Island of Bones (3 page)

“That’ll gross them out.”

“No, it won’t. Trust me.”

Strickland went up to the couple and showed his badge. He watched their faces go from surprise to horror, then to interest. They started nodding, and moved away, gently kicking at the sand and whispering to each other.

Moved by his success, Strickland hurried on to another couple, then another, quickly building his team of curious volunteers.

Louis turned away and walked the beach, angling down toward the water, using a stick to search the debris. It occurred to him how strange it was that he had assumed the
holes in the skull were the result of a pickax. That was the cop in him. A father had seen it differently.

He walked along, head down, stick poking the kelp. He was thinking of Roberta now and wondering why she had been so quick to take his dispassion for disrespect.

Like he had told her, he had seen bones before. He had seen the skeleton of a lynching victim lying in a shallow grave back in Mississippi. He had seen the bones of a murdered teenage girl laid out on an autopsy table.

It’s what’s left of a baby...

He had never seen a bone so small though. Maybe that’s why he had no answer for Roberta’s comment.

He looked down the beach
. “Strickland! You find anything yet?” he called out.

“Nope,” the deputy yelled back.

“Keep looking.”

“I don’t think there’s
—-”

“Keep looking.” Louis squinted out at the water. “Just keep looking, man.”

The royal palms were still there. Seeing the towering trees lining McGregor Boulevard made him feel better somehow, as though the hurricane hadn’t really touched anything or anyone.

But
Louis knew that wasn’t true. He could see that clearly now as he drove slowly down the boulevard toward downtown Fort Myers.

He
had borrowed Strickland’s scooter and he kept it at a careful crawl, going up on swales and lawns to avoid the flooded streets and fallen tree limbs. It was oddly quiet, none of the usual traffic buzz, just the distant whine of chain saws or the chug-chug of generators.

Cars still sat abandoned in the street, and many trees were stripped or snapped, leaving homes baking in the hot sun, their windows blanked by big Xs of masking tape. The Buddha Bar and Grill, Giovanni’s Deli, the Market Caf
e, they all still had their plywood up. Two days after Alina and Fort Myers still had a forlorn aura, like one of those whitewashed, fading rust-belt downtowns.

It was so hot it hurt to take a breath and the sky was a cruel bright blue. Power was still out in most neighborhoods, so people were outside, looking up at their battered roofs, dragging palm fronds to the curbs. Everyone was moving slowly. Except the kids. They were laughing, the big ones paddling canoes down McGregor, the little ones splashing in the water in defiance of mothers and health department warnings about snakes, rats, and microbes.

At the police station, Louis left the Vespa in a bike rack up near the door. He took a moment to run a hand over his sweating neck, looking at the empty parking lot. Normally, it was filled with green-and-whites, but every cop in the county was out on cleanup duty today. Even Strickland had been called in, but not before coming over to Louis’s cottage to tell him that Chief Horton wanted to see him.

They had news on the baby skull.

Louis was about to go in when the glass door opened and Al Horton came out, followed by a tall bald man in a suit.

“Kincaid!” Horton said, pulling up short. “Shit, I forgot you were coming in.”

“I got here as soon as I could. The roads —-”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Horton ran a hand over his unshaven jaw. He looked harried and tired. “Listen, it’ll have to wait. Mel and I gotta get going.”

Louis looked to the man in the yellow-tinted sunglasses and black suit, the name Mel itching his brain. He had heard through the grapevine that Horton had hired a new chief of detectives, some guy from Miami. He had also heard that bringing in an outsider had caused grumbling in the department.

“What about the skull?” Louis asked Horton.

“Later. I got a body washed up in some mangroves out in the sound,” Horton said, easing by.

“A body? Can I ride along?” Louis asked.

Horton stopped, running a hand roughly over his brush cut as if that might keep the brain neurons from shorting out. “Yeah, come on. We’ll talk on the way,” he said. “Meet you there, Mel.”

The detective glanced at Louis through his yellow lenses and turned away. He headed toward his car, a patrolman hustling after him. Louis noticed the detective catch the uniform by the shoulder and order him to drive.

Louis followed Horton to a white Crown-Victoria. “That your new guy?” he asked, nodding toward the other car.

“Huh? Oh, yeah, that’s Mel Landeta. Sorry I didn’t introduce you. Got a few other things on my mind,” Horton said as he slid into the car.

“Not very friendly, is he?”

Horton started the car. “What, you been listening to those baboons down at O’Sullivans? Landeta’s a good man. He’s not some old burnout.”

“That’s not what they’re saying, Chief,” Louis said. Even though he knew they were. “They just resent you going outside, that’s all.”

“Landeta’s just had a few rough years.” Horton thrust the shift into reverse. “And I don’t think we got enough chips in for you to be questioning my hires, Kincaid.”

Louis sat back in the seat without responding. No chips in? That’s how Horton saw it? They had worked Walter Tatum’s murder together. But that was as far as it had gone. And as far as it would always go, given the line that separated cops from private investigators.

They were back onto McGregor before Horton spoke again.

“Look, I’m sorry, Louis,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by that. You know I’ve got a lot of respect for you. It’s just that I haven’t been home since they issued the warning, I’m stretched too thin and I’m running on empty.”

“Apology accepted, Chief,” Louis said. “Anything I can do to help out maybe?”

Horton shook his head. They slowed to go through a flooded area, the Crown-Vic’s wake washing up into someone’s driveway.

“How come you didn’t apply for the opening?” Horton asked.

It was Louis’s turn for silence. He had known about the opening for a patrolman. Once, he had come close to calling Horton. But he hadn’t, and he knew he never would. He did owe Horton an answer though.

“I’ve kind of gotten used to working freelance, Chief,” Louis said.

Horton glanced over at him. “You get that PI license yet?”

Louis nodded slowly without looking at Horton.

“Gun?”

“Yeah, a Glock.”

Horton raised a brow. “Well, I guess that makes it official.”

They followed the other car as it made the turn onto Fowler heading toward the river.

“So what are they saying about Landeta?” Horton asked. Louis hesitated and Horton saw it. “Come on, I need to know.”

“That something happened and he’s lost it.”

Horton let out a sigh. “A few years back Mel had an accident. He was in a pursuit and some kid ran a light. He hit Mel broadside. Mel came out okay but the kid ended up a paraplegic and his family sued. The kid was at fault but the city didn’t care. They settled the suit and got Mel on breaching departmental policies. He said he was forced to resign.”

“Tough break,” Louis said.

He was thinking that Landeta didn’t look old enough to be near pension age. He had the lean body of a basketball player. The bald head, he guessed now, wasn’t bad genes but probably a style choice to go with the black suit, white dress shirt, black tie, and yellow aviator shades.

“How old is he?” Louis asked.

“Forty-five. Been a cop since he was twenty.” Horton was quiet for a moment. “Mel’s a good man,” he said again.

There was something final in Horton’s tone that let Louis know
the subject of Mel Landeta was closed.

At the docks,
the three of them boarded the patrol boat. Landeta took a spot standing by the officer who was driving, his eyes trained straight ahead as they motored down the river toward the open waters of Pine Island Sound.

Louis’s eyes scanned the riverbanks. Many of the homes had missing shingles and tiles, and one old bungalow had a bright blue plastic tarp covering a large hole on the roof. Splintered docks floated near battered
seawalls and giant twists of metal and gray screening hung over pools like shrouds.

“Where we going?” he asked
Horton.

“Monkey Island up near Useppa. Uninhabited, just a bunch of mangroves.”

Louis had heard of Useppa. It was an exclusive private island club of homes. You had to have a boat —- and big bucks -— to get there. Monkey Island on the other hand was probably just one of the hundreds of little scrub keys that pockmarked the sound.

“So, what about the skull?” Louis asked.

“Oh, yeah. I overnighted it to the State Bureau of Archeological Research,” Horton said.

“Archeologists?”

“Yeah, it’s standard procedure when we’re not sure what we’re looking at,” Horton said. “The skull could’ve floated out of a cemetery or some damn Indian burial ground or something.”

He saw Louis staring at him.

“Calusa Indians. We got a mess of their burial places around here. So every time we find a bone we gotta call the eggheads in Tallahassee.”

“And?” Louis asked

“They check their files to see if the place where it was found matches somewhere in their computers, like a historical or aboriginal type of place. Your find didn’t match anything. They don’t believe the skull is an Indian bone or anything weird like that.”

“So what do they think it is?”

Horton shrugged. “They don’t know and they don’t care. So they’re sending it back to me.”

“Were they able to tell you anything about it?”

“They said it probably got dredged up during the storm, maybe from an abandoned waterlogged cemetery or the bottom of the gulf. Plus, they said it was at least fifty years old. No rush on solving that one.”

“I guess not,” Louis said.

“Just as well,” Horton said. “Last thing I need right now is an infant homicide.”

They were out in the sound now. It was coming up on eleven a.m. but there were no other boats out and the water was as flat and silver as a mirror. The driver throttled up and the boat cut across the water, heading north.

The motor’s noise made talk impossible, so Louis sat back in the seat. He was disappointed about the skull. Then it occurred to him how sick it was for him to be disappointed that it was not a homicide but probably a natural death that happened half a century ago.

That was the cop in him, the part that felt a rush every time a body washed up or a question mark came up. It was the part of him that would never go away. It was why he was tagging along with Horton now, like some voyeur, hoping for a vicarious cop fix.

After about a half hour, the boat slowed. They were approaching a small thatch of dark green that looked more like a discarded clump of sod than an island. Horton stood up, his eyes scanning the greenery.

“So what are you going to do with it?” Louis asked.

“With what?” Horton asked.

“The skull.”

Louis saw Landeta glance back at them.

Horton shrugged. “Hell, I dunno, Louis. Stick it in the evidence room, I guess. Maybe I’ll give it to Vince.”

“Vince? Why?”

“He has a skull collection in his office. Has them lined up on his bookcases like bowling trophies.”

Louis looked down at his hand, seeing the small skull in his palm. Man, he just couldn’t see it sitting on some dusty old shelf in the evidence room next to rusting guns and rape slide smears. And he sure couldn’t see it ending up being just a macabre souvenir on the medical examiner’s shelf.

He thought of Roberta Tatum again.
It's what’s left of a baby.

They were slowing, coming up alongside an old skiff bobbing empty. Then he saw a man in a wide-brimmed hat waving at them from the mangroves.

“Can I have it?” he asked Horton.

“The skull? Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because I found it.”

“Hell, I don’t care. I’ll give you a call when I get it back.”

The officer looked back at Horton. “Low tide. This is as far as I can go without grounding her, Chief,” he said

Horton surveyed the island still a good twenty-five yards away.
The water ahead was shallow, leading to a stretch of black mud leading into the dense, twisting roots of the mangroves.

“Shit,” Horton muttered.

With a grunt he hoisted himself over the side and landed with a splash in the knee-high water. He started slogging toward the man in the straw hat.

Louis watched as Landeta calmly took off his suit jacket
, folded it, and laid it on a seat. Then he carefully climbed out and eased himself down into the water. He started slowly after Horton, his arms held up, a gold watch glinting in the sun.

The driver was looking at Louis. Louis glanced at the mangroves, then back at the patrolman.

“I guess I should leave my shoes on,” Louis said.

“I would, sir. Don’t want to cut yourself on those oyster shells or kick up a stingray.”

Louis got in the water. It felt good, cool after the hot sun. But the feeling vanished as he reached the mud flats. The low-tide stench was overwhelming and the black mud sucked him ankle-deep as he trudged toward the mangroves. When he pulled up next to Horton and Landeta, he was breathing heavy and sweating.

The man who had been waiting for them was wearing tattered shorts and a shirt, a grimy straw hat covering his hair.

“I’ve been keeping an eye on her,” he said. “I had to leave to call the cops but I came right back. She ain’t moved. You can see her good now that the tide’s out.”

“How’d you find her?” Horton asked.

“I fish for mullet every night around here,” the man said. “At dawn, I went in to pull my nets. That’s when I saw the white thing in the water by the roots. I thought it was just a trash bag but when I went close I saw that it weren’t. So I got out of here and called you guys.”

“Where’s the body, Mr. Peg?”

Louis turned at the sound of the deep soft voice. It was the first thing Landeta had said all morning.

“Peg, it’s just Peg.” The old man pointed into the gloom of the mangroves. “Over
theres. You don’t mind if I stay here, do you?”