Disembodied Bones (26 page)

“Scott said something about the Harkenrider
case,” Dacey said softly. “This woman wanted you to find her child.
This isn’t exactly a lie, is it?”

Leonie discovered that she had suddenly lost
her appetite. She thought that the story would die away after a few
weeks, but it seemed to find new energy at the slightest lull, as
if someone were deliberately feeding tidbits to the press. Scott,
she thought with no little amount of rancor. No press. No
publicity. But there wasn’t anything in the paper about her visit
to the city morgue yesterday. Wouldn’t that been Scott’s
mainstay?

No
, she decided firmly. He wouldn’t
want that publicized unless something came of it, or perhaps she
was disproved entirely. “I did find her child,” Leonie said softly.
“She just didn’t want to know it.”

“But the police didn’t find the remains,”
Dacey insisted. “That is accurate? You showed them where but they
didn’t find him?”

“He’s still there,” Leonie added. “Alexa
doesn’t want to admit that her son is dead. The police weren’t
enthusiastic about being told where to look by a psychic. They
looked, but they walked quickly, they didn’t really do what they
should have done. The remains weren’t immediately evident, so they
dismissed me as well. Since I was positive that Jay was there, I
told Alexa that and she became utterly enraged with me in
particular. She had been determined that her child was still alive,
despite the fact that she had told me that she would want to find
him either way. When I first spoke with her I knew he was already
dead. But she twisted my words in her brokenhearted fury and I
became no more than a conniving thief out to take advantage of a
mother with a missing child. She even accused me of asking for
money, but that really was a lie. The rest of it I can forgive her
for. No one wants to know that their eight year old son was
murdered by a devious pedophile, who was clever enough to dispose
of the body in such a way that it would be difficult to
recover.”

Leonie paused and let Dacey digest that
information, not wanting her partner to judge an inconsolable
mother too harshly. “Alexa still maintains a phone line in Dallas,
you know, with the same number she had when Jay lived with her.
Just in case he calls. I guess she checks it every day. She has an
answering machine hooked up to it with Caller ID, even though she
lives in Colorado now.”

Dacey put her hand over her mouth. “That poor
woman. Day after day, not knowing, never sure where her child is.”
She shuddered. “It could have been that way with Olga.”

Leonie nodded. “Alexa will be nothing more
than that until she begins to understand that her son is truly
gone. I tried to help her but she had to have someone to blame.”
Her voice was neutral and Dacey suddenly understood that her friend
had truly forgiven Alexa Harkenrider for her bitter words and
vicious manner.

One of Dacey’s hands covered Leonie’s in a
warm clasp. “Oh,
amiga
, how can you live with that? Knowing
that the little boy is there and no one believes you?”

With a shrug, Leonie looked down at their
intertwined hands. “No one wants me to find a dead child. They only
want the live ones. I don’t have a choice in that.”

Dacey took that in and squeezed her hand.
“Aie. I thought you’d be upset about the story.” She sighed. Then
she said, “Are you going to tell me what Scott said to you
yesterday? Why you were gone all morning?”

“What? So you can hold it against him?”
Leonie found the energy to move her lips into the semblance of a
brittle smile. “I really want to be a bridesmaid at your wedding
like a big, fat, pointy thorn in his side.”

“Oh, God forbid,” Dacey laughed. “Well, we
got a shipment of toys in yesterday while you were gone. And
Michael told me he wanted to go work at Home Depot with Tinie. He
doesn’t care if you’re psychic. He just wants to be near Tinie. The
little rat.”

“I should have mentioned that,” Leonie
offered. She opened the box of donuts. “So the newspaper was why
Mrs. Thu was staring at me. I’m surprised someone hasn’t forked the
sign of the devil behind my back.”

“Well then,” Dacey smiled and reached for a
donut. “Maybe if I make a deal with Beelzebub to keep the calories
from these donuts off my hips.”

Leonie’s eyebrows rose expressively. “I don’t
think that really works, dear.”

“One can wish.”

•

“Scott,” said Deacon Brady pleasantly over
the phone. “I hate your guts. You stink. Your dog stinks. The fleas
on your dog’s butt stink.”

Scott sighed. The middle of the morning
wasn’t the best time to get a call from an aggravated homicide
detective from Dallas
. Where the hell is my coffee? I could take
up smoking again, right now.
“I gather you didn’t appreciate
the information I gave you.”

Deacon Brady was a man Scott had met while
he’d been a rookie cop in Dallas many years before. A more genial
man he’d never known. He got along with most of the cops and 99% of
the people on the street. Even the most obnoxious criminals he’d
arrested turned out to like him in the end. If one were going to be
arrested in southeast Dallas then one should have Deacon Brady do
it. That was the mantra that went around. Deacon would give you a
fair shake. When he’d made his gold shield, there had been a mild
protest from the neighborhoods of people who adored him. But Deacon
returned to practice another kind of law enforcement. A tall black
man in his forties, he played in a local baseball league and lived
with his family in the area. He was family. If anyone would know
about a blind, black woman who wore a hat with cherries on top,
Deacon would.

“It sounds like someone reached into a box of
words and drew out a bunch and smacked them together,” Deacon said
affably. “You still stink.”

“No new church within ten miles of where the
dead body was dumped.”

“It’s a demilitarized zone, brother. No one
wants to build a church that’s going to get torched by gangstas two
days after it’s finished.” Deacon suppressed a snort of disbelief.
“Is this some kind of profiler information? I always thought those
FBI guys were tight-assed crackers. I mean, how do they get a blind
woman with a hat with plastic fruit on it? Not to mention that
she’s in danger herself?”

“It’s-ah-not a profiler,” said Scott, wincing
on his end of the phone, wondering if his old friend could hear the
cringing note in his voice. He’d wanted to test Leonie, but there
was something inside him that also wanted her to score with Jane
Doe. The young dead woman appeared so forlorn lying there on the
extended drawer with its carefully constructed drain outlets. No
one to claim her. No one who would miss their pretty daughter.
Another few months and she’d be buried in a pauper’s grave with
only a number to remember her by.

“It’s not a profiler,” repeated Deacon. “Then
what the fuck, over?”

Scott mumbled something.

“What’d you say?”

“I said, the information came from a
psychic.” Scott spit the undesired words out in a rush. It sounded
even sillier in the bright light of day.
God, she’d sounded so
convincing in the fluorescent light of the morgue
. The look in
her eyes and the way she spoke so condemningly of the man who had
done that awful thing had moved Scott
. A woman with an active
imagination? A woman able to perceive more things than the most
eagle-eyed detective? Or just a woman?

“A psychic?” Deacon breathed. “Uh-huh.”

“She found a little girl on Saturday last,”
Scott tried to defend himself, but knew it came up weak. “Larry
Palacios told me about your Jane Doe and how no one had been able
to identify her. I thought that maybe my girl could help. No
publicity. No press. No one needed to know except you, me and the
wall.”

“Good Christ, Scott,” Deacon exclaimed. “They
keep electing you down there in Pegram County. I should come down
and give you a run for your money. They could use a smart, black
man for sheriff, instead of a dumb, freckle-faced bubba like
you.”

“I know, buddy,” Scott said. “It was a long
shot, but I had to know about this woman.”

“Your psychic, you mean. My wife was talking
about that on Sunday, but I been busy. I got four other murders.
But hey, I looked high and low for this girl’s family. Nothing.
Nada. Zip. I dint think of a psychic, though.” Deacon laughed.
“Glad it was you and not me. So just for your information, your gal
is way the hell off. No new church in the area. I don’t know of a
single blind black woman who wears cherries on her Sunday church
hat and I been to a bunch of churches in southeast Dallas, you
betcha. And that’s about that.”

“She knew about the pregnancy, and about the
woman being dragged into the forest.” Scott had a sudden impulse
not only to defend his own actions, but those of Leonie’s as
well.

Deacon cogitated. “Good guesses, I reckon.
Don’t take no genius to figure that after someone done kilt her,
that he’d have to drag her body off. But Scott-” His voice suddenly
stopped, then he continued quickly. “That ain’t the part that
really chaffs my hide.”

Scott didn’t say anything.

“It was this guy who called this morning,”
Deacon said. “The one who said she was wrong. I dint know what the
hell he was talking about until this conversation.”

“What guy?”

“I don’t know. He dint leave his name, social
security number, and local address. And he used a cellular phone
that couldn’t be traced.” Deacon made a little noise on the other
end of the phone. “He said she was wrong and that I wouldn’t find a
church in the area here where her body was dumped.”

Scott wasn’t sure what to say
. Who’s
calling Deacon Brady about Leonie’s visit to the County Medical
Examiner’s Office? Who else but Leonie and Larry Palacios had
known, and Larry could be trusted to keep his mouth shut? Now what
in hell is going on?

Deacon went on. “Our mysterious caller said
everything she said about the old lady was true, ditto the church,
triple ditto the old lady being in danger from the killer. But what
your gal didn’t get was that the body had been moved twice.”

Scott chewed on the end of a pen. “Moved
twice?”

“Yep. Once the first time. Then the guy
decided the body was too close and moved it again, but the second
time, he moved it clean out of the county. You been giving my
number out to the fruits at the sanitarium, again, Scott?”

-

What is always in front of you

But cannot be seen?

The Future.

Thursday, July 25th - Friday, July 26th

It stands alone, with no bone or solid form.

Adamant, it prospers never wrong,

Though hurt it may.

Twistable, malleable, might it be,

But always straight as an arrow.

What is it?

Deacon Brady hung up the phone. He hadn’t
told his old friend, Scott Haskell, the entire truth. The Medical
Examiner, Solomon Cross, had found something very interesting on
the body of Jane Doe. He couldn’t exactly tell Deacon what it
meant, but he could speculate and speculate he had. She had been
dragged over the ground without thought as to the damage it would
cause to her tissues. Someone held her by the armpits and allowed
her heels to scratch across the ground. Finger marks were clearly
delineated into her flesh. It wasn’t an uncommon way to dispose of
a body, or to move one so that it was out of sight, lest it be
discovered quickly. Embedded into the flesh of her heels were two
distinct types of earth.

Type A was red, sandy, and contained a high
content of chemical consistent with the output of a paint factory.
This corresponded with the fact that Jane Doe’s body had been found
on the thickly wooded edge of such a property, long since
abandoned, its walls only stubby pieces of rebar and concrete. The
factory had gone bankrupt over twenty years before and the building
was in the process of dissolving back into the earth. In the
ensuing years it was used as a place for crackheads to smoke their
cheap drugs and for homeless people to take refuge or a place where
people discarded things they no longer wished to keep, like Jane
Doe.

However, the doctor found another type
underneath the first. He wouldn’t have noticed except that it was
so visually different from the first. Type B had no chemical
residue from an old paint factory, tan in color, and containing a
heavy percentage of granite and limestone.

“If you can find out where the dirt comes
from,” Dr. Cross had suggested happily, “you can find out where the
girl was initially dumped, which might in fact, lead you to her
identity.”

No geologist, Deacon had come up empty,
although he had spoken to the heads of Geology at several
universities in the area. One professor had indicated the
commonality of the type of dirt. “Anywhere in east Texas, southern
Arkansas, parts of Louisiana,” he had chortled. “But if you
narrowed it down, you could probably tell exactly where. The
trouble is that you have to know where to look in order to have a
match. Needle in a haystack.”

But the other part was hard to ignore.
Someone other than himself and Dr. Cross had known that the body
had been moved twice. Their theory was exactly what the mysterious
man on the phone had proclaimed. The murderer had thought the body
was too close for comfort, that she would eventually be found, and
consequently linked to him in some fashion. So he had stripped her
of clothing and taken her elsewhere. How far away was anyone’s
guess.

An artist’s representation of Jane had gone
into a dozen newspapers in the vicinity. The title above the sketch
asked, “Does anyone know this woman?” Brief details of the body
were included. The scar on her left leg from some kind of injury
from years past was included. The pregnancy was not. There hadn’t
been any jewelry included with the body and no clothing had
appeared. Her fingerprints had produced no results from the state
and federal indexes. Jane had never been fingerprinted. The
murderer had covered his tracks. That man had obviously hoped that
distance would conceal her identity and so far he was right.