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.”
6
So far as he knew, Pender had no children. Sometimes he regretted it.
Other times, though, like when he was interviewing the parent of a murdered kid, he didn’t regret being childless at all. There was so much pain, and it didn’t matter how long after the event you encountered them, every time they spoke about it the wound reopened. Sometimes, oddly enough, it was easier to interview them right away, when they were still in shock.
One hour and two cups of chicory coffee after entering the one-room shack, Pender hadn’t picked up any information pertaining to the investigation, but he had learned a little more about Hettie. He’d seen her favorite dress and the bed she’d slept in and the raggedy old doll propped up on her pillow. At twelve she’d considered herself a little old for dolls, but she never slept without it, even took it on sleepovers. Spen’ nights, Mrs. Jenkuns called them.
He also knew a little more about Hettie’s mother, about life in Sugar Town, a third-world city at the eastern edge of the great American empire, and especially about Julian Coffee, who had grown up only a few alleys away. Pender had always suspected Julian of having partially invented himself; now he understood why, and from what material.
From Sugar Town to the Danish quarter quadrangle known as Government Yard was an uphill walk of fifteen minutes’ duration. Pender had to stop twice to rest. He wasn’t so much ashamed of himself as he was angry at how badly he’d let himself go to seed-for the first time, it dawned on him that all the weight he’d put on and all the Jim Beam he’d put down in the last year or so might have been his own way of eating his gun.
Screw retirement, he told himself: when this was over, he’d get himself a job in law enforcement-private sector, at his age.
Over lunch at the King Christian, Julian told Pender they had either a suspect or another potential victim on their hands: an itinerant sailor named Robert Brack, who’d hadn’t been seen on the island for some time, but whose post office box had apparently been used as a drop by the killer as late as July. That was the box number on the advertisement Tex Wanger had circled in the back of that month’s
The postmistress had no idea who’d been picking up Brack’s mail, if not Brack-the glass-and-brass wall of post office boxes was around the corner from the counter. But she had agreed to let the police set up a still camera on the wall above the boxes, that would be triggered when anyone inserted a key into the box in question.
“All we need now is a camera and someone knowledgeable enough to set up the triggering device,” said Julian.
“Don’t look at me,” said Pender. “I can’t even program a VCR.”
After lunch, Julian walked Pender across Government Yard’s slanting cobblestone courtyard to the morgue in the basement of the courthouse to view the two dead bodies on hand before Mr. Wanger was shipped back to Miami. The corpses were in airtight body bags, on roll-out slabs in refrigerated drawers. Even so, the coroner handed out cigars.
The female’s body was in an advanced state of decay-the only trauma still visible was the severed wrist. Wanger’s body, six weeks dead, showed signs of severe battering, but the worst of the injuries were postmortem, the coroner explained, save for a few bruises, some rope burns at the wrists and ankles (no fiber evidence remained, unfortunately), and of course the missing right hand.
Pender expressed surprise at how cleanly both victims’ right hands had been severed.
Not surprising at all, Julian informed him-not on an island where machetes (machet’ in the vernacular) were as common as pocketknives stateside, and their owners kept their blades stropped sharp enough to harvest cane, chop kindling, or skewer fish in the shallows.
Pender spent the rest of the afternoon familiarizing himself with the paperwork generated thus far in the investigation-autopsies, forensics, interviews, photos of the bodies at the base of the cliffs, and of Hettie Jenkuns’s makeshift grave.
He left headquarters with Julian around five. They stopped by Apgard Elementary School to pick up Julian’s grandson Marcus at soccer practice on the way home. Julian parked the Mercedes in the yellow zone at the bottom of the school steps. Pender followed him around the back. Julian crossed the field to chat up the coach, while Pender joined a clump of adults watching over by the chain-link fence as the team went through a complex, weaving, passing drill.
When Pender first noticed the handsome, shirtless mixed-race boy in the center of the drill, through whom every pass was routed, it took his mind a moment to grasp what his eyes were seeing. All he registered at first was a sort of what’s-wrong-with-this-picture? feeling.
Then the knot of boys parted and it became obvious: the boy had no arms. Nothing at all depended from his shoulders to mar the smooth brown dolphinlike curve from neck to waist.
“Would you look at that poor little bastard?” muttered Pender, to no one in particular.
The woman standing in front of him-pretty Jewish- or Italian-looking gal in her thirties, with curly, close- cropped black hair-turned around, her green eyes flashing angrily. “That poor little bastard, as you refer to him, is my nephew. Not only that, he’s the best under-eleven soccer player this island has ever seen. So frankly, mister, why don’t you take your goddamn pity and stick it where the sun don’t shine?”
7
After her morning with the old folks at the Governors Clifford B. Apgard Rest Home, and her afternoon round at Blue Valley (she was preparing for the women’s match play tournament this coming weekend), Hokey drove straight home for a long, hot, and most importantly, private shower. She had always been shy about locker room nudity, a residual effect of her prep school days in the states. Hokey had been the last girl in her crowd to reach puberty; the other rich girls had teased her unmercifully.
Hokey had the last laugh in the end. Puberty worked out just fine, and she ended up marrying the first man she set her cap for. Lewis Apgard was considered quite a catch among the Blue Valley set on St. Luke, as much for his golden blond good looks as for his name and money.
But even as an adult Hokey still preferred to shower at home. This afternoon she was both surprised and pleased when Lewis asked if he and Clark could join her in the shower. She decided to permit him that treat-he’d
