Twenty-Seven Bones (8 page)

In Pender’s dream, it was the Machete Man who was missing a hand. His dreams, as they often did during investigations, took the form of a pursuit reversed. Early on, Pender was chasing the killer; just before he woke up, he realized the tables had been turned, and he was now the prey.

He awoke and found himself in the Coffees’ guest bedroom. Warm air enveloped him like a second skin; the sensation was far from unpleasant. But he also had the disconcerting feeling that he was being watched. He turned his head and saw a green gecko staring goggle-eyed from the bedside table on the other side of the mosquito netting. It was four inches in length, two of that tail, and so close he could see the delicate bones of its rib cage expanding and contracting.

He sat up, pulled the cord dangling over his head to roll up the mesh canopy, then padded barefoot, in his boxers and strap under-shirt, across the wooden floor to the unglazed window. He leaned way out to push open the shutters—the sill was two feet deep. The Ginger Thomas tree outside his second-story window was in bloom. The flowers were shaped like trumpets, yellow as the sun in a child’s drawing. He breathed in the perfume and smiled—he couldn’t remember when he’d last felt this good, this early in the day.

And no wonder: it had been love at first sight, man meets island, man falls head over heels for island, since he’d stepped off the plane yesterday.

This had come as a surprise to Pender—he’d never thought of himself as a tropical kind of guy. But the limpid blue skies and the bright surrounding sea, the embracing heat and the unhurried pace, the swaying palm trees and the vibrant colors of the riotous flora, were only part of the island’s charm. There was also a constant, lively juxtaposition of the strange and familiar, the North American and the West Indian, summed up for Pender by the Kentucky Fried Chicken shack located next to the open-air fish market in Sugar Town.

Julian hadn’t been exaggerating about the plethora of establishments selling alcohol by the drink, either—at least not much. One of the featured stops on the Coffee tour had been the Rum Shack, a wooden shed by the side of the Circle Road on the south coast of the island that sold dipperfuls of rum out of a wide-mouthed twenty-gallon jar with a pickled octopus floating in the bottom. Every night, the Puerto Rican bartender had explained, he’d refill the jar to the top, but the same octopus had been in there since 1976.

“What for?” asked Pender

“Por sabor, señor,”
the bartender had replied—for the taste.

Breakfast at the Coffees was served on the patio, weather permitting, as it did most of the year. Julian and his wife Sigrid—Ziggy—were seated at the glass-topped wrought-iron table when Pender came down. As they exchanged good mornings (yesterday Julian had explained to Pender the importance the islanders placed on the formal greeting), Pender noticed that the two were holding hands. Apparently their twenty-five-year marriage—three children, three grandchildren so far—had somehow failed to quench their romance.

Julian had been single when Pender first met him in Little Rock. The Bureau had sent him back to his home island a few years later, after the hurricane of ’75, to set up a resident agency charged with investigating the riots. Within a few months he had fallen in love with Sigrid Faartoft. The Faartofts, like the Hokanssons and the Apgards, were among the Twelve Danish Families (actually closer to two dozen families, not all of them of Danish descent) who still owned or controlled much of the island’s real estate.

On St. Luke, with its long history of racial mixing, the marriage had been less of a problem than it would have been in, say, Arkansas, where Coffee had last been stationed, or Atlanta, where, unaccountably, the Bureau decided to transfer him in ’82, when they closed down the R.A. in a cost-cutting move.

Julian had immediately resigned to join the St. Luke Police Department. Within five years he was chief; fifteen years later, he was The Chief, and if there were islanders whom he didn’t know by name, or who didn’t know him on sight, Pender hadn’t run into any of them in the course of yesterday’s tour.

Along with breakfast, the down-island maid brought the morning paper, with its page one picture of William “Tex” Wanger. The text beneath the picture said only that Wanger, a resident of Miami, Florida, had failed to return home after a trip to St. Luke in mid-August, and asked anyone who’d seen him on the island to contact the police department.

No mention of his body having washed up beneath the Carib cliffs, or of the other body that had washed up with him, no connection drawn to the death of Hettie Jenkuns, the only victim of the Machete Man to have already appeared in the paper, and of course nothing at all about the Machete Man himself.

Pender could only shake his head in wonder and admiration. St. Luke was indeed paradise, at least for old serial killer hunters accustomed to spending an inordinate amount of time and energy wrestling with the media, trying to manage the flow of information and control potentially damaging leaks.

After breakfast, Julian drove Pender to police headquarters, a nineteenth-century stone fortress on Frederikshavn’s Dansker Hill, anchoring one side of the Government Yard quadrangle. He introduced Pender to his daughter Layla and the two detectives, Felix and Hamilton, then led him down to the basement room he’d be using as an office. The room had been a jail cell until Hurricane Eloise, Julian explained; the three dank stone walls showed the high-water mark through their dark green paint, and the cell door had never been replaced.

At ten o’clock, the entire department assembled in a windowless briefing room on the second floor. (So who’s minding the store? wondered Pender). A lazy ceiling fan stirred the air ineffectually as he delivered the set piece he called Serial Killer 101. A little history, a little psychology, a description of the two types of serial killers, organized and disorganized, a few instructive anecdotes as examples of how both types of killers could be caught.

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.”