BoneMan's Daughters (34 page)

It was an ugly prospect but true. The fact that they were sitting here with their feet up while Bethany was still out there
was enough to make Ricki swear off this cursed line of work for the last time.

“If he’s not BoneMan, a jury will excuse him for what he did to the DA. After what he’s been through—probation, maybe a short
sentence, but no one’s going to lock up a tormented father for too long, not after so many fathers have lost their daughters
to BoneMan. He’ll be public hero number one when this is all over.”

“That’s a big if.”

“What is?”

“If he’s not the BoneMan.”

She set the half-empty bottle down and checked her phone in case she’d somehow missed a call in the ruckus.

“No call?”

“No. But he claims the killer gave him until daybreak. We can be anywhere in the state in matter of a couple hours. He’s got
till three or four in the morning before he runs out of time.”

“What could possibly change between now and three in the morning? Why not just tell us now, assuming he’s going to tell us
anything at all?”

“
We
could change,” she said. “We could change our minds. The DA could have second thoughts. After leaving Evans, I laid out all
of the reasons for letting Evans take this last shot, wearing a location transmitter, and Kracker promised to pitch my reasoning
to Welsh one more time.”

“Not a chance, not after his dog and pony show with the press this afternoon. Welsh already has his mind on the next election.”

However depressing, neither of them could argue.

Ricki dug out a five-dollar tip and set it on the table. “Then let’s hope we get a call from Evans before four this morning.
I have to get some sleep.”

“You talk to anyone down at the station lately? He awake?”

“Half an hour ago, just before I got here, and yes, he’s awake. Just sitting there. You coming?”

“Go ahead, I’m going to finish my drink. Call me if you hear anything.”

Ricki walked down Fourth Street toward the Trulucks, where she’d valet parked her car. She handed the attendant her ticket
and called the station while she waited. Johnson, one of the guards on night shift, answered and agreed to take a quick look.

He returned thirty seconds later and confirmed that Evans was still awake, lying down now, but he wasn’t going to sleep any
time soon.

“How’s that?”

“He just don’t have that look,” Johnson said. “He staring up at the ceiling like he’s expecting it to cave in at any minute.
Sweating up a storm.”

“Sweating?”

“His whole shirt is wet.”

She frowned. Good. He was sweating it out, literally. Maybe he would change his mind.

Ricki reached her apartment at twelve-forty in the morning, called Kracker one last time on the chance he would pick up, and
sat down in front of the television to let off some steam when he didn’t.

She checked her TiVo and watched a bit of Letterman, then kicked off her shoes, lay down in the corner of the couch, and let
exhaustion push her slowly toward sleep. They would call; she’d given them all her numbers.

If there was any change at all, they would call.

LETTERMAN STILL GRINNED on the monitor when Ricki jerked upright out of a dead sleep half an hour later.
Two AM.
She grabbed her cell phone on the coffee table.

“Yes?”

“Agent Valentine?”

“He’s talking?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Evans! Evans is talking.”

“Um, no… no ma’am, no. I’m calling for Assistant Director Kracker. Can you hold the line?”

“Kracker? Sure.”

Kracker? At two in the morning. The DA had agreed then. If so, they had to hurry. She kept the phone to her ear and pulled
on her boots.

Dropped the phone. Picked it up off the carpet and lifted it to her ear. “Hello?” Nothing.

Then Kracker’s familiar low voice filled her ear. “Ricki?”

And she know immediately that something was wrong. She stood.

“What is it?”

“Ricki, I’m at Burt Welsh’s house. God help me, I don’t know how we let this happen.”

“What?”

“He’s dead. It looks like the work of BoneMan.”

Her heart hit hard and seemed to stop, then kicked in steady. “Dead?”

“He was found a few minutes ago after an anonymous call reported a murder at his house.”

“Found how? How do you know this was BoneMan?”

“He was found on his bed, tied off to the posts, naked. All of the bones in his extremities are broken. God, he looks like.
…” Kracker’s thick voice failed him.

“No blood?”

“No. No bleeding except from his head where he was hit, hard enough to put him out. I hope he was out.”

The revelation made her legs feel like rubber. “Ryan told us this would happen.”

Silence.

“He warned us that BoneMan wanted Welsh dead. The father of lies. Right? When Ryan failed to meet his demands he went after
Welsh himself and then he made the call because he wanted us to find him. He doesn’t want us pinning his work on Ryan.”

“He’s dead, Ricki. For God’s sake, the district attorney of Austin, Texas, was just brutally murdered in the same manner as
the victims he’d sworn to avenge. And it happened right under our noses! Do you have any idea how this looks?”

But Ricki couldn’t care less how it made anyone look. Her mind was suddenly full of one thought, and one thought only.

“What about Ryan?”

“He’s locked up in—”

“Have you called down there?”

“He’s in a cell, Ricki.”

“But have you checked?” she demanded with enough force to rattle her phone.

Pause. “No. My first call was—”

“I’ll call you back.” She pressed the end button. Quickly scrolled down the recent calls log, selected her last outgoing call,
and hit send.

The phone rang seven times without an answer. She hung up, checked that she’d dialed the right number, and called again. This
time a receptionist picked up after ten rings.

“Please hold.” That was it. The woman abruptly cut the line and placed her on hold. Ricki holstered her Glock and headed to
her car. Fired it up and pulled out onto the street. Still nothing but a silent line.

She cursed, hung up, and called Kracker back.

“Kracker.”

“I need your help. Do you have an alternate line to the Eighth Street station? The main line isn’t responding.”

“What do you mean, not responding?”

“I mean something’s going down there and I need you to connect me!” she yelled.

“Hold on.”

He punched her off. She pulled onto MoPac and headed south. The highway was nearly empty at two in the morning, and she took
the car up to a hundred. According to state law, any speeding infraction over a hundred miles an hour earned the driver an
immediate escort to jail. That’s where she was headed anyway.

She’d covered a mile before Kracker came back on with the sound of a ringing phone behind his voice.

“Ricki?”

“Here.”

“I’m conferencing. This is the only number I have on me so I’m not—”

“Fourteenth Street Prison Division, please hold—”

“Mort Kracker, FBI here. What’s your name, son?”

“Sergeant Joseph Spinelli.”

“Fine, Joseph. I need to speak to someone in charge.”

“I’m… This is about the incident?”

“What incident?”

“I’m sorry, it’s a bit of a zoo down here. We had a prisoner break out of a cell. He knocked out a guard and managed to get
out of the station before an alarm was sounded. The night chief—”

“What prisoner?” Ricki demanded.

“Evans,” the man said. “The prisoner who took the district attorney.”

But of course. They should have expected nothing less. She took the car up to a hundred and ten.

“When?”

“About half an hour ago,” Spinelli said.

“As of now, consider the scene part of a federal investigation,” Kracker snapped. “Lock it down. Do you understand me, Sergeant
Spinelli? We’ll have an evidence response team there within half an hour. Don’t let anyone touch anything. This is a federal
matter now.”

“The chief would like to talk to you, sir.”

“Put him on.”

“Hold on.” He set the phone down with a clunk.

“Ricki?”

“I’m already on my way, sir. Tell them I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

RICKI HELD THE shackles in her gloved hands, slowly turning them over, mind spinning with the story they told. Mark Resner
had just arrived after she’d woken him with the news.

A crime scene investigator was already dusting and probing, but there were very few unanswered questions to investigate. They
all knew what had happened.

They knew who the prisoner was; they’d put him in the cell themselves.

They knew that he’d managed to get out of his restraints. They knew that he’d called for the guard so that he could use the
bathroom. They knew that Johnson had responded to the request and had, by all appearances, followed proper protocol by unlocking
and entering the cell only when the restrained prisoner was safely against the wall with his shackled hands in plain sight.

They knew that Evans had overpowered Johnson and rendered him unconscious before the guard could raise an alarm. The prisoner
had then taken the man’s gun and his uniform and made it all the way out of the building before another guard had gone looking
for Johnson and found him in the cell in his boxers.

They also knew that Ryan had taken Johnson’s keys and that his white Honda Accord was missing from the parking lot out back.

What they didn’t know was where Ryan had gone.

Or how he’d managed to get out of his restraints.

Mark stared at the flat steel ring in Ricki’s hands. “You’d think they could come up with a more efficient way of restraining
prisoners.”

“It’s a temporary arrangement. They don’t hold prisoners here very often, only special parties on the request of the DA.”

“Special parties? Is that what our man is?”

“Their term, not mine.” She turned the black shackle over and tried to slip her hand into the small opening, but it wouldn’t
go. Maybe with a little Vaseline.

“Evans isn’t a small man. His hands have to be quite a bit larger than mine.”

“Only one way out.”

“He broke his thumb.”

“At the very least.”

She handed the restraint to Mark. “That’s what I call commitment.”

“He seems to be developing a taste for this.”

Ricki looked at him. “I don’t think anything could be farther from the truth. I think there’s nothing in the world that terrifies
him more than the thought of his daughter’s bones being broken. To the point where he’s willing to break his own with his
own hand, for the slimmest chance to save hers.”

“Well, that’s one way to look at it.”

“He was here, locked in chains when BoneMan killed Welsh. Ryan Evans is a father who will do anything to save his daughter.
That is now the only way to look at it.”

Mark nodded, point conceded, and dropped the shackle on the bed, where it clanked in its chains. “Back to square one,” he
said.

“A Honda Accord speeding on a back highway somewhere. At least it’s not black.”

“Somehow I don’t think it’ll matter. By morning the Accord will be long gone and Evans will be with BoneMan.”

The idea sent a shudder through her bones.

“God help him.”

THE NIGHT WAS dark, the night was cold, the night was hell there just ahead, beyond the car’s long-reaching high beams, around
the next corner, at the Crow’s Nest. Ryan held the accelerator pedal to the floor, gripped the wheel tightly with his right
hand, and prayed he was not too late.

Pain throbbed up his arm from the bone he’d broken next to his thumb. He’d wedged the shackle between the bed frame and one
of the posts and positioned his hand so that all of his weight would fall on his thumb when he threw himself backwards, but
even then the bone had survived two failed attempts.

When it had finally popped, he passed out from the pain.

And he’d passed out a second time trying to slide his collapsed hand through the shackle. But he had succeeded, and after
a five-minute reprieve to collect his senses, he’d wound the chain around his wrist so that it appeared he was still bound
by it, and he’d called the guard.

If there was one bit of grace in breaking a hand bone, it was that the swelling was limited because there was far less flesh
to tear around a thumb than around many other bones, like the femur or the radius.

His left hand was still puffy, as if it belonged to someone a hundred pounds heavier than him, and it throbbed like a steam
train struggling up a long hill, but the pain was bearable next to the true pain that he faced.

No amount of nerve damage could compare to the terror that had drummed itself into his mind as the Honda roared due west over
vacant predawn roads.

A dozen potential scenarios whispered like serpents, most with sinister flickers of the tongue, suggesting that she was already
dead. That Bethany, the child whom he’d ignored in his passion to serve his own career, was dead and broken in a hole somewhere.

And if she was alive—which he finally convinced himself she must be, if for no other reason than that BoneMan was too fixated
on tormenting them both to end it so quickly—she could be badly hurt. Disfigured for life. Broken and twisted even now as
he pushed the car to the breaking point.

He’d already decided that if the police found him before he reached the Crow’s Nest, he would not stop until he reached Fort
Davis, where he would surrender and demand to speak to the FBI agent Ricki Valentine about leading them the last few miles
to the meeting spot.

To Crow’s Nest Ranch.

Trapped for four hours in a car with only his thoughts proved to drive him only further from the calm, reasoned state that
would serve him in this crisis. He found himself unable to hold back tears on numerous occasions, and because he was alone
with nothing to do but drive, he allowed them to run down his cheeks. But then they began to interfere with his ability to
drive at high speed, so he wiped his eyes, set his jaw, and swallowed his fear.