Twenty-Seven Bones

Chapter Four
1

Second morning on the island; a pounding at Pender’s door.

“Good mornin’, Edgar! Are you awake?”

Eight o’clock, according to the watch on the nightstand, next to the motionless gecko. “If I ain’t, I’m dreaming about you. That can’t be a good sign.”

Julian pushed the door open. He was already in uniform-pressed khaki pants, pressed khaki short-sleeved shirt with navy blue tabs at the shoulders; no rank, no insignia. He handed Pender a mug of steaming coffee under the mosquito net. “Time to get cracking, me son. I just got off the phone with the Machete Man-we may have another victim on our hands.”

“He called you?”

“No, I called him, what do you think?”

Pender took a life-giving sip of hot coffee. “Get me up to speed.”

“A call came in twenty minutes ago. Man’s voice, muffled. ‘It took you so long to find the others, this time I’m going to give you a hint. The old mill tower.’ Hangs up before I can ask him which one.”

“Your home number-it’s listed?”

“Always has been.”

“And you didn’t recognize the voice?”

“He spoke in a whisper, used a phony British accent.”

“That tells us something then,” said Pender.

“What?”

“That he’s not British. Do I have time to take a shower?”

“Make it a quick one-bodies don’t keep well in these latitudes.”

In the bad old days, when King Cane ruled St. Luke, every plantation had its own grinding mill, Julian explained to Pender as they drove east along the southern arc of the Circle Road. Some were powered by wind, some by steam, some by oxen, some by slaves-and every last one of them had been rendered gradually obsolete after emancipation and the development of the sugar beet made growing cane economically unfeasible.

There were only a few producing cane fields left on the island, said Julian-you can’t make decent rum from beets. But there were still at least a dozen old mill towers standing, or falling, in various states of repair, all across the island. “I have my people checking out each of them, but the most likely spot for a body drop is the tower on Sugar Loaf Hill. It’s isolated but well-known and easy to drive to-I reserved that one for us.”

“Lucky us,” said Pender.

Sugar Loaf Hill was a rounded lump standing alone in the middle of a burned-out autumnal canebrake. The tower was conical, crumbling, thirty feet in diameter at the bottom, ten at the jagged top. Great round stones were tumbled about at the base, along with broken fingers of mortar, dry worm castings, sandwich wrappers, broken bottles, empty pop and beer cans, used condoms. Julian parked the Mercedes at the bottom of the little hill. Pender followed him up the slope and around the ruins to the arched doorway. A date was chiseled into the lintel stone in triangular strokes: 1792.

Julian squatted just outside the archway; Pender peered over his shoulder into the dimness. Inside, no grinding wheel, no mill works. Just a round dirt floor speckled with grayish white bird shit, and a naked corpse lying on its side in the center of the room, with its back to the doorway and its head resting on its outstretched right arm, which had been severed at the wrist. The end of the stump was covered with swarming blackflies. Their buzzing was the loudest sound in the ruins, with Pender’s heavy breathing a close second.

“Caucasian,” said Julian-the corpse’s skin was tanned all over, but the hair was whitish blond in the light pouring through the broken top of the tower.

“Female,” said Pender-there was no mistaking the cellolike curve of a woman’s back, the narrow waist, the flaring hip, the heart-shaped ass.

“I’ll be right back,” said Julian. “Don’t muck up my crime scene.”

As Julian hurried back down to his car to use the police band radio-no cell service on St. Luke as yet-Pender stepped carefully into the tower and circled wide around the body, keeping to the perimeter of the conical stone walls so as not to disturb any transfer evidence left by the killer. There were no visible footprints except for his own, which meant the killer might have swept his way out of the tower-but you never knew what a good criminalist could pick up.

“Hello there,” murmured Pender as he approached the corpse from the other direction. “Tell me a little about yourself.”

But she didn’t have much to say, other than that she was, or had been, a Caucasian female, between twenty-five and forty years of age, tall, slender, with long, blond hair that matched her pubic hair. Full body tan, no bikini line, no stretch marks. No marks anywhere, except for a few old tomboy scars on her knees-and of course the missing hand.

The ground beneath the severed wrist was dry, which meant this was a body drop and not a murder scene. Pender squatted down, took off his hat and waved it to shoo the flies away so he could get a better look at the wound, but they ignored him. Her other arm, her left arm, was drawn up at her side, bent at the elbow, the fingers splayed out stiffly as if she were modeling her diamond-studded gold wedding band. (Robbery not a motive, Pender noted.) Close to full rigor, somewhere between ten and twelve hours postmortem, at a rough guess.

“Edgar?”

Pender looked up, startled. Julian was standing in the arched doorway with his daughter Layla, a handsome young woman with light brown skin, bright green eyes, and wavy brown hair.

“And whom do we have here?” asked Layla.

“You tell me.” Pender stood up, backing away from the body as the other two walked in his footsteps around the perimeter of the chamber.

Layla drew her breath in sharply. “Daddy, is that…?”

“Oh shit,” said Julian, and for a moment there, as he started to raise his arm, then put it down hastily, it looked to Pender as if he’d forgotten that Layla was a grown woman, and a trained criminalist to boot, and was trying reflexively to shield his little girl from a terrible sight.