Disembodied Bones (54 page)

Scott stared at Gideon Lily. He had mental
images that he couldn’t shake from his tired brain. There was an
elderly black woman who was missing her granddaughter. There was
the cold corpse of a young woman whose only mistake was to sleep
with a man who she had trusted. The vision of Olga Rojas tied up
under a huge cottonwood floated in his thoughts, along with the
photograph of Keefe Grant he’d seen. There was the image of
Leonie’s wintry beauty who reminded Scott of a fairy tale with her
black hair, pale skin, and rose-red lips. It reminded him of one
thing.

“I’ve got to go feed her cat,” Scott said. “I
hate her cat. I think her cat would like to disembowel me and play
with the entrails.”

Gideon didn’t say anything.

“And Sue is going to call her hysterical
committee buddies and find out the contact numbers for the Gorshin
Corporation.”

“I am?” Sue said.

“You
am
,” Scott agreed. “And you,
Lily,” he pointed at Gideon. “I don’t trust you. You’re still a
prisoner. But you’ve raised doubts. Lucky for you, there’s some
outside corroboration for you. The police aren’t quite as stupid as
you’d like to believe. I don’t arbitrarily condemn someone without
considering facts.”

Gideon got up and came around to Scott’s
desk. “You mind if I use your computer?

Scott glared. “I don’t want to know what you
do with it. I don’t want to know about anything at all, except if
you find a name and a place for us to go look at.”

“You gonna leave him alone in here?” Sue said
in amazement.

“No, you’re staying with him. Use my phone
and the cuffs don’t come off.”

Sue said, “Great.”

When Scott walked out the door, Sue was
dialing on his telephone and Gideon was pounding on his keyboard.
It certainly wasn’t going to sound good on any report Scott could
envision writing. But he’d still rather write that report than feed
that mean bobtailed cat.

•

“Where are you, Leonie?” came Elan’s voice
long minutes later.

Leonie had found the blind spot under one of
the many cameras that dotted the narrow passages. This one looked
down a short length of corridor and the corner restricted the view
of the last one. In the darkness she’d had to feel her cautious way
toward the spot, but the little red dot of light gave her a little
optimism. She knew what she had to do. If Elan Carter wanted her to
suffer he’d have to make sure she didn’t die right away. A few
hours wasn’t what he had in mind, it wasn’t what he’d planned
meticulously for decades, it wouldn’t come close to the suffering
he wanted her to endure.

Trapped. Trapped underground without
hope.
He wanted her to know what he had known. She waited for a
moment and said, “I’ve had enough, Elan. You don’t intend on
letting the child go. You’ve made it clear.”

Elan didn’t immediately respond. The little
red light above her head went out and Leonie stood still. He was
looking for her, alternating views on the cameras to see where she
could have gone. He didn’t find her and abruptly the dim blue light
flickered on. Leonie blinked with the suddenness of it and allowed
her eyes to adjust. The weak lights from above seemed like
floodlights at first. It almost blinded her.

“Leonie,” his voice came again and she
thought she heard a note of something uncertain in it. “Leonie,
where are you? If you don’t show yourself, I’ll go and kill the boy
right now.”

“Elan,” she said. “Then you’d lose all
leverage with me. If the child’s dead, what hope would I have?”

“There are others I can bring back to torture
you with,” Elan said silkily, his electronic voice sounding like it
was in her ear. The speaker was close to her head. “Your friend,
Dacey. She isn’t out of the hospital yet. Or better yet, Olga. Or
perhaps one of your employees, the two teenagers. The girl is
particularly pretty. Too bad she left you to work somewhere else.
But I bet you’d still care if I started cutting off some of her
fingers.”

“Do you know what a thin piece of porcelain
will do, Elan?” Leonie asked.

“Of course I know,” Elan growled. “I left it
in there so you could cut through your flesh. I practically left
you a first aid kit so you wouldn’t bleed to death.”

Leonie smiled to herself. For the first time
in hours, days, and months, she felt like she had a degree of
control again. It was going to be her against him. Only the two of
them.

“Bleed to death?” she repeated. “Now there’s
an idea.”

-

Devils and rogues and scoundrels know nothing
else,

Save starlight.

What is it?

It is darkness.

Monday, July 29th

It is a tolling of the night.

When all is still.

And the wind whispers near the mill.

‘
Twas struck twelve times!

And his voice rang out!

And then was stilled.

What is it?

Scott Haskell’s private line rang exactly
sixty seconds after Sue Hewitt hung up. She had time to say to
Gideon, “John Martinez is going to look into the paperwork. He’s
digging it out.”

Gideon spared her an indignant look. “You’re
not computerized?”

“We’re a nonprofit, slick. Would you like
your ear thumped again?”

His eyes narrowed. “When this is all over you
can be sure I’ll be over to straighten your bloody Historical
Preservation Committee out. A couple of high end units and you’ll
be turning down donations.” His fingers tapped the keyboard. “All
you need is a little modernization.”

Sue snapped her gum in her mouth and the
phone rang. She picked it up and said, “Sheriff Haskell’s office.”
She listened for a moment. “Yep. Sure is. Uh-huh. This is the
Pegram County Sheriff’s Department. In fact, this is the sheriff’s
office. Yeah. Funny, that.”

Gideon hesitated. Sue said, “Sure, I do. You
didn’t know, right? Of course, you didn’t.” She paused and
presented the receiver to Gideon. “It’s for you.”

Roosevelt Hemstreet was on the other end.
“I’m at the Lakeside Cemetery, standing right in front of the
Whitechapel Crypt. It’s a very gaudy concoction of marble and
carvings. There’s even a great big angel on top. And Gid, the
angel’s eyes seem to follow me wherever I go. It looks like a
little boy with wings who stares a lot. It’s very creepy.”

“It’s broad daylight, Rosy,” Gideon said.
“And you’re one big motherfucker who scares them more than they
scare you. Stare back. What do you see?”

“It looks like a crypt. It’s a little bigger
than the rest in the area, but then the Whitechapel’s were rich
lumber people. The guy co-opted half the paper mills in the area
and forced a lot of other owners out of business. For a while, it
was just Alfred Whitechapel and Luc St. Michel down in St. Germaine
Parish. Now it’s national corporations. Monroe sold out as soon as
his parents’ wills completed probate. Anyway it made him rich.”
Roosevelt’s voice came and went as he walked around the area and
Gideon waited impatiently. “I remember that the executors of Monroe
Whitechapel’s will had a problem finding the money. As a matter of
fact, a lot of it was missing. They had people looking for it in
offshore accounts.”

Gideon was having his own problems. There
were always records of companies and transactions, but the Gorshin
Corporation seemed to have up and vanished into thin air. He was
condemning himself for not having asked more questions at the time.
The house had been a great deal, and he’d been so drawn to the area
that he’d been giddy with excitement. He’d performed minimal
security checks on the corporation. It had simply seemed like a
really good steal, one too good to pass. The connection with Leonie
became clear later. The corporation, having accomplished its given
task, closed up shop, and effectively disappeared.

Roosevelt was saying, “Names, dates, basic
stuff commemorating their passage. A couple of lines of poetry.
Nothing out of the ordinary. Think that George Ogden was yanking
your willy, man.”

Gideon frowned. Maybe if he came down on the
black operation hackers that had aided and abetted the corporation
before, he could shake a few names or numbers out of their trees.
“Nothing?”

Roosevelt sighed into the phone. “I should be
at work. I have to cut the ribbon on a brand new supermarket in an
hour. I hate cameras. Cemeteries aren’t much better.”

“Wait,” Gideon said quickly. “Ogden was so
positive. There’s something there. He wouldn’t have broken into the
crypt, right?”

“Locked up tight,” Roosevelt said. “And
there’s a seal on the door. And look at that,” he paused for a
moment, “the seal is dated. This place ain’t been opened for two
decades.”

Gideon grimaced. “What would you look for out
of the ordinary on a crypt?” He shook his head. “Okay, then, what
does the writing say, Rosy? Under Whitechapel’s name.”

Roosevelt sighed again. “His name isn’t on
there, like I told you. There’s his parents’ names and dates, maybe
an uncle’s too, and something in the fourth spot that looks like
stanza of poetry. I’m in a T-shirt and shorts, Gid. You really want
to-”

“Please,” Gideon said and it made Roosevelt
stop. He hadn’t ever heard Gideon speak that way, not even as a
little boy who had been truly terrified to the roots of his hair
that he would be viciously murdered right after the young girl who
had tried to rescue him.

Roosevelt read the words and then Gideon
asked him to repeat them. He jotted down some of them with a pen on
the same yellow legal tablet he’d been using previously.
“Really?”

“Yeah, that’s what it says,” Roosevelt
confirmed. “What does that mean?”

“It’s not poetry. It means you have to go to
the Caddo Parish Vital Records Office, now.”

“I do?”

“Yes, you do. Screw the supermarket.”

“Okay.” Roosevelt agreed and hung up.

Sue looked at Gideon curiously. “So what did
the crypt say?”

“It was a riddle, except most people wouldn’t
have known what it was.”

“What freaking riddle?”

Gideon said it quickly and Sue nearly didn’t
catch it. “Dawn’s away, the day’s turned gray, and I must travel
far away. But I’ll be back and then we’ll track the light of
another day.”

“What?”

“There are two answers to that one. One is a
shadow. The other is the sun.”

“I don’t get it,” Sue complained.

•

“Leonie?” Elan’s voice echoed through the
narrow passageways. She perked up. He wasn’t in his isolated
surveillance room any longer, watching her suffer from a distant
set of monitors. “I won’t let you die yet! It’s not time for you to
die!”

Elan sounded as if he were running up and
down the cement block corridors, searching for her. He’d have to
look in every pit, and check to make sure she hadn’t disappeared
into one of those. From his tone of voice, he wouldn’t have allowed
her to drown in the water pit, or the snakes to devour her. Leonie
decided that he had been lying about the cottonmouths and the
rattlers. He couldn’t take the chance that one would kill her. And
the spiked trap was designed to be seen well before it was
triggered, just as she had done, with minimal damage to her.

Leonie heard his rushing feet as he trampled
through the passages looking for her. She had run as soon as the
red light on the camera faltered. There was only one place to hide.
The pit wasn’t deep. In fact, it was only chest deep on her, deep
enough to contain the critters he’d put inside. Garden snakes and
nonpoisonous varieties slithered around her. Most of them were
sluggish. Clearly, Elan hadn’t been feeding them as well as he
should have, because they were weak and not overly interested in
her presence. She lowered herself with a groan and kicked away a
knot of them with her bare foot.

Pressing herself up against the wall at the
base of the opening, she knocked away a gray snake that was only a
foot long. So far nothing had even come close to biting her, bare
feet and all. She clutched her arms around her shoulders and
listened for Elan. The slithering mass drew her attention, although
the darkness of the pit couldn’t afford her a decent look. There
wasn’t even a rattling noise that would indicate a deadlier variety
was present. A weary garter snake glided across her foot and before
she could make a noise it was gone, its yellow stripes disappearing
into the darkness on the far side of the pit.

Elan was yelling again, screaming himself
hoarse. He was threatening her, threatening the boy in the other
room, and Leonie closed her eyes at that. Then he threatened to go
back to visit Unknown. “I’ll make Charles Whitman look like a
baby-faced amateur, if I go there!”

There was an abrupt silence and Leonie
trembled. She didn’t know what he would do now. She didn’t have a
clue. If he imagined that she had somehow managed to escape him,
then he might very well kill Keefe outright and cut his losses.

When she opened her eyes there was light
above her. A flashlight was shining down into the pit, but she was
still protected in the darkness directly below the opening.
However, she could clearly see the light gray snake with reddish
brown blotches was gliding up to her toes and its tongue flickered
out to taste one. It was about two feet long and as thick around as
two of her fingers combined and very interested in the newest
occupant of the pit. But beyond the solitary snake she could see
dozens of others, with varied colors and shapes. Nonetheless, there
wasn’t a single rattlesnake that she could see and she knew she had
accurately second-guessed Elan.

Leonie was about to brush the reptile away
from her toes when Elan said from above her, “Where are you,
Leonie?” The tone was modulated and calmer now. “I’m smarter than
you are. I’ve planned this for years. You’re in here somewhere.
I’ll find you.”