Read Twenty-Seven Bones for Free Online Page B

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