Disembodied Bones, page 42
“He’s already got the number for Scott’s cellular,” Gideon said wryly.
•
There was darkness and only Elan’s flashlight showing weakly around a corner. Any movement abruptly stopped as he realized what she’d done. There was dreadful silence and Leonie took the hesitation to feel around for one of the boards. She wrapped a bloody hand around the 1X6 board, grasping it clumsily with one hand and waited. More dirt spilled in from above and she almost moved anyway, fearing that the earth would cave in on her.
Elan didn’t move. She thought she could hear his breathing intensify as she stood there, hoping that darkness would conceal her from the revenge driven psychopath. True, he had a flashlight, but he no longer had her. He no longer had Keefe, and he didn’t have the means to find them quickly. Leonie hoped that enough time would pass and she would be able to communicate once more with Gideon. Once that occurred, he might be able to convince Scott of her need, even if he had to lie to do it.
Leonie trembled as she waited. She wondered what Elan was thinking. Was he calculating where she was or was he thinking about slowly dismembering her while she was still alive? Either way, she was on the losing side and it didn’t feel good.
“You have no idea what you’ve done, Leonie,” Elan said finally. His voice was hoarse and threatening all at the same time. He sounded as if he were shocked. “You shorted out the electricity. You’ve killed the power. You damn little fool. Now we’re both trapped.”
Leonie swallowed. She wanted to ask the question. But Elan knew she was close, so he answered regardless of her silence. “The doors are electric. They’re designed to shut down with the power. Steel doors in steel frames, mounted to concrete blocks. No little metal keys. No exit at all. It’ll take a fucking pile driver to get through those doors and I’m not even sure if that’s possible.” He laughed bitterly. “Someone would have to know we’re down here. Someone who cares enough to move heaven and earth.”
More silence followed. Leonie’s hand holding the board began to shake. There was the earth above her threatening to fall in on her and there was Elan who threatened her, period. Behind her was a water filled pit that she could never hope to pull herself out of if she fell in. Worse was that she suspected she couldn’t really hit Elan hard enough with the 1X6 to do any damage to slow him down. She couldn’t hold it very well with her damaged hands.
Elan said, “No point in playing this game anymore. We might as well end it right now.”
She heard a footstep. Then there was another one. Elan was about to turn the corner and even with a narrow flashlight beam he would see her. Leonie shut her eyes and prayed, just as she had prayed when she was thirteen years old.
Leonie?
The headache came but it wasn’t as furious as it had been. She opened her eyes and ignored Gideon with all of her might, resisting the crushing impulse to cry out to him. She wanted to scream out for him to help her. She was trapped in a dark place with a monster just as bad as Monroe Whitechapel. His intention had been to torture her, but now he merely wanted her dead, so he could work on his own escape…again.
Then Elan stepped around the corner and Leonie hit him with the board. The board smashed across his arm and shoulder and snapped in two. The flashlight dropped to the ground and rolled against the wall, softly illuminating both of them. Elan snarled at her and stood in place, glaring at her as he rubbed his shoulder. Leonie kept her eyes on Elan as she reached down for another board, but all she could find was dirt. She straightened up and inched back as much as she could.
“What are you going to do, Leonie?” Elan taunted her. “Not a unicorn’s horn in sight. Just me. Just you. I’ll find where you’ve put the child. I’ll make it quick for him. Then I’ll get out. Just like I did before. But you won’t. No, you’re staying down here. Forever and more.”
“What kind of stupid idiot makes a trap just like the one he was in before?” Leonie said right back. “What kind of demented fool makes the same mistake?”
Elan’s response was a low growl. In the muted light he appeared demonic. His brown eyes were the color of pitch; his hair was brushed back from his head, showing the hard slanting lines of his face. He seemed just as insane as she thought him to be.
Leonie swallowed her fear and said, “This must be your worst nightmare, next to jail. Trapped in a pit, without sunlight, without hope, and no one to know. You must feel like you’re coming home.”
Elan launched himself at Leonie and with all the strength in her arm she threw the dirt into his face. His body collided into hers and knocked her back. She looked frantically over her shoulder at the water filled pit and one foot teetered in mid-air. Her arm cart wheeled crazily, trying to shift her balance so that she wouldn’t fall in. Elan was scrubbing at his eyes, teetering himself. He blinked madly and started to reach toward her, clearly intending on pushing her in.
Leonie found a hidden source of energy and she twisted away from the edge. She lowered her head and aimed her shoulder into his stomach and charged. She crashed heavily into him. Elan was thrust back into the wall with the embedded razors. He issued forth a terrible scream that made her bones ache. She turned and fled.
•
The road unfurled before Scott, Gideon, and Sue. The county car ate up the tarmac like it was a long-awaited lunch. Gideon reached up with both hands, still handcuffed, to scratch his ear. He was sitting in back behind a grated barrier. Sue and Scott were largely silent.
“What about a warrant, Scott?” Sue asked.
“We’re just looking around, Sue,” Scott said. “If we happen to see some evidence, just lying around, well, then there’s our probable cause. Judge Harvey will back me up. If we don’t see anything at all, that’s another story.”
Gideon closed his eyes and laid his head back. For a moment he was in a dark place and he was full of fear and desperation. His feet bit into a hard cold floor and his hands were broken and bleeding; the throbbing could be felt like a child clashing cymbals together. Leonie?
She was tempted for a scant second, but something else was there. Gideon could feel the temptation like a fever in his blood. Something was frightening her so badly that she didn’t dare let her attention be on anything else. She blocked him out of her mind and fled into the stuff of which nightmares are made.
“Hurry,” Gideon said. Scott eyes met his in the rearview mirror and he nodded once. Sue didn’t say anything. Her eyes got large and round.
•
Trapped with Elan in a black hell with a man who wanted her to suffer the indignities he had suffered, right from the moment he was left to rot in cement cavity. Leonie felt along the sides of the walls until she found the doorway back to the room she’d woken in. Not taking the flashlight was a gamble. Elan clearly still feared the darkness as he’d brought a flashlight into his maze of horrors even though the dim blue lights lined the ceilings all the way through. Perhaps it would give her enough time. There was a sense of something coming and she wasn’t sure if her innate abilities were telling her about the danger that Elan presented or that something else was about to happen.
She heard the gurgling of water and knew that she had the right place. The water from the broken pipe was still filling the pit. But Leonie wasn’t interested in that at all. She slowly walked into the room and felt her way to where she needed to be. Elan was injured now and more mad than he’d ever been before. The playing field was level, but he still had advantages. Leonie knew that it was only a matter of time before he came after her.
-
What force and strength cannot get through,
I with a gentle touch can do.
And many in the street would stand,
Were I not a friend at hand.
What am I?
I am a key.
Chapter Thirty-One
Monday, July 29th
What has two eyes and cannot see?
Scott’s phone rang shortly after they left the sheriff’s department. He handed it to Sue and concentrated on the road. Traffic on the country road was heavier than normal due to construction. He was passing cars, tractors, and road equipment. He had already used the lights and sirens twice to get around packs of slow moving vehicles.
Sue answered the phone and determined it was Roosevelt Hemstreet, patched through the station to Scott’s cellular phone. Then she looked crossly back at Gideon. The grill was in the way and she couldn’t pass the phone to him. “You’ll have to talk through me,” she said finally.
“What did he find?” Gideon said.
“What did you find?” Sue said obediently.
Roosevelt said, “What, have you got him hogtied?”
“He’s in the back of the county car and we can’t stop.”
“Why?”
“We think we have a handle on where the woman and the child are,” Sue said back. Scott shot her a glance. “We don’t know for sure,” she added.
Roosevelt thought about it for a moment. “Gideon was right. It was a long shot that the child was born in Shreveport, but the office of vital statistics has their records computerized from 1945 and it includes all Louisiana parishes. You can ask it all kinds of stuff, especially if you’re nice to the clerks. They liked my badge a lot.”
“Peachy,” Sue said out of the side of her mouth. “Says you were right, Gideon.”
“About what?” Gideon leaned forward and she said into the phone, “Shoot.”
“Kid was born in the right time frame. To Amanda Dolby.”
Sue repeated it to Gideon.
Scott said, “What kid?”
“There was a riddle on Whitechapel’s crypt,” Gideon explained. “Although most people wouldn’t have paid too much attention to it. It was added years after he died, by someone who was connected to Monroe Whitechapel and what got George Ogden curious. Ogden was an investigative journalist who found out a little too much and got warned off. But the someone was who Leonie didn’t know about because he wasn’t missed by someone. She told you that-they have to be missed by someone. Truly missed.”
“Huh?”
“Ask Rosy who the father is,” Gideon said.
Sue asked.
Roosevelt said to Sue, “How does he think we found the name? His name is James Allen Dolby. At least it was when he was born.” There was a brief hesitation. “He’s Monroe Whitechapel’s son.”
“His son?”
Gideon explained to Scott, “The riddle on the crypt said, ‘Dawn’s away, the day’s turned gray, and I must travel far away. But I’ll be back and then we’ll track the light of another day.’”
“Huh?” Scott said again, feeling incredibly stupid all of a sudden.
“Whitechapel taunted his victims with riddles. Just like the riddle on Olga. Just like the one in the backpack. He told us that if we could solve the riddle, he’d let us go. He must have done the same with his own son. Someone he could play with until he got tired of, without fear of being caught by the police.” Gideon sat back in the seat and sighed. “His own son.”
“That’s the answer to the riddle?” Scott deducted. “Not son. Not S-O-N, but S-U-N. Some kind of twisted joke on his father. A last little dig. No pun intended.”
Sue was saying, “Uh-huh. Really. That makes sense.” She put the phone down for a moment and said, “Yep, Monroe Whitechapel’s only son. Not recognized in his will, but apparently there’s more. Amanda Dolby went missing about a year ago. She was a waitress in Bossier City, living with her third husband. Your deputy chief of police says he recognized the name as soon as they saw it because there was a crime scene at her house. Enough blood in the garage to indicate death, but they never found the body. Don’t even have a suspect.”
“The son again?” Scott said. “Why go after the mother?”
“She gave him to Whitechapel,” Gideon said. “I bet she sold him to his own father. Maybe she didn’t know what he was going to do, but she took the money and ran, never looked back, and eventually he decided to get even with everyone who wronged him.”
“Wronged him how?” Scott asked. “You’d think he’d be grateful that Leonie killed the man who abused him.”
“We think that he was kept somewhere, some kind of secret compartment, where Whitechapel intended to put me, once he disposed of his son. Whitechapel didn’t like his victims once they got too old for his tastes. When he took me, it was the death knell for James Allen Dolby. When Leonie killed Whitechapel, we condemned the son to a slow death, because the police searched every part of the house and the grounds and they never found it, because they didn’t know it was there. Starvation? Maybe dehydration? Being alone in some rotten hole would have been enough to send anyone over the edge.”
“Jesus,” Sue breathed. “But you think he escaped somehow.”
“Yeah, escaped, managed to get some of Whitechapel’s money, and grew up with a thirst for revenge. I was just part of the big picture. Olga and Keefe were secondary to get to Leonie. She’s the one he hates the most.”
“And Elan Carter or James Dolby, whichever, didn’t count on you two having this bond, or whatever you call it?” Scott said incredulously. “It sounds like a story from the Syfy Channel.”
“Yeah, is that it?” Sue said, half-listening to the phone, half-listening to Scott and Gideon. “Thanks, I think. I guess you can go to the supermarket now, huh?” She disconnected and folded the phone up, passing it back to Scott. “The deputy chief said to be careful.”
Gideon looked at his hands. The thumb still throbbed faintly, the swelling had gone down. He suspected in a few hours that it would be gone altogether. What would happen to me, he wondered with some shock, if Leonie died? He swallowed convulsively. What if she’s not there? What if it’s the wrong place?
No, he thought, rejecting indecision. I can feel her. We’re getting closer to her. She’s still alive. Frightened, but still alive. It isn’t too late.
•
“How about a riddle, Elan,” Leonie called. “A riddle from me to you. If you answer it, then I’ll let you live, what do you say, Elan? Is that really your name? Or just a persona you affected to make sure I was gullible to fall for your act?”
Darkness surrounded her, engulfed her like a cold blanket. A faint gurgle of water bubbling up was the only noise she could hear. She cocked her head so she could listen better. Elan was being as silent as possible, trying to gain an advantage. She wanted him in this room. She wanted him to be as mad as possible. She wanted his fury to simmer up inside him like a volcano’s lava fighting to explode out of the earth.
“How about something simple, something that Whitechapel would have appreciated greatly? He would have laughed at your efforts. Not as sophisticated as his. It took the police years to catch him, and you, you’ve put yourself into the open. People have seen your face. They know what you look like, and you’ve probably left a thousand fingerprints behind. If they don’t catch you soon, it’s only a matter of time.” Leonie shrank into the wall and was comforted by the cold concrete blocks roughly caressing her back.
Nothing. Nothing answered her. Not even a hesitant creeping noise that would indicate Elan moving closer to her. Doubt assailed Leonie for a moment. Could I have killed him? Could he be still attached to the razor-blade wall, slowly bleeding to death? And oh, Dieu, how am I going to force myself to go look and see?
“Here it is, Elan,” she called again. She made her voice deriding. “A simple one. A child could answer it. A child as young as you were once. When is a door not a door? Did you hear me, Elan? A stupid little child could figure it out because it’s as obvious as the nose on your face, it’s as plain as an ugly woman, it’s as clear as crystal. When is a door not a door?”
Leonie paused and listened. Nothing. Not a hint of sound. No movement at all.
There wasn’t even a sliver of light that would indicate that Elan was approaching with the flashlight. Either he was coming in darkness or he wasn’t coming at all. Judging by how much Elan seemed to hate her, Leonie bet that he was coming in darkness.
And it was very, very dark.
•
“This is it,” Sue said, pointing to a sagging fence. The property was fairly isolated. A hundred odd acres of land sprawled before them. Once it had been used for growing cotton, then Sue related that the owner had gone off to Korea and came back with mental problems. He hunkered down on his property and fired a shotgun at anyone who came on the grounds. He let the house decline. He let the fields grow wild and it was a thick growth of woods now, almost sixty years’ worth, with nothing left but a barn. A few years after he’d died, the house had been struck by lightning and burnt to the foundation, leaving nothing but a storm cellar. The smoke hadn’t been seen until the following day because of the storm and the veteran’s few relatives didn’t care about the property, other than selling it to the person who would pay most for it. “So it finally sold to…a child kidnapping lunatic.”
Driving through a badly rusted gate hanging limply on its hinges, Scott turned onto a dirt trek that led into thick woods of pine, juniper, and oak. It was similar to Gideon’s property, but the road didn’t curve. It went straight back, echoing the lines of former cotton fields. Finally the county car came into a cleared area. Two acres of land had been forced to grow only grass and knee-high weeds. The trees and shrubs had not reinstated themselves in this area.
In the middle of the area was a simple barn, two stories high. In its heyday it would have held bales of cotton and equipment with which to till the soil and harvest the crops. It might have held some hay for various farm animals, but this had been no ranch.
“There’s no house,” Gideon said with shock.
“I told you,” Sue said. “Burned down five years ago.”
“But it was exactly like Whitechapel’s house. The long hallway, the doors, the attic. It was the duplicate of his house. And his house was burned down not too long after he was killed.” Gideon’s voice was overloaded with guilt and dismay. He had gambled and lost, but oh, what a price he would have to pay.
