Twenty-Seven Bones

6

Pender stuffed his notes into his old briefcase as the room cleared, then turned his back on the auditorium to wipe off the white board beside the lectern, scrubbing away diligently at phrases like filter factor and floating-point strategies as if they were top secret code. Every year he returned to Quantico to give his lecture, and every year the class seemed to get younger, until by now even the experienced National Academy students looked like kids to him, while the kids, the blue-shirted FBI trainees, looked as if they should have been attending summer camp in the Catskills.

Clap…Clap…Clap…Clap…

Pender turned. The auditorium was empty save for a silver-haired black man standing in the back row, applauding slowly and deliberately. Pender stepped to the edge of the platform and shaded his eyes from the recessed lights overhead, his half glasses dangling from a ribbon around his neck. “Julian?”

“Good afternoon, Edgar! Mahvelous lecture. Just caught the last few minutes.” Fastidious as ever in a shimmering, meticulously tailored two-piece gray suit, white shirt, red silk tie knotted in an impeccable Windsor, and black wing tips shined to a fare-thee-well, Julian Coffee strode down the aisle with his laminated photo-ID visitor’s pass dangling from a cord around his neck. Coffee was the only man in the last thirty years who’d been permitted to call Pender by his given name, and then only because his lilting West Indian accent made it sound almost musical: Ed-Gah, both syllables equally stressed.

“Thanks.” Pender started to hop down from the platform, then thought better of it and took the steps. At six-four, 279, with a BMI of 34, nine points past healthy, four points past dangerously obese, Pender was well beyond hopping weight.

The men shook hands, embraced, and clapped each other’s shoulders.

“Did you get it?” asked Pender. He’d last seen Coffee two months earlier-as the chief of police on the island of St. Luke, a U.S. territory in the eastern Caribbean, Pender’s old friend had come to Washington seeking a federal law enforcement grant for his department.

By way of answer, Coffee stepped back and assumed the classic staged handshake pose, right arm stretched across his body, left arm thrown around an imaginary shoulder, teeth bared in a frozen grin.

“They made you come all this way for a photo op?”

“I’m afraid the attorney general insisted.”

“How long are you in town for?”

“Flying back in a few hours. I’m glad I was able to catch you-are you free for a drink?”

“A drink? I’m free for the rest of my life-I’m retired.”

“And how is that going for you?”

“When I retired, all I could think about was that I could play as much golf as I wanted to. Within six months, I had.”

“How about the book-how did that do?” Pender’s ghostwritten autobiography had been published three months earlier. A warts-and-all undertaking, it detailed the checkered career of the man once known as the worst-dressed agent in the history of the FBI, from his early years as a field agent in Arkansas and New York, through the glory years hunting serial killers for the prestigious Liaison Support Unit, and the dark years, when drinking and philandering had cost him his marriage and very nearly his job, to his final, improbable incarnation as the hero agent who’d personally taken down two of the most vicious serial killers of recent times.

“To quote my editor: ‘The Bundys and Dahmers of the world live on in the public’s memory, but the guy who cracked the case is forgotten by the next full moon.’ The good news is, I get to keep the advance.”

“Assuming then that you have nothing else of importance on your plate,” said Coffee, “what would you say to an all-expense-paid vacation in the beautiful Caribbean, in exchange for your services for a few weeks?”

“I’d probably say, ‘Helloooo, all-expense-paid vacation in the beautiful Caribbean!’ ” Pender replied. “But what do you need an old fart like me for?”

“We have a live one.”

“A serial killer, you mean?”

“Three victims so far.”

“The question remains: why me?”

“One, you’re the man when it comes to serial killers. Two, you’re available. Three, you can keep your mouth shut-if word of this gets out, it’s going to be another body blow to our tourist industry, which frankly can’t take many more shots and survive. And four, who else am I going to find who’ll work for free?”

“You could have stopped at ‘you’re the man,’ ” said Pender.

“The only good thing about airports is that there’s a bar every ninety feet or so. Salud.” Pender, bald and homely as a boiled potato, wearing a baby blue Pebble Beach golf cap and a green plaid sport jacket over plum-colored polyester Sansabelt slacks, raised his glass just high enough to qualify as a toast before bringing it to his lips. Experienced drinkers are like veteran baseball pitchers-they try to avoid unnecessary arm movements.

Julian Coffee, on the stool next to him, returned the gesture, sipped at his bar Scotch, and winced at the taste. “On St. Luke, me son, there’s a bar on every street corner, and liquor is duty-free: a man can drink single malt for less than this swill costs.”

“Great,” said Pender. “Cheap booze and an island of alcoholics-just what I need.”

“Actually, by our definition there are very few alcoholics on St. Luke.”

“What’s your definition?”

“Someone under the age of sixty who ends up facedown in the gutter more than twice a week.”

“Why under sixty?”

“We’re brought up to respect our elders.”

That fetched a chuckle. One of the things Pender liked best about Coffee (or about anybody, for that matter) was his sense of humor. And Julian had certainly needed one when Pender first met him back in the early seventies. The Bureau, not without a sense of humor of its own, had assigned Coffee, raised on an island where over 90 percent of the population were people of color and where racial prejudice, at least of the overt Dixie variety, was largely unknown, to its Little Rock field office.

Pender looked down at his glass, which had somehow emptied itself, and signaled to the bartender for a refill. Chuckle time was over. “So what can you tell me about our serial killer?”

“Not much. If it hadn’t been for the hurricane last week, we wouldn’t even know he was out there.”

“Yeah, I saw that on the news,” said Pender. “You got hit pretty hard, huh?”

“We’ve had worse. But the storm tide washed up two bodies, one male, one female, both in bad shape, both unidentified as yet. Yet according to the coroner, even though they washed up together, one corpse was between six months and a year older than the other-I mean time of death, not age. We’ve managed to keep both bodies under wraps so far, but-”

“How’d you manage that?”

“One of Ziggy’s brothers owns the only newspaper on the island.”

“You really think you can continue to keep something like this quiet?”

“So far, so good.” Julian rapped the bar top for luck. “Now as I was saying, the two vics died months apart…”

“But the bodies were found together.”

“On top of each other.”

“Well, that’s something in common.”

“That’s not all. When I said the victims had nothing in common, I meant when they were alive. The bodies-”

“What?” said Pender eagerly.

“I ga’ tell ya, buoy, doan be hasty so.” Coffee could no more keep from breaking into dialect every so often than a bird could keep from breaking into song. “The two that washed up last week were victims two and three. Vic number one, Hettie Jenkuns, aged twelve, disappeared in broad daylight on her way home from school four years ago. Two years ago a mushroom hunter saw her femur sticking up out of the ground-somebody’d buried her in a shallow grave in the old slave burying ground in the forest.

“After two years there wasn’t much left other than the skeleton, but that was intact, except for the right hand, which was missing. As were the right hands of both the corpses that washed up last week. Chopped clean off at the wrist-probably by a machete. Which is what my people have started calling him, by the way-the Machete Man.”

“Catchy,” said Pender.

“An old St. Luke bogeyman. ‘Machete Mon a get ya if ya doan watch out.’ ” Coffee glanced at his watch and tossed back the last of the nasty Scotch. “Listen, Edgar, I’d better get in line for the security screening. Do you want to make your own arrangements for flying down, or should I have my travel agents call you?”

“Are they any good?”

“No, but one of Ziggy’s cousins owns the business, and if it fails, she’ll make me put him on the force.”