Twenty-Seven Bones

7

The Raintree Room, and every piece of furniture in it, was said to have been carved from the same Saman tree. The food was strictly St. Luke: conch fritters for appetizers, then kallaloo soup thick as stew. For an entree, Dawson had the triggerfish broiled in butter. Pender passed on the goat entrees, and ordered honey-ginger pork chops. Both meals came with a side of fungi-heaping yellow mounds of cornmeal boiled with okra.

Over dinner, they exchanged life stories. He gave her his, she gave him C. B. Dawson’s-by then she knew it as well as she knew her own. But just the skeleton, no embellishments, and when he pressed her, she deflected his questions with questions of her own. She had a million of ’em. What was happening in the investigation? Were the police any closer to finding the killer? How many victims had he claimed thus far?

For a change, Pender was free to answer at least some of her questions. Tomorrow’s Sentinel, he knew, would be breaking most of the story, linking the death of Fran Bendt to that of Hokey Apgard.

It was only a matter of time before the story broke anyway, Perry Faartoft had told Julian, who’d informed Pender. Newspapers can sweep a lot of things under the rug, but the death of a reporter isn’t one of them. The afternoon hydrofoil had brought reporters from Puerto Rico and St. Thomas-poor Fran had scooped himself with his own death.

After some heated bargaining, including a conference call with the governor and the head of the St. Luke Chamber of Commerce, the publisher had agreed to hold back news of the bodies that had washed up on the rocks beneath the Carib cliffs and not to bring up Hettie Jenkuns again. With only two deaths, there’d be at least a chance the stateside papers wouldn’t be picking up the story.

That chance soon diminished considerably, however. As dessert was being served (flan drizzled with pomegranate syrup), the maitre d’ stealthily signaled to Pender that he had a phone call.

He took it in the bar. It was Julian. “How’d you find me?” asked Pender.

“I have my sources.”

“What’s up?”

“Headquarters just received a fax from Germany. The identity of the second corpse from the cliffs, the female, has been confirmed through dental records. Frieda Schaller.” The name had come up before, Julian explained-Schaller was a tourist from Swabia, wherever that was, who’d failed to return home from a two-week cruise last Christmas. The ship laid over for the Three Kings Day carnival; the cruise line had lost track of her somewhere between St. Thomas and Barbados.

Coffee and Pender talked it over in cop shorthand. A cruise ship passenger was much more likely to have been a target of opportunity. And if it was a pickup or a random snatch, someone was much more likely to have seen the vic with the perp. No subterfuge, no cloak-and-dagger arrangements as with Tex Wanger.

Their next moves were obvious: get a detailed description and some head shots of the woman, publish them in the Sentinel, print flyers and blanket the island with them, especially the tourist haunts. Get her credit card statements, canvass the stores, bars, and restaurants she visited. Have the German police question her friends and relatives, see if she called or wrote anybody, maybe mentioned some cool guy she met, who was going to take her treasure hunting.

“Could be the break we’ve been looking for,” said Julian hopefully.

“Could be.”

“Give my best to your lovely companion, me son. Maitre d’ says she’s a knockout.”

“I can roger that.”

“You’re coming to the Apgard funeral tomorrow, right?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” said Pender-an astonishingly large percentage of murderers showed up at their victims’ funerals.

“Let’s have a meeting afterward. My office. You, me, Hamilton, Felix.”

“Do I get time and a half for working Sundays?”

“Double time,” offered Julian grandly-they both knew that two times nothing was nothing.