Island of Bones (34 page)

Louis made his way through the clutter of cameras and reporters and slipped inside the entrance of the Fort Myers Police Station.

The
women had been released, and rather than force the women into the media pack outside, Horton had allowed them to wait in a conference room on the second floor. Frank Woods was on his way to take the women back to the island.

Louis
stopped at the top of the stairs to catch his breath. He wasn’t even sure why he was here. What was it he wanted to know? He already knew why the killing had started. Did he really expect any of them to tell him why they allowed it to happen?

But still, he had to ask. There had been something about this case right from the beginning that gnawed at him unlike any other he had worked.
He couldn’t seem to let it go. Not yet.

He paus
ed at the open door of Landeta’s office. It had been cleaned out. All that was left was the desk, the chair, and the empty bookcases.

Louis continued down the hall to the conference room and opened the door slowly.

The women were seated at a conference table, backlit by the sun streaming through a window. Paula Berkowitz was closest to him, dressed in the shapeless cotton dress, her hands folded in her lap. Next to her was Cindy Shattuck, her blond braid now half undone around her face. Emma Fielding sat nearest the window and her wary gray eyes followed Louis as he stepped around the table.

“We don’t have to talk to you,” Emma said.

“I know that,” Louis said. “But there are some things I need to ask you. Off the record.”

The women sat as stiff as stone statues, dust
motes floating in the air above their heads.

Louis slipped into a chair across from Emma. She looked up at him slowly, her expression a mixture of anger and sadness.

“How could you let them kill your babies?” Louis asked.

Emma shook her head. “Francisco told us not to talk to anyone else. He says they still might put us in jail.”

“We don’t want to go to jail,” Cindy said.

“
We’re going home to take care of Roberto,” Paula added.

“Roberto isn’t going home,” Louis said. “The state will keep him until all this is over, if not forever.”

“What about the baby?” Cindy asked.

Louis looked at her. “You ask about a baby you were going to let die?”

“It’s her grandchild,” Emma said. “Rafael is Cindy’s son.”

Louis looked back at Emma, trying to keep his voice even. “What you let happen was wrong,” he said.

Emma’s eyes hardened. “You’re judging a situation and people you don’t even know. You came to our home, you shot my nephew, and now your people are desecrating the babies’ graveyard. You just want to punish us for being what we are, for being different.”

“You murdered children,” Louis said.

“We survived,” Emma said.

“That’s not surviving.”

Emma shook her head. “What do you want from us?”

“I want to know why you let it happen. Just tell me why,” Louis said.

Paula started to speak but Emma hushed her with a raised hand. “I was twelve when my stepfather first climbed into my bed,” Emma said.

“
I don’t need to hear –-”

“Y
es, you do,” Emma said. “I was fourteen when my mother dragged me off to a doctor and he put me on a table and stuck something up inside me and killed my stepfather’s baby.”

Louis couldn’t move. Emma’s face was stiff but her eyes jumped with emotion.

“After my brother Neil left, I was alone,” she said. “I used to lock myself in my closet at night, praying I would die.” Emma straightened her shoulders. “Do you know what it’s like to be twelve years old and want to die?”

Louis was quiet.

“I met Emilio del Bosque at the grocery store. I was only fifteen. He offered me a candy bar. I was afraid to take it because I figured he wanted sex in return.”

“Mrs. del Bosque
—- ” Louis began.

“Let me finish. We met every week for six weeks. He would buy me sandwiches and sodas, things I couldn’t afford. He never asked a thing of me
, not once.” Emma took a breath, looking at the other two women.

Paula was staring at the table, and Cindy had her eyes closed.

Emma looked back at Louis. “Then one day he took me to the island for lunch. His brother Edmundo, his uncle Alfonso, Ana, they were all kind to me. They had something...something I never knew existed. They had family, love, traditions. They were normal.”

Emma paused again, glancing back at Paula. “
When Emilio said it was time for me to go home I begged him to let me stay. I told him I would do anything he wanted. I was sixteen when we were married.”

Louis put a hand to his brow.

“A year or so later, I gave birth to Carlos,” Emma went on. “Emilio was so proud and for a few years we were really happy. Emilio and his brother opened the restaurant and we had money coming in. We had everything we needed there on the island and life was good.”

Emma paused
. “Then I became pregnant again,” she said. “When the time came,
Abuela
Ana took me to the birthing house and I had a little girl. I heard her cry but Ana told me later she just stopped breathing. For months, I cried. Then one day Emilio told me he couldn’t stand my tears anymore and he told me that our baby had been smothered.”

Emma paused again.
Her face was empty, her eyes still dry.

“I was only told that was the way it was done
,” she said. “To this day, I don’t know why.”

“When you get back to the island ask Frank,”
Louis said. “He knows.”

Emma blinked in surprise and glanced at the other women. “He knows? Is that why he took Sophie away?”

“Like I said, ask him,” Louis said.

The scrape of a chair made Louis look at Cindy. She
had gone to stand at the window, her back to them. Emma watched her, her expression suddenly tender, almost maternal. Then she turned back to Louis.

“You probably want to know why we didn’t leave,” Emma said. “I thought about it. We all did at one point. But there was nowhere to go. I had a son and a husband. Where was I going to go?”

Louis heard Cindy crying softly.

“When you finally have something good,” Emma said, “when you finally feel connected to
someone, you’ll do anything to keep from being alone again.”

Louis shook his head.

“I know you want us to somehow pay,” Emma said. “My husband and son are dead. Paula’s son, Tomas, is dead. The only thing I have left is my grandson, Roberto, and he isn’t coming back.” She paused. “How much more do you want to punish us?”

Louis felt a pull in his chest, and it bothered him because it felt like a pang of sympathy and they didn’t deserve his sympathy.

“I need to ask you something now,” Emma said. She was looking straight into his eyes. “What would you have done?”

S
uddenly, he wanted out of here. He didn’t want to deal with the women, their pathetic stories or their dead children. He rose and went to the door.

“I
answered your questions,” Emma said. “I think you should answer mine. What would you have done?”

Louis looked at the other two women. Cindy was staring
out the window. Paula’s head was down, her cheeks streaked with tears.

“I can’t put myself in your place,” Louis said. “I’m sorry.”

He left, closing the door behind him.

Louis leaned back against the closed door and let out a long, slow breath then he started down the hall. At the top of the stairs, he stopped.

At the bottom
was a heavyset woman dressed in a dark blue suit, carrying a briefcase. She had Roberto by the hand. His head was down as he trudged up the stairs, a half step behind her.

“Come on, Robert,” she said, “we don’t have all day.”

The boy’s eyes shot to her face. “It’s Roberto.”

Someone had found him some
clean clothes -- jeans, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt and new Nikes. He looked stunned, like someone wandering alone in a foreign country where he couldn’t understand the language.

Halfway up the stairs,
Roberto spotted Louis and froze. His dark eyes were locked on Louis and in them Louis could read all the questions: Why am I here? Why is my father dead? What’s going to happen to me? Why did you do this to me?

The
woman started tugging his hand again, pulling him up the remaining steps. Louis stepped aside to let them pass, and Roberto shuffled by him silently.

“Roberto,” Louis said.

The woman turned. Roberto did not.

“Do I know you?” she asked.

“I know him,” Louis said. “What is he doing here?”

The social worker sighed. “He wanted to see his aunts before we left. He’s here to say good-bye.”

“I’d like to speak with him. Please.”

“I don’t think
—-”

“I work with the police department,” Louis said.

The woman looked down at Roberto. “Do you want to talk to him, Robert?”

Roberto shrugged. Louis came
back up the stairs.

“Can we be alone, please?” Louis asked.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” the woman said. “The boy is very upset and he might —-”

“I’m not going to take him anywhere,” Louis said
.

The woman hesitated then let go of Roberto’s hand. She walked about twenty feet down the hall, sinking into a chair near the conference room door. She watched as Louis took Roberto by the shoulders and eased him down to the
top step then sat down next to him.

Roberto kept his eyes on his
new Nikes.

“Roberto, I want you to know how sorry I am,” Louis said.

Roberto said nothing.

“And that I know what you’re going through,” Louis said.

“You don’t know anything,” Roberto said. He pulled his knees to his chest. His eyes were on the two cops in the lobby below.

“When I was your age, I had to leave my home, too,” Louis said. “I didn’t want to go, but I had to.”

Roberto’s eyes welled. “I want to go home.”

Louis wanted to touch him, but he didn’t dare with the social worker watching.

“I know,” Louis said. “I felt like that, too. But I had to go live with somebody else for a while. Until things could be straightened out.”

Roberto didn’t look at him. “How long?” he asked.

Louis took a deep breath. “Well, there are some things that have to be sorted out first about your family, and if the judge decides...”

He stopped. He would only make things worse by lying. He knew what was ahead. “I don’t know when you can go home,” he said.

“Do I have to stay with her?” he asked.

Louis looked back at the social worker, who was still watching them closely.

“No,” Louis said.

Robert
o’s chin quivered. “Then who’s going to take care of me?”

Someone good and kind? Someone who will make you believe that you might, someday, be able to trust people again, like Phillip Lawrence did for me?
It had been a long two years and too many other shadowed houses before Louis had finally been placed with Phillip, his last foster father.

“They’ll find a place for you with a family and
—-”

“I already have a family. I want to go home.” He was crying now
. “I miss Papa and I want to go home. Why did you have to come? It’s all your fault.”

Louis reached out and touched Roberto’s hair. The boy jerked away.

Louis heard the social worker’s heavy footsteps coming toward them. He rose slowly.

“I think you should go,” the woman said.

Louis hesitated, looking down at Roberto. He went slowly down the stairs. At the bottom, he stopped and looked up. Roberto and the social worker were gone.

He pushed open the door and wedged his way through the reporters. When he reached the other side of the street, he looked back at the second-story window of the police station.

Horton’s words came back to him.
Your whole fucking Rambo act is going to end up being for nothing.

H
e couldn’t let himself believe that. If he believed it was all for nothing, he would go crazy.

It wasn’t all for nothing. It was
to save one baby’s life.

He felt a trickle of sweat make its way slowly down his back and the air was suddenly too thick to breathe in. He was standing but he felt as if he’d been punched in the gut. He took a shallow breath and blew it out, looking across the street at the blur of faces and color in the media pack.

Wiping a hand over his brow, he turned, unsure where to go. He felt the urge to move, to run. But there was nowhere to go -—except back to an empty cottage. He started toward his car, reaching for his sunglasses.

Forget it, Kincaid. It’s just this case. Just those pitiful women, those small graves, and that damn baby skull. Nothing a six-pack and a nice sunset won
’t cure.

He pulled out his car keys and reached for the door of the Mustang. A pay phone on the co
rner caught his eye.

He walked to the phone, fishing for change. He dropped a quarter in the slot and dialed the number.