Twenty-Seven Bones

5

The bogeyman come to life on St. Luke. A real live Machete Man, but this one hacks off his victims’ hands instead of their heads. And the Sentinel wasn’t going to be printing a word of it until wishy-washy Perry Faartoft got the okay from the chief of police, who’d probably get it from the governor, who’d get it from the Chamber of Commerce, of which Lewis was a member.

That’s how things worked on a small island, thought Lewis, waiting by the pool for Dr. Vogler on Wednesday afternoon. He had of course seen the ramifications immediately; suddenly, killing Hokey had gone from a vague, scarcely articulated idea to a very real possibility. There might never be another opportunity like this. When the wife dies or disappears, Lewis knew, the husband is always the first suspect. And unless he can come up with an airtight alibi, he might be the only suspect.

Which is where having a serial killer on the loose comes in handy. If the wife is just another in a series of victims, and the husband has an absolute vacuum lock of an alibi, the cops aren’t going to look at him twice, especially with a news embargo in place. They couldn’t accuse him of being a copycat killer if he had no way of knowing about the original in the first place.

But vacuum-lock alibis don’t grow by the side of the road, and time was of the essence. A lot of things could go wrong. The news might leak out any day, or even worse, the cops might catch the killer before Lewis could make his move. It would have to be soon, then, maybe even as soon as-

No. Dammit, there was someone who knew that Lewis knew about the Machete Man: the reporter, Bendt. Which didn’t rule out the scenario entirely. It just meant that if he killed the one, he’d have to kill the other-a complication, but perhaps not insurmountable, once he’d figured out the alibi part. Because while he didn’t know for sure whether he had it in him to kill even once, it seemed to him a second murder would be less distressing, not more.

Just then the houseman, Johnny Rankin, a short, dark, white-jacketed man with a long narrow face, threw open the French doors. “Excuse me, Mistah Lewis, Dr. Vogler is here.”

“Thank you, Johnny. Send him out. And bring us some iced tea, if you would.”

The second session took place by the pool, with both the doctor and the patient on chaise longues, sipping refreshing cold beverages. Not your usual analytic setup, but Lewis had the feeling that for what he was getting per session, Vogler would have agreed to hold it in the pool, if Lewis had so requested.

“The U.S. Marines arrived from Guantanamo the morning after the hurricane to restore order.” Lewis picked up his story where he’d left off. “Panicked Lukes by the score, white and black alike, went swimming out to meet the ship. I’ve seen newsreels of the Guv in a combat helmet, wearing a borrowed flak jacket over his trademark white linen planter’s suit, waving from the bow. He probably thought he was cutting a MacArthurian figure-instead all he managed to do was remind his constituency that he hadn’t been there to share their ordeal.

“My own ordeal was almost over. I’d made my escape the night before while the looters were busy with my aunt, and spent the entire night hiding in the dumbwaiter in the anteroom off the second-floor ballroom. Hungry, thirsty, and cramped as I was in that little box, I didn’t come out until the next morning, and then only to take a piss and look for food.

“The kitchen was still underwater, but Auntie Aggie, I discovered, had squirreled away an assortment of cookies and candy bars in the top drawer of her bedside table. Aggie herself lay on top of the bed with a pillow over her face. I didn’t want to look, but the naked corpse held a magnetic fascination for me. I wasn’t terribly surprised that they’d killed her, but it puzzled me that they’d undressed her first.

“I was still in Aggie’s bedroom when the Marines broke down the front door. They could have come in through the back door, which the looters had already broken down, but I guess that’s not the Marine way. I knew I was safe when I heard men speaking in stateside accents. I came out to meet them, a candy bar in each fist and another in my mouth, as they splashed up the staircase. The Guv was right behind them, still wearing the helmet and flak jacket. I burst into tears and tried to throw myself into his arms. He fended me off-I guess he didn’t want to get chocolate all over his white suit.

“The following year, after the Guv lost the election-”

Vogler interrupted him with a stagey cough. “Excuse me, Lewis?”

“What?”

“Let’s stay with this a while longer-I think there’s some more ore here to be mined.”

“Such as?”

“Did you see your aunt being raped and murdered? Did you feel as if you were to blame? How did it make you feel when your father pushed you away after all you’d been through? That sort of thing.”

“I don’t remember; yes and no; bad.” Actually Lewis had hung around watching far longer than was compatible with a healthy sense of self-preservation-his auntie’s gang rape had been the impressionable young Lewis’s first immersion into the seductive world of voyeurism. But while he had no intention of giving Vogler too close a peek at his psyche, he knew he had to give him something, so he gave him the dying ram.

“After the Guv lost the next election, we moved from the Governor’s Mansion, the only home I’d ever known, out here to Estate Apgard, the old family sugar plantation, which had been converted into a sheep and cattle ranch in the twenties.

“The Great House was even older and larger than the Mansion. I had the run of the place for a year. It was paradise, except for one incident that gives me nightmares to this day.”

Vogler looked up from his notebook, nodded encouragement.

“It was Christmas Day. I knew I was getting a new bicycle for Christmas, so I got up real early to take it out for an inaugural spin. I was up by the sheep cotes when I saw one of the breeding rams coming toward me down the lane. Now I knew it shouldn’t have been out that early in the morning, on account of the wild dogs, so I decided to lead the ram back to the pen, maybe get an attaboy, if not from the Guv, then from Mr. Utney, the ranch foreman.

“But I could tell right off that something was wrong. The ram was wobbling with every step, as if it were drunk, and its chest was stained reddish pink, like somebody had dyed it or something. When I got closer, I could see what had happened. How it had gotten out, whether the shepherd screwed up or there was a hole in the fence, I never found out, but it had, and the wild dogs had ripped its throat open.

“I froze, couldn’t have taken a step if my bumsie was on fire, but the ram just kept coming, wobbling from side to side, its head hanging low, those big brown eyes staring directly into mine. Then, when it was only a couple feet away, its forelegs buckled, as if it were kowtowing to me, but its eyes never left mine, even when it toppled forward into the dirt.

“And when I say never, I mean never. Because ever since that night, those eyes have been popping up regularly in my dreams in one form or another. Sometimes they’re where they belong, in the ram’s face, and sometimes they’re completely disembodied, which is spooky enough, but in the worst nightmares of all, they’re in a human face-those are the ones that wake me screaming, nine times out of ten.”