Disembodied Bones (27 page)

Deacon had fielded a few calls in response to
the artist’s sketch. All had turned out to be nothing. Wrong woman.
Theirs had turned up in Florida. Another had gotten married in Las
Vegas and moved to Alaska to work on oil rigs. Another had been a
drug overdose.

But the truth was apparent. The right someone
hadn’t seen the sketch.

Because she’s a blind woman? Because she
believes her granddaughter is out of state in some bible school?
Because I haven’t put the sketch in the right city or town’s
newspaper?

And how else would someone know about the
body being moved twice, except that he was the one who had done
that. The voice on the phone had sounded like a young, educated
white man. Not a black man old enough to be Jane Doe’s father. Not
like the one who fit the psychic’s bill of goods.

Deacon had an open mind. He’d heard about
police officers using psychics before. In fact, he’d attended a
conference where it was the main topic. Several had lectured police
officers in force. Their help could be used, but one had to
carefully differentiate between the one who actually wanted to
help, and the one who wanted publicity.

Chances were strong that the mysterious
caller had to be someone who knew Leonie Simoneaud, and wished to
help her case. Perhaps the caller had even been spurred on by
Leonie herself. After all, the article in the paper that morning
made it look like she was one great big huge fake who used people
at will.

And she used Scott
, thought Deacon.
Poor bastard
.
What next?

•

When Leonie woke up the next morning, she
found a note from the Historical Preservation Committee taped
neatly to her front door. She took her cup of coffee to the front
patio and discovered the note. It wasn’t something derogatory, but
merely a missive from Mr. Martinez stating that her lawn was
getting too long. It was six inches in fact, and exceeded the area
standards by two inches. He had known because he had measured it.
Then he had drawn a little frowny face on the bottom of the
note.

After Leonie crumpled the note, Vinegar Tom
did his very best to eat it. “Good cat,” she said approvingly. Then
she noticed that someone else had left something on her patio. It
was next to the wooden railing and sat incongruently next to a
potted hyacinth. It looked like a child’s backpack. It was blue
with red straps and was puffed out as if it had something
inside.

She sat in the Adirondack chair and stared at
it. Vinegar Tom was growling at the remains of the note from the
Historical Preservation Committee and ensuring that this particular
note would never ever bother another living soul again. When Leonie
put her coffee on the arm of her chair she found that she was
shaking.

In the past two days Leonie hadn’t really had
the kind of headaches that had really begun to plague her in the
last six months. The Advil that Scott had given her seemed to work
a thousand times better than the ibuprofen she had been using. And
for one bright, shining moment she realized that she felt better
than she had in months. Even staring at the puzzling bag on her
porch that caused her fingers to tremble, she knew that something
integral had changed.

But what?
Not yesterday’s paper. Not
the odd looks she’d been getting all week long, which had grown
progressively worse. Pretty soon, Leonie was sure, someone was
going to cross the street to the opposite side when she approached
them.

Elan hadn’t called as promised. She idly
wondered what he was doing, and expected he was cutting his losses.
Especially after yesterday’s debacle. The next thing that would
happen was a recounting of what had happened at the county morgue
in excruciating detail, down to exact words from Leonie’s mouth.
Something along the nature of, “I have felt the spirits calling to
me, and the poor demented spirit of this murdered child! She calls
to me! Come to me!”

Leonie made a noise under her breath. A soap
opera writer couldn’t come up with better dialogue than the
journalists. But she was steadfastly ignoring the backpack on her
patio. She slowly rose up and took a step forward. The air around
her crackled in sinuous anticipation.

I don’t really want to touch that. It scares
me.

“I don’t really want to,” she repeated aloud.
Vinegar Tom looked up from shreds of paper and hissed at her.
Startled, Leonie glanced at the cat. He wasn’t hissing at her. He
was hissing at the bag. Doing his best to warn her, the cat knew
whatever it was, it was bad business.

Deciding she wasn’t going to heed him,
Vinegar Tom gave up the ghost and fled the porch. A wailing hiss
floated back as he vanished behind a clump of pampas grass.

Someone is missing someone else. Leonie knew
it the moment she took the second step toward the bag. It was a
little child’s pack. Something a mother would pack with paper and
pencils and a little lunch, so the child could take it on the bus
to school and not lose anything. The child’s name would be written
on the little label inside the pack and probably on the outside as
well, just to make sure he or she didn’t get it mixed up with some
other child’s blue and red pack. And although it was not school
time, this child liked to use their pack. They took it to daycare.
Sometimes they took it to their grandmother’s house and grandmother
would put little baggies filled with chocolate chip cookies in
it.

A rattling breath shook her and she couldn’t
help the shudder that followed it. This child had been taken. A man
with a black mask covering his face had come into his blue-walled
bedroom and he’d taken him. Then he’d given him something to drink
and said in a harsh voice that unless the child drank what he’d
given him, he’d be forced to hurt the child’s mother.

Leonie knew it was the same man who had taken
Olga in the alleyway. And the child taken wasn’t just any child. He
was a very special child. He was connected to Leonie in a
particular manner. He wasn’t related to her. No one in the family
would be harmed like that; they wouldn’t allow it. No, this was an
outsider’s child, but one that was very unique.

The man had been clever. He had come into the
boy’s room at the crux of night, when dogs were sleeping in their
little houses and parents were dreaming about their second
mortgages and exterior lights were turned off to save on the
electricity bill. Clever, yes, but he needed this child, this child
above all else. Olga had been a test. He’d had no intention of
harming Olga, the fact that the creek’s bank was about to collapse
under her slight body had been an interesting development and
nothing more. But this one was different, in oh, so many ways.
Harming him was part of the plan, part of the experience he would
have. It would be the exquisite culmination of all that he’d worked
for, all of these years.

Leonie started to reach out to touch the
backpack but couldn’t bring herself to do it. She didn’t want to
know what was happening to the nameless child. A little boy, alone
somewhere, drugged into a stupor, not knowing where he was, much
less what was going to happen to him. His mind was a pool of black
sluggish water, like the deepest, darkest depths of Twilight
Lake.

I can’t quite see what’s happening to
him
, Leonie thought. Then she closed her eyes and tried to
focus.
Where are you?
But it was hidden like a wealth of
thick fog obscuring a dense forest. There were shapes around her
and there were things moving in the shadows; things that taunted
her and called to her to find them, if only she could.

She forced her hand forward and realized the
pack was stained with blood. A moan escaped her lips, rising above
the sounds of the neighborhood and she moved the top flap back to
reveal the interior. There were some toys inside, but nothing to
indicate that the child had been harmed. There were only several
drops of blood marking the exterior that she could see, not enough
to show anything but that a small amount had been spilled. There
was also a little tag on the inside. The ragged strokes of a thick
black marker had been used to write a name there.

Leonie chewed on her bottom lip in soundless
disquiet. This bag didn’t belong to Olga; she already knew that for
certain. But she was deathly afraid it belonged to the child of
someone else she knew. Somehow, someway, Monroe Whitechapel’s
malicious pique was coming to haunt her by stealing the children of
those she cared for, and his appointee on earth had left her this
token to make sure Leonie understood what was happening. She
brought her other hand out and carefully spread out the letters she
saw there.

ANT became GRANT as her trembling fingers
worked the slightly ragged material of the tag.
Grant
, she
thought in confusion.
I don’t know any child named Grant. Not
one of Erica’s. Not Michael’s little brother. I don’t think Dacey’s
got any nephews named that.
She would have sighed in relief,
but that she knew a child had still been taken by someone who liked
to play the same games as the man Leonie had killed all those years
before.

But there was more. Grant wasn’t the first
name. It was the last. When the much washed label was fully
unrolled it became KEEFE GRANT. The little words above the
handwritten name said, “Property of:”

The pack belonged to someone named Keefe
Grant. A little boy. He was young, his mind was muddled with
something that he had been given and he drifted on the edge of
unconsciousness. He couldn’t see anything around him, and it might
have been moving. A sickening swaying motion felt suspiciously like
the rocking of a vehicle speeding down a road.

Leonie pulled her hands away from the bag.
She looked out into the neighborhood and everything appeared so
normal. Two houses down, Mrs. Smith, in bikini top and cutoff
jeans, was mowing her own lawn in front of a mission style house
built in 1914. Maybe she had gotten a note from Mr. Martinez. A
Culligan truck was delivering water to the Gerald’s house. The
workman hoisted two large bottles over each of his shoulders and
walked swiftly up to the front porch. Further down the street, a
red Chevy truck was backing out of another driveway.

Normal. Like nothing is wrong. Like
nothing can ever go wrong. And there’s a little boy’s backpack on
my front porch and Mr. Martinez wants me to mow my front yard
because he thinks that the people a hundred years ago would have
kept their yards to four inches or less.
She covered her mouth
with her hand and realized that there was a bit of blood on her
fingers. Leonie would have screamed aloud but she was quite certain
it wouldn’t do any good. She looked back down at the bag.
Is
there a riddle contained in this one, as well? A personal message
to me? “Figure it out and I’ll let him go, safe and unharmed, with
only a little headache to remember me by?”

Leonie knew without touching it again. There
was. Perhaps, under the little plastic Stegosaurus or beside the
Tonka Dump truck, was a note exactly like the one found with Olga,
with a little twisted set of words to get Leonie’s mind racing with
all sorts of unimaginable things that this man could be dreaming up
for her, or for young Keefe, whoever he was.

And what would Scott Haskell say if she
called him. He hadn’t been impressed with what she’d said about the
Jane Doe in the morgue, nor had he been particularly impressed that
she had fled the building like a madwoman on methamphetamine.
What would he say if I called him and said, “There’s a little
boy’s pack on my porch. It’s got spots of what I think is blood on
it. It’s got a few toys in it and another riddle, but I can’t bring
myself to open it. And I think this child has been kidnapped, just
like Olga, but I don’t know who he is, because I’ve never heard of
someone named Keefe Grant.”?

Scott would hang up the phone. “Hell,” Leonie
said. “I’d hang up the phone on me.”

So she reached into the bag once again and
looked for the riddle.

•

Gideon woke up gasping in his own bed. So
exhausted by his vigil at Leonie’s house and business he had given
up for the time being and returned to his home to sleep. He hadn’t
done the work that he had been contracted to perform by several
intermediate business corporations on security issues. In fact, he
knew he was falling behind and would have to subcontract out the
work to one of his competitors in order to complete it. He would
lose half of his profit, but this thing that was stuck in his mind
like an ice pick through the ear was driving him insane.

He knew what Dacey Rojas and Leonie Simoneaud
probably thought he was. Stalker was the word they used and he
winced when he thought about it.
God, ever since I moved here. I
didn’t know Leonie was here when I came here. But I remember what
it was like. I was drawn here. It was like the fierce gravity of a
gigantic black hole drawing me relentlessly inward. No way to
escape it. I had to move here. Here and nowhere else.
One of
his email buddies had suggested it. It was close enough to the
metroplex to be useful, far enough away to get away from the rush
of people, and the online friend knew that Gideon liked his
privacy.

That had been an understatement. Gideon
zealously guarded his home like the most meticulous of
multi-billionaires. No rich man he, he had vowed never to be so at
risk again. It was that which had prompted him to go into the field
he was in. The official title was Security Systems Specialist, an
anti-hacker to be precise. His job was to know more about the
systems they protected than the hackers who would break in and
steal or destroy as they saw fit. Consequently, Gideon was a
hacker’s nightmare. He spent a majority of his time training to
keep on top of cascading technologies; it kept developing and the
hackers kept getting smarter.