say on overtime and payroll matters. All I’m asking is that you think of your husbands and wives and children as potential victims and let your conscience be your guide as to how many hours you put in.

“And one more thing I want to stress to you: we may be looking for a monster, but the person we eventually catch won’t look like a monster. The Machete Man will look just like you or me. More like you, if he’s lucky,” Pender added, to polite-or were they impolite? — chuckles.

“So don’t rule a suspect out just because you know them, even if you’ve known them your whole life. We’re looking at three dead so far, the victim pool is the entire population of St. Luke, plus tourists, and as far as you’re concerned, the Machete Man could be anybody you weren’t actually in bed with when a murder occurred. Any questions…? Nobody…? Okay, if any questions come up, technically my office doesn’t have a door, but if it did, it would always be open.”

The stuffy room cleared quickly, except for Pender, Coffee, and a rookie cop Pender had taken note of earlier, as he embodied several departmental extremes. Vijay Winstone appeared to be the youngest person in the room; he was certainly the tallest and the darkest complected. His uniform looked to Pender as if it had been slept in, which proved to be the case. He explained that he’d had come off night shift at 8:00 A.M. and caught a quick nap in one of the holding cells before the meeting, and volunteered himself for a second shift-either he had taken Pender’s pep talk to heart or he was particularly eager to suck up some overtime.

Pender turned to Julian. “Chief?”

Julian turned to Winstone. “You on golden time yet?” Double pay.

“No, sah-straight.” Time and a half.

“I’ll authorize four hours, then I want you to get some sleep, me son-I’m going to need you to stake out a phone booth tonight.”

That would be the phone booth outside the Bata supermarket that anchored the island’s largest strip mall, whose number had appeared several times on Tex Wanger’s July and August phone bills. And according to the printout from the St. Luke phone company, Tex had been called from the booth several times thereafter, always between 11:00 P.M. and 2:00 A.M., up until the day he left Miami for St. Luke. Thanks to the news blackout, there was no reason to believe the killer would change his or her pattern; hence the stakeout.

“Do you know your way around Sugar Town?” Pender asked the young officer, after Coffee left.

“I bahn deh,” replied Vijay, a St. Luke native of mixed African/East Indian descent.

“Beg pardon?”

“Bahn deh, I bahn deh.”

“Oh, you were born there! Can you tell me how to get to…” Pender showed him the address he’d jotted down in his spiral-bound pocket notebook. “Washhouse Lane?”

“I bettah take ya, sah-if ya cyan’ understand me, ya gahn ta need a translatah down deh.”

Lewis Apgard left the Great House late Wednesday morning feeling a little logy from the sleeping pills Vogler had prescribed. His first stop was the office of Apgard Realty, on the second floor of an eighteenth-century stucco building on Dansker Hill. A jewelry store featuring coral necklaces and duty-free timepieces rented the first floor from Lewis. His secretary Doris, an attractive distant relation from one of the darker branches of the family, was just updating the rent accounts when he arrived.

“Good mornin’, Cousin Doe. Tell me a good word,” he said in dialect, walking around behind her and peering over her shoulder at the computer screen.

“Good mornin’, Cousin Lewis. Only two delinquents dis mont’, two Corefolk,” she said, scrolling back up to the beginning of the file: Arena, Andrew; Bendt, Francis. The first was a surprise: as a full-time bartender at the King Christian, Arena was one of the more solvent denizens of the little village in the forest.

The second was not. Fran Bendt was a freelance reporter for the Sentinel, whose career in the States had been derailed by a coke habit and a penchant for voyeurism, but whose nose for news was somehow still as sharp as ever. If he was short of funds, he might have some information or candid (extremely candid) photos to offer in lieu of rent. Lewis asked Doris to beep Bendt and set up a meeting at the Sunset Bar at Bendt’s earliest convenience, as long as his earliest convenience was no later than high noon.

On St. Luke, high noon was high noon all year round-the island did not observe daylight savings time. The freelancer Bendt, an unprepossessing man with a scruffy beard that failed to hide a complexion moonscaped with adolescent acne scars, was sitting at the bar nursing a beer when Lewis arrived, wearing chinos, a short-sleeved white shirt, sandals, no socks.

After Lewis had taken care of some business with Vincent, involving half an ounce of rain forest chronic (Hokey hadn’t said anything about giving up weed), he and Bendt walked fifty yards down the beach, the reporter carrying a beach umbrella and two plastic folding chairs.

Bendt set up the umbrella and chairs. Lewis filled his corncob pipe with chronic, took a wasteful toke, more than his lungs could hold, then, wreathed in smoke, passed it over. “So what do you know that I don’t, chappie?” he said when he’d finished coughing.

Bendt took a more circumspect hit and waited for it to dissipate entirely in his lungs before he spoke again. “I do have something for you, but you’re going to have to give me your word it doesn’t go any further. ’Cause it’s big, and it’s real tightly held-only about a dozen people know, and most of them are cops.”

Lewis was impressed. “Word,” he said, and they dapped knuckles.

“Okay, you remember that little girl that disappeared two years ago?”

“The one whose body was found under the Judas Bag tree?”

“Right. Well, you know she was murdered, right?”

“No, I thought she cut off her own hand and buried herself for a gag.”

“Very funny.” Bendt took another toke before handing the pipe back; again he held it in until his exhale was devoid of smoke. “Last Friday I’m monitoring the police band, I hear there’s something going on in the north end, by the cliffs. I get there, every cop on the island is climbing around the rocks. It turns out two bodies have washed up with the hurricane tide, one male, one female, and guess what body part both of them are missing?”

“I’ll take a wild guess-a hand?”

“Right hand. Same as the Jenkuns girl. Which means we have a serial killer on our little island. And according to Mr. Faartoft, he’s been asked not to print it-so much for the public’s right to know. Oh yeah, and they’re calling him the Machete Man.”

Lewis suppressed a shudder: Queen Charlotte and Auntie Aggie used to frighten him with stories about the Machete Man. “Who else knows about this?”

“Lemme see…Faartoft, the cops, the coroner, and of course us-you and me. But that’s not all. Did you see this morning’s paper?”

“Not yet.”

“There’s a picture on the front page-missing man from Florida.”