Disembodied Bones (30 page)

The same angular face looked back at her; his
brown eyes were jarringly serene and studied her with similar
interest. The expression on his face was warily circumspect, not
looking away, as he had so many times before. Shyness wasn’t his
problem as she had thought before. No, it was something more,
something that caused him to not want to make direct eye contact
with her…because it troubled him. Tilting her head curiously, she
didn’t sense that he meant her harm, despite that he had clearly
broken into her house.

Gideon shook his head shortly. “The door was
open. I didn’t have to break anything.”

Leonie said, “I’m not sure if I want to get
used to you reading my mind.”

“It was as plain as the nose on your face,”
he said sincerely. “And I wasn’t sure if you’d let me in if I had
knocked. You should be more aware of security. Your whole house is
one big invitation to thieves.” There was a slight pause and then,
“And other people.”

Understanding flooded through Leonie. Elan’s
words of the past Saturday came back to her. He had seen someone
around her house on his way to see her. “You’re the man Elan saw
near the house. You followed me to Dallas a few days ago. You
called me on the phone that night, trying to make me think of
Whitechapel, deliberately scaring me.” A choked laugh forced itself
out of her throat. “Dacey was right. You
are
stalking
me.”

Gideon sighed raggedly. “It looks like that,
doesn’t it? And when you figure out who I am, you’ll think she was
right. I don’t know what this thing is between us. I wish to God
sometimes it wasn’t so. I could ‘hear’ what you were thinking, like
a radio had been turned on inside my head and you were all but
oblivious to me. For a while I thought I must be going insane. But
you couldn’t see that you were in danger.” He hesitated and his
voice became uneven. “I was trying to look out for you.”

“Danger?” she repeated. Gideon didn’t move.
He shifted on his feet a little, his arms hanging at his sides, his
fingers twitched on one hand as if he longed to be doing something
else, longed to be somewhere else. “From who? You?”

“I don’t know,” Gideon said. “You’ve said it
yourself. It doesn’t work like that. Things don’t get presented to
you on a silver platter. All rolled up with a scarlet ribbon tied
around it in a bow. It’s just that someone is so interested in you,
and me, as well, that he’s circling you like a hawk on the breeze,
waiting for just the right moment. There’s a dozen people around
you that could be interested that way, and I’m not even really sure
it’s a man.”

Leonie was confused. Gideon spoke like a
member of the family, although he hadn’t made a reference to them.
He spoke as though he’d known her for years. Clearly he knew
something, he was speaking to her telepathically, but what his
intent was eluded her. She needed to know, but trusting him to tell
her the truth came hard.

“Trust,” Gideon muttered. “It’s a matter of
trust. You don’t know me. You see me in the Gingerbread House
sometimes, staring at you like I’ve never seen a woman before. You
saw me in the park after you found Olga. In the parking lot at the
County Building in Dallas, too. I must seem like a big
whack-job.”

“I said it myself?” Leonie was trying to
comprehend his words. “You heard me say that to someone? To Scott
Haskell? I think he was the only one I said that to and to the
forensics specialist at the morgue. What did you do, follow me
inside the building?”

Gideon shifted again and his eyes flitted
over the room. He could see this wasn’t going the way he’d planned.
He wanted Leonie to find Keefe. He thought honesty would be the
best approach. But in his haste to reach her, he hadn’t thought
about how ludicrous it all sounded. He seemed like the biggest
lunatic imaginable. He wasn’t just infatuated with Leonie; he was
ostensibly obsessed with her. He had followed her around the city
when she’d been doing daily errands. He had investigated her
boyfriend, Elan Carter, to see if there was any dirt on him, and
found nothing. He had looked over her house while she’d been at
work to see if he could somehow persuade her to get better
security. He thought about her almost every waking moment and up
until this point in time he hadn’t been sure what he could do to
protect her. “I need you to believe me,” he pleaded suddenly. “My
nephew’s been kidnapped by that same bastard who took Olga. It has
something to do with you in particular, me as an adjunct.”

Leonie couldn’t prevent herself. Gideon’s
abrupt shift of mood made her take a step back. His eyes narrowed
at the action and his face twisted with something she likened to
pain. “His name is Keefe,” she said. “He likes dinosaurs and Tonka
trucks.”

“Was there another riddle?” One of his hands
touched his head. “It’s like it’s right there in your head. I know
that you’re thinking of it and it frightens you.”

“Another riddle?” The words escaped from her
lips like a faint gray bit of fog blowing up from a black bayou.
The words appeared in Leonie’s mind helplessly and she even had the
answer now. The bits of blood smeared the bottom of the paper in
her mind and began to dribble down in great crimson torrents.

Gideon’s face twisted more, a gnarled mask of
torment. “Blood? Blood on the riddle?” There was an immediate
eruption of anger-ridden emotion that made Leonie cringe. His head
quickly looked around the living room. “What riddle? Where is
it?”

“The pack on the porch,” she whispered. “It
has his name on it. The man who took Keefe left it there for me to
find. Another taunting little arrow to pierce my soul. I think that
he’s drugged him. And no matter how much I concentrate I can’t
quite get it. Not where he took the little boy, or who it is.”

Then Gideon moved. He reached her in two
steps and grasped her shoulders. “You have to get it! He’s only
seven years old and that son of a bitch has him! If you don’t find
him, then-”

That surge of electricity slid unwanted
through Leonie’s body when Gideon touched her. She didn’t know what
to say, only that when he touched her it was like someone had
reached inside of her and was grasping the whole of her soul,
clutching it solidly in a hand. She took a wavering breath and
tried to wrench away from him. Gideon wouldn’t let her. He stared
down at her with his brown eyes and a pleading grimace on his
mouth. An immediate clarity swelled through her body. This
particular man had touched her before. He had touched her and
helped her and there had been a connection that had been severed by
the bullet of an insane pedophile. Not only did Leonie know this
man’s name but she knew who he really was.

•

Ten minutes later, the Craftsman house had
been secured and, unfortunately for them, devoid of human life. On
the other hand they didn’t find immediate signs of death in the
house. Neither was there anyone or anything substantial in the
barn. “No car. No human. No nothing,” reported Sue. She chewed on
the wad on the side of her mouth and Scott was momentarily reminded
of a cow. He blinked and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Frustration
only made him get more irritated and anyone within reach became a
target for his ire.

Ken Ash stood behind Sue and barely repressed
a smirk. Scott knew that Ken was mentally composing his next leak
in his mind for the local press. “Sheriff Lets Child Molester
Escape.” Doubtless, Ken couldn’t wait to get a moment alone with
his cell phone to call the lady he knew at the paper, the one that
everyone at the department knew about anyway.

“Search the house,” Scott said. “You know the
drill. You know what we’re looking for.”

So they searched and before Scott started to
help them, one of the other deputies called him back. “You got a
call, Sheriff,” he said. “Patched through the station. Said it was
urgent.”

“Who in the name of God is it?” Scott said
irritably. He wondered if they would find any evidence other than
the solitary print to link the owner of the house to Olga Rojas’s
kidnapping.

The deputy’s eyes went large. He motioned the
microphone at the sheriff and said, “Uh, Deputy Chief of Police
from Shreveport. Hemsneeze. Hemsmart. Something like that.”

“Hemstreet,” said Scott. “His name is
Hemstreet
, for the love of Pete.”

The deputy pushed the microphone at him,
clumsy in his urgency to have the other man take it and to step
away before something further upset the sheriff.

“Haskell, here,” said Scott.

Roosevelt Hemstreet’s voice crackled on the
other end. He kept his conversation brief, telling the Pegram
County Sheriff just what he thought the other man needed to know. A
child in Shreveport had been kidnapped. The forensics team had just
finished with the house and Roosevelt had read the report with no
little amount of horror, once he realized to whom the child was
related.

Scott listened absently, wondering what the
fuss was about. In fact, he knew that the fingerprint in question
belonged to a man who Dacey Rojas had complained was stalking
Leonie Simoneaud, or at least, staring luridly at her when he came
inside the Gingerbread House.

Roosevelt was stricken silent for a moment.
“You mean, you found something that connects Gideon Lily to the
kidnapping last weekend?”

Scott sighed, glancing at the house. “I
thought that was why you called.”

Roosevelt grunted on the other end, a little
frustrated. “You don’t get it. He changed his name. There was that
much press back then. A child who’d escaped from a molester.
Someone who managed to escape with the help of a psychic who had
come to rescue him. It was a banner headline. Journalists drooled
over it.
People Magazine
and
Newsweek
parked their
people on the family’s lawn for weeks. They offered beaucoup tons
of money. They wanted his story and all he wanted, all his family
wanted, was to be left alone.”

“So what was his name before?” A sinking
feeling was beginning to affect Scott, as if he knew the boom was
going to drop, right on top of his head.

•

“Douglas Trent,” Leonie murmured in dawning
comprehension. Her mouth dropped open in amazement. “It’s you. How
can you possibly be so close to me and not be part of the
family?”

After a lengthy pause, he said, “I’ve heard
the rumors. Roosevelt Hemstreet told me some more. People talk
about the people out at Twilight Lake. They say they’re special.
Really special. But they keep to themselves. Some go out into the
world and do other things, but most don’t. You’re one of the few
who cut themselves so completely off from the rest. Roosevelt
thought it was because the family couldn’t forgive you for rescuing
me, that you exposed them. He thought that they forced you out.
Because of me.”

Leonie stared into those dark brown eyes and
tried to read him. She let her consciousness flow and the anger
that had colored his thoughts so utterly began to evaporate. “I
exposed them, but-” her hand came up, despite his tight grip on her
upper arms, and touched her scarred cheek-“I wasn’t the same, ever
again. I wasn’t one of them. Not in the way they wanted, and they
never looked at me the same.”

“It doesn’t make you any less beautiful,”
Gideon muttered agitatedly. One muscle in his cheek twitched
spasmodically. The thought of her being ostracized because of what
she’d done for him made him ache with dismay.

“It’s not the scar,” she hastened to correct
him. “But up until now, the gift was never like most of theirs, and
it was wretchedly sporadic. I couldn’t call it at will. Only with
certain children. Missing children. And then only with those who
had been missed the most.”

His face distorted again in some painful
travesty of compassion. “And they didn’t want to believe you when
you told them. Not with the dead woman in the morgue.” Gideon
thought about what she was saying. “But I’m missing Keefe and God
knows my sister and her husband are ripping their guts out with
their bare hands in guilt. So how can it not work?”

“It’s him. The man who wants me to know about
the missing children. I think he’s figured out a way to thwart me
and I don’t know how to get around it.”

-

Never ahead, ever behind,

Yet flying swiftly past:

For a child I last forever,

For an adult I’m gone too fast.

What am I?

I am childhood.

Friday, July 26th

As I was going to St. Ives,

I met a man with seven wives;

Every wife had seven sacks,

Every sack had seven cats,

Every cat had seven kits:

Kits, cats, sacks, and wives,

How many were there going to St. Ives?

“Jesus,” Roosevelt said to Scott. “It was
Douglas Trent. Gideon Lily is Douglas Trent. Gideon is one of his
middle names. Lily is his mother’s maiden name. He had it changed
legally. Then he went to college for a while and started in this
whole security thing. He’s real successful. Does business for all
kinds of folks, including corporations, defense contractors, big
computer places. That’s why he needed clearances. Consequently,
he’s been fingerprinted for that purpose. I went back and looked
but his compares weren’t in the file with Leonie’s when I sent you
those to check against hers. I reckon they got lost over the years
or one of the people back then forgot to take his, which wouldn’t
surprise me. We weren’t looking at Douglas at all. We were looking
at Leonie and her people, exclusively, trying to put them together
with Whitechapel. And by the way, unless you missed the really good
connection, Keefe Grant is Gideon Lily’s nephew.”

Scott was stunned. When he’d seen the name
that Sue had pointed out to him on the fax, he’d recognized it. G.
Lily was the one Dacey had complained about to him. He came into
the Gingerbread House and looked at Leonie. Dacey said the guy was
giving them the creeps, but Leonie didn’t want to bother filing a
complaint. He’d moved into the area about six months ago and Scott
had told Dacey not only did he
not
have a criminal record,
but that “staring luridly” at Leonie was not a criminal offense.
But the fact that Gideon Lily and Douglas Trent were one and the
same person put a new slant on it. It also added a new correlation
to Olga’s kidnapping.