Jonathan Nasaw - Twenty-Seven Bones

The female’s body was in an advanced state of decay-the only trauma still visible was the severed wrist. Wanger’s body, six weeks dead, showed signs of severe battering, but the worst of the injuries were postmortem, the coroner explained, save for a few bruises, some rope burns at the wrists and ankles (no fiber evidence remained, unfortunately), and of course the missing right hand.

Pender expressed surprise at how cleanly both victims’ right hands had been severed.

Not surprising at all, Julian informed him-not on an island where machetes (machet’ in the vernacular) were as common as pocketknives stateside, and their owners kept their blades stropped sharp enough to harvest cane, chop kindling, or skewer fish in the shallows.

Pender spent the rest of the afternoon familiarizing himself with the paperwork generated thus far in the investigation-autopsies, forensics, interviews, photos of the bodies at the base of the cliffs, and of Hettie Jenkuns’s makeshift grave.

He left headquarters with Julian around five. They stopped by Apgard Elementary School to pick up Julian’s grandson Marcus at soccer practice on the way home. Julian parked the Mercedes in the yellow zone at the bottom of the school steps. Pender followed him around the back. Julian crossed the field to chat up the coach, while Pender joined a clump of adults watching over by the chain-link fence as the team went through a complex, weaving, passing drill.

When Pender first noticed the handsome, shirtless mixed-race boy in the center of the drill, through whom every pass was routed, it took his mind a moment to grasp what his eyes were seeing. All he registered at first was a sort of what’s-wrong-with-this-picture? feeling.

Then the knot of boys parted and it became obvious: the boy had no arms. Nothing at all depended from his shoulders to mar the smooth brown dolphinlike curve from neck to waist.

“Would you look at that poor little bastard?” muttered Pender, to no one in particular.

The woman standing in front of him-pretty Jewish- or Italian-looking gal in her thirties, with curly, close-cropped black hair-turned around, her green eyes flashing angrily. “That poor little bastard, as you refer to him, is my nephew. Not only that, he’s the best under-eleven soccer player this island has ever seen. So frankly, mister, why don’t you take your goddamn pity and stick it where the sun don’t shine?”

After her morning with the old folks at the Governors Clifford B. Apgard Rest Home, and her afternoon round at Blue Valley (she was preparing for the women’s match play tournament this coming weekend), Hokey drove straight home for a long, hot, and most importantly, private shower. She had always been shy about locker room nudity, a residual effect of her prep school days in the states. Hokey had been the last girl in her crowd to reach puberty; the other rich girls had teased her unmercifully.

Hokey had the last laugh in the end. Puberty worked out just fine, and she ended up marrying the first man she set her cap for. Lewis Apgard was considered quite a catch among the Blue Valley set on St. Luke, as much for his golden blond good looks as for his name and money.

But even as an adult Hokey still preferred to shower at home. This afternoon she was both surprised and pleased when Lewis asked if he and Clark could join her in the shower. She decided to permit him that treat-he’d been an absolute lamb all week, and she hadn’t smelled rum on his breath even once.

“Mmm, that’s nice.” He’d begun soaping her back and buttocks.

“Did you win your match today?”

“Mmm-hmmm. Oh, that’s nice, too. Wait, I don’t have my diaphragm in.”

“Let’s take our chances.” Lewis was powerful ready, as the men say on St. Luke-he’d been watching Hokey through the semiopaque glass of the shower enclosure for several minutes, fantasizing that he was peeping on a stranger.

“Easy for you to say, me son.”

“I mean it, let’s take our chances.”

She turned to face him, squinting against the hot cascade. “Do you know what you’re saying, Lewis? Because this isn’t the sort of thing that-”

His arms had snaked around her. He grabbed a buttock in each hand, pulled her body tight against him, kissed her tenderly on the lips. “Yes, I know what I’m saying,” he said over the roar of the hot water. “I’m aware of how the process works.”

Hokey felt like crying. After all these years of wanting a child and being denied by her child of a husband, she’d all but given up hope, so to hear this at last was almost more than she could bear.

For Lewis, what had begun in the shower as an improvisation designed to get himself laid, ended in the bedroom in a deadly earnest missionary position orgasm. The more time he spent with Hokey, he was beginning to find, the more he found himself thinking about ways to kill her, and the more he thought about killing her, the hotter it made him.

Until he solved the Bendt problem, though, his recent brainstorm about copycatting the serial killer was still unworkable. And certainly the last thing on earth he wanted to do was raise a motherless child.

But reasoning with the single-mindedness of a man with an erection, in a shower with a naked woman, it had dawned on Lewis that Hokey wasn’t going to be around long enough to bear any child they might conceive. And whatever plan he eventually adopted, it could only be furthered by winning her over, keeping her off guard.

So let her last days be happy ones, Lewis thought-it’s no skin off my bumsie. And accordingly, after another hard-earned orgasm, he turned to his wife, lying beside him in their two-hundred-year-old bed. “Hoke?”

“Mmm?” Her attention had been focused inward: she fancied she could feel those millions upon millions of Apgard sperm swimming determinedly upstream, their tiny little tails flagellating earnestly.

“I’ve been thinking.”

“About what?”

“That property by the airport.”

“Please, Lewis, please please please please pleeeeaze don’t start that again. Not now, not when everything’s so sweet.”

“You don’t understand. I was thinking you’re right, that you’ve been right all along. This baby we’re making? I was thinking I’d be proud to take him-or her-up there, show him those trees, tell him how at a time when people were destroying the rain forests all over the world at a rate of hundreds of acres a day-”

“Thousands.”

“Okay, thousands of acres a day-that on the day he was conceived, his mommy and daddy agreed to protect the forest land they owned for as long as they both drew breath.”

Hokey felt a fluttering so deep inside it had to have been her womb. “Lewis, I don’t know what you and Dr. Vogler have been talking about,” she said softly, “but if this is the upshot after two days, I can’t wait to see what you’re going to be like after a few months.”

“Me either, Hoke-me either.”

Wednesday was cook’s night off. Lewis took it upon himself to go down to the kitchen and fix sandwiches. But he never made it as far as the refrigerator-the newspaper on the kitchen table caught his eye. It was that morning’s Sentinel, which he hadn’t seen yet. The photograph of the missing Floridian in his high-crowned white cowboy hat, captioned Have You Seen This Man? was on the front page.

“Cheese-an’-bread,” Lewis muttered aloud. He grabbed the table for support and lowered himself carefully into the broad-bottomed, spindle-legged kitchen chair. “Bloody cheese and bloody bread.”

Because he had-he had seen that man, back in August, while crouched behind an oleander bush, peering into the living room of the overseer’s house. At the time, he’d been disappointed-there’d been nothing of any interest going on. Everybody was fully dressed. Bennie, Phil Epp, even Emily, who often went around topless.