BoneMan's Daughters (21 page)

She ground her jaw and groaned. If only she could see. Anger flared through her gut, her chest, and her face, and she suddenly
wanted to scream. So she did. She screamed her frustration at the darkness that surrounded her.

Pointless, she realized, and closed her jaw.

Her knees.

The thought stopped her cold.

She could remove her blindfold with her knees, couldn’t she? Why hadn’t she thought of that before?

She folded her legs and leaned over her knees. Her forehead made contact easily enough, and it was only a matter of seconds
before she was able to push the blindfold up over her eyes.

Dim light filtered into a large concrete room from several cracks in the ceiling corners. A wooden door was shut, twenty feet
away. Several ammo boxes sat on a table to her right. A folding chair. A metal bed with a thin gray mattress sat unused against
the far wall.

She was underground, she guessed, in a bunker or basement.

She stared at the bed, wishing she could lie and rest while she waited. But then a new thought occurred to her, one that was
mixed up with the sounds of James Caan having his legs broken while he lay in bed in that movie
Misery
.

She swallowed hard and tried to relax. Her blue plaid flannel pajama bottom was smudged but not ripped. She wore a white T-shirt
that was surprisingly clean. Bethany stared at her bare feet.

The problem with the character in
Misery
, as with so many characters in horror movies, was that they didn’t think clearly. Bethany could understand why, seated here,
strapped to a metal pole in a cement basement, waiting for BoneMan’s return.

But she would not allow herself to give in to her emotions the way all of those other girls probably had so that he could
send them straight to hell in a bucket of broken bones.

She would engage him, work his respect, draw him out, and if she could—if she found even the slightest opportunity to do so—she
would bash his skull in and send
him
straight to hell.

That was one side of it. The other side of it was that she was finally getting what was coming to her. A bit extreme, but
her whole life had been a bit extreme. What goes around comes around and this was life coming around. One day in New York,
the next day in a lunatic’s basement.

She was having some difficulty piecing together exactly why she deserved to be in this place, but she wasn’t stupid enough
to deny that in the end life was cruel and didn’t pay attention to what was fair.

Bethany sat back and let out a long breath. No, no, that was ridiculous. She no more deserved this than she deserved to be
abandoned by her father. If only he’d been there…

She closed her eyes and clenched her jaw.
Stay calm, Bethany. It’ll work out. It’ll all work out.

RICKI VALENTINE HAD seen her share of type A raging bulls, but Burt Welsh had the unique ability to make even the twenty percent
of those in society who were type A cringe.

She should know, she was a type A, and she felt as uncomfortable around the DA as a kitten in a cactus patch. Not that she
had any trouble telling him what she thought, only that she had trouble believing that he cared one iota what she thought.

He leaned over a desk in the downtown police station, running down a list of demands on the phone with the chief of police
and mayor. The DA had little business running an investigation, and of course Welsh would insist that he was doing no such
thing. But he might as well be—the local authorities ate out of his hand when he asked them to.

To be fair, the BoneMan case was now as much a political and social issue as a matter of the law. The whole city was neck
deep in fear because Burton Welsh had put the wrong man behind bars and the right man had just taken another high school student.

Ricki sat back against the desk and watched, judging, thinking.

“Every road, Bill. I don’t care if it’s a dirt road that leads to a vineyard off 183; I want a hundred-mile noose around this
city… . Then get more men!”

He spun to Ricki. “Where are those agents from Dallas?” he demanded.

“On their way. This is a thinking game, not a pissing match.”

Welsh glared at her. “I’ll call you right back, Bill. Fine.” He set the phone down and walked up to her.

“Whatever this attitude is, lose it. You might be FBI, you might be the freaking Secret Service or the NSA. You might be whoever
you like, but we just got handed a gift, Agent Valentine. How he managed to get out of Barton Creek before we could stop him,
I don’t know, but I’m not going to let him slip through our fingers again. Either get on board, or run along home.”

One of these days she would have to slap the man just to see his reaction.

She nodded. “Are you done?”

“For now.”

“Fine.” She stood and faced the room. A dozen officers, agents, and detectives assigned to the joint task force were working
over their desks or speaking quietly into phones. Ricki clapped her hands.

“Okay people, listen up. The FBI is still taking the lead on this, but the task force’s mission has not changed.”

The room quickly stilled as the officers turned their attention toward her. Mark Resner eyed her from where he stood by a
large wall map, working with two detectives on plotting a network of blockades.

“He’s been out there for”—she glanced at her watch—“an hour and ten minutes, which puts him within sixty miles of Barton Creek
without traffic. We have an all-points bulletin on the Toyota Camry. Over two hundred uniformed officers are now actively
engaged in the search. We have eyes in the air, four helicopters searching four grids. As of ten minutes ago, all four major
affiliates went live on the air with photographs of Mr. Ryan Evans. By now half the city knows what BoneMan looks like. But
we still don’t have the slightest idea what happened to him. I hope I’m not the only one who sees this as a unique challenge.”

She had their attention now, all of them.

“I’ve eaten, slept, and breathed BoneMan. His disappearing into thin air shouldn’t come as a surprise. There’s a reason he’s
remained at large.”

“You’re sure this is the guy?” a Detective Richardson asked.

“He’s the guy,” Welsh said.

Ricki nodded. “Everything we have points to him, yes.”

“Someone once said the same about Phil Switzer.”

Welsh turned on the man. “We have a witness with a broken finger this time. He spoke to her before he snapped her bone. Then
he took her daughter. This is the first time we have a live witness. Ryan Evans is BoneMan.”

“That is the assumption we are all working under at this time,” Ricki said. “Naval Intelligence. Been through some pretty
nasty stuff. He’s reportedly suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder; I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

Captain Bradley, who headed the city’s Special Weapons teams, shifted on his polished black boots. “What are the rules of
engagement?”

“Use all necessary force to apprehend. Do not terminate. Corner him, but do not shoot unless fired upon. Use of nonlethal
force is authorized. He’s got a hostage out there, people. Our top priority right now is to bring his daughter back alive.”

The mention of his daughter brought stillness to the room.

“Sick freak,” someone muttered.

Something about the connection between Ryan Evans and BoneMan’s latest victim, Bethany Evans, struck Ricki as disjointed.
She’d sat with the man in his hotel room for an hour, watching him come apart at the seams over the prospect of losing his
daughter. An obsessed man, broken by the war, she’d assumed.

Or a man broken long ago when he was a much younger man, when he was in basic training and suffered his first snap.

When the drugs administered by BoneMan had worn off, Celine had screamed until the neighbors found her floating in the pool.
She’d been hysterical for several hours and hadn’t made any connection to the possibility that the man who’d taken her daughter
might actually be Ryan until this morning; the reason for her demand that Valentine and Welsh meet her at the house.

Even to Ricki the idea had first seemed preposterous. But the more she considered the killer’s profile, the easier it became
to match Ryan with that profile.

He had a history of breaking under intense stress that extended beyond his trauma in the desert.

The string of murders had ended at about the same time he’d been deployed for his second tour in the Middle East, just coincidently
the same time that Phil Switzer had been arrested.

He’d come out of Iraq after supposedly encountering a kind of BoneMan in the desert, which could easily be a fabrication built
upon his own obsession.

Ryan’s unusual intelligence might account for the cleverness that BoneMan had exhibited in each of his murders. And his falling
out with Celine and Bethany provided the motivation for this most recent assault.

There was more, and all of it pointed to the man who’d held them at gunpoint this morning before fleeing.

All of it except for the love she’d seen in the eyes of the man who’d fallen apart in his hotel room two months ago.

Then again, Ricki knew how easily eyes could lie.

One thing was certain: if Ryan was indeed BoneMan as they now suspected, he was one twisted and very shrewd adversary. Enough
to send a chill down her back now, as she paced in front of the joint task force.

“That’s right,” she said softly. “One very sick puppy. So tell your men to keep their guard up. He’s scary sick. In all likelihood,
he doesn’t even know what he’s doing.”

Burton Welsh stepped up. “We can’t let him out of this city.”

“Please, sir, have a seat.” She looked him over, satisfied by the twitch in his cheek. “The reason he hasn’t crossed our paths
in the last hour is because he hasn’t left the city. And if he’s as smart as I think he is, he won’t leave till it’s dark.
We’re going to leave roadblocks in place on the seven primary thoroughfares leaving the city.” She nodded at her partner.
“Mark?”

He turned to the wall map and pointed out the roads.

“Good. We have two more helicopters en route from Dallas as we speak. When they arrive, they’ll join the four we have in the
air now and monitor the tributaries that funnel into these seven routes. In the meantime I want you to pull all of your cars
off all these other roadblocks you’re setting up and begin a full sweep of the city itself.”

She could almost feel the DA’s face heat up. “The FBI is posting a $50,000 reward for information leading to the capture of
Ryan Evans. Please circulate the news as aggressively as possible. I’m open to any and all suggestions. It’s no secret that
we missed this guy once; no one wants to miss him again. Any questions?”

The deputy chief was already on his phone, quietly speaking orders. She didn’t give the rest of them time to consider her
request for more than a few seconds.

“Good.”

Ricki grabbed her cell phone and strode toward the door.

“Where are you going?” Welsh demanded.

“To Waco, Mr. Attorney. I’m going to take a look under Ryan Evans’s sheets, if you don’t mind.”

THE VALUE OF leaning on the power of understanding and wisdom in a world ripped apart by schoolyard bullies and third-world
tyrants had first become saving knowledge to Ryan when he was in the sixth grade.

He’d always been a bit of a nerd, admittedly so even at twelve. And Bobby Knutz had always gone out of his way to make sure
he didn’t forget it. Ribbing and an occasional beating on the playground had been a part of Ryan’s life as long as he could
remember. But Bobby Knutz and those he ran with were simply taller and thicker.

Thing of it was, any idiot in the school could see that Bobby didn’t exactly come from a home brimming with goodwill and covetous
treasures. His father was an unemployed drunk and his mother didn’t make enough as a waitress to keep Bobby in much better
than rags. Muscle, it occurred to young Ryan, didn’t pay.

Intelligence, on the other hand, like that exhibited by professors and all those who worked in office buildings, did pay.
He began a very purposeful and quietly successful retreat away from the impulsive, macho, pubescent world of the American
teenage scene then, determining instead to excel in the more rewarding pursuit of knowledge.

Ryan had torn up less than a mile of Barton Creek Boulevard after fleeing Celine’s house when his good sense returned and
announced in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t settle down and think like he’d never thought before, he was going to the
clinker. And if he was going to the clinker, Bethany was going to the grave.

It was that simple.

In a strange way he’d been thrown into the same situation in which Kahlid had found himself in the desert. Like the father
in the Middle East, Ryan was reacting out of love for his child. He could never do what Kahlid had done, killing innocents
for the sake of others.

The thought made him shiver. Dear God, help him. For the first time since seeing what he’d seen in the desert, Ryan’s mind
was able to comprehend Kahlid’s anguish at losing his child.

War was hell, quite literally. And Ryan was now in a war, wasn’t he? This was no different. The only difference was that having
suffered as he had in Iraq, he would be unwilling to sacrifice any innocent blood. Period. He just could not go there.

He grabbed a lungful of air, then another, and slowed down. Nothing like a speeding Toyota Camry to draw attention.

His mind, however, did not slow. To understand that he was in a pickle required only a very little bit of intelligence, the
amount that graced the minds of America’s upper half, including him.

He had just held his wife, two police officers, the district attorney, and the FBI special agent in charge of the BoneMan
case at gunpoint. And he’d done so after being asked if he might be the BoneMan. A ludicrous suggestion, of course, but one
that was now undoubtedly all but assured in their minds.

Having held these five individuals at gunpoint, he’d fled the scene, an act of complete desperation because he, like they,
surely knew that he couldn’t get away. Yet he’d fled anyway, having walked directly into a trap.