Twenty-Seven Bones

8

The best way to approach a slam dunk crime scene is not to treat it as one. Take nothing for granted. But by late afternoon no clear signs of a third party to the events in the lime grove had been found, and everything else seemed to be falling into place.

Layla and Dr. Parmenter had examined Shea’s entrance wounds, verified the powder burns as consistent with a point-blank discharge, traced the trajectories of the bullets and found them consistent with an entry from below and slightly to the side.

The recovered shells, two from inside Shea’s body and a spent, flattened through-and-through found on the blanket, had all been fired by the.22 pistol found in Angela Martin’s hand, the pistol in turn had been identified as Angela’s by the other Wharf Street whores, and thanks to the Saturday night special’s shoddy Korean manufacture, even the antique 1970s-vintage spectrophotometer in Layla’s lab had picked up traces of gunshot residue on Angela’s left hand.

Nor could Pender fault Layla Coffee’s proposed scenario. To wit: lying atop Martin, Shea had reached across their bodies to pin her outstretched right arm with his right hand and chopped downward with the machete in his left hand, leaving her left hand free to fumble for, and fire, the gun in her purse. This clumsy positioning, with his body angled awkwardly to the left, would have accounted for the first bullet exiting just below the rib cage; when he turned to his right, the next two shots would have been angled lower and hit the hipbone from the inside.

But even so, by close of business Monday, Pender remained unconvinced, or at least uneasy. “Twenty-five years hunting serial killers,” he told Julian privately, in the chief’s office, “and I’ve never yet seen a perp and a vic kill each other at the same time. And I interviewed Shea Sunday morning, after the Bendt murder-he seemed kosher to me.”

“Did he have an alibi?” asked Julian, somewhat testily, it seemed to Pender.

“No, but according to Holly Gold, Shea was the first one to reach the Crapaud when she blew her whistle. If he were the killer, wouldn’t he have been more likely to stay away entirely?”

“Unless he thought getting there first would make him look less guilty. In which case, it seems to have worked. On you. And what’s your alternative? The Machete Man waits in the lime grove, jumps on Shea’s back, chops off Martin’s hand, then finds the gun in her purse and shoots Shea from underneath, with the barrel angled upward? And what’s Shea doing all this time, jerking off?”

“No, he…Or…” But Pender couldn’t come up with anything less far-fetched than the theory he’d worked up the previous evening. “What if there was more than one perp? One to hold the gun on Shea, one to-”

“Edgar.”

“-chop. What?”

“It’s over-let it go.”

“Julian, I have this hunch-”

“So did Quasimodo.” Coffee opened the humidor on his desk, handed Pender a Monte Cristo. “Go home, smoke this. Enjoy the rest of your time on the island. Get laid. Go swimming. Go snorkling on what’s left of our coral reef. Get a tan.”

“There’s a tropical storm out there, in case you haven’t noticed,” said Pender.

“And in here, me son, you’re rainin’ all over the parade. Tomorrow morning I’m going to hold a press conference that will simultaneously reassure the public, keep the cruise ships coming, and still leave enough wiggle room to cover me rass, in the unlikely event you’re not entirely full of shit. But we’d all better pray to the gods of tourism that you are, because the Caribbean Princess is docking at the end of the week, and according to the governor’s office, they’re already talking about rerouting to St. Croix instead.”

“And if another little girl like Hettie Jenkuns goes missing?” asked Pender.

“I kiss your hunch in the middle of Government Yard and we start all over.”

Julian went home. Pender closeted himself in his basement office, and with the case files in front of him and the ghosts of the drowned convicts of Hurricane Eloise looking over his shoulder, he scribbled notes on a legal pad, trying out one Machete Man scenario after another, subjecting each one to a check against the facts on file, then discarding or altering it when it failed to conform to those facts.

This was known as the floating point strategy, but the point Pender started from, and the point to which he kept returning, was the Apgard murder. It was the pivotal moment in the Machete Man’s career. It marked a change in the concealment pattern. It brought in a suspect with a motive for the first time, then eliminated him with an airtight alibi.

And except for the actual cause of death being a machete, the following murder, the Bendt murder, had so little in common with the previous ones that it might as well have been committed by someone else entirely. Hand left behind-no souvenirs. Up to then, the Machete Man had been a collector. For the collectors, the souvenir assumed critical importance for various reasons-self-esteem booster, fetish, a way to reexperience the thrill. For the Machete Man, leaving the hand behind was the equivalent of a bank robber leaving the money behind.

Another big difference in the Bendt murder was that there had been no attempt at abduction. Again, for varying reasons-intimacy, control, sexual abuse, torture-almost all serial killers were abductors. If they weren’t, they were usually snipers or serial poisoners.

But the two were different personality types, and killed for different reasons. It would be as out of character for an abductor to commit a hack and run like the Bendt murder as it would be for a collector to leave his souvenir behind.

So forget all the other murders, especially the multiple in the lime grove, and run the old mind-tape all the way back to Hettie Jenkuns, then forward to the Apgard murder. The pivot point, as previously noted. Wife dies, you look long and hard at the husband. What condition was the marriage in? Does he have a lover? Did she? Had he suffered financial reverses? Was there much insurance on her? Because even if he has an alibi, there’s always the possibility of a contract job. Or a trade-off: criminals aren’t the only ones who know about the famous Hitchcock scenario.

And if it was one of those Strangers on a Train deals, thought Pender, he’d had two “persons of interest” in mind since yesterday. The neighbors, the Epps. Who hadn’t seen or heard anything the night of the Apgard murder. And who had offered no alibi for Mrs. Apgard’s murder, but had an airtight alibi of their own for the subsequent, even more anomalous Bendt killing.

Of course, it was still only a hypothesis-and a muddled one at that. He didn’t know whether the original Machete Man was Apgard, one or both of the Epps, Ruford Shea, or someone else entirely, or how many copycat killings there had been-somewhere between none and four-or what had actually taken place in the lime grove.

All he was sure of was that he had to come up with something tonight, something that would convince Julian not to announce publicly that the danger was over and that everybody could relax and let their guard down.

Unfortunately, he had no way of knowing that as far as the Corefolk were concerned, it was too late-their guard was already down.