Jonathan Nasaw - Twenty-Seven Bones

Fran had gone into shock; his skin felt cold even to Holly, who had just emerged from a cold shower. It didn’t seem possible that he could live after losing so much blood. She cradled his head, stroked his brow, murmured to him as he lost consciousness, and only noticed that the back of his skull had been cracked open when the blood began to soak through the lap of her bathrobe.

For a bunch of flakes, the Corefolk responded to the emergency with surprising efficiency. While Miami Mark jumped into his old flatbed sheep truck and backed it carefully up the hill to the end of the Crapaud path, two search parties were formed, one to check the Core to be sure the killer had left and the other to look for Fran’s hand, which they found in the ivy by the side of the Crapaud.

Three men carried Fran out to the truck; another kept his injured arm elevated. Holly followed, clutching her beltless bathrobe closed with both hands, and watched helplessly as they loaded Fran onto a thin foam egg-carton mattress in the wooden bed of the truck.

Molly Blessingdon, a practical nurse who worked at Missionary, put Fran’s hand in a plastic bag filled with ice. She rode with Fran, along with two men to keep him steady; Miami Mark drove. There was nothing Holly could do, other than return to the Crapaud and take another cold shower to wash the blood off. Dawson brought her a dry towel and a change of clothes, and she went back to the cabin to wait for the police.

Marley was still asleep-that boy could sleep through anything-but Dawn was awake. Holly told her Fran had had an accident and they were taking him to the hospital. Dawn asked if he was going to be okay. We all hope so, but it was a very bad accident, Holly told her. She didn’t know how long the lie would fly, but was determined to shield the little girl from the horror as long as she could.

Because really, when you thought about it, what business did any adult have, telling a little kid the bogeyman was real?

The murder scene-Bendt had breathed his last on the sheep truck on the way to the hospital, without regaining consciousness-was as compromised as an old hooker by the time Pender and Coffee arrived. After clearing the area around the outhouse building, Coffee gave orders that no one was to leave the Core, then dispatched a uniform for someone named Silent Sam.

Silent Sam, who arrived just before dawn, turned out to be a lanky, knock-kneed bloodhound with doleful, expressive eyes and a mournful countenance even for a bloodhound. According to his owner/handler, Burt Reibach (who was also tall and knock-kneed, but less mournful, and wore a tan Stetson and a tan gabardine zippered jacket and slacks outfit like his fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson used to wear on the ranch), Sam owed his prodigious scenting abilities to the fact that he was a deaf-mute.

They arrived just before dawn. On their way up to the Crapaud, Coffee congratulated Reibach on finding a missing girl in Puerto Rico a few weeks earlier.

“Them P.R. dawgs are purty good with drugs and bombs, but they couldn’t track a skunk crost a railroad trestle,” Reibach grumbled, by way of deflecting the compliment. “Wasn’t nothin’ fer Sam, though.”

“This one might be a challenge even for Sam,” said Julian, when they reached the outhouse. “The scene’s been badly trampled.”

“Cain’t track in a buffalo herd,” agreed Reibach, as Julian led him around the side of the building, where they believed the attack to have taken place.

“See those screens under the eaves?” said Julian. “Those are above the shower stalls on the inside. A woman was inside taking a shower-either the victim or the killer stood on that log to spy on her.” He pointed to a fat log resting against the base of the wall; there were drag marks in the dirt-it wasn’t hard to figure out how or why it had gotten there. “Maybe the victim came upon the killer, maybe vice versa. The bloodstains over there”-he nodded toward the brownish spatter marks at the base of the wall, three feet beyond the log-“show the victim was already on the ground when he was attacked with what we believe to be a machete.

“After the attack, the victim regained consciousness and staggered into the building-you can see the blood trail. The question for Sam, of course, is which way did the killer go?”

“Lessee if we cain’t answer your other question first, about which one was the peeper.” Reibach unclipped Sam’s lead from his collar, pointed to the log, then gave him a hand signal. Sam sniffed the log, then trotted, nose down and snuffling, back around the side of the building to the door, where he turned and gave his owner a baleful stare, as if to say, now give me a hard one.

“Okay, that’s your victim standin’ on the log, then goin’ inside. But the only way we’re gonna isolate the killer’s trail among all these others is if he was lyin’ in wait. I’m gonna ask Sam to fan out, tell us where he finds the strongest scent, where somebody’s been hangin’ around the longest.”

More hand signals; the dog began loping back and forth along the path, then ducked into the underbrush on the high side of the trail. The men followed, found Silent Sam standing at the edge of a trampled patch of ground, his head raised and his lower jaw, jowls, and chest quivering-he looked as if he were trying to balance an invisible ball on the end of his nose while having an epileptic seizure.

“He thinks he’s baying,” Reibach explained. “Somebody was here, and for a while. Lessee where he went.” Another hand signal. Sam loped out to the trail, straight back to the log, then raised his head again, sniffed the air, and took off back down the path toward the clearing. He waited for the others to catch up, then zigzagged diagonally across the clearing, toward the misty, dawn-gray forest.

“Why he zigzag so, mon?” called Detective Hamilton, bringing up the rear as Coffee and Pender followed Sam and Reibach into the woods.

“Bloodhound on the trail is picking up scent particles down to the mo-lecular level,” Reibach called over his shoulder. “Molecules drift from side to side on the wind, he tracks from side to side.”

They caught up with Reibach just as Silent Sam veered through the undergrowth to the left, snuffling head down. A moment later he came loping back, shaking his heavy head furiously from side to side, jowls and saliva flying, as if he’d been skunked, or gotten a faceful of porcupine quills. Only there were no skunks or porcupines on St. Luke.

“Son of a bitch,” yelled Reibach. He scooped the huge dog into his arms and stood up, staggering from the weight of the load. “Help me get him under one of those showers, quick.”

“What happened?” asked Pender.

“Son of a bitch run him into a manchineel tree.”

With a first murder, as with a first marriage, there are bound to be surprises. The biggest surprise for Lewis Apgard, waking up the morning after the murder, was how much it had changed him. Simply lying in wait, watching the Corefolk coming and going, and knowing in a very deep and real sense that he held the power of life and death over them, was in itself a transforming experience; the murder itself only enhanced the transformation.

The second biggest surprise for Lewis was how gifted he was at it. Things hadn’t looked any too promising at first: no singletons. A parade of potential victims marching to and from the outhouse, but always by twos and threes. Cheese-an’-bread, thought Lewis, can’t any of these people take a crap by themselves? It was almost as if they’d been forewarned.

But if his experience as a practicing voyeur had taught Lewis anything, it was the value of patience. Waiting sucked, but sometimes, indeed most of the time, you had to wait for the good stuff. You had to be very still, you had to put yourself into sort of a trance where time passed in jerks-it was now, then it was later, then it was later still, but with no real sense of transition-until the gotcha! moment arrived.