RICKI VALENTINE PULLED up to the Super 8 Motel, parked her car in a visitor’s space near the entrance, and made her way to the elevator.
Room 312, Evans had said. She pushed the call button and waited for the elevator car.
She’d spent the three days that had passed since Kracker had authorized her to open a new investigation conducting interviews of all those linked in even the most limited ways to the last victim, Linda Owens, on whom someone had supposedly planted blood as evidence. At least that’s the way she was viewing the blood evidence—everything she did was predicated on the assumption that Switzer really was the wrong man, which could only mean the blood had been planted.
Although they’d conducted a full investigation of Linda Owens’s murder, the interviews had come to a screeching halt when the lab had matched the blood sample found in Linda Owens’s hair to their primary suspect at the time, Phil Switzer. There was still a string of possible links between the victim and those who knew her at school, which hadn’t been fully explored.
But that wasn’t the reason Ricki was here this Friday afternoon. It was this business about Burt Welsh, who had somehow managed to tangle with a naval officer whose wife he’d become friendly with. No concern of Ricki’s. But according to Welsh, Ryan Evans had made some unusual claims that linked him to BoneMan in the Iraqi desert. That made Ryan Ricki’s business, if only until she made sense of these claims.
Ricki had already spent fifteen minutes on the phone with Celine Evans and half an hour at a Starbucks with Bethany Evans, his sixteen-year-old daughter who, interestingly enough, now attended the same school, Saint Michael’s Catholic Academy, that the last victim had. She’d learned more than she wanted to know about their family.
Nothing of note regarding BoneMan.
The bell rang and the elevator door slid open. Ricki stepped in and patiently waited for the car to grind its way up three stories.
Ryan Evans. She’d done her homework on the man after Kracker had asked her to check him out. One of the navy’s best, from everything she could gather. His commanding officer had nothing but the highest praise for the captain’s work in Naval Intelligence, most of which was classified. But his record in the military wasn’t classified. By all accounts, Ryan Evans had the kind of character that men like Welsh couldn’t touch.
The kind of backbone that would lead a man to barge into the DA’s office two days ago and accuse him of sleeping with his wife.
The idea of Burt Welsh on the floor with a knee in his throat—you had to at least grin. The DA hadn’t pressed criminal charges, but what he had done was probably worse.
She stepped up to #312 and knocked.
The man who opened the door looked like he hadn’t set foot in the sunlight or the shower in a week. Ryan Evans was dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, no shoes, at least a few days’ growth on his face, his short brown hair disheveled and dirty. A big man with a naturally strong physique.
He stared at her out of a dark room with brown lost-puppy eyes. “Yes?”
“Ryan Evans?”
“Yes. Oh… FBI?”
She stuck out her hand. “Agent Ricki Valentine. You mind if I come in?”
His grip was limp, but he dutifully shook her hand before politely stepping aside.
“Whew, this place could use some air.” She crossed to the drawn drapes. “Do you mind?”
“No, no, go ahead. Actually, maybe it would be better to turn the lights on.”
She withdrew her hand from the cord. “Sure. Yes, light. At least that much.”
He flipped on the overhead light. One of the two queen beds wasn’t made up. The orange floral on the bedspreads matched well with two impressionistic prints on the wall, typical of so many hotel rooms. Someone had cut a deal with someone to turn virtually all budget-priced hotels into one of five common models, the orange floral variety being the most common.
“Mind if I sit?”
“Sure.” He crossed to a small table with an empty ice bucket and pulled out the chair for her. A regular gentleman.
She set her wallet (the black snakeskin one that was large enough to be called a purse) on the table and sat. “Thank you.”
Ryan sat on the bed and folded one leg under the other. “You’re welcome.”
“As I told you on the phone, this shouldn’t take long; just a few questions. You’ve heard about the BoneMan case, I take it.”
“It’s all over the news.”
Ricki glanced at the muted television playing CNN. “Of course. By the looks of it, you have all the time in the world to watch the news these days.”
He just looked at her.
“When was the last time you left this room, Captain?”
“I’ve been in the country for just over a week. I’m still getting my bearings.”
“I have to admit, I’m not accustomed to interviewing an intelligence officer who spends his time reading between the lines.” She crossed her legs and folded both hands over her knee. “So why don’t we skip the cute stuff and get right down to the issue?”
“That would be fine.”
“Are you always such a gentleman?”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m here for two reasons, Ryan. Can I call you Ryan?”
“Yes.”
She nodded. “First of all there’s this business of your assault on the DA after you discovered his relationship with your wife. Frankly, your reaction seemed entirely reasonable to me. Unfortunately, it didn’t help your case any. I’ve been asked by the DA to give you this.”
She withdrew an envelope from her purse and handed it to him. “You can read it later. It’s a restraining order that prohibits you from stepping within one mile of your wife, your daughter, or Burton Welsh. Seeing as how Welsh is the DA around these parts, I would stick to the terms of this order without compromise. He’s agreed not to press charges for that little stunt you pulled because he’d rather not deal with this in the press. But he made it quite clear that any violation of this order will land you behind bars.”
The man blinked. “One mile?”
He looked completely stunned. The police had released him from custody two days earlier with strict orders not to move from the motel, and it looked like he’d abided by their terms. But his good behavior clearly hadn’t earned him what he was hoping for.
“One mile?” he asked again, standing slowly. “That’s… What about Bethany?”
“You might want to consider leaving town.”
He stared for a moment, incredulous, then sank back on the bed and shifted his stricken gaze past her.
“I’m sorry, Captain. There’s nothing I can do.”
“They have no idea what it was like. I… I watched them die.”
“Watched who die?”
Ryan stood and paced to the window, then back. “This can’t be happening. This just can’t be happening.”
Ricki felt oddly moved by the sight of this man’s angst. He clearly loved his daughter in particular and was overwrought at the thought of being kept away from her.
But she was here because the DA claimed that the captain had hinted at a connection with the BoneMan in the desert. She turned to her objective.
“I understand that you were confronted by a party in Iraq who compared you to the BoneMan.”
He cast her a side glance but kept pacing, eyes fixed on the carpet as if the fibers at his feet held the answer to his dilemma.
“You may know that I was the lead investigator on the case against BoneMan two years ago,” she continued. “With Switzer officially exonerated and free, I’m revisiting the case. Your daughter, Bethany, goes to school at Saint Michael’s Academy, the same school the last victim attended.”
He nodded absently.
“It’s interesting, to say the least, that you ran into the case in the desert, an ocean away from here. Any details of the encounter would be appreciated.”
“It’s classified,” Ryan said, then immediately returned to the pressing issue at hand. “She can visit me though, right? How long will this last? Surely they can’t expect me to just… not see my own daughter.”
He was too distracted by his own loss to focus on his ordeal in the desert, Ricki thought, swiveling the leg that hung over her knee. She felt overdressed here in her black heels and skirt; the only way to draw out useful information was to appear completely comfortable with him.
She stepped out of her heels, crossed to the curtain, and crossed her arms, leaning back on the darkened window. “I can see you love your daughter very much. This must be very difficult.”
He stopped and looked up at her, and she could see immediately that Ryan Evans wasn’t going to clear his mind to accommodate her need for information any time soon. He stared at her with those puppy eyes.
Tears appeared, then snaked down his cheeks. His hands balled into fists and he began to shake, just a little at first, but the tremor overtook his body from head to foot.
And all the while he stared at Ricki.
His breakdown was so unexpected, so riddled with anguish, that Ricki didn’t have time to prepare for the sudden emotion that swept over her. This was more than a husband who’d just discovered that his wife was leaving him. Something else was eating away at Ryan Evans.
She had to say something in the face of such pain. Do something, anything. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
He caught himself and steadied his hands. Blinked away the tears. “Sorry. Sorry…”
“It’s quite all right; you’ve been through a lot.”
“I didn’t know… I didn’t know that she felt like this. What could I do? I tried, I tried. I thought I was doing the right thing for my country, for her, for Celine. I was sacrificing everything for what I knew how to do.”
“Ryan, I—”
“Where did I go wrong?”
“This doesn’t mean—”
“They have to give me another try.”
“I’m sorry… .” Ricki had wept with mothers whose daughters had been broken up by a horrible monster. She’d stayed awake through the night, seething with anger at the kind of human being who could prey on the innocent with such savagery. She’d held a dead baby in the aftermath of spousal abuse that had gone way too far. The horror haunted her always.
But there was something different about the sight before her. Fresh tears filled his eyes and he turned away.
“Ryan…”
What could she say? She stood and crossed to him. Gently rubbed his shoulder and lowered her voice. “Ryan, please, it’s okay.” A knot filled her throat.
She had come to interrogate a sailor who might be able to shed a glimmer of light on a killer who’d broken bones and instead she found a father with a broken heart.
Someone pounded on the door.
Ricki stepped around the bed and walked to the door. A maid stood in the hall. “Will you be checking out today?”
“We’ll call the front desk,” Ricki said. “Give us a minute?”
“Take your time.”
“Thank you.”
When she shut the door and turned around, she saw that Ryan was lying on the bed, face buried in the pillow. The bottoms of his white socks were dirty, and his right pant leg was hitched up so that she could see his calf. What was she to do, sit by him and comfort him?
She had to bring this scene back to earth so that she could do what she’d come to do. If that meant helping him make a little more sense of his world, so be it.
Ricki slid one of the chairs closer to the bed and sat facing him. “I’m really sorry for all of this, Ryan. But you have to get a hold of yourself and make some decisions. You can’t keep yourself cooped up in this dingy motel forever. It all looks bad now, I know, but bad times have a way of passing. Right?”
He lay still, back slowly rising and falling with each breath.
“I’m sure your daughter loves you very much. Teenagers are terrible at knowing how to express themselves.”
Her mind bounced back to her own youth, a time when her father, then a cop, had been killed in a motorcycle accident. He’d never been one for words of encouragement and he’d recorded his regret in a journal that her mother had found after his death.
The memory of reading those two pages from his computer had been seared into her mind for all time. She’d sat there in silence, alone in the house a full month after his funeral, and wept uncontrollably for the first time since his death.
I swear I’d kill the man who laid a hand on Ricki. And at times I feel like I deserve no more. I’ve been such a bad father. Dear God, I hate myself.
The pain had haunted her for years, and sitting here next to another broken father, the memory threatened to tear her apart again.
She spoke very softly. “Listen to me, Ryan. I know what it’s like. She loves you. She has to; every daughter loves her father. It’s hard at times, but in the end they feel different.”
He didn’t react.
“I spoke to your wife and daughter this morning. She seems like a reasonable woman. And your daughter’s angry; none of this makes any sense to her. You have to admit, your reactions have been a bit erratic. But she’s only sixteen; in time she’ll forgive whatever stands between you.”
Captain Ryan Evans suddenly rolled off the bed and stood on the far side, looking disoriented for a moment before fixing her in his sight. His behavior was strange, she thought, even for a distraught man. She didn’t know much about him, but his commanding officer had made one thing very clear: Captain Evans had a unique and very intelligent mind. What she would give to know what was going through that mind now.
“BoneMan?” he asked, crossing to the room to the television and flipping it off. “BoneMan, or whatever you would like to call him, was only doing what he felt needed to be done, Agent Valentine. He followed his instincts, just like we did when we bombed Iraq to smithereens. That’s what I learned in the desert from BoneMan’s work. Beyond that, I’m afraid it’s all classified.”
He stood calm and thoughtful, as if the father in him had flipped a switch and become the captain.
“I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can tell you that will help you.”
“Seven girls lost their lives to a sadistic killer who may be out there right now, stalking an eighth. And you say you can’t help me?”
“I’m saying that nothing I have to say will help you stop the man, assuming he’s still active.”
“You of all people should know what it means to make sure BoneMan never kills again.”
For a moment she thought he might yell at her. But if the impulse tempted him, he covered it well.
“Unless you don’t realize that Muslim fundamentalists think of us as no better than the BoneMan, I have nothing to add to your profile of the man,” he said.
“What happened to you in the desert, Captain Ryan?”
“A group of insurgents tried to take out my convoy in retaliation for the coalition forces bombing Iraqi women and children. Before I escaped they made it clear that I was no better than BoneMan. So while there is a very loose connection between your investigation and myself, it will hardly deliver you new evidence to solve the case. I’m sorry for your frustration, Agent Valentine, but I’m useless to you. Really.”
He was probably right, but the ease with which the man righted himself and faced her with such a reasoned conclusion struck her as uncanny.
She studied him for a moment, then rose, withdrew her card from her purse, and set in on the table.
“I’m sorry for your troubles, Captain Evans. It sounds like you’ve had a rough few weeks. If I think we need it, we’ll get a subpoena that will allow you to tell me what happened in the desert. In the meantime, if you wouldn’t mind keeping me apprised of your movements?”
He nodded once.
“Are you headed back any time soon?”
“No. I’ll be stateside for a while.”
“End of tour?”
“Something like that.”
She wondered about that.
“Word of advice, Ryan. I really would steer clear of Burton Welsh. He can be an animal if he gets backed into a corner. You picked the wrong guy to drop your knee into.”
“I understand.”
“I was serious when I said you might want to get out of town.”
“Yes.”
She picked up her heels. “You have my card. Call me.”
“Yes,” he said.
But she doubted he would.