Disembodied Bones (16 page)

“What’s an Amber alert?” Elan asked, closing
the door behind him. He and Leonie were sitting in the back. Dacey
was turned halfway around in the front seat, staring through the
cage at her partner as if she had never seen her before. Erica
Jones stood frozen on the sidewalk while Scott issued rapid-fire
instructions to her about Olga and the officers who would be
arriving presently. Erica nodded in a stunned fashion and simply
watched them.

Scott got into the driver’s seat just in time
to hear Elan’s question. He held up a finger while he got on his
radio set to call in the APB for Olga Rojas, pausing only to ask
Dacey what the little girl had been wearing.

“Red T-shirt with Mickey Mouse on it,” said
Dacey. “Blue jeans. Pink tennies with glitter shoelaces.” She put a
trembling hand up to her mouth. “Oh, Jesus,” she said softly.
“Leonie, are you sure she’s all right?”

Scott put the patrol car into gear and
finally answered Elan’s question. “An Amber alert is a cooperative
effort on the part of area authorities and media to quickly
broadcast a possible child abduction by a stranger. It gets
broadcasted on radios and televisions when law enforcement feels
that the situation warrants it. More people listen to radios in
their cars and there’s a joint effort by a multitude of news
stations and radio stations to get the word out. The plan was named
after a little girl who was kidnapped and murdered.” His head
swiveled around to set cool brown eyes upon Leonie. “Which way,
Leonie? Unless you just want to admit you’re full of it and stop
torturing your friend.”

“A park, I said,” Leonie repeated. “There’s
only four or five in the area. Two of them big enough to have large
trees.”

Scott didn’t hesitate. He headed east toward
the largest park in the area. Armstrong Park had been named after a
town benefactor. It was twenty acres of trails and picnic tables
and an intricate children’s play area. Any day of the week would
find dozens of people there barbequing or walking the trails along
a tiny rivulet that eventually fed into the larger creek for which
the town was named.

Leonie thudded the chain divider between the
front and back seats. The flat of the palm of her hand hit the
metal mesh solidly, causing it to reverberate in its fixtures, as
if she had slapped down something that was holding her back. Scott
jumped visibly and snarled, “What?”

“We’re going the wrong way.”

He cursed again and did a U-turn in the
middle of the street, causing an elderly man in a PT Cruiser to
flip him off with a crude gesture. Scott ignored it and sped back
the way he’d come. “Then you’d want Headrick Park. Why didn’t you
just say so?”

Leonie winced from the acidic tone of Scott’s
voice. “It doesn’t work like that.”

Headrick Park was the home of the Chautauqua
building. It was a huge octagonal auditorium built to seat nearly a
thousand people in 1902. Originally sponsored by a church
association, it became a focal point for community activities.
Famous lecturers came to speak, as well as humorists, concerts, and
every imaginable type of entertainment in the days long before
television, long before radio enthralled audiences. At one point in
time Texans from all over the state came to hear such American
celebrities as Will Rogers and William Jennings Bryan. The
association that ran the Chautauqua events became defunct in 1911
and Jason Headrick obtained the facilities and the lush land that
surrounded it. He donated it to the city of Buffalo Creek a few
years later. As other entertainment venues grew in popularity the
Chautauqua building began to decline in use and started to
deteriorate. On the verge of being torn down, there was a massive
grass roots effort to rebuild and restore the building. Once
restored, there was a renewed interest in the unique octagonal
auditorium and the park that surrounded it. It had become a tourist
attraction, one of two left standing in Texas.

Leonie had been to the park dozens of times.
There had been picnics there, alongside Buffalo Creek as it rambled
from west to east. Two black iron, pedestrian bridges spanned its
width, and led the curious onlooker into the heavy uncut forests on
the opposite side of the park. There were deep pools of water where
in the summer the occasional group of children would come to swim,
enjoying a cool respite from the summer heat.

Only two miles away from downtown Buffalo
Creek, Scott pulled into the park and passed the wooden building
that was the Chautauqua Auditorium. The huge octagonal shape had a
central peaked roof with great wood shingles and the walls were
pulled up to conceal the hundreds of bench seats inside to keep the
vandals at bay. Leonie didn’t look at it. She gazed across the park
toward where one of the blackened iron bridges straddled a spill of
clear greenish gray water rushing on its way somewhere else.

Leonie quietly directed Scott to that bridge.
Dacey said, “She’s here, Leonie?”

“Somewhere,” Leonie said distractedly.
“Across the stream. In the woods. Along the trails, near a tall
tree.”

“If she is, Olga didn’t walk here by
herself,” Scott snapped at her. He got out and opened the back door
for Leonie, but he didn’t wait as she pulled herself out, Elan
scooting across the seat and following her. Scott didn’t spare them
a glance as he slowly looked around the park. There was a large
party of people at one of the barbeque pits on the other side of
the park. Festive balloons and ribbons proclaimed it to be a
birthday party. There was an elderly man with a cane walking the
circuit of the paved road that ran the exterior of the park.
Although it was Saturday, it was also a fiercely hot day. Most
people had chosen to take their families to a pool or to the air
conditioned relief of a mall or the theater.

“Of course, she didn’t,” Leonie said.
“Someone brought her. I can’t see his face.” Her eyes seemed to be
glazed over in shock. She reached up with a slender hand and
touched her face as if she were touching the unknown man’s face.
“He’s got something over it. He doesn’t want to be recognized by
Olga or by anyone else. He knows her. Or he’s known her.”

Dacey interrupted with, “You’re scaring me,
Lee. You make it sound like some pervert who took her and-and…” She
covered her eyes with shaking hands. “Oh, God, don’t let that be
true!”

Leonie didn’t even pay attention to Dacey or
Elan, who stared at her with an unnerved look. Scott only paused to
send her a volcanic glare. Leonie drifted across the bridge and the
three people followed. Scott’s urgent voice as he related his
location to the police operator echoed across the hollow under the
bridge span. There was only his hard voice and the gurgle of water
as it ran across smoothened river rocks.

One of Leonie’s hands rested on an iron rail
as she stared into the forest on the other side. One side had been
developed into the park with the Chautauqua as its crowning jewel
in the midst of picnic tables and an expanse of well-maintained
emerald grasses. The stream split the park into a developed side
and a side left to go wild. Trees grew to heights that showed that
this forest hadn’t been cut or burned for hundreds of years.
Cottonwoods, ash, and oaks soared above them and caused wicked
shadows to play over their flesh, creating a travesty of frigid
black gloom that touched warm living tissue. Dirt trails had been
worn by bare feet as children had trampled the vegetation into
nothingness in their effort to make their way into the unclaimed
shrubbery beyond to the most sheltered glens and the deepest pools
along the creek where fish as large as cats swam in the currents.
In the center of a town that had buildings a century and more old,
it was a forest primeval.

“We should split up,” said Elan. “We can
cover more ground.”

“You go with Dacey,” said Scott, regretting
his impulse to give into the anxious mother. A thousand scenarios
ran through his mind. Any one of them was worse than a nightmare
that would wake him screaming. He almost made Elan go back to the
car with Dacey, but realized short of handcuffing the Hispanic
woman to the car she would be out and looking fruitlessly for her
only child. Scott certainly didn’t want her to find her child dead
or discover just what some ruthless bastard was capable of doing,
nor did he want Dacey to discover that her erstwhile partner was
capable of deception. He pointed to the eastward trail because
Leonie was already drifting down the west end, seemingly caught up
in something that dragged her along, willingly or not, he couldn’t
tell. He added grimly, “I’ll go with Leonie.”

A moment later Scott caught up to Leonie,
gritting his teeth as he heard Dacey’s frantic yells for Olga. He
glanced over his shoulder and saw that Elan and Dacey had vanished
into the thick vegetation. Then he pulled his metaphorical gloves
off. One arm shot out and blocked Leonie from moving further. “You
want to tell me just what in the name of God is going on?”

Leonie’s head tilted to one side. She looked
at Scott’s thick arm, corded with muscle and covered with fine
golden-red hair. He was well-tanned from being outside so much. She
didn’t know much about him, except that he seemed to dislike her on
sight. He didn’t spare any licks on that account. He thought she
was some kind of trickster, if not out for money, then for some
kind of inane glory that she would receive from locating a missing
child. “How do you know so much about Jay Harkenrider?” she asked
and moved swiftly around his arm.

She could almost hear his teeth grinding on
one another as he struggled for the patience he needed to deal
coherently with someone he actively disliked. Finally, he said, “I
was there. You don’t remember me. I was there years ago, hunting
down the banks of the Trinity River with a hundred other local law
enforcement volunteers. I saw what you did to that woman.”

Leonie hesitated. The thick shrubbery of the
Trinity River looked a lot like the banks of Buffalo Creek. The
river fed the trees there and caused every kind of undergrowth to
go feral in a wild way that would have a man thinking he was lost
in an untamed, unexplored wilderness ten feet from the road.
Sweetgum, cottonwood, ash, poplar, cedar, and willow all fought for
the opportunity to grow thick and large, attempting to show their
dominance over a dozen kinds of ivy. Honeysuckle, morning glory,
and creepers twisted and crept over every concealable surface,
hiding that which was present only in days past. Poison ivy twisted
up trees upon vines the size of a grown man’s wrist and presented
leaves as broad as plates and wicked irritating to the unfortunate
soul who forgot to wear long sleeves and pants. With the incredible
growth there came the animals that roamed in the living thicket,
from great flying birds to fish that leaped to lazily swimming
alligators to nomadic insects that would cheerfully suck the blood
right out of any living thing.

If she closed her eyes Leonie could see the
top of the bank of the Trinity River. A narrow dirt trek composed
of two parallel trails led from a distant asphalt road. Men came to
that isolated spot to fish. Teenagers came to party and to park. A
small clearing with a fire pit marked where many people had camped
there over the years. If the air was free of smog then one could
look up and see the very tops of the towering buildings that were
the core of Dallas’s downtown area, the distinctive cityscape
unmistakable less than fifty miles distant.

That spot in her mind’s eye was the spot
where Jay Harkenrider’s body had been disposed. The very spot where
the man who was now in prison for kidnapping the child had thrown
away the body of the child he had used so ruthlessly. The police
could prove the kidnapping charges; the man had confessed, but he’d
sworn that he left the child alive in a city park. The mother,
Alexa Harkenrider, a thirty-five year old widow, couldn’t bear to
believe that her only child could be dead and gone. She had grabbed
onto any hope she could. Somehow, someway she’d heard of Leonie
Simoneaud, a young woman who could find missing things and people.
But Alexa hadn’t wanted to listen to what Leonie had said, nor had
she wanted to go where Leonie had led, a lonely bluff above the
brownish Trinity River as it curved and poured its way toward the
Gulf of Mexico.

“She wanted to know where her child was,”
Leonie said quietly, breaking out of the past by blinking her eyes
violently.

“We searched that bluff for three days,”
Scott said behind her. “We didn’t find shit. Beer cans. Tires. An
engine from a ’58 Chevy truck, if you can believe that. Some bones
that turned out to be from a deer. But we didn’t find a kid,
certainly not Jay Harkenrider.”

“I know what you didn’t find, but he’s there.
Still there to this day, years later.”

There was silence from behind her. It was
plain that Scott was mulling over what to say to her. Finally, he
said, “Wasn’t it enough that Miz Harkenrider spit in your face? Do
you want Dacey to spit in your face, too?”

Stopping suddenly on the little trail, Leonie
pointed downward. “Look.”

On the gritty brown earth of the path lay a
little pink tennis shoe with glitter shoelaces. Leonie started to
reach for it when Scott yanked her arm back. “Don’t touch it!”

Leonie stepped around the forlorn tennis shoe
and began down the trail, her pace quickening. Scott yelled after
her, “Leonie! Don’t!”

Her lungs began to burn as she ran. Something
was more and more urgent. Leonie had wasted too much time thinking
about the past. Alexa Harkenrider’s derisive, half-hysterical words
to Leonie that day on the bluff were scorched into her brain like a
still-sizzling brand on a cow’s hide. “My son isn’t dead, you
freak! Jay couldn’t be dead! You were supposed to find him! You
were supposed to help me find him alive! You’re nothing but a
twisted little liar!”