Disembodied Bones (39 page)

Leonie slowly sat up and waited while her
stomach churned with protest. She looked for her absent watch and
remembered the blue flash of someone’s white grin reflected in a
pitch-black barn. A man dressed in a uniform who had tackled her
before she could mouth a single word, or an alarmed shriek to
receive help. He had whispered into her ears, words that made her
tremble and Gideon was somewhere far away, screaming his violent
protest.

Something had been shoved forcibly into her
shoulder. Leonie put a hand up to her shoulder and felt a sore
place just below where her upper arm connected to the shoulder. In
the fleshy part there was a sickly hurt that revealed the stuff of
nightmares wasn’t contained merely in her head. What had he said?
Luckily for me, I’m a boy scout. Always prepared.

A psychotic boy scout
. Leonie’s eyes
returned to the little boy’s still form. Tied at the ankles and
arms, he resembled the images of Douglas in her mind. Hogtied like
a calf at the rodeo, without regard to the feeling in his hands or
feet, he was as limp as Leonie felt. But as she reached out to
touch his neck, she was relieved that she had been correct.
Although he was unconscious, asleep in some drug-induced coma, his
pulse was strong and regular.

Her fingers occupied themselves, feeling as
though they had been dipped in concrete, fiercely struggling with
the knots that tied him. These were unyieldingly tight and she
ripped her nails to the quick getting the ropes to loosen up so
that she could draw the loose ends through the loops. But
frustratingly long minutes later, Leonie had freed the boy and she
gathered him up in her arms, tucking his head into her shoulder.
“You’re all right,” she murmured. “You’re all right, and as long as
we’re alive, we have a chance.”

But the little boy didn’t respond. Leonie
looked down and saw that there was a faint facial resemblance to
Gideon. She was holding a limp Keefe Grant in her arms. His little
heart was beating steadily and his flesh wasn’t cold or overly hot.
He was merely sleeping. She carefully peeked under the bandage on
his arm and discovered a two inch long incision, crusted over with
blood, with no signs of infection. It wasn’t even deep enough to
warrant stitches, but had probably been the origin of the blood on
the pack and on the shirt.

And the drops on the riddle
, Leonie
thought
. Oh, Gideon. I’ve found him but I don’t know where I
am.
With that revealing thought, she reached out to Gideon,
hoping to reassure, ask for help if he could give it, and she
discovered a raging, implosive headache that made her cry out. She
managed not to drop Keefe, but shifted him in her arms and braced
him against her as she freed one hand to rub at the pain-wracked
place between her eyes.

It raged into her brain and flowed down her
back, making tears rush to her eyes. For an instant, Leonie wanted
to scream, but she clamped her teeth on her lower lip and felt a
spurt of blood inside her mouth. She thought about that pain
instead and after long seconds, the headache began to recede like
an inevitable tide returning to the sea.

Slowly she rocked Keefe in her arms, the
soothing motion doing as much for her as it didn’t do for the
unconscious child. Leonie’s head methodically scanned the room. It
was the same. She hadn’t been in this room that long, but it looked
the same. It was painted the same bland color, and the bright
scarlet pillows looked identical to the ones of her memory.

However, there were differences. The lack of
an attic door was the most obvious one. Another was the specialized
electronic lock on the door. It had a keypad on it. She kept
rocking Keefe gently back and forth and then she realized that
there was a little camera in the upper corner of the room. A tiny
lens stared back at her and she knew that he was watching her.
Perhaps he was even recording her.

There was one other thing in the room as well
and she started as she saw it. It was sitting on a pillow directly
underneath the camera lens. A laptop computer, its top closed, sat
there. Chillingly normal, it looked distinctly out of place in this
room. And it might as well have a sign pointing to it that loudly
proclaimed, “Touch me! Open me! See what’s inside, Leonie!”

What had Gideon said to her on the phone
?
Who do you know that likes to play games?

This was a game to him. A game he fully
intended on winning, a game in which Leonie and Keefe had a chance
in a million of surviving. But she wasn’t going to make it easy for
him. She wasn’t going to simply accede to his wishes at the drop of
a hat. Perversity wasn’t in her nature, but she could make it part
of her characteristics if she desired and she did at that
moment.

Leonie rocked Keefe back and forth. He grew
heavy in her arms and she began to consider putting him down but a
sideways look at the anonymous camera lens gave her pause.

Finally, there was the impatient voice that
came over an intercom. Leonie started but she continued her gentle
movements with the child and did not look around for the speaker.
She hadn’t seen it before and knew that it was most likely
well-hidden in the walls or ceiling. “Open the laptop, Leonie.”

The voice was low-pitched and sounded
markedly electronic, as if deliberately distorted, but it also
revealed a note of edgy annoyance that pleased Leonie.
I’m not a
good little lab rat. And electric shocks won’t do piddly squat to
me.
She didn’t recognize the voice, but then she wasn’t sure if
she would. She didn’t even know if she would know his face when he
ultimately faced her. And he would eventually.

After a few minutes, the intercom crackled
again. “Open the laptop or I’ll kill the boy right away. Open the
laptop and have a…chance. The chance I never got.”

Mutinously, Leonie narrowed her eyes and
looked down at Keefe. Helpless and unconscious, he had no one but
her to protect him. Like all those other children, some of whom she
had never reached in time, some of whom had never had any kind of
chance. “You have a choice, though,” she said clearly. “We all have
choices.”

“Your choice is simple then,” returned the
voice calmly, assured that he was once again in control. “Open the
laptop or sacrifice the child.”

Leonie carefully put Keefe on the floor,
tucking his head into a pillow, ensuring that he was breathing
evenly. “What did you drug him with?”

“The same thing I used on you. It’s illegal
in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan. But quite readily
available in third-world countries. They use on mental patients,
although the patients have a nasty habit of developing brain tumors
and aneurysms.”

“You’ve been drugging me all along,” Leonie
breathed with sudden realization. There had been headaches for
months and very little psychic activity, not until the day that
Olga Rojas was kidnapped. Finding out from the hospital doctor had
been only the tip of the iceberg; there was so much diving deep
beneath the surface.

“Testing you,” returned the voice. “I
decreased the level a week before I took the little girl. It seems
to work very well on you, causing you to have headaches instead.
But you confused those headaches with the ones caused by the bullet
in your head.”

“You were in my house. You substituted
pills.” Leonie tried to determine the level of the transgression.
This person wasn’t just impulsively picking some woman he fancied.
He had planned it for months, years even. This was not active
interest; this was the thing that made psychiatrists rub their
hands together in immense delight as they planned the lengthy
dissertation that would bring them academic fame. “You poisoned
Dacey and set up Gideon. What have I done to you? What could I have
possibly done to you?”

“Open the laptop before you find out what I
will do to you,” threatened the voice.

Leonie got to her feet, feeling sluggish as a
worm, and waded through a pile of pillows to the laptop. Realizing
that her watch wasn’t the only thing missing, she noticed that her
shoes and socks were gone as well.

She looked expectantly at the camera lens and
thought that it resembled the eye of a rapacious lizard. It stared
at her relentlessly. Tugging at the top of the laptop with a
careless movement, Leonie cried out as something slashed at her
fingers.

“Lesson one,” said the voice amusedly. “This
house has fangs and will bite.”

Looking closer at the edge of the laptop, she
saw that it was rigged with razor blades, carefully concealed in
the seams of the equipment. She put her index and middle fingers
into her mouth and hoped that the cuts weren’t deep. Instead of
protesting, Leonie carefully opened the lid and stared at the
screen. There was a riddle there in bold large letters.

Another riddle
. Leonie suddenly
decided that she loathed riddles.

“Lesson two,” the voice went on. “Solve the
riddle and get out of this room. Use the number you come up with on
the keypad at the door. Solve all the riddles and you’ll live to
grace the cover of another newspaper. You might even save the boy.
You might even save your friend.”

There was an imperceptible movement of
Leonie’s shoulders. She didn’t say anything.

“I didn’t know Ms. Rojas had a peanut
allergy. I was only interested in the effect of Olga’s kidnapping
upon you.” There was a malice-filled pause. “But it wouldn’t be
hard to doctor her coffee one morning or perhaps those donuts she
likes so much from Thu’s Bakery. You buy them at least once a week
and she eats more than her fair share.”

“She didn’t do anything to you,” said Leonie
suddenly. “Neither did that little boy behind me. There’s no point
in punishing them for my crimes.”

“But punishing them punishes you,” the voice
went on blithely. “You’ve got a soft heart for children, but you
haven’t had any yet. I couldn’t kidnap yours then, and I needed to
find out how strong your abilities are.” There was an eerie
electronic chuckle. “Oh, I know all about them. You’re one of a
select few. And your precious family has excluded you for your
previous acts of charity. You found missing children and garnered
unwanted publicity for the people of Unknown, publicity that they
seem to be afraid of.”

Leonie took her bloody fingers out of her
mouth and discovered the cuts weren’t bad. The bleeding was already
slowing. She didn’t look at the camera lens. But she felt a burning
surprise at the level of knowledge from the nameless person.
Furthermore, he sounded as though he was proud of his planning and
contrivances.

“Your family is remarkably stupid about
keeping their mouths shut, even around themselves. For a group of
remarkable telepaths, they tend to talk more than I would have
anticipated, and when they talk, they don’t seem to care who might
be listening a half mile away, on a boat in the lake, or down the
block with a parabolic microphone.”

“You spied on the family to find out about
me,” Leonie stated coldly.

“They like to talk about you. Your mother
talks to her sister frequently. She worries about you. She worries
that you’ll die alone, in the outsider’s world.”

Leonie clamped her mouth shut and stared at
the laptop, wondering if she could get the razor blades off without
cutting her fingers to shreds.

Her unseen observer anticipated her. “The
razor blades are glued on with construction glue. You’d need pliers
to get them off. So don’t waste your time. Speaking of time, did I
mention a time limit?”

“Must have slipped your mind,” Leonie
muttered.

“Solve the riddle, get out of the room, take
the little brat with you, if you’d like. Although I wouldn’t. He’s
going to slow you down.” There was an undeniable smugness in the
electronic voice that Leonie found infuriating. “An hour, but I
don’t think you’ll need it. It’s a simple riddle. Oh, and
Leonie?”

She looked over her shoulder and saw the
keypad on the door. Then she looked at the laptop again. The riddle
wasn’t hard, but there were two possible answers. Either would open
the keypad and release her from this waking nightmare.

“Three tries and you’re out. Just like
baseball, except it’s not.”

Leonie picked up the laptop and avoided the
razor blades on the edge. She slammed it against the camera’s lens
and was inordinately pleased to hear splintering glass. Both the
laptop and the camera lens fell to pieces on the floor near her
toes and she looked satisfied as she stared downward. What were
left of the two pieces of equipment were plastic and computer
components. But the razor blades hadn’t come loose from the
lid.

Carefully picking her way back to Keefe,
Leonie did the riddle in her mind. She quickly checked him and made
her way to the keypad.
Twice four and twenty blackbirds, sitting
in the rain. I shot and killed a quarter of them. How many do
remain?

Twice four is eight. Eight added to twenty
is twenty-eight. One-fourth of twenty-eight is seven. Seven
subtracted from twenty-eight is twenty-one.

Leonie was going to try twenty-one when her
bloody fingers hesitated. She’d taken algebra in high school and in
college and hadn’t been fond of the classes, but it was a simple
word problem. It could also be read as twice times four plus twenty
instead of twice four plus twenty. Her mind twisted.
Twice( four
plus twenty) is forty-eight. One-fourth of forty-eight is twelve,
which means that twelve from forty-eight is thirty-six.

It was one of two answers. Twenty-one or
thirty-six. Which answer would be least likely? A riddle assumes
the most obvious will occur to the person, which would be the
numerical answers. But if the birds all flew off, then the answer
would be zero, because none would logically be left there, and that
was the least obvious answer. Her fingers tapped in four zeros.
There was a satisfying click that indicated that the door was open.
She pushed it a little and watched as it slowly swung wide.