Twenty-Seven Bones

“Just when the hell were you planning to warn us there was a serial killer running around?”

“I’m sorry about that,” said Pender. “It’s always problematic, trying to balance-”

“Problematic? My kids’ lives are problematic?” She slammed the door as emphatically as she could without waking the kids.

“Knock, knock,” said Pender, through the closed door.

Holly couldn’t help herself. “Who’s there?”

“Anita.”

“Anita who?”

“Anita talk to you about last night. I was hoping to do it informally, over a cup of coffee…”

Pender stopped short of adding …but if you’d prefer, we can do it downtown. He hated cliches even more than he hated threatening witnesses into cooperating, a technique that was usually counter-effective as well as counteraffective.

The interview began on the steps behind the cabin. The two sat side by side, sipping instant coffee out of brown Yuban mugs.

“Were you that aware that Mr. Bendt was a voyeur?” asked Pender.

“Sure-that’s why we called him Peeping Fran. Dave Sample caught him spying on Mary Ann outside the shower a year and a half ago, beat the living crap out of him. He said he learned his lesson, and we voted not to turn him in, and to let him stay as long as he behaved himself. He’s been behaving himself since then-we thought.”

“So you weren’t aware of his presence last night?”

“Of course not-I’m not an exhibitionist, Agent Pender.”

“I didn’t mean to imply-”

“I didn’t know anything until I heard him open the door,” she said. Just thinking about it gave her the shivers; she wrapped both hands around her coffee mug for warmth, though the temperature that time of the morning was seventy degrees and climbing. “You probably won’t answer this, but is that what happened to Hokey Apgard, too?”

Pender thought it over. It was becoming obvious that with the entire population of the Core in on the secret, that particular hold-back (information known only to the killer and the cops, which the investigators could use to differentiate the true killer from the phonies, the crazies, and the publicity seekers who always seemed to pop up in this sort of case) was useless by now. He was about to nod when he heard a soft noise behind him. He looked over his shoulder, glimpsed a featureless face in bas-relief pushing against the plastic screening under the rust-flecked overhang of the tin roof.

“I think we have an eavesdropper,” he whispered. They carried their coffee up the hill and reconvened sitting side by side on the same split log they’d sat on to watch Thursday’s sunset. “Now where were we?” He remembered of course, but he was hoping she’d forgotten.

She hadn’t. “Hokey Apgard-was her hand chopped off, too?”

“I’m afraid so. And now I have to ask you to do something that’s kind of unpleasant, but absolutely necessary.”

“What’s that?”

“I need you to take me back to last night, run through it again, everything you saw or heard.”

“Do I have to?”

“It would help.”

But it didn’t. Holly was willing, and had a better memory than most witnesses, but as it turned out, she hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual from the moment she drove through the gate to the moment the dying Bendt opened the outhouse door.

And what Pender was really hoping for didn’t exist: no last words from the victim, no deathbed accusations. Which was disappointing but not surprising. For one thing, Holly had already been interviewed by Hamilton-it would have been the first question he asked. And for another, as much blood as Bendt had spilled out there, it was a wonder he’d made it as far as the door.

The truth was, Pender was starting to feel flop sweat. He characteristically approached an investigation with a hearty surface confidence that he hoped was contagious, but underneath there was always the nagging possibility that this was going to be one of the big ones that got away. The annals were rife with serial killers who were known to history only by their sobriquets because they’d never been caught. Was the Machete Man going to join Zodiac, Jack the Ripper, and the rest?

Fortunately, the best way to cure flop sweat is also the best way to catch a serial killer: hard work, total immersion in the minutiae, and a determination never to give up.

And it wouldn’t hurt to be a little closer to the action, either, Pender decided. He found Julian out behind the Crapaud, helping Layla collect samples of bloodstained vegetation, on the theory that if Bendt had put up any sort of struggle, the Machete Man might have shed some of his own blood. He told Julian what he had in mind.

“Are you sure? There’s no indoor plumbing, you know.”

“I’ll rough it.”

“Your choice,” said Julian. “I’ll square things with Ziggy.”

“She won’t mind,” said Pender. “You know what they say about houseguests and fish.”

4

“Good morning, Agent Pender,” Apgard, sleep-tousled, in rumpled shirt and shorts, met Pender at the door and ushered him into the drawing room.

“Good morning, Mr. Apgard. Sorry to have to bother you.” Julian had insisted Pender take a cruiser to use for the duration, instead of the Vespa. Pender had had the switchboard operator patch him through to Apgard on his way over from the Core, to let him know he was coming.

“Not at all. What was it you needed to see me about?”

Pender answered with a question of his own. “When did you last see your tenant, Francis Bendt?”

“Let me think-Thursday? No, Wednesday-I remember because that was the second of the month, the day after his rent was due. We had a drink at the Sunset, he gave me a sob story, I told him pay up or move out, he paid up. Why?”

“He was murdered last night.”

“My God, no!”

“We think it’s probably the same man who killed your wife. And another of your tenants, a Mr. Arena, has been reported missing.”

Lewis was genuinely thunderstruck this time-it hadn’t occurred to him before that the Epps might be behind Arena’s disappearance as well. “Cheese-an’-bread, that explains that.”

“What explains what?”

“Arena missed his rent, too, this month. First time ever for him. I’m…I can’t…Excuse me.” He crossed the room, opened the glass-fronted liquor cabinet, poured himself a shot of Reserve. “How about you, Agent Pender?”

“I’ll pass.”

Lewis tossed back his first shot of the morning, then sent a friend down the hatch after it. “Were there any clues this time? Do you have any suspects?”

“A few promising leads,” said Pender. That was FBI-speak for zilch. “The reason I’m here, though, is that I’m concerned about the safety of the rest of your tenants at Estate Tamarind-and of course that’s the first place we’re looking at in terms of suspects. And since it looks as though I’m going to be down here longer than I’d anticipated and I’ll need a place to stay anyway…”

“Say no more. Why don’t you take the A-frame at the end of the lane, on the left. Electricity, sleeping loft, gorgeous view.”

Pender asked what it was going for. Apgard said he wouldn’t think of charging him. Just catching whoever was doing this would be payment enough. And the furniture in the storage shed behind the