Twenty-Seven Bones

said of his little brown great-granddaughter-he’d have been speaking ironically, of course.

“Okay.” Holly took a deep breath, blew it out slowly, to demonstrate to her niece that this wasn’t easy for her, either. “I was working at Blue Valley, and one of my clients said something very nasty to me and really hurt my feelings.”

“Did you tell him sticks and stones?”

Holly laughed-if you didn’t find that kids had as much to teach you as you had to teach them, you just weren’t paying attention. “No, but I should have. I should have told myself, too. Instead I ran away. Your turn, now.”

“I was thinking about something bad that could happen.”

“What’s that, baby doll?”

“I was thinking what if you, well, you know.”

“Not really.”

“What if you…you know, like Mommy.”

“What if I died, you mean?”

Dawn covered her ears; her hands are still so tiny, thought Holly. “Don’t say that, Auntie.” Doan say dot, Ahntie-what her grandfather would have made of the West Indian accents the kids slipped in and out of so easily, Holly couldn’t begin to imagine.

Her first instinct was to explain that death was nothing to fear, that it was just part of life, but that would have been another BPM. It wasn’t death the child feared, it was abandonment. “Tell you what, baby doll. I give you my solemn promise, I’ll live to dance at your wedding.”

“That means if I don’t ever get married, you have to live forever,” said Dawn.

“Very funny,” said Holly. “Now go to sleep.”

9

The torchlight flickered, sending oily black smoke drifting across the cavern ceiling. Emily Epp staggered away from the lifeless body on the horizontal cross. Her knees buckled; her eyes were rolled up into her head, only the whites showing. Phil caught her, steadied her; he and Bennie helped her back to the chamber they called the white room.

All three wore ceremonial gilt-threaded sarungs; all three were bare to the waist. Emily fell heavily to her knees on the nearest rattan mat. As Phil and Bennie helped her lie down, the men’s eyes met across her body. Phil rolled his briefly toward the corner of the ceiling-what a drama queen, said the look. Bennie’s creased face was impassive as always. You could read anything you wanted into it. Phil read affectionate agreement.

“You going to be okay, Em?” he asked his wife.

“I just need some time to integrate,” she said weakly, but it did not escape Phil’s notice that as she lay back and crossed her hands over her belly, she did not fail to press her elbows and arms against her sides to push her bazooms together. Vanity, thy name is woman, thought Phil.

But Emily’s men had work to do. Leaving Emily to her integration, they returned to the cavern they called the cross chamber and unstrapped the body. Phil, the stronger of the two men, took the shoulders. Bennie, more agile, took the feet and led the way, walking backward. Phil used the beam from his helmet lamp to guide them down a sort of natural winding staircase carved into the limestone by an underground stream that no longer existed.

After thirty or forty feet, the path forked. To the left was the stinking chamber they called the Bat Cave, for obvious reasons. The bats were the size of large crows; the males had testicles like Ping-Pong balls. Phil guided Bennie to the right, through an archway to the Oubliette, which appeared to be a hollowed-out lava chute, an upcropping of the hundred-million-year-old volcanic bedrock upon which the limestone caprock had gradually accrued over the past two million years.

In a way, the Oubliette was the reason the Epps were conducting their rites belowground in the first place. When they first settled on St. Luke, several years earlier, they’d conducted the sacrifices at home and buried the bodies in the rain forest.

But when that little Jenkuns girl surfaced two years ago under a baobab tree-a Judas Bag tree, the natives called it-in the old slave burying ground, they realized they had to find a more secure place to dispose of the bodies. While searching the forest for a suitable location, they had discovered the cave complex mentioned by the early Spaniards.

The entrance had been plugged by a boulder, but removing it had been an easy task for Phil and Bennie, and it had taken them only two days of unchallenging caving to find the apparently bottomless dry well formation they named the Oubliette. From that day forward, they’d never had to worry about where to dump bodies again.

Together Phil and Bennie laid their burden on the ledge, perpendicular to the edge of the hole. Bennie chanted a Niassian prayer that translated roughly as: Let he who travels the sea return within a cycle of the moon; let he who travels to the grave be seen no more on earth. Then they dropped the body feetfirst down the hole. A few seconds later there was a splash-the men turned to each other in surprise, each momentarily blinding the other with his helmet lamp. Apparently the bottomless dry well wasn’t bottomless after all-or dry.

“Must have been this last hurricane,” said Phil, blinking. “Groundwater seepage or something.”

Bennie shrugged. Dry grave, watery grave, all the same to him, so long as the traveler never returned.

Chapter Two 1

Sometimes Pender only knew what he was feeling by the song lyrics running through his mind-he had more songs stored in there than Napster in its heyday.

The first one he found himself humming, as he tossed his empty suitcase on the bed to begin packing early Tuesday morning, was an old country favorite, “You Don’t Miss Your Water (’Til Your Well Runs Dry”), which segued into Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” with its lyric about not knowing what you got ’til it’s gone.

But the well had somehow miraculously refilled itself. Pender had work to do, a serial killer to catch. And while his professional discipline wouldn’t allow him to think of it as fun, there had been a good deal of truth in what he’d told Julian about golf and retirement. The sport had been a marvelous hobby, had given Pender something to look forward to on the weekends, something to take his mind off the endless progression of monsters and serial killers it had been his duty, his burden, and his honor to remove from the general population.

But when you’ve spent your entire adult life performing a job that fulfilling and important, and then it’s taken away from you because of something as arbitrary as your age, after a surprisingly short number of go-rounds on the old links, you realize with a sinking heart, standing there on the first tee, that it just doesn’t matter to you anymore whether the fucking ball goes fucking left or fucking right.

And the next thing Pender knew, he was fifty pounds over-weight, cracking a new bottle of Jim Beam every few days instead of once a week. Although he was not yet so far gone that he was seriously considering eating his Glock, he did find himself thinking a good deal less harshly of the retired agents he’d known who’d done just that.

None of those were good signs, Pender realized, taking his white Panama out of the closet to wear on the plane. It was the one he’d purchased in Carmel with a woman named Dorie Bell, whom he’d rescued from the clutches of a man known as the Phobia Killer two years earlier.

That romance was already deader than Kelsy’s balls, Pender reminded himself with a sigh. Although he’d known going into it that white knight/damsel-in-distress relationships rarely lasted, the end of the affair had shaken him up. He hadn’t dated anyone else, much less got laid since the breakup-those eighteen months were the longest period of celibacy in Pender’s adult life, not counting the last few years of his marriage.