Rebel Island (Tres Navarre #7)(63)

“I think,” I said, “it’s high time we visited the lighthouse.”

36

Calavera checked his watch. Only minutes left now.

His things were safely stashed away. He would retrieve the money later, after the storm had passed. Then he would disappear for good.

What would the police think? They would have little to go on. They would scratch their heads about Alex Huff’s fate, but eventually they would drop the case. They would accept the easy answer, because it meant less work.

No one would escape to contradict his story. He would make sure of that.

He looked at the last candy skull in his hand.

He had never meant it to be a calling card. The skull was a tribute, left at his early kills to remind himself of a dying child—a lone eleven-year-old girl.

It had been only one of many atrocities he’d seen in the army. Why this one stuck with him, he didn’t know. He came into the hut just as his comrades had finished their business. They slashed the girl’s throat to silence her. The killer turned to face him, his eyes glazed. The blade of his knife glistened red. Calavera watched the girl die. He saw the light go out of her eyes. Her family was already dead. No one would grieve for her or even know what had happened.

And Calavera said nothing. He walked out of the hut and carried on, checking for weapon caches.

But he memorized the faces of the attackers. Within a week, all three of them had died. Freak accidents: the first blown apart by a land mine where no land mine should’ve been; another burned alive by an incendiary bomb; the third the victim of a defective grenade. Afterward, before his division left the area, Calavera went back to the location of that hut—now a smoking pile of ruins—and placed an offering to the girl: a few cookies, a wilted flower, a candy skull.

Her death kept things in proportion for him. If an innocent like her could die senselessly, why should he feel guilt? Why not take the money of the wicked to kill the wicked?

Even so, he had tried to stop. He had thought the days of Calavera were behind him, until New Year’s Eve.

Now it was different. He had to kill indiscriminately to protect the only thing he cared about.

It isn’t too late, he thought. I could stop it now. I could warn them.

He threw the candy skull into the corner. There would be no tributes today. This was about survival.

He made sure his gun was loaded. Then he went out to complete his plans.

37

On our way out we passed the dining room, which is why I saw Jose with the bodies.

“Wait for me,” I told Garrett.

“Why?” Then he saw what I saw, and he didn’t look too anxious to follow.

In the dining room, Jose had laid out the two dead bodies on tables, each wrapped in white linen. I could tell which corpse was Chris Stowall. He was frozen in the fetal position. The other, Longoria, I would’ve been able to recognize from the smell. A day of death had mingled unpleasantly with his regular Old Spice.

Jose stared at the two men the way he might study a dinner setting, wondering whether he’d put the salad forks on the correct side.

“You moved them,” I said. I have a talent for stating the obvious.

“Everyone was packing, señor. It seemed to me if we leave…”

He didn’t finish the thought, but I got it. The dead have to leave, too.

When the police finally got here, they were going to have a forensics hissy fit. The bodies had been moved so many times. Yet Jose’s feelings seemed sensible, somehow. He was tidying up. Looking out for the guests. Even Longoria deserved some measure of final respect. Or maybe I’d just been spending too much time in this damn hotel.

There was a jangling sound from the kitchen, and Imelda appeared in the doorway, flipping through a big ring of keys. “Jose, I can’t—”

She stopped when she saw me. Her eyes were pink from crying. The keys in her hand looked like the same set Jose had used the night before, to let me look through the office.

“It’s all right, mi amor,” Jose assured her. “I’m almost ready.”

Imelda met my eyes briefly, set the keys on the nearest table and backed out of the room. Not for the first time, I had the sense she wanted to tell me something, but I’d begun to wonder if that was just the way Imelda was—perpetually frustrated by her inability to express all the strange horrors she’d seen in her life.

When she was gone, Jose pocketed the keys. He picked up two tins of marigolds from the floor—the same marigolds that had been on his altar upstairs—and set them at the feet of each corpse. I wondered if he’d packed up his old pictures, too, and the ofrendas for his ancestors.

“You’ll leave the bodies here?” I asked.

“I’m not sure, señor.” Then he focused on me, as if realizing that this was an odd place for me to be. “Where are you going?”

“To look for your boss.”

Jose kept the same stoic look he’d had folding linen over the corpses. “Do not, señor. Please. It isn’t worth it.”

“You’re trying to protect him?”

Jose said nothing. He picked up a bottle of tequila from the wet bar.

“You’ve suspected Alex for a while, haven’t you?” I asked.

“Help will come soon, señor. Let the police handle things. You should take your wife outside. Wait there.”