Disembodied Bones (45 page)

“You found Douglas, but you didn’t find me.”
His voice turned thoughtful. “At first I was forgiving. I thought
once you regained consciousness in the hospital, I would be saved.
Douglas had been saved. I would be saved. I had water. I had a
little food in here. I watched the television reports about the
police’s search for bodies on the property. They used special rods
to go over the grounds where recent work had been done. They used a
bulldozer to tear up the playground and the pool. They ripped holes
in the house’s walls and the media ate it up.”

“They searched for a week,” Leonie
muttered.

“I screamed until I was hoarse. I screamed
until I couldn’t make a sound.” Elan’s brown eyes stared intently
at Leonie. He had judged her and found her wanting. Her odd gold
eyes were huge in her waxy face. The strain showed on her beautiful
face, and the only bit of color there was the pink of the scar on
her cheek. “You found Douglas and you didn’t find me, not even when
you woke up.”

“You…weren’t missing,” Leonie said. Her voice
was halting and she clearly did not like saying the words that
damned her.

“I wasn’t…missing,” Elan repeated oddly. “Of
course I was missing.”

Leonie licked dry, cracked lips. “Then I’ll
put it another way. No one missed you. Not like they missed
Douglas. Not like Olga was missed. Not like Keefe is being missed
now.”

Elan nodded slowly. “It doesn’t matter.” He
shook himself and jumped into the pit, standing not far from her.
“I freed myself and then I helped myself to Whitechapel’s money. He
had a significant amount of stocks and bearer bonds in his safe.
The safe, incidentally, was not found by the police either. Not
only did he take me there, but he bragged to me about it. Showed me
the little bags filled with flawless diamonds, and the stacks of
papers that didn’t mean shit to me, until much later. Whitechapel
even gave me the combination, never dreaming that I would one day
be able to use it.” He grinned and it was an incongruent flash of
brilliant white in a hate-filled face.

Leonie didn’t move. She simply stared back,
keeping her face as neutral as she could. She was remembering six
months of dates with Elan Carter, defense contractor, a gentleman
who wanted to wait, a man whose mother lived in his house and he
took care of her. It was nothing but a detailed lie in order to
make a snare for her.

Elan stretched his arms out, resting one hand
on the wall nearest to her. He stretched for the other side with
the other one. The tips of his fingers spanned the width of the
pit. He loomed over her, a demented avenging angel, bearing a
grudge that would crush a towering mountain. “Money solves all
kinds of problems. It also provides the solid basis for the kind of
revenge that I wanted on you. You left me in this pit to rot and
I’m going to do the same with you. Except I’m not going to put the
cement cap on. I was sealed in. But you won’t be.”

“Elan, this won’t make things right,” Leonie
said softly.

When he spoke his voice was slow and
deliberate. “How would you know what will make things right for
you?”

“Don’t you want to know how I knew it was
you?” she asked instead of answering.

Elan shrugged. “It doesn’t matter now that
I’ve got you. It doesn’t matter because you’re here in this place,
right now, where I’ve wanted you for the last decade. Maybe it was
a process of elimination. Maybe I came on a little too strong. It
could have been many things. A project like this has a thousand
details, and one has to plan and proceed with the flow of
events.”

“You said to me at the house something about
what kind of man would have the bloody shirt in his barn,” Leonie
said. “And no one told you that. It’s one of the details the
sheriff’s keeping back to eliminate false confessions.”

He laughed. “Well, a detail. A trivial point
at best. Even if you mentioned my name to him, he’s going to have a
hell of a time figuring out where I am now, or where you’re
at.”

Slowly Elan dropped his arms to his sides and
straightened up, drawing himself to his full six feet of height. He
turned his face into the shadows and she couldn’t tell at what he
was looking. Keefe moaned in his sleep and Elan’s face
twitched.

Leonie didn’t move. Chained to the wall, she
wasn’t sure what she could do to Elan, or what she didn’t dare to
do. With chilling emphasis, she realized that she was in the same
precarious position that the younger Elan had been in. When
Whitechapel came to him, did he not dare to fight because he knew
that no one else would come for him? Did he feel the sinking
desolation of utter despair when he saw that his abuser was dead,
killed by a mere slip of a girl who came to free another child? Did
he have hope that had been so dramatically murdered by the passage
of time? Understanding came to her, but it was a bitter
comprehension, and she knew the same despair that she had felt with
Alexa Harkenrider. Every missing child that was out there was
potentially still alive. Every missing child might be found.

Except one child, a child who hadn’t been
missed. Why hadn’t he been missed? Before you can tell me, what I
have forgotten.

“And who is the woman in the attic?” Leonie
said warily. “Another person on which complicated revenge was
called for?”

“An unexpected bonus,” Elan said and his face
moved out of the shadow again. “My mother. The woman who should
have missed me. In a way, it was as much her fault as yours.”

“Your mother with Alzheimer’s?”

Elan shrugged. “She doesn’t exactly remember
everything. She had forgotten her own child. The last riddle.” A
pause. “Did Whitechapel say anything about me at the end? Did he
die knowing full well he was leaving me to rot in a hole in the
ground?”

“He said that,” Leonie whispered. “His last
words were that I hadn’t solved the last riddle. I don’t know what
he meant. You? Some other intricate riddle he had planned for us? I
didn’t know that he had another child secreted away. If I had, I
would have come for you, too.”

“Would you?” Elan said it softly as a feather
floating on a gentle breeze. One hand reached out for her. “In the
last six months I looked for something in you. I had a few doubts
that you might have been innocent. But you wouldn’t talk about that
time. You wouldn’t give out any kind of reasons for why you left a
fourteen year old boy alone in a dark pit. Why you walked away and
let him slowly decay into a tormented pile of skin and bones?
Despair was his companion. Futility was his attendant. He had
nothing.”

His hand stroked Leonie’s cheek. The fingers
were stiff against her flesh and she froze into place, not knowing
what to say to curtail Elan’s growing rage.

“And you? You had fame and glory. You had the
family. A whole family that came around you like a warm blanket, to
protect you and to keep you from harm, while I starved and had
nightmares where Monroe Whitechapel’s bones came rattling down into
that makeshift crypt to make sure I died the death he had planned.”
Elan bared his teeth again and Leonie trembled. “And after a little
time had passed, I wanted that shocking nightmare to come true, so
I could go ahead and die.”

He saw that Leonie was shaking and he reveled
in it. The bared teeth became a real smile of amusement. “So you
can have the same fate. But all you have to do is get out of the
handcuff. Then make your way to a riddle on another laptop. No
razors this time. Solve the riddle, and I’ll let the child go
free.”

Leonie’s eyes darted to the side and saw
Keefe. She didn’t know anything about the seven year old boy, but
she knew he was innocent, and he didn’t deserve this fate. “How can
I trust you to do that?”

“I’m not a pedophile, like he was,” Elan said
it gently, as if he really cared. “Keefe Grant was a means to an
end, and he’s served his purpose. There’s no reason to kill
him.”

“That’s not true,” Leonie said back, and
wished she had bitten it back.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you still hold something against
Douglas Trent.” Leonie stiffened her back and pulled back from
those fingers against her flesh. Elan’s eyes narrowed dangerously
at her action. “Kill Keefe and plant his body on that property,
just like you said you would. That would pretty well ensure
Gideon’s fate, wouldn’t it?”

Elan’s eyebrows lifted. He didn’t pull his
hand back, but shifted it to tug at her hair. “I always liked your
hair.” A pause ensued. “I can only tell you that I will let him go.
Alive. Drugged. But alive. If you make it out of this pit and make
it to the laptop and solve the riddle. Not an easy one this time,
by the way. It’s more of a chance than Whitechapel ever gave the
children he kidnapped and raped. It’s the only chance you’re going
to get.” Suddenly he wrapped his hand around a thick lock of her
hair and yanked viciously. “Do you understand?”

Leonie winced. She stared up at Elan and saw
for the first time that he really was just as insane as Monroe
Whitechapel. It was different than the other man, but he was mad
all the same. Abruptly she twisted her head and sank her teeth
ferociously into his hand. She reached for him with clawed fingers,
but Elan abruptly started to laugh, and Leonie stopped.

Gradually and with growing alarm, Leonie let
her teeth relax. It felt as if she had been biting into hard
rubber, not flesh.

Elan pulled back a little and showed her his
left hand. She didn’t know how she had missed it. For a prosthetic
device it looked as real as her hands. Then he deliberated put the
hand in front of her face and showed how he could make the fingers
move by using the muscles in his forearm. “State of the art,
Leonie,” he said. “With a suit on and the right circumstances, no
one is the wiser. And no one really notices the left hand isn’t
quite as active as the right.” He paused to look deeply into her
eyes. “You didn’t.”

Leonie deliberately glanced at the handcuff
around her left wrist, so tight that it constricted the blood flow
in her hand. Then she looked back at Elan. He nodded at her. “Yes,
that’s exactly how I got out of it. Like a rabbit caught in a steel
jaw. I did exactly what I had to do. Just like you’re going to do.
That is, if you want the boy to live.”

-

What is it you have to speak?

But to answer you have to ask?

And to ask you have to speak?

And to speak you have to know the answer.

It is a riddle.

Sunday, July 28th

My children dressed in black or white,

Darkness or light might bring me calling.

I am oblivion, an empty void, to some,

And a haven for others.

In peace and war I conquer,

Even the tyrants fear me,

Yet the tortured bless my name.

Unmapped am I,

Uncharted are my waters.

I visit in dreams and reality.

I never make an appointment

But I’m always on time.

Laugh in my face

And I will laugh right back.

What am I?

The first thing that Gideon did was to shut
the blinds tightly. The office had large windows that overlooked
part of a parking lot and a soccer field. He certainly didn’t want
the light to show while he was working. The second thing he did was
to check out the hardware in the office. The computer wasn’t bad,
top of the line Dell with all the bells and whistles. While it
didn’t compare to the stuff in his house, it had a network hard
line with a connection to the rest of the PD’s system. All he
really needed was a password. He was guessing Linux or a recent
Windows operating system was being used on the computer itself.
Child’s play and I am so the child.

Gideon studied the desk for any kind of
useful miscellaneous information. With a casual hand he turned the
computer on, waiting while it went through its paces. The office’s
occupant certainly wasn’t expecting to have someone sitting at the
desk while he was absent and consequently it wasn’t secured
particularly well. Neither was the security on the system as good
as it should have been considering the surroundings.
I will have
to submit a contract to them
, he thought ruefully.
As if
they’ll go for it.

The desks’ drawers weren’t locked and Gideon
opened them one after another. Standard stuff in the desk for a
police officer. Well, even for a sheriff. He had some pepper spray
in one. Handcuffs were neatly placed next to the pepper spray for
convenience. There was a bunch of pencils and pens with various law
enforcement insignias on them. There was a book tucked away in the
bottom called,
Big Daddy’s Book on Birding
by Dan “Big
Daddy” Sully. Gideon shut the drawers. He looked under the desk
calendar and even checked under the telephone.

Gideon sighed. So maybe Scott Haskell is a
little more aware of security than he should be. He had a sudden
thought.
A big, tall bubba like Scott is a birder?
He opened
the bottom drawer again and pulled out
Big Daddy’s Book on
Birding
. On the inside cover was a handwritten list of
passwords, neatly inscribed with a steady hand and notations next
to each what the password went with.
Ah-ah-ah, not bad, but not
good.

The computer’s little box that queried for a
password had been up for a while, and Gideon looked at
Big
Daddy’s Book on Birding
and typed in the appropriate one. The
computer accepted it without pause. He was online with the Pegram
County Sheriff’s Department internal systems. He could look at all
their computerized records, arrest reports, active warrants,
personnel files, and any other area that he cared to peruse.
Really, really sad. That only took me six minutes and
change.

Gideon had made a mental list of what he
needed to do. He had attempted to prioritize his mission. He didn’t
really know how long he would have before Malone discovered his
absence, or how long it would take to mobilize a search team, or
even how long it would take before it occurred to them to search
the building. He wasn’t going to hide. Well, not really. He had
things to do, and a computer to do them on, so staying put was part
of the agenda. His expertise was urgently needed and in some
desperate back part of his mind, he recognized that he couldn’t
even begin to search the areas that would give him a clue as to
where Leonie might be. He had to get something else first,
something that would make Scott Haskell have doubts about Gideon’s
guilt and proof of Leonie’s abilities.