“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.
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 not all. When I said the victims had nothing in common, I meant when they were
“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.”
7
I’m ready to hear the long version now, thought Andy Arena, salvaging one last scrap of humor from the wreckage of his life. His old life, that is, his life outside this cave-it already seemed so distant it might as well have been a dream.
If so, he’d gone from a dream to a nightmare. Emily Epp’s kiss had been unexpected enough, but finding himself halfway down the tunnel leading to the cave only seconds later, with tingling lips and absolutely no memory of having begun the crawl, had been downright disconcerting.
Then there was the cave itself. Andy had kicked around the Caribbean for fifteen years prior to washing up on St. Luke’s indolent shores, and had seen many of the great limestone caverns of the West Indies-Harrison’s Cave on Barbados, Bermuda’s Crystal Cave, the Peace Cave in Jamaica. This one seemed like it might rank right up there with its more celebrated cousins, if not for size, then for beauty and eeriness.
The first chamber had a sandy floor, black walls that reflected the light from the helmet lamps, and a ceiling covered with short, in-curved dragon’s-tooth stalactites that looked sharp enough to tear flesh from bone. With Bennie bringing up the rear, Andy had followed the Epps down a winding passageway to the second chamber, where they’d had to pick their way around conical stalagmites jutting from the cave floor like giant purple traffic cones.
Another passageway, same low height but not quite as wide or long, led to the third chamber, one of the brightest, but somehow also one of the eeriest caves Andy’d ever seen. Not only were its floor, walls, and ceiling made of pure dolomite, a magnesium-rich limestone as white as a wedding cake, but once the Epps had set up
