Disembodied Bones (46 page)

He accessed the exterior Internet and started
surfing. Gideon hadn’t done this kind of work in years. Sometimes
it took a little finessing to get the right information. On a
Sunday night he wasn’t sure he could get exactly what he wanted. It
would have been better during business hours in the week.
But
then
, he looked around the spacious office with the leather
couch and framed Texas memorabilia on the walls,
I wouldn’t have
Scott’s office all to myself.

Picking up the phone, Gideon got an outside
line and dialed a number he’d looked up on the net. A PBX with an
androgynous computer voice answered and he had to wait about twenty
minutes before he found a warm body to speak with. But the warm
body’s name was Hope Mena and she was very helpful, more so after
she found out she was talking to Scott Haskell, sheriff of Pegram
County, Texas.

“Texas,” Hope said. “I always wanted to go to
Texas. Is it true that all men wear cowboy hats there?”

“Yes ma’am,” Gideon replied promptly, using
his best southern drawl. “It’s the law. And we have to tip them at
the ladies, too, but I never minded that. Especially to a perty
one.”

Hope giggled.

“We cain’t ride our horses to work, but we
love a good pickup truck. Good for anything we need to carry,
ma’am. But I digress, Miss Mena. It is miss, isn’t it?”

“Oh, heavens, no. I’ve been married for
fifteen years, but you can call me anything you like, sheriff,” she
said coquettishly.

“Well, Miz Mena, then,” he drawled deeply. “I
surely hate to disrupt your evening, seeing as how you’re the on
call administrator for the Social Security Administration, which is
a very critical position of leadership. But it’s really important
like that we find this woman.” Gideon decided he hated himself
sometimes. He had sunk to a new low. “Real important. I cain’t
stress that enough.”

“Oh, I’m just one of many, and I’m sure you
have a good reason,” Hope said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Gideon said firmly. “It’s life
or death.” And that ain’t no lie.

“Let’s see what we can do, then.”

Almost an hour later, Gideon was holding a
sheet of names that Hope had sent directly to Scott’s private fax
machine. They had accounted for all North Texas zip codes within a
hundred miles of Dallas, right up to the Red River that divided
Texas from Oklahoma. Gideon was privately praying that Jane Doe’s
murderer hadn’t been so clever as to drive the body across state
lines. If he had done so, all the way from Oklahoma to Dallas to
dump the poor girl and her pregnancy out of his miserable life,
then Gideon had a problem and a whole lot more names of elderly,
black, blind women to search through. Hope had expressed the same
thing, but he’d said, “Let’s stick with Texas for now, then if
doesn’t pan out, we’ll move on up to Oklahoma.”

Gideon had helped Hope devise a strategy for
eliminating women under a certain age and a specific race. Then
they had added the qualifier of legally blind. Hope had been
curious about how Gideon AKA Scott had known what to look for but
she had restrained herself with a simple, “I guess it’s all about
some murder case, huh?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Gideon had answered solemnly.
“We’d like to prevent more and your help is more than critical, Miz
Mena.”

It turned out there were more than Gideon
would have liked. He eliminated the ones that lived in Dallas and
Fort Worth. That excluded most of the list, leaving twenty-three
women.

Diligently studying the names, Gideon wanted
something to come to him, something to pop out and tell him the
answer he needed so urgently, but there was nothing. The little
black names on white paper didn’t ring any bells with him. One of
them was probably Jane Doe’s grandmother, a woman who was missing
her grandchild and in danger from her grandchild’s murderer, a man
who was still lying to her. Like Leonie is in danger.

Is it a trade-off?
Gideon froze in
Scott’s comfortable leather chair. He couldn’t feel Leonie at all
anymore. There was nothing there and he had tried so hard to “hear”
her thoughts, feel what she was going through. The mental image of
Leonie and Keefe inside some twisted duplicate of Whitechapel’s
house made him want to scream his utter helplessness. It made him
desperate enough to want to switch to the second part of his plan
before he was finished with the first.
Am I trading off this
anonymous elderly woman’s life for Leonie’s and Keefe’s?
Jesus.

But he firmed his resolve and started making
calls. After a while Gideon became fairly proficient at pretending
to be Scott Haskell. And the image that haunted him began to recede
into the back of his thoughts.

Gideon paused once to peer out the edge of
the blinds at the parking lot. It was full now, whereas before it
had been almost empty. Several police vehicles with flashing lights
were parked in front, and officers scurried like worker bees with
honey to collect and a queen to please. He was counting on the fact
that Scott seemed to be a hands-on kind of guy, rather than an
I’ll-wait-in-my-office kind of sheriff.

Sure enough, Scott appeared a little later in
the parking lot, all six foot plus inches of him, with bright red
hair gleaming in the parking lot’s lights. He was directing a group
of men. Once he pointed back at the building and Gideon almost
ducked, but after a few minutes, the troops began to disperse.
Oblivious to anything but their various missions, they left in
droves. Off to road blocks, door to door searches, and someone was
dragging two baying bloodhounds off to a pickup truck, just like a
chain gang movie from the sixties.

Gideon’s eyebrows went up. But the dogs
couldn’t get a scent in the parking lot and they didn’t have
anything to give the animals a scent with. He touched his chest. He
was still wearing the coveralls and he hadn’t left anything in the
cell. He turned his back on the scene outside and got back to work.
He needed to get as much done as possible before someone came in
and caught him.

Twenty long and excruciating phone calls
later, Gideon got to talk to J.C. Burke. J.C. was a Paris Police
Department officer. Paris, Texas, that was, in Lamar County, just
about on the Oklahoma border with Texas. J.C. was an amicable good
old boy, who was bored stiff with being in the office on a Sunday
night while the missus was off to Houston to visit their daughter,
Delilah. “I never liked that name, Delilah,” confided J.C
cheerfully. “Too biblical for my tastes, but the missus is a devout
Christian and she named all our children after people in the bible.
I got an Abel, and a Joseph, and baby Delilah, who is twenty. She’s
lucky though she didn’t get named Deuteronomy or somethin’ like
that.”

Gideon chuckled appropriately, withholding a
disgusted sigh. His ear was starting to hurt and every time he
heard a noise in the hallway he winced. He was beginning to think
that he had wasted his escape and that his plan really stunk.
“About my witness?”

“Oh, yeah. You got a material witness and you
don’t know her name? I reckon that’s a hell of a story. Okay, I
know most folks around here. Ifin I don’t, I bet I know who
does.”

“An elderly blind woman,” Gideon put in
quickly before J.C. continued to speak about God knew what next. “A
very religious woman. She’s black. She likes to wear a hat
with…”

“Cherries on it?” J.C. finished for
Gideon.

It seemed surrealistic. Gideon was on his
twentieth call and had gotten zilch for his efforts. As he marked
off each name, he was rapidly coming to the conclusion that his
master plan was complete bullshit and Leonie was probably well and
truly screwed, if she were counting on him to rescue her.
That
was, if she isn’t already dead. No, not that. I would have
known.
“What?”

“Yep. Miz Sumetria Grimes. She’s out walking
to the store and to the senior center every day. All the officers
like to keep an eye on her because she’s a real nice lady and she
cain’t see a lick. But she surely loves that hat. Bright red
cherries on top you can see from a mile off. All the ladies just
love that hat. Even the missus likes that hat and lemme tell you
what, the missus got funny tastes about clothing.”

The twentieth name on the list was Sumetria
Joella Grimes. Gideon focused on the black lettering and followed
the line across with his finger. She was seventy-two years old, had
disability for blindness, and lived in Paris, Texas. He blinked
with a little puzzlement. When it came down to it, it had been
disappointingly tranquil for the actual denouement.

“Yeah, buddy,” continued J.C. “That be a
funny coinkydink, you know. Not two days ago, some dumbassed
burglar done broke into her house. The stupid sonuvabitch caught
Miz Sumetria’s entire sewing circle there and they chased him down
the street with knitting needles. Some kind of stupid kid, hopped
up on drugs.”

“They didn’t see who it was,” Gideon said,
remembering what Leonie had said about the lady being in
danger.

“He was wearing a ski mask. Just in case one
of the neighbors looked out, I ‘spect. Which means that he’s
probably from the neighborhood. The detectives will be putting a
whomping on his narrow ass before long.” He paused and added,
“Yeppers. Twelve pissed off old arthritic ladies with sewing
utensils chasing some guy down the road. One of them threw her
dentures at him and nailed him in the back of the head, although it
dint stop him none. I wish I’d had a camera to get that on
Youtube.”

Gideon lost his train of thought while he
considered the mental image that J.C. was imparting. “Christ, me
too,” he said finally and truthfully. “I’d of laughed until I
cried.”

“So what could Miz Sumetria possibly be a
witness to in your neck of the woods?” J.C. said. “She don’t get
out of Paris much. As a matter of fact, I think she ain’t been out
of town since her granddaughter off and went to someplace back east
for school.”

“Do you know her granddaughter then?” Gideon
perked right up.

“Shore. Gwendolyn Parker. Little Gwennie.
She’s one sweet little gal. Goes to church like a little trooper.
Takes care of her granny. Even sends her mama stuff while she’s in
jail.” J.C. sighed. “Her mama had some problems with drugs and all.
Got caught trying to drive a car full of cocaine over the Mexican
border.”

“If I send you a photograph, could you
identify it?” Gideon said slowly.

“A photograph? A photograph of who?”

“I’m sorry to say this, but I think it might
be Gwendolyn Parker. We’ve got a Jane Doe up here who’s been here
about six months. A homicide without any identification. I’ve had
some information that indicates that she was related to an elderly
woman who is blind, so I’ve been tracking down everyone who fits
that description.”

J.C. was silent for a moment. “Shore. I’ll
look at your photograph, but Miss Gwennie’s been back east at
some…bible school. I think it’s been, uh, over six months. Miz
Sumetria done talks about her every chance she gets, says that gal
don’t…write enough…” There was another moment of silence. “Well,
hell, that just about ruins my whole fucking day.”

“Sorry. You got email?”

“Yeah, lemme give you my address.” J.C.
rattled around on the other end and gave Gideon an address. “You
shore about this gal? There be a whole lotta gals out there and a
few of ‘em got to have grannies who are blind, although I cain’t
quite understand how you came to have that information and not know
her name.”

“It’s a long story,” Gideon said. He felt a
certain amount of elation. He tapped into the Dallas Police
Department’s website and found a current list of missing people.
There was a head and shoulders photograph of Jane Doe included. She
had been carefully made up, her hair arranged and poised as if she
were lifelike. The photograph made him shudder, but he copied it
and forwarded it to J.C. Burke.

There was another problem he was cogitating
on. The man who’d murdered Gwendolyn Parker had indeed gone back to
kill the grandmother. In not the smartest move, he’d picked the
worst time imaginable and angered a group of elderly women armed
with all kinds of nasty sewing implements. But was Miz Sumetria
still in danger? And here was a dilly of a pickle, how did he tell
J.C. Burke who the bad guy was without sounding like a complete
loon?

Gideon called J.C.’s direct line after five
minutes and J.C. picked the phone up with a brusque, “Burke.”

“Yeah, it’s, uh, Scott,” Gideon said. “You
get that photograph.”

“It’s downloading right now,” J.C. replied.
“My server is as slow as an alligator in Alaska. I got the top of
her head and it be working as fast as it can. Hold on.”

Gideon waited impatiently, closing his eyes
as he listened to a distant police officer fiddling around his desk
while he watched a photograph unfold before him.

J.C. said, “I, oh, creeping crud, doggy
dingleberries, shit on a shingle.”

It wasn’t exactly the answer Gideon was
waiting for, but it was the one that helped him out the most. “I’m
going to give you the name of the Dallas detective who’s holding
the case, and his direct number. He’ll be there in the morning. I
have a lot on my plate.” He heard rapid footsteps in the hallway
and finished quickly, “I may not have time to call him myself.”

“Well, shore,” J.C. said. “Ah, man. I’m gonna
have to call Pastor Manning. That be Miz Sumetria’s pastor over to
the Baptist Church. He’ll help her out.”

Gideon stopped and cursed under his breath.
“J.C., I think you better have a patrolman go to her house and make
sure she’s okay. Maybe take Miz Sumetria over to one of her
friends’ houses so she won’t have to be alone.”

“Uh, why the hell you say that?”

“You said she’s been getting letters from
someone pretending to be her granddaughter,” Gideon lowered his
voice as someone paused in front of the sheriff’s office.