Disembodied Bones (52 page)

“Yeah, hi. This is Gideon Lily. Don’t hang
up.” Gideon waited and was pleasantly surprised she didn’t
immediately hang up. Her real name was Winifred A. Fields and he
even had her social security number.

“Oh, great,” said Winifred. “I knew I should
have gone to the cyber café.”

“You routed the email through six countries,
two satellites and an offshore oil rig that they use to laundry
drug money. It wasn’t easy to track. However, I particularly
applauded your anonymous donation from the Republican National
Party to the International Abortion Consortium.”

“Well, they deserved it.”

Gideon smiled. “Even made
Time
.”

“Well, it was one of my better moments.”

“How did you crack the bank?”

Winifred laughed. “Even an old hacker like me
has to have some secrets. When I was my kids’ age, I learned how to
use a Commodore 64, bet you don’t even know what that is.”

“Thanks for the email. No one else seems to
be talking.” Gideon got right to the point.

“That’s because the guy plastered a ton of
money across the horizon. He hired one of the black ops guys out of
New York who do dirty stuff like that to do his business. One of my
buds told me about it because he thought I would go for easy
money.” Winifred snorted. “I always need money. You would too, with
two daughters wanting to buy Hilfiger and Abercrombie & Fitch.
But I didn’t take it. It reeked bad. Wicked bad, my daughters would
say.”

“Maybe I can help.”

“Ever the good Samaritan, Gideon?” Winifred
was skeptical. “I know you don’t play dirty, but that was before
someone came slinging for you.”

“You got curious, didn’t you, CQ?”

“Call me Freddie,” she said. “Everyone who
knows me calls me that.”

“You got curious, Freddie? You do a back
trace? Got a whiff of trouble and decided it was a challenge?”

“That’s what I like about you, Gideon,”
Freddie laughed. “You don’t mess around.”

Gideon glanced around the room. He could hear
men in heavy shoes tromping up and down the exterior hall. Any
moment and Scott was going to come back to his office, or someone
else would, and the jig would be, as they said in the movies, up.
“If you know something, Freddie, I need the help, and I’ll owe you
big time. You know what that means?”

“Wow,” Freddie breathed, not sarcastically.
“I do. I like that. Okay. Gorshin Corporation initiated the
payments to the black ops guys. They have registered domains in
Louisiana and the Cayman Islands. No surprise there. I didn’t feel
like dipping into that slime pool, so I passed. But I’ll email you
what I’ve got. With the proviso that you don’t reveal your sources.
And I want a promise written in pure electronic code.”

“Agreed.” Gideon sighed. That meant that he
owed Freddie the Caffeine Queen programming skills when she needed
them, and he would follow through if he wasn’t inside a cell. But
the part that got him going was that Gorshin Corporation was the
one who had purchased the house he lived in, the one that had fit
his bill of goods so well. They hadn’t just been set up for months,
but at least for two years, or more. If it all led back to Monroe
Whitechapel, it might very well be over a decade and a half that
the planning had taken place.
What could a crypt possibly tell
me that an investigative reporter would find so
interesting?

Freddie was telling Gideon why she hadn’t
warned him in the first place, when the door in Scott’s office got
kicked opened by a large, angry man.

•

After being called into an emergency session
of the county commissioners, Scott decided that his day couldn’t
get worse. The commissioners weren’t, as a general rule, pleased.
One had even yelled at Scott and that hadn’t made him any happier.
Another one threatened a voter recall. Scott frowned, thinking of
his recent record. Two kidnapped children, one possibly in the
neighborhood and quite likely dead. A probable kidnapper in the
jail ambled on out of his own accord, while Scott was stealing
flowers out of the cemetery like a common criminal. There was a
missing psychic with a mean tailless cat.
What can possibly come
next?

Upon his return to the headquarters building
he found several messages. One was from a doctor from the hospital
about the medication that Dacey Rojas had accidentally ingested.
The laboratory had finished their analysis. It wasn’t poison but
some kind of psychotropic medication intended for use with
schizophrenics or schizo-something-or-others. Apparently, Brad
Husbands, M.D., had done some detective work himself over the
weekend. It was suggested to him by Leonie Simoneaud that someone
had switched her ibuprofen for something else for reasons he didn’t
understand. As it happened, no one would have known except the
switched pills had an incremental amount of peanuts in the coating
used to make them easier to digest. So when Ms. Rojas had
inadvertently taken several, she had a severe allergic reaction to
the peanuts. Dr. Husbands had called to let the sheriff know that
the drugs had been purchased in a large quantity in Mexico by a
corporation he couldn’t find out any further information about.

The lengthy note had annoyed the clerk and
made Scott’s head ache. “What the fuck?”

“I wrote down exactly what he told me,” said
the clerk who’d handed him the notes. “Dr. Husbands is my mother’s
doctor and he’s not a fruit loop. My mother would kill me if I
hadn’t.”

Scott, tired and crabby after a long night of
being awake, snarled, “Just remember who you work for, and it ain’t
your mama.”

The clerk remained defiant. “Dr. Husbands
said it was important that you understand.”

Whirling away with a disgusted grunt, Scott
said, “Fine. Fine. I’ll think about it later.”

There was absolutely no sign of Gideon Lily.
The roadblocks had produced nothing. The dogs had failed to find a
scent. House to house searches within five miles of the sheriff’s
department had found no even a single hair of evidence that showed
where Lily had vanished. It was like the guy was a magician. It was
like he had flown away.

He flew away
? Scott blinked. A sudden
vision popped into his head. Toasters with little wings were flying
away into infinity. He never left his computer on. But it had been
on, and the screen saver had been engaged
. Oh man, I’m gonna pay
for that momentary lapse of reasoning.

They hadn’t been able to find Gideon Lily
because he hadn’t left the building. Scott slapped the top of his
head with the stack of messages and the clerk shot him a second
look. Then the sheriff paused for a moment.
Why stay in the
building? Why not escape? He’d had time
. Jay Malone had spent
the better part of an hour trying to convince the night clerk of
his sincerity.
Why stay in the building?

“I could prove it to you right now,” was what
Lily had said to him. It was something about tracking down social
security disability to blind women who would fit the bill of
Leonie’s “theory.” Scott had disregarded it out of hand. Just like
Leonie, it had to be crap. No matter what Dacey believed about her
friend, it had to be. He didn’t know how Leonie had managed to
convince so many people, but she had done it, and Scott wasn’t
buying it. Not without convincing, irrefutable, diehard proof.

Scott got a few deputies and went to his
office. One of them was Ken Ash and Scott said out of the corner of
his mouth, “You didn’t search my office?”

“I-uh-I-uh,” was all Ken was able to say. “I
was gonna.”

“Great,” Scott said. “He’s been in there all
night, and had access to my computer and the system, and he’s some
kind of super computer nerd. So let me guess what he’s been
doing?”

Ken said, “Uh, I don’t know.”

When Scott kicked the door open, Gideon had
his hands in the air. In spite of three weapons pointed at him, his
frank brown eyes flickered to the clock on the computer and he
said, “It took you a really long time to figure the screen saver
thing out, Scott. And really, I never took you to be a bird
enthusiast.”

•

Ken Ash and Sue Hewitt had Gideon pinned on
the floor. Sue had her knee across Gideon’s neck and Gideon groaned
as she pressed harder. She also had his arm twisted behind his back
while Ken was cuffing the other one. In Gideon’s favor, he wasn’t
struggling. As a matter of fact, he didn’t even protest. He had
kept his hands in the air and had simply let himself be taken down
by the two deputies while Scott kept them covered.

When Gideon was secured, Scott put his weapon
back in its holster and buckled it once more.
Well, there’s one
problem solved.

Gideon said, “I’ve got the proof you need,
Scott.”

Scott took a deep breath and struggled not to
get angry. He hadn’t gotten to sleep the previous night and the
thought of this guy sitting at his desk, going through his
possessions made his skin crawl. He was going to have to fumigate
his office when the scumbag was back in jail, if not outright burn
everything. “What proof?” he said tiredly.

“Her name is Sumetria Graves. She’s
seventy-two years old, and she has a disability for blindness. She
lives in Paris and until six months ago, her granddaughter took
care of her.”

Scott put his hand up just as Sue was going
grab Gideon by the hair and introduce his face to the floor. “So
you found a blind woman with a disability.”

“Her favorite hat is one with cherries on it.
Her granddaughter left to go to a bible school back east six months
ago. The pastor reads her letters from her granddaughter that no
one else sees. She had a break-in last week but her sewing group
ran the guy off. And J.C. Burke, of the Paris Police Department,
has identified the Jane Doe photograph as Gwendolyn Parker via an
emailed photo from the DPD posters of missing/unidentified people.”
Despite Sue’s grip, Gideon lifted his head up and added, “He’ll be
calling Deacon Brady this morning. Call him. J.C. Burke. Paris PD.
You don’t even have to believe me. You can get the number from
information and call him yourself.”

Scott stared down at the man who was lying
face down in front of his desk.

Ken shifted his weight on Gideon’s back. “Oh,
for Christ’s sake, Scott. He’ll say anything to get your goat.”

Sue said to Gideon, “I’m going to get up now
and if you budge, I’m getting my mace out and you are going to be
one upset kemosabe. You got that, Mr. Lily?”

“Yes. Mace bad. Me be still. Got it. Maybe
you should go on a diet, sweetie.”

Sue thumped Gideon’s ear and he said, “Ow,
dammit. Do you hire sadists as a rule, Scott?”

“Take him back to the jail,” Scott said,
looking at his desktop. “Try not to shoot him while trying to
escape.”

Sue took one arm while Ken took the other and
they lifted Gideon up.

Scott sat down and looked at the notes that
Gideon had taken on a yellow legal pad. It sat next to the phone
and next to it was a fax with a list of women’s names on it. The
header said it was from the Social Security Administration and
Scott wondered how in the hell Gideon Lily had managed to talk
someone into giving out that information. Glowering, Scott decided
it probably had to do with pretending to be a law enforcement
official. There was a name circled, Sumetria Joella Graves, just as
Lily had said.

But as Lily was being dragged out the door,
Scott saw something else on Gideon’s notes and glowered harder. He
had stuck his messages in his shirt pocket and he dug them out,
dropping half on the floor in the process. The long one was on top
and his eyes shot down to the part about the doctor finding out
that a specific corporation was responsible for buying up most of a
recent lot of the same drug that had been used to dose Leonie and
to cause Dacey’s allergic reaction.

It was the same name on Lily’s notes.
Gorshin Corporation.

“Wait,” Scott called. Ken, Sue, and Lily all
looked back at the same time.

-

Who makes it, has no need of it.

Who buys it, has no use of it.

Who uses it, can neither see nor feel it.

What is it?

It is a coffin.

Monday, July 29th

Devils and rogues and scoundrels know nothing
else,

Save starlight.

What is it?

Twenty seconds after Leonie began to run the
dim blue lights flickered and went out altogether. She bit off a
dismayed cry and stopped. She wanted to howl in protest, but knew
that it would do no good. Tired and groggy, as well as weak from
the overstimulation from pain and fear, she was overwhelmed with
bitter frustration.
This is want Elan wants from me. He wants me
to suffer. He has no intention of following through with agreements
with me. I’m the enemy. I’m the one who didn’t find him. The one
who has to pay for my sins.

Leonie took a deep breath and tried to focus.
It was time to stop playing Elan’s game. She began to move again,
feeling the walls with her hands, visualizing the maze as she had
gone through it.
Time to start playing a game of my own. Left at
the sprung trap. Then right. Then left, left again. Pass the
opening that leads to the snakes. Pray a rattlesnake hasn’t found a
way to slither out. Left. Left. Back in the original long hallway.
One more left and I can protect Keefe. I can leave him somewhere
safe in the darkness while I find the way out.

•

Scott was staring uncertainly at Gideon when
one of the clerks yelled down the hallway. “Telephone,
SHERIFF!”

He tapped the desk with his blunt fingers and
said sarcastically, “I love the way our modern technological system
works in this building.”

Sue Hewitt yelled back, “What line,
Lindsey?”

“LINE THREE!”

Sure enough, the third button on his phone
was blinking, and Scott gave Gideon a lingering look before turning
back to the phone. “Haskell here,” he barked into the receiver.