BoneMan's Daughters (24 page)

Ricki glanced at Mark, who plopped down on his desk. “Nothing?” she asked.

He was in charge of communication with the various state and city agents that had joined the search in force over the last
two days.

“Nada.”

She frowned and eyed the priest. “Par for the course. Your patient is proving to be quite the resourceful vagabond, Father.”

“Does that surprise you? He was trained in intelligence and counterintel. They pay him to outwit and outguess his opponents
at every turn in the road. You’ve seen his file. Captain Evans is one of the best.”

“Evidently. I’m sure you’ve heard this,” she said, crossing to a playback machine on the credenza. “You’ve had to have been
dead not to have heard it over these past couple days. But I want you to listen to him carefully before I ask you a few questions.
Fair enough?”

“Sure.”

She pressed the play button. A hissing preceded his voice.

BoneMan, this is Ryan Evans. You have my daughter and I accept your challenge. I will follow you as you’ve requested and I
will save my daughter. You hear me? I’m doing what you wanted me to do. I’m doing it for the whole world to hear, and so now
I have the power. You’re in check, my friend. It’s your move. The only question now is whether you can find me before they
do.

She pressed the pause button. “The prevailing wisdom is that he’s speaking to himself, Doctor. What do you think?”

Hortense stared out the window, momentarily lost in his thoughts.

“It’s possible. Classic case of multiple personalities. Fractured by a traumatic event. He wouldn’t have been a multiple before
the most recent experience in the desert, naturally…”

“You mean he would have known what he was doing two years ago as BoneMan and carried that knowledge with him when he was deployed
to Iraq this last time.”

“Yes. If he fractured, it would have been in the desert. He no longer remembers that he was BoneMan.”

“And so now he’s playing both parts, abductor and father. He’s essentially playing a game with himself.”

“It’s possible, yes. I told you as much on the phone.”

“Right. As the therapist in charge, you probably know Ryan better than anyone. When you hear his voice on the tape, what conclusion
do you draw? I just want your gut reaction, Father.”

Hortense’s soft brown eyes flickered. “Hard to say, agent.”

“If you were to guess. If his daughter’s life depended on your guess.”

“Then no.”

“No as in he’s faking it, or no as in he’s not BoneMan?”

“No as in he’s neither faking it nor BoneMan,” Hortense said.

She let his statement stand for a few seconds.

“We have a lot of evidence that suggests he took his daughter, Father,” Mark said.

The psychiatrist nodded at the machine. “Play the rest.”

Ricki depressed the pause button to disengage it.

You’ve taken the daughters before. I know your work. I sat with the children for three days and I heard their bones break.
Now take the father. You know that’s what you need, to destroy the father.

Then:

I’ll be waiting where they make their home, BoneMan. Find me before they shoot me out of the sky.

“Understand, MPD is anything but a precise diagnosis, and I can understand the temptation to pin it on Ryan—it would answer
plenty of questions. But the man I treated was a distraught father who was just coming to grips with the realization that
his failure as a father wasn’t solely his responsibility. He never once broke from that persona while I was treating him.
What I hear on this tape is the same man, pushed into regression by the discovery that his daughter whom he loves more than
his own life is now in the hands of a killer. He is a desperate man, capable of only God knows what, but I don’t think he’s
fractured.”

“Welsh is gonna love that,” Mark muttered.

“It’s just my opinion,” Hortense said. “I’m sure you could find other professionals to disagree. And with more evidence, I
myself might change my opinion.”

“But if you are right,” Ricki said, “then this is all a crime of passion, not something that he planned.”

“No, he did plan it. But men like Ryan Evans don’t need a lot of time to plan. They think well on their feet. I would say
that what you have here is one very desperate father who is playing along with the killer for his daughter’s sake.”

“And this last statement?”

“Where they make their home?” he said, repeating the tape.

“Mean anything to you?”

“No. Clearly the killer has been in contact with him.”

“He claimed the killer left him a message, but we found no answering machine in his apartment.”

“Really? I left him messages all the time.”

“Then he took it with him.”

An FBI evidence response team had spent six hours tossing the entire apartment and found nothing of earth- shattering import.
The lab had confirmed numerous interesting details that filled out his profile as a meat eater who loved Lucky Charms and
coffee, wore Armani Exchange boxers, changed his sheets frequently, and read books on foreign politics for pleasure. But nothing
in the apartment had led them any closer to understanding the man who’d kidnapped his own daughter after brutally killing
seven young women as BoneMan.

“The machine holds the killer’s voice,” Hortense said. “His only tangible connection to the person who holds his daughter.
I would take it as well.”

“Where would you go?” she asked. “If you were Ryan?”

“That’s an impossible question. Depends who
they
are. Where they make their homes. A home or lair somewhere, home to more than one, but who. The victims?”

“Did you ever talk about flying?”

“What?”

She shrugged. “‘Before they shoot me out of the air.’ I know it’s grasping, but that’s all we have now.”

“Birds?” Hortense said.

“What birds?”

But he just shrugged.

Ricki stood and crossed to the window. “Anything else comes to mind, I’m sure you’ll contact us, Father.”

“Of course.”

“And if he calls you…”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

She turned back. “You may be the only person he trusts.”

“You may be right.”

“And you, do you trust him, Father?”

He thought about that for a moment, then frowned. “I trust that he will do whatever love demands he do for the sake of his
daughter.”

“Well, he’s running out of time.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He said the killer gave him seven days. He’s down to four days.”

The priest who was also a psychiatrist blinked. “Really? Like the seven days of creation.”

“I would say this is more like un-creation.”

“BoneMan is playing the role of Lucifer.”

“Oh? And what would that make Ryan?”

“I suppose we’ll eventually find out, won’t we? How far would God go to save his child?”

“Not as far as Lucifer would go to possess a child,” Ricki said.

“Oh?”

“Surely a good God would limit himself. I doubt Lucifer, on the other hand, would.”

The man nodded slowly. “Ryan’s not God. He’s a father who has lost his child.”

“And God hasn’t?”

ALVIN FINCH DISLIKED two things about the human condition; he truly despised three. Their love of pleasure. Their love of
knowledge. Their love of life that was devoid of both pleasure and knowledge.

He’d seen a bumper sticker once that claimed life wasn’t measured by the number of breaths one took but by the moments that
took one’s breath away. It was one of those sayings that impressed average humans because, however much they hoped they believed
it, they simply couldn’t. In reality they were too fearful of death to consider living any moment of life in a manner that
might even harm, much less kill.

In fact, the only humans who risked death for the sake of living, truly living, were those who had lost their minds and did
stupid things like jump out of airplanes or off high-spanning bridges with rubber bands attached to their legs.

Alvin had provided those in Texas with a string of moments that quite literally took their breath away, both on a very intimate
level and on a social level. Instead of thanking him for exposing such beautiful moments of life, they’d set out to hunt him
down and erase him from their petty little world.

Ryan Evans, on the other hand, was proving to be a human being who was willing to explore death for the sake of living well,
and this fact disturbed Alvin Finch.

He would flush out the man’s true nature as an imposter soon enough, of course. He would humiliate this traitor and send him
away yelping with his tail tucked between his legs. He would destroy the man’s resolve to play father. He would rip out his
heart and shove it so far down his throat that he would die from constipation.

Killing the man outright was tempting, and the time for that would come, but not before he convinced the man to wholly reject
Bethany first. So that Alvin could truly be her father.

The only way to truly be a daughter’s father was to win her heart, regardless of who contributed the seed. And the only way
to truly win a daughter’s heart was to help her reject any other father she blindly accepted as her own so that she could
be free to love Alvin as much as he loved himself.

Thinking these thoughts, he fought a terrible temptation to turn around and rush back to the daughter. He’d spent days watching
her through the cracks, studying her every move, resisting only with great effort the temptation to rush in and persuade her
to love him.

This time was different. This time he had to deal a decisive and final blow to any living soul who would pretend to be her
father.

Alvin slowed the Ford F-150 pickup down as he approached the sign along Highway 166 that read CROW’S NEST RANCH, 2 MILES.
Gravel crunched under the tires like popcorn.

He’d heard the message on the radio seventeen hours after Evans had delivered it. He would have heard it sooner because he
did like to follow the authorities’ general progress on the case each time he took a girl, but he’d been preoccupied with
securing the site with Bethany, which explained his delay.

The moment he heard the challenge his heart had begun to beat strong. He understood where Evans was immediately. A place called
Crow’s Nest.

Crows made their homes in crow’s nests, and Evans, an intelligence officer who was accustomed to speaking in code, was telling
him that he would wait for him at a place called Crow’s Nest.

An intelligent man would choose a location unlikely to be visited by authorities or a steady stream of patrons, which eliminated
the seven restaurants in Texas that incorporated Crow’s Nest in their names.

He dismissed two small bed-and-breakfasts as well.

The Crow’s Nest Ranch was the only place in Texas that Alvin would have chosen to wait, if the shoe was on the other foot.
Not only was Evans courageous, he was highly intelligent.

The Internet brochure for Crow’s Nest Ranch claimed that it was a secluded camping retreat eighteen miles west of Fort Davis,
four hundred and thirty miles directly west of Austin. Rugged, only for the discriminating traveler who wanted to commune
with nature in the most positive way. Evergreens grew from a parched landscape that rose to the mesas surrounding the isolated
camping retreat, which offered some cabins as well as RV spots and dry camping.

Alvin drove past the self-service payment box and the cabin near the entrance that announced a manager lived inside and wound
past the three motor homes that were parked at the hookups. He knew that all F-150 pickups were suspect now that he’d struck
again, but there were far too many of them to raise suspicion every time one drove by. He felt reasonably safe.

A man wearing a blue plaid shirt and a brown cowboy hat walked with his head down. Anyone who came to Crow’s Nest Ranch was
probably looking to escape the hustle and bustle of the city. It was an almost perfect hiding spot.

Perhaps he would bring the next girl here, to this remote getaway nestled in the trees eighteen miles away from the closest
town. But there wouldn’t be a next girl, because he had finally and fully found his daughter in Bethany, he was sure of it.

He pulled the truck onto a dirt road that wound around the campground to a ravine along the north side. Taking the binoculars,
he exited the truck, checked to make sure he was alone, and headed up into the trees to his right.

A large outcropping of rock hid the campsite that Evans had chosen, but from his vantage point above the grounds, Alvin could
see him and his car, laid out bare like a dog.

He wiggled in behind a pile of boulders, brought the binoculars to his eyes, and scanned the campsite below. He acquired the
man’s form, seated in the dirt, with his back against a tree, slumped over, bored out of his skull.

The black Ford Taurus was parked behind some trees in precisely the same spot Alvin had found it yesterday. By all appearances,
the man had not moved a muscle in the last twenty-four hours. He’d raced here after delivering his message and then waited
like an obedient father, out of options.

Alvin set the binoculars down and folded his hands. A lizard scattered some pebbles behind him. A faint breeze cooled his
neck. The boulders provided some shade here. He wondered how many hikers had found their way to this precise spot. Likely
very few. In fact, he might be the first human to touch this soil.

He wasn’t able to shower regularly during a taking, and this time, because he’d agreed to extend the father seven full days,
he was concerned that his skin might begin to smell.

Protected as he was from the elements, hidden behind the rocks, he stripped off his shirt, set it next to the binoculars,
and then loosened his belt. He pulled out the travel-sized bottle of Noxzema lotion and set it next to the shirt, then he
lowered the cotton dungarees and pulled his boxer shorts down to his ankles.

Now he stood naked except for his boots, his underwear and his pants around his lower legs. Not ideal, but it would have to
do.