Disembodied Bones (25 page)

“No publicity, Scott,” Leonie repeated
faintly with a last look over her shoulder. He took her arm and
guided her toward the parking garage.

“Sure, I’ll tell him. I’m real curious
myself. Larry said there hadn’t been anything in the papers about
Jane being pregnant or being dragged through the woods. The dragged
part could be an astute guess, I’ll grant you that, but the other,
well, that one’s got me willy-wanked.”

“Scott, you didn’t tell anyone we were coming
here?” Leonie asked faintly. Her head was swiveling around as she
tried to look at every face they passed.

“No, that would have defeated the purpose. I
even told Dacey that I was just going to ask you some questions,”
Scott said and added under his breath, “And I had to promise your
complete safety, both physically and mentally.”

Just as Leonie climbed into the county car
she saw a figure at the end of the row of vehicles and she craned
her neck to see. It was a tall, lean shape. A man with dark brown
hair moved quickly and silently, as if he were trying to speedily
remove himself from her line of sight.

Was it the elusive G. Lily? But there were
too many shifting shadows in the parking garage and cars were
coming and going in droves. Leonie sighed and settled into the seat
of the car. Scott didn’t say anything.

After a while, Leonie asked Scott if he had
any aspirin or something for the repetitive throb in her head. He
rustled around in the glove box and gave her a bottle of Advil and
even stopped at a 7-Eleven to get her something to drink with the
pills.

-

I was born blind,

And could not see,

Until it was a quarter of three.

I could not smile

‘
Til half past six,

And all of my arms and legs

Were made of sticks.

What am I?

I am a clock.

Thursday, July 25th

What is always in front of you

But cannot be seen?

She didn’t get it right
, thought
Gideon. Leonie was off on what she’d told the two men. He didn’t
stop to ask himself why or how he knew, but he was positive. Leonie
had accompanied Scott Haskell to Dallas, and had entered the city
building, never looking back. Gideon had spent the night down the
street in his car, cogitating over that horrendous riddle. He’d
woken up stiff and cramped and seen Scott’s patrol car in front of
her cottage. Scott was standing on the little porch, dwarfing it
with his immense size and staring down at Leonie. Leonie had been
looking up at the sheriff with an expression of disdain on her
lovely face.

What the hell?
had been Gideon’s only
thought. And he’d followed them a half hour later, fully expecting
Scott to take her to the county courthouse, but instead Scott had
taken the freeway and headed north. Gideon had blinked and kept on
going, wondering if the lawman would look up and catch his tail in
the rear view mirror, but he hadn’t.

Gideon knew that Leonie had helped the police
before. Several times, in fact, at the behest of Roosevelt
Hemstreet, leading to the recovery of three children under the age
of ten and one fourteen year old, all alive and well. The fifth
remained missing and was presumed dead, having drowned in the Red
River on a hot summer day. Despite the press that tended to
denigrate her abilities, calling into question whether they
actually existed, she had persevered. Right up until she had failed
to locate Jay Harkenrider’s remains and Alexa Harkenrider had
issued forth to the press and law enforcement alike an angry tirade
of virulent accusations against the younger woman. Then Leonie had
stopped cold turkey. She had fled the sanctuary of her family home,
the little village beside Twilight Lake, and made sure no one knew
where to find her. And most people wouldn’t have been able to
locate her.

Why else would Scott Haskell be taking Leonie
anywhere but to jail? Why would he take her to the Dallas County
Medical Examiner’s Office? Gideon could only come up with one
reason. He wanted Leonie to try to do what she had done with Olga
to some other misfortunate soul.
Some other missing
child?

Gideon considered where his train of thoughts
was leading him.
Isn’t that what a skeptical lawman might do
with a supposed psychic? Ignore her, arrest her, or…test her? But
the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office? There isn’t going to
be a missing child there. No, there are only corpses there. Only
people who had met with unexpected deaths, who might have been
murdered, who might not have been identified. The missing, but not
really missing.

Gideon smiled to himself in sudden
comprehension. He had to hand it to Scott. He’d found someone who
probably was missing from someone else’s life and presented it to
Leonie as a puzzle, his very own warped riddle for her to solve.
There hadn’t been anyone in the outer office so Gideon had quietly
let himself in. The inner office was locked, and he couldn’t hear
anyone in that room, but it was the only way they could have gone.
He’d long since mastered the use of lock picks and it didn’t
present an obstacle for him. Finding himself in the room where the
pathologists changed or stored their belongings, he listened for
the sound of voices to alert him of their whereabouts. Then there
was a laboratory and Gideon had been pleasantly surprised at the
absence of bodies lying under sheets. However, a trio of people
could be heard talking through the half open steel door on the
opposite side of the lab.

But Gideon had discovered quickly that he
didn’t need to hear what they were saying. He could feel it in his
head. There was a brilliant surge of emotion that lit into his body
and made him feel as though he was suddenly set on fire, a blaze of
pain and fear and longing that made him want to gasp with the
intensity of it. It was the same thing that had happened on the
Saturday before, when Olga Rojas had been kidnapped. It had made
him stagger with the abrupt sensations that poured through him; he
likened it to a huge magnet being turned on and attracting every
bit of iron in his blood. It had made him breathless.

One hundred bodies
, had come her
thought, swift and unerring like a faultless arrow. Then a minute
or two later, her throaty voice had come, but the words seemed
duplicated in his mind. “A young woman. Someone misses her. Someone
with a hat covered with plastic cherries, the same kind you’d find
in Hobby-Lobby. They’re as red as rubies and she thinks they’re
just marvelous. That woman goes to church regularly. She lives near
it, too. A big church with a huge spire that reaches almost to
heaven. It’s new. Real new. They just finished it last month. This
lady sold candy and other things door to door to raise money for
the building. So did this young woman.”

Other voices had spoken. Then it was Leonie
again, “So young. Pretty, too. She was pregnant, you know. A few
months along. The father is the one who killed her. He didn’t want
people to know he’d slept with her. Because he’s older than she
is.”

There had been more. A lot more, but Gideon
almost gasped when Leonie described how the woman had been most
betrayed at the moment of her death. “She never stopped hoping that
he wouldn’t carry on through with his threat.”

The surge of emotion had peaked, becoming
almost unbearable. Gideon had thought he might explode into flames
so compelling were the feelings that gushed through him. Then he
knew without hearing it, Leonie had had enough. She had said, “You
should probably find this woman pretty quick. He’s thinking about
killing the grandmother, too. Making it look like a robbery. Before
she gets suspicious about her granddaughter. Before she starts
asking too many questions.” There had been a hesitation and Gideon
had moved quickly, finding refuge under a steel table. She had
muttered, “I need some fresh air,” and run out of the morgue,
knocking something metal over in her haste to flee this place of
death. Gideon had almost followed her without thinking, before he
had remembered the two other men.

They talked as well, seemingly unimpressed
with Leonie’s psychic deductions. The one who was not Scott Haskell
had been slightly interested in some of her comments, but Scott was
noncommittal, promising to take the information to the detective in
charge of the Jane Doe case.

After Scott Haskell had left, Gideon had
followed silently after him, listening to the other man fiddling
with the equipment in the other room.

Although, Gideon had remained out of sight,
locked in the shadows, somehow, someway, Leonie had known he was
there, watching her. He had been shocked into being still and he
had lost them on the trip home. It hadn’t mattered though, because
he had work to do.

But he knew that she was off. Had his
presence put her abilities off kilter? It seemed reasonably to
Gideon that that was the cause.

That’s interesting,
he thought.
That’s so very interesting
. He sat a block up from the
Gingerbread House on Thursday morning, waiting for Leonie to appear
and thought about it. In his hand was a folded copy of the Dallas
Morning News. The headlines on the Metropolitan section could be
seen if he turned his head. He was wondering with a grim look on
his face if Leonie had seen it yet.

He lifted a cell phone from the passenger
seat beside him and called information. Scott Haskell had said the
name Gideon needed. “Dallas, please.”

The operator said, “Go ahead.”

“Dallas Police Department. Specifically
homicide if you have a listing.”

“Is it an emergency?” the operator asked
politely.

“No, not at all,” Gideon replied amicably. “I
don’t suppose they sublist their directories under the detectives’
names?”

“No, sir. The number is as follows,” she
said, and a mechanical voice told him the number he needed.

It took Gideon about a half-hour but he
finally got to speak to Deacon Brady.

•

Leonie came into the Gingerbread House with a
little smile on her face. The weather had turned a little. A cold
front had dipped into Texas and brought ninety degree weather as
opposed to weather with sweltering triple digits. It almost felt
comfortable in comparison. The front door was already open, with
the sign flipped to indicate the store’s status. It was rare for
Dacey to beat her into work, but it had been known to happen.
Thursdays usually brought brisk business and it would be Dacey and
Leonie for most of the day and Erica and Michael for the remainder,
unless Michael had managed to get a job at the Home Depot alongside
Tinie.

Dacey was counting the register contents as
Leonie came inside and shut the door behind her. Her cream colored
hands efficiently stacked bills and replaced them in their proper
drawers.

“I’ve got donuts,” said Leonie. “That place
on Franklin had those old fashioned ones you like. You know Mrs.
Thu stared at me the whole time as if I had a third eye.” She
pushed the box over to Dacey and finally noticed that Dacey wasn’t
meeting her eyes. “Okay, I thought the third eye thing wasn’t the
best way to put it, but it seemed funny when I thought of it.”

Dacey ultimately brought her chin up and her
brown eyes locked with Leonie’s. She didn’t appear to be happy.

Leonie rested her elbows on the counter and
briefly considered turning around, taking the donuts and fleeing
for the comfort of her cottage. There she could feed Vinegar Tom a
can of tuna fish and eat every last donut for herself, taking
solace in a sugar-induced high of candy-store proportions. She
didn’t know what was bugging Dacey, but whatever it was, in order
to shake Dacey, it had to be bad. Dacey could make jokes about the
specter of death coming through her favorite
abuela’s
door.
Dacey often proclaimed herself the master of black humor. So
whatever it was, it had to blow. “Let me guess,” Leonie said
lightly. “Brick through the window with a note that says, ‘Leave,
Accursed One!’ Or something a little less subtle. They revoked my
library card. Mortgage Company said psychics were bad for business
because we’d know when they were going to raise the rates before
they actually raised the rates?”

Dacey swallowed. She reached to the side of
the counter and pulled out the morning paper. Then she pushed it
toward Leonie. Leonie glanced down and sighed. Dacey had it folded
to the correct page. It was the headline, but at least it wasn’t on
the front page.

Leonie reached out to touch the paper but at
the last second decided that it would be like touching a spider or
something equally vile. “This is what’s got you upset, Dacey?”

Dacey’s eyes flickered to the paper’s
headlines. Somewhere along the line a bold journalist had dug out
the old stories and tracked down Alexa Harkenrider to rehash the
whole incident with her missing son. Jay was still missing. Mike
Ferris, the convicted kidnapper, was still in prison at Huntsville,
keeping his mouth shut about where Jay may or may not be. He’d be
there for decades until he was eligible for parole. He continued
denied harming Jay or knowing where the child was located to this
day. The journalist had done a brief telephone interview with him.
But the headlines didn’t condemn Ferris.
No, not the man who had
actually done the unspeakable deed.

“So-Called Psychic Promised to Find Missing
Son,” it announced in bold 36 point letters. Below that came a
quote from Alexa Harkenrider. “‘Leonie Simoneaud swore she’d find
my son and she failed,’ sobs bereft mother.”

Leonie skimmed the story. It mentioned Dacey
and Olga. It even brought up Monroe Whitechapel again. She thought
it was getting rather repetitive. After all, Sunday’s edition had
pretty much rehashed the old story again. The slant was a little
more accusatory this time. It portrayed her as someone who was out
for money and glory and she would use anyone’s tragic circumstances
to further her twisted desires.
Slow news day
, she
thought.