Disembodied Bones (55 page)

There was an eternity where she expected the
snake to bite into a toe because it was starving or to feel Elan’s
strong hand grasping her long hair just like Whitechapel had done,
yanking her upward. An eternity stretched and became infinite.

Suddenly, the flashlight turned away and
Leonie knew that he hadn’t seen her. He was looking into the snake
pit, but he hadn’t honestly thought she was there. She heard his
footsteps echoing in the passageway and brushed the snake off her
foot.

•

Gideon wanted to smash the monitor in front
of him with the keyboard. He was getting truly frustrated.
Pissed. I’m pissed and there isn’t another word for it
. He
was waiting for Roosevelt to call him back, but he knew that it
would take the other man at least twenty minutes to get to the
building on Texas Street in Shreveport, longer if there was
traffic. Then to confirm what Gideon suspected it would take
Roosevelt more endless minutes.
He would have to be older than I
was. But no older than eighteen. Whitechapel liked a certain age of
child. Under twelve. Perhaps as old as fourteen. I was ten at the
time. That narrows the gap.

The realization was startling. It was as
Leonie and Gideon had perceived.
The forgotten child
. Leonie
wouldn’t have known about him because no one was missing him. They
cleared up all of the cases that Whitechapel was implicated in;
there weren’t any others that he was suspected of being involved
with, except the missing children in Chihuahua. Hidden in some
elaborate hidey-hole that the wealthy pedophile had created, he had
somehow managed to escape. Had he known about Whitechapel’s wealth?
Was he somehow able to use it for himself? Was that why the
executors of the will were unable to find all of the monies? This
child, who would be no more than a few years older that Gideon or
Leonie, was now a grown man with enough financial resources to plan
an elaborate and vindictive strategy to gain vengeance on those who
he perceived as having wronged him.

Where’s the child’s mother? Had Whitechapel
simply killed her or disposed of her because she was no longer
necessary? Was that why the boy hadn’t been missed and consequently
hadn’t been open to Leonie’s special powers?

Scott’s phone rang and Sue picked it up with
a rushed, “Scott Haskell’s office.”

She listened for a moment and said, “Uh-huh,
John. A post office box? Great.” She covered the receiver and said
to Gideon, “The address on the forms is a post office box. Guess
this guy covered that angle, too. I’ll call the post office,
next.”

Gideon took a pained breath. T
ick-tock.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
Cinderella was still at the ball and
the clock was about to strike midnight, showing her up for the
charwoman she was. But Cinderella wouldn’t end up with her throat
cut.

“Got a phone number from John,” Sue said and
Gideon opened his eyes. She slid a piece of paper over to him and
he looked down with a pang of hope. Phone numbers could be traced.
Gideon knew a couple dozen “phreaks,” people who systematically
broke into various phone systems to mess with the descendants of Ma
Bell for the express purpose of causing chaos. Even better he knew
at least five who would track down the number within minutes.

“Give me the phone,” he said. Sue didn’t say
anything but passed over the whole unit.

•

Leonie pulled herself out of the snake pit
and said a muttered goodbye to the inhabitants. She listened to the
hallways and decided that Elan had gone to the left. So wherever
he’d come in at, wasn’t from the left where the riddle on the
laptop had been located. He had another hidden entrance somewhere,
perhaps closer to the pit where she’d been handcuffed. She took to
the right and cautiously hurried down the passages. She turned left
once and then right and came on the long corridor that had all the
other passages leading off.

She knew that she had to protect Keefe, first
and foremost. She turned left, tilting her head as she listened for
Elan. She also kept a wary eye on the cameras she passed. None of
them were on, so Elan was probably still searching for her. It
wouldn’t be long. She went into the room where the pit with the
toilet and sink was. She spared it a single look as she found a
still unconscious Keefe wrapped in the blanket underneath the
camera. The hissing of the broken water pipes had become a gurgle
and with a little surprise, she realized that the pit was rapidly
filling up.

Keefe’s heartbeat was still strong. Either
Elan had been in a hurry or he was still saving Keefe as a
potential stick with which to beat Leonie. She carefully picked the
child up in her arms, wincing as she jarred her broken thumb.

With another cautious look out into the
passage she quickly took the child back to the pit with the glass
and the nails embedded in the bottom. If Keefe didn’t move then he
should be all right, and he seemed as though he would stay
unconscious for some time. She lowered him into the pit and made
sure he was braced against the wall directly under the doorway. If
Elan made the same mistake then he would miss the child if he were
just glancing inside for her.

But Leonie was going to make sure Elan was
too occupied to look for Keefe. She stood up and took account of
her injuries. None was life threatening at the moment. She supposed
she could get blood poisoning from not being treated with
antibiotics but that would take a lot of time, and Elan was no
longer patient.

The passages seemed as quiet as a cemetery.
Nothing stirred, not a mouse, or even a snake. Then there was an
eerie echo that reverberated through the cement blocked halls.
“Leonie,” Elan called. “Leonie. I’m not angry now. Going to find
you. I know you can’t get out. So it’s simply a matter of making
sure I’ve looked in every nook and every cranny.”

It was almost as if he had returned to his
monitoring room and was speaking through the hidden speakers, but
it was only the underground stone walls that were causing the odd
reverberation. Leonie glanced around the corner and saw movement at
the end of the long corridor. She froze. Elan was walking straight
toward her, holding the flashlight in one hand, and there was
nowhere to hide. She couldn’t get into the pit with Keefe because
not only would she cut her limbs to shreds but there would be no
way for her to get out.

Elan looked to his left as he passed an
opening. Then he glanced right and he stopped. “Leonie? I’m only
going to make sure you’re not bleeding to death and then I’ll let
the child go, just like I promised.” He shined the light into the
first room with the rapidly filling pit and peered inside. He
glanced back down the corridor, seemingly directly at Leonie, and
she was afraid to even blink, lest he see the movement. For a long
minute, she thought that it was impossible that he couldn’t see
her. She must be as visible as a white sheet in a coal mine, but he
glanced away, looking into the original room again.

Leonie had forgotten to breathe and black
spots began to dance at the sides of her eyes. She saw Elan step
into the room and took her chance. Focusing on moving as quietly as
Vinegar Tom stalking a blue jay she moved down the corridor. At the
opening to the room Elan had entered, she took a breath to dispel
the nerves that were going to obliterate her sanity, and peeked
around the corner. Elan stared into the pit, looking at the rising
water. She heard him swear and she walked past the opening, losing
herself in the dim light on the other side.

She went straight, took a left and found the
pit with the water in it. The razor blades on the walls glittered
in dim light. But Leonie settled her eyes on the camera above. Now
that Keefe was hidden she could do something about those blasted
cameras. She unwrapped her right hand and firmly grasped the
camera, yanking it to and fro. Plastic and metal creaked as she
rocked the audiovisual equipment. Then it broke off, falling to the
ground.

Leonie hesitated, listening. She knew that
she didn’t have a lot of time. Elan was still in the tunnels
somewhere and before long it would occur to him that it would be
easier to find her again by using the cameras. She dropped the
camera onto the floor and studied the wires protruding from the
wall. If one wanted to operate a camera, one needed power,
specifically electricity.

Wrapping a length of wires around her right
hand, Leonie ignored the pain as the movement reopened the cuts on
her palms and fingers. She bit into her lower lip and yanked. The
wire came out about a foot. From where it was pulling, she could
see it ran up into the wooden plank ceiling. She glanced to one
side and decided she needed about six feet of wire. She yanked
again and got two more feet. Blood began to spill down her arm. She
twisted more wire onto her hand and ignored it.

This time Leonie put her body weight behind
the pull and leaned backward. A plank overhead began to give way.
She gritted her teeth and gave it a final yank and three boards
gave way with a load of dirt. It made enough noise that she knew
Elan had to have heard it. When the earth settled a moment later,
she heard him yelling as he came running. Her only saving grace was
that he didn’t know exactly where the noise was coming from.

Leonie twisted the wires and peeled off the
protective plastic off. Briefly, she shocked herself with a spurt
of electricity and snatched her hand away. Elan was getting closer
and closer. She saw the gleam of the flashlight and then she thrust
the hank of wires into the water pit and silently cheered as the
entire system shorted out with a spray of sparks and a sharp crack.
Darkness descended with only a burning smell of discharged
electricity in the air.

-

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?

It is a clock striking midnight.

Monday, July 29th

What force and strength cannot get through,

I with a gentle touch can do.

And many in the street would stand,

Were I not a friend at hand.

What am I?

Gideon threw the phone down and Sue cracked
her gum in silent rebuke.

“The number is a cloned cell phone,” he said.
Fred the phreak had found out about in two minutes flat. “Cloned.
Someone swipes a cellular phone from someone else. A purse
snatcher, a pickpocket, whatever, out of a grocery cart. The thief
sells the phone to someone who specializes in cells. That guy
reprograms the phone with a new, anonymous number and sells it to
someone who wants free phone service until the phone company
figures it out. Sometimes that takes as long as a year or two to
catch up with the charges. It really depends on how much the
individual uses the phone. The phone company looks for excessive
charges. Hours spent on the phone to Columbia or Pakistan. Usually
something to do with drugs.”

Sue raised her eyebrows. “They can do that
with a cell phone? And what about tracing it?”

“Tried that already. The bad guy’s got the
phone turned off. The cellular towers can’t make a fix if the phone
is completely off. And yeah, phreaks do it all the time with cells.
Newer models are less vulnerable, but people are adaptable. It’s a
challenge to figure out how to beat the system. I find that in my
work every day of the week.” Gideon stared at the computer monitor.
The flying toasters screensaver had popped up again and he moved
the mouse to clear the screensaver. He had run out of things to
follow up on. The number didn’t pan out. No one had seen Leonie’s
car since Saturday. Keefe hadn’t been sighted either. There weren’t
any responses on his online bounties, quite probably because the
guy had covered his tracks too well. Gideon was done and he didn’t
want to know there was a fork stuck in him.

The door opened and Scott strolled inside. He
had a row of four parallel scratches down one forearm and he had a
perpetual frown on his face. “If you knew what I had to do, you’d
be laughing your asses off.” He stared first at Gideon and then
briefly at Sue. “Well?”

“Post office box for the corporation’s
address,” Sue said. “Nothing unusual about that. Called the post
office branch and it’s been closed and the account had a falsified
address on it. Shreveport PD told me the address would be smack dab
in the middle of the Red River. Other than checking fingerprints on
the application, I don’t guess we can go any further that
route.”

“It’s a real corporation?” Scott asked.

Gideon nodded.

“Well, then, they have to file federal
papers, have a board of directors, all and sundry. There’s got to
be more than a few paper trails to follow up on.”

“Falsified,” Gideon said. “Same post office
address. The names are fictitious. Franklin B. Gorshin is the CEO.”
He laughed bitterly. “Bad joke.”

Scott said, “Huh?”

“Frank Gorshin was a character actor,” Gideon
replied. “His most famous role was on a sixties television show
called Batman.”

Understanding filled Scott’s face. “He played
the Riddler. Riddles. The Riddler. I don’t know why we didn’t
notice that before.”

“Maybe he didn’t think you’d get that far.”
Sue snapped her gum again. “Let’s see, Lily would be in jail and no
one would believe shit about him except that he kidnapped two
children and probably killed one in an effort to regain Leonie’s
attentions. Then Leonie would have enough of the bad press and
simply up and disappear. The stress got to her. Then this guy would
have what he wanted and no one would be the wiser. Except Lily, of
course, and he would sound like a thousand other convicts. “‘I’m
innocent. I’ve been framed. Someone set me up.’” She shrugged.
“Although most of them
are
lying.”