Twenty-Seven Bones (29 page)

Emily opened her eyes, found herself naked on the horizontal cross. Phil had been wrong as usual—there were no ropes in the cross chamber—so Bennie had used her poncho to secure her ankles to the long axis, her blouse, torn in strips, to tie down her left arm, and her brassiere, with its heavy elastic straps doubled over and tied under the board, to hold her right wrist in place. And apparently he’d brought along a lighter, because the old torch was sputtering feebly in the sconce on the wall.

He had failed to strap down her head. She raised it, looked around. Bennie was to her right, his back turned. From behind, it looked as though he were grating carrots or sharpening something, making quick repetitive motions with one hand against the other. He glanced over his shoulder to check on her. Emily let her head fall back and closed her eyes, then opened them a slit. He turned. When she saw what he was holding, her bladder let go. He followed her eyes, saw her staring at the Swiss Army knife in his hand. He shrugged. “It’s all I got,” he said.

The letup in the storm was short-lived. By the time the search party (everybody at the Core who could wield a shovel or a flashlight; every cop and fireman and spelunker on the island) hit the road, the rain was driving so hard it stung like hail when it hit bare skin.

Still no wind, though—you had to be thankful for that, Chief Coffee told Dawson. They were in the lead, in the front seats of the department’s only four-wheel-drive vehicle, a modified Jeep Cherokee with a light bar, a radio, and a steel mesh cage welded into place behind the front seat, enclosing the entire rear compartment, backseat, fold-down seats, cargo space, and all.

Holly, Marley, and Dawn were in the backseat. Holly had of course argued vehemently against the Chief’s proposal that Dawn come along to help them locate the mouth of the tunnel. But Dawson might or might not be able to bring them to the exact spot, Coffee argued—it had been months, it had been daytime, it had been the dry season. If she could get them to the general area, however, Dawn might be able to lead them the rest of the way.

In the end, it wasn’t Coffee’s words that persuaded Holly, but the mute appeal in Dawson’s eyes. All right, all right, she told them, but on two conditions: Dawn volunteers, no pressure, and I go with her.

Marley’s presence was accounted for simply enough: the only way to keep him from coming along would have been to lock him in his room, and even then she’d probably have had to chain his ankles to the bed frame.

The sharp stench of urine filled Emily’s nostrils. She could hear it drip drip dripping onto the ground. To anger and terror, add shame—for wetting herself, for being naked, for the way her weighty, aching breasts had flopped sideways off her chest like water wings. She knew, of course, why Bennie had tied her to the cross, but it was the machete she’d been picturing in her mind—or trying not to picture. A downward flash, a moment of pain. Or maybe impact, not even pain.

How silly of her—they had of course left the machete in the lime grove, in the dead man’s hand. But a pocketknife? Was he planning to saw her hand off with a pocketknife?

Or maybe he was only trying to frighten her—maybe it was all just a sick joke. “Bennie, please. Bennie, you’re making a mistake.”

He tested the knife’s edge against the callused tissue at the base of his palm, nodded in satisfaction, tossed away the chunk of rock upon which he’d been sharpening the blade.

“Bennie, we can get out of here, we can go on, just you and me, the two of us. Apgard will help us. I’ll take you back to Nias.”

He tested the knotted brassiere to make sure it would hold, realized there was too much play in the elastic. He tightened the knot, tested it again.

She closed her eyes again. “Just don’t cut it off. Not with a knife, Bennie, please, not with a—”

Led by the Jeep Cherokee, the procession of vehicles—cop cars, ambulances, Miami Mark’s flatbed sheep truck, a fire truck, the fire department’s disaster van—followed the Circle Road east, north, west, through the rain. As they neared Smuggler’s Cove, Dawson had Chief Coffee turn on the Cherokee’s searchlight and aim it to the left. Once she’d spotted the divi-divi that marked the turn, all he had to do was hang the left and follow the deep ruts the Land Rover had dug, coming and going.

The four-wheel-drive Cherokee made it to the end of the track while the other vehicles were still slipping and sliding in the mud. The occupants of the least successful off-roaders gave it up, nosed their vehicles off the track, helped push the more promising vehicles along, jumped on hoods and roofs and trunks and hung on for dear life, whipped at by overhanging vines and branches, until it was time to jump off and push again.

The lead party didn’t wait for them. Coffee, Dawson, Holly, and Dawn set off uphill. Marley waited behind to direct the late-comers. The chief carried Dawn most of the way. The path was easy to make out, having been hacked and trodden recently, but difficult to traverse. Mudslides seemed a definite possibility. The Chief sent Dawn back with Holly; he and Dawson continued on alone, their rubber boots caked and heavy with mud.

Julian, closer to sixty than he was to fifty, stopped for a breather, standing doubled over in the middle of the trail, his hands on his knees. Dawson had been hiking this forest for years—she slogged on until the spreading trunk of the elephant’s ear tree rose gray and forbidding by the side of the trail. From here, shining her lantern up the hill, she could see the raw slash where a portion of the hillside had collapsed. Under there, she told herself—he’s under there someplace.

Like a brave little girl at the dentist’s office, Emily did not scream. She gasped, then sucked in a long, hissing breath as Bennie drew the blade of the Swiss Army knife across her wrist, pressing hard, digging deep, severing flesh, tendon, muscle, artery, until the blood spurted and the blade bit into bone. She opened her eyes, saw him standing over her. She turned her head to the right. He wasn’t going to saw the hand off after all. That was good, she thought, as he grabbed her chin firmly in one hand, turned her face up to his again, pinched her nostrils together with the other hand.

Too soon, she wanted to tell him, as he brought his face down to hers, his mouth opening wider, wider. Because Emily knew, from the strength and rhythm of the beating of her heart and the throbbing in her arm and the pulsing of her blood, just how long it would take her to die.

She closed her eyes, turning her attention not to the pain but only to the rhythm and strength of the throbbing, with such fierce concentration that her whole being dissolved into it. There was mercy in that: for the last few moments of her life, until the little man standing over sucked down her dying breath, the naked woman on the cross was no longer Emily-mind, Emily-body, or even Emily-spirit, but only that throbbing pulse, that slowly beating heart, that hot dark rush of blood.

Pender awoke in the darkest dark he’d ever known. Impenetrable blackness—he’d left the flashlight on and the batteries had worn down. He couldn’t see his nose. He’d have felt disembodied if it weren’t for the throbbing in his head.

He forced himself to move slowly, changing the batteries with painstaking deliberation, to prove to himself that he was in charge of…something…himself, his mounting panic, something. But Pender knew, even as the beam from the flashlight did its narrow best to light up the cave, that he was in charge of nothing at that point, least of all his life.

Lying still, conserving oxygen, looking up at the hundreds of tiny, curved stalactites hanging from the ceiling, an old picture book memory surfaced for Pender: somebody sowed dragon’s teeth in the ground, and they sprang up as warriors.

He rolled onto his side, went back to reading the manuscript beside his makeshift pallet. The adventures of P and E and B. It didn’t have a title. Call it
The Autobiography of a Serial Killer,
thought Pender. Or was that already taken?

And what a motive: the victim’s dying breath. Pender was less surprised than most would have been. He’d consulted on the Richard Chase investigation. Chase, the so-called Vampire of Sacramento, killed for blood. Pender had also worked on cases where people killed for thrills, for lust, for body parts to add to their collections. This was a new one to him, but it was a difference in degree, not in kind. In Pender’s opinion, in the long run serial killers killed for the sake of killing, they enjoyed holding the power of life and death, and the rest was window dressing.

Before falling asleep, Pender had read up to the part where the trio of psychos were in California, city unspecified, experimenting to find the most efficient way to “dispatch” their “subjects.” (Considering the topic, the prose of the unnamed author—presumably Phil—was surprisingly bloodless, except during the frequent sex scenes.)

Now he read how they’d tried piercing the heart, only to breathe in bloody flume. Internal injuries proved unpredictable. Some died on the spot, others lived hours and might have lived days, if permitted. Then B told them (in pidgin English, dreadfully rendered by the author) that in the old days, after the Dutch had outlawed head-hunting and some of the villages on Nias had switched over to taking the right hands of their enemies, a captured warrior’s hand was often lopped off while he was still alive, and that death invariably resulted within a predictable period of time: two to three minutes.

And the glee, the pure bubbling elation of P and E when they put B’s hypothesis to the test and found he was right, struck Pender as more purely, repulsively pornographic than all the sex scenes that had preceded it, even the ones that didn’t have a murder for a centerpiece. P was as boastful of the way E developed the ability to predict the precise moment of death as he was of her “overdeveloped female attributes,” to which he couldn’t help referring every two or three pages.

By the time the manuscript ended, with a secondhand description of what sounded convincingly like Fran Bendt’s murder at the hands of Lewis Apgard, Pender had reached the boiling point. He didn’t always hate the serial killers he pursued. Sometimes he felt sorry for them, especially the schizophrenics. They couldn’t help themselves, couldn’t have stopped themselves if they’d wanted to. But he hated this batch with a white-hot passion. And in a way, Apgard was the most revolting of the four. The other three were clearly psychopaths, but if the manuscript was to be believed, Apgard had his wife killed out of sheer greed, of which the Bendt murder was merely an offshoot.

Suddenly the worst part of Pender’s current predicament became not knowing whether any or all of the others in the cave had survived the explosions. There were no bodies in this chamber and no blood save for his own. The possibility that any or all of the killers had survived, and that they had the little girl, was troubling enough, but the possibility they might get away with it was maddening, and made the prospect of waiting passively to die or be rescued, without knowing, seem unbearable.

Without any way to gauge how long his air supply would last, or even if there was really any danger of running out of oxygen, Pender began to consider the likelihood that he might be backing the wrong horse. Because if he had only hours left, he was going to die anyway, and if he had days, then all he’d accomplish by lying there doing nothing would be to
guarantee
his death.

But he could dig. By God, he could dig. If there were rescuers, he could meet them halfway. And if he didn’t make it, they’d find dirt under his fingernails and know he died trying. And he’d take the incriminating manuscript along with him. They find him, they find it; they find it, they take down Apgard, Bennie, and both Epps. Hang ’em side by side. Man, thought Pender, it’d be worthwhile staying alive just to see those bastards swing.

The Fire and Rescue Chief, Toger Erlaksson, took charge of the rescue effort as soon as he arrived. The Erlakssons were one of the Twelve Danish Families, but there wasn’t much Scandinavian DNA left by Toger’s generation. He and Chief Coffee got along well, except at budget time, when they were competing for pieces of the same limited public safety pie.

It was decided to go in from the side, through the original tunnel, using hand tools and shoring up as they went. If there were any signs of mudslides, it was agreed, they’d have to pull their people out, sink an air shaft from above if possible, and wait for the rain to stop before proceeding.

Meanwhile Dawson went exploring on her own, looking for the hole through which she’d seen the bats exiting last summer. It wasn’t easy to find, in the dark, in the rain, especially as she was looking for a vertical shaft, a literal hole in the ground. Later, she would realize she had passed the spot at least once, because it wasn’t until the second time she smelled the funky, acrid smell of the guano that she realized she had to be close to the entrance to the bats’ cave. She shined her lantern around in a full circle and spotted the dark hollow in the side of the hill.

The closer she approached, the worse the stench. The hole was a few feet high, but only a foot wide; the shaft traveled horizontally a few feet, then dived straight down. “Anybody in there?” she shouted. “Pender? Any—”

A leathery rustling of wings, a cacophony of high-pitched squeaks and squeals. Dawson threw herself flat against the ground and covered her head with her arms as the huge creatures came streaming out of the hole, filling the sky above her with swift, darting, angular shapes so flat against the dark sky that they seemed two-dimensional, like swooping kites. Suddenly the phrase
like a bat out of hell
took on a whole new meaning for Dawson.

But at least she’d found another entrance to the cave system, if it was a system. She left her spare flashlight behind as a beacon and made her way back to the scene of the rescue efforts to let the others know.

Bennie froze. He thought he’d heard someone shouting. The sound was not repeated. He shrugged and went back to work. Rather than hack Ina Emily’s hand off with the saw blade of the Swiss Army knife, he was working the cutting blade through the radiocarpal joint between the wrist and the hand, slicing easily through muscles and tendons instead of trying to saw through bone.

When the hand came free, he slipped it into the freezer bag containing Mrs. Apgard’s hand and resealed the bag.

So: six hands altogether, and three freezer bags stuffed with hundred-dollar bills—a worthy tribute, when the time came to cross the bridge to the other side. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, Ama Phil was fond of saying. Bennie had always taken it literally, and made it his motto. He’d cross that bridge when he came to it, but he hoped that wouldn’t be until he’d returned to Lolowa’asi, to reclaim the rest of his legacy.

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
As he shouldered his knapsack and started down the passageway, Bennie remembered Ishmael’s words. And what a tale he would have to tell, what a deathbed oration he’d be making, when his time came.

The path forked. Bennie followed it to the left, to the Bat Cave. The bats, which had been coming and going all night, were no longer there. He leaned into the chamber. The stench was unbearable. He ducked back out, held his breath, leaned in again, twisted his head around to direct the narrow red laser beam of his helmet lamp up the chimney. He saw that it narrowed to a diameter of less than a foot before turning horizontal. No exit there—he turned back.