Twenty-Seven Bones

directly under the domed skylight. Another uniform helped a sobbing dark-skinned girl in a thin flower-patterned dress into the chair; when he caught sight of Pender he beckoned him over.

“Two more Machete Mon deadah in de lime grove,” he whispered, as somebody else gave the girl a glass of water. “She run all de way.”

“Where’s Chief Coffee?”

The officer looked around in surprise. “He was here a minute ago.”

Pender raced his cruiser full throttle up the dundo road leading into the rain forest. Layla Coffee’s makeshift crime lab van was parked next to the road. The sky was gray, verging on black; the grove looked like a tangled fairy-tale maze. “Julian?”

“Edgar?”

“Yeah.”

“Over here.”

Pender followed the voice, ducked under a low-hanging branch, saw Julian standing behind Layla, who was crouched beside a blanket where two bodies lay, one atop the other. Pender circled the crime scene at a distance, saw the machete in the male’s left hand, the female’s outstretched brown arm, the wrist stump, the severed hand. He kept circling, saw the revolver in the girl’s left hand. Too good to be true? “Please tell me this hasn’t been posed,” he called to Layla.

She was kneeling, with her head almost on the blanket, peering upward at the bullet wounds in the male’s lower right rib cage. “Trajectory looks about right,” she said. “Won’t know for sure ’til we get him on the slab.” Her accent was her mother’s-the pronunciation was pretty close to standard English, but the tune was definitely Caribbean. “Blanket under the wrist is soaked, ground under the blanket is soaked, and you can see the spray pattern across the blanket and onto the dirt, so this is where it happened. If there’s GSR on her hand, I’d be willin’ to-Oh Lord, here she comes.”

She being the rain, arriving not with a tentative pitter-patter, but a whoomp, as if the sky gods had overturned a giant bucket. Layla quickly pulled off her nylon windbreaker and covered as much of the bodies as she could, while Pender and Coffee raced to the van. Julian stayed behind to man the phone; Pender donned a hooded yellow SLPD slicker and raced back through the rain with his arms full.

For the second time in four days, Pender helped Layla set up a crime scene tent. “We have to stop meeting like this,” he called, over the roar of the driving rain. When they were done, he offered to look for footprints in the woods before it was too late.

She gave him a disposable Kodak in a yellow cardboard case and a pocketful of numbered plastic evidence markers. As he ducked out of the tent and into the storm, Pender heard sirens dopplering up the dundo road, barely audible over the sound of the rain.

4

Phil had slept poorly. Despite Emily’s reassurances, he couldn’t shake the idea that his younger wife might be phasing him out, grooming his replacement. The girl last night, for instance-by all rights her last breath should have been his, shouldn’t it?

He ran through the chronology again. There was the German woman last Three Kings Day-she’d been his. Then there was the debacle with Tex Wanger in August. He was to have been Emily’s, but the big man turned out to have had a violent and unseemly will to live. He had somehow managed to yank his bloody stump free of the restraints, battered at Phil with it, twisted his head away from Emily’s avid mouth, and died before they could restrain him again, his last breath wasted, dissipated into the still air of the cross chamber.

So Arena had represented Emily’s rain check, and Hokey Apgard, whom they hadn’t bothered to take to the cave, since her body was intended to be found, had breathed her last into Bennie’s mouth in the back of the van. So yes, the whore’s final breath should definitely have been Phil’s.

Equally troubling, for the first time in years Phil had been unable to arouse himself physically, before, during, or after the sacrifice. And to add insult to injury, he’d been reduced to sitting in the corner of the room chafing his flaccid old dick while his wife fucked the screaming bejesus out of the younger, handsomer Apgard, who’d stolen the dying breath that should have been his.

But Phil knew where the blame for his own impotence really lay. Something he’d feared for years was finally coming to pass: ten months without a dying breath, an infusion of eheha, and he was already starting to feel his age. If he didn’t replenish himself soon, he knew, he’d turn into an old man. An impotent old man-and for Phil, life after sex would hardly be worth living.

But when he broached the subject to Emily later-unlike him, she’d slept like a log late into the morning-she’d simply refused to see things his way. After all the trouble they’d gone to the night before to provide the police with a dead Machete Man, another sacrifice was out of the question just yet, she told him. They’d have to let the stir die down-then they could start working tourists or down-islanders, people who wouldn’t be missed, and find a chamber other than the Oubliette in which to dispose of the bodies.

Or even better, she said, they could come up with a new way of releasing their sacrifices’ ehehas-something that would look natural and not be associated with the Machete Man. Bennie already had more than enough hands to get him safely across the bridge to the other world, said Emily, so why not turn their attentions to lone hikers in the forest who could be made to look as if they’d fallen from the cliffs, or lone bathers who would appear to have drowned?

Emily chucked Phil under the chin, told him to be patient, that he was her loving man and no other could ever take his place, then raised her loupe to her eye again and went back to examining the tiny brown shallowly cupped bone fragment she believed to be part of the cranium of a five-hundred-year-old Carib neonate.

5

Stay busy. The important thing was to stay busy. After Vogler left, Lewis made his first appearance at Apgard Realty since Hokey’s death. He’d seen Doris at the funeral yesterday, but it seemed to Lewis there was something different about her today. A gleam in the eye, perhaps; one less button fastened on her blouse. It occurred to Lewis that he was a single man again-and Doe was such a distant cousin that marriage wouldn’t have been out of the question. All the gals would be setting their caps for him, he reminded himself-he’d have to be careful, watch out for snares. All in all, though, he expected to be dwelling in nookie heaven for the foreseeable future.

But thinking about the future only brought on the dread again. Even though the Epps and Bennie appeared to know what they were doing, Lewis had read enough true crime stories to know how even an infinitesimal clue could give a killer away. A strand of hair, saliva, a shoe print…

Shoe print? No problem there, chappie, thought Lewis, glancing out the window. Johnny had been right: Tropical Storm Sylvia, which had begun while he was still closeted with Vogler, continued to piss buckets. Here in town, great silver sheets of rain were hitting the cobblestones so hard an ankle-high mist hovered over the cobbles of Tivoli Street.

Still Lewis couldn’t entirely dispel the feeling of dread that had been haunting him all morning. And Vogler’s comment about Delusional Disorder being contagious hadn’t helped any, especially because it fit with what little he really knew about the Epps.

The delusion had obviously taken hold of Emily first-perhaps she’d been traumatized by the scene at the chieftain’s deathbed-but Phil surely shared it now. And for Bennie, if Lewis had understood Vogler correctly, this dying breath business wasn’t a delusion. More like a matter of religious belief. Which no doubt made him the most dangerous of the three.

But Lewis wasn’t really worried about “catching” the delusion, contagious or otherwise. He’d felt nothing the first time, and there wasn’t going to be a second.

To ensure that, however, he’d need to get some blasting supplies. And since it wouldn’t do to apply for a