FOR WHAT FELT like several minutes but could only have been a few seconds, Ryan found that he could not move. He just stood in his living room, arms spread slightly by his sides, eyes peeled at the kitchen, mouth gaping. Frozen like a stone pillar in the dead of winter.
The photographs that Kahlid had pinned to the wall filled his mind. The sound of Ahmed’s breaking bones.
BoneMan had Bethany. The knowledge felt distant, only vaguely relevant because it couldn’t be true, not in its entirety. He was missing something. A mistake had been made. It defied all reason.
Ryan had allowed other children to suffer to protect his own daughter. This wasn’t Kahlid because he’d killed the man. And yet by escaping Kahlid he’d still condemned his own daughter? BoneMan had stumbled upon the story, maybe talked to Burton Welsh after Ryan had rubbed the BoneMan in his face for effect.
Was it possible that he’d actually attracted the BoneMan’s attention?
His heart pounded like a steam piston. His mouth felt like it had been stuffed with powder; waves of heat rolled over him, but he was fully aware and fully in control, because he knew that his mind was in a delicate place and could be thrown back into disorder, driven by irrational emotion. He had to stay calm!
Ryan’s eyes jerked to the television screen. The woman anchoring Headline News was now talking next to bold letters that read BONEMAN STRIKES AGAIN. A photograph stared at him from beneath the letters.
A beautiful, smiling young woman with flowing brown hair and bright blue eyes who looked nineteen, not sixteen. Bethany.
Ryan knew that he was losing control before the shakes came, but he was powerless to stop them. He felt as if a giant hand had reached down his throat and ripped out his heart and, now hollowed, his chest was reacting violently with the rest of his body before dropping into a pile, dead.
But he didn’t drop dead and was no longer only shaking. He was sprinting. Racing into the kitchen, stabbing at the play button, fighting a full-tilt panic.
Father Hortense’s voice came on, asking him to—He erased the message, and the next, and the next, and then BoneMan’s voice crackled over the machine’s tiny speakers.
“Hello, Father. I have the girl you think is your daughter. Her name is Bethany and she is mine now. It took you seven days to make her, now I’m giving you as much time to save her. If you think you can catch her, follow me where the crows fly, alone, Father.”
He slammed his fist down on the machine and screamed.
“Mail box empty,” the device announced.
He had to think… .
Think, think!
Stay calm, Ryan. Just stay calm.
How had the BoneMan known to call him? Father, as if Ryan was the BoneMan’s father? As if BoneMan were some kind of sick Satan who had taken a daughter and wanted her father to play God?
Come and get me, Father.
Ryan grabbed the phone and punched in Celine’s cell number, pacing as it rang.
“Come on, Celine. Please pick up.”
“Leave a message,” her cheery voice announced.
He quickly entered the home phone, missed a digit, retried, and hit the connect button.
This time it was Bethany, and Ryan’s world blurred at the sound of his daughter’s voice. “Hello, you know the drill. If you want me, call me. If you want Celine, call Celine. Don’t bother with this machine, no one checks it.”
Click.
“Celine?” His voice sounded frantic. “Celine, for God’s sake, pick up the phone!”
Silence.
“Celine?”
But she wasn’t answering. He stood breathing hard for a moment, then tried all the numbers that might connect him with someone, anyone, who could tell him what was going on. He had to know why? When? How long had she been gone? Had they found her?
He frantically spun through the handful of contacts that might connect him to Celine. Her cell again, the home phone again, the DA’s office, which connected him to another voice mail.
Why hadn’t Celine contacted him?
He tried the priest’s line, but again, no live connection.
The apartment walls felt like they were closing in on him, toppling over, pushed from the outside to crush him.
Did the FBI know about the seven days BoneMan had given them? Or was it just him? Had this been a private challenge only for his ears?
Angel, my angel, dear God please, please don’t let her be hurt.
But he knew that it was too late. No matter what the outcome now, Bethany, his sweet little girl who was the very essence of his life, would be scarred for life.
He had to know what was happening!
Ryan snatched up his car keys, ripped the answering machine from the wall, and ran from the apartment.
It took him an hour, most of it doing ninety miles an hour in a cool, steady sweat, to reach Capitol of Texas Highway. Another twenty minutes to reach Celine’s neighborhood, all of it regretting that he didn’t have a cell phone yet.
The moment Ryan pulled up to Celine’s house, he knew that BoneMan had taken Bethany from this house. A squad car sat in the driveway, along with two unmarked sedans—likely FBI. Yellow tape cordoned off the sidewalk that ran around the house to the backyard.
Rather than march in through the front door and demand answers as he’d intended all along, he parked his Camry on the street and angled around the house toward the backyard.
Only then did the restraining order occur to him, but the thought did little more than slow him down. Clearly, a restraining order meant nothing in the face of what had happened.
He stumbled forward, legs wobbling beneath him like Twizzlers. An extension ladder rose from the ground to the upper balcony, where it rested against white railing in need of a fresh coat of paint.
Ryan pulled up hard, locked down by the sight. A slight breeze was blowing lazily through the trees. Behind him, car tires rolled past on Barton Creek Boulevard. High overhead a jet roared as it clawed higher.
But none of the sounds swirling around Ryan were as pronounced as the stillness of the ladder BoneMan had used to access his daughter’s bedroom.
It was the stillness of utter emptiness and it hit Ryan’s chest with enough force to rob him of breath for several long beats of his heart. The crime scene had already been processed a full day after the crime. The yellow tape served as a reminder that forensics investigators had been and gone and enough time had passed for any trail to have gone cold.
He felt himself guided by an innate need to know. To the foot of the ladder. Up the metal rungs, one step at a time.
His gut and his heart and his mind were all staging a fullscale revolt, demanding he get off the ladder, away from the vicinity of the taking, to protect himself from the agonizing images that flooded his mind.
His daughter screaming into duct tape as her wide eyes searched for meaning.
Daddy!
Daddy, Daddy, please!
How he managed to hoist himself over the railing he wasn’t sure, because by the time he reached the top of the ladder, he was a limp mess. He stood on the balcony facing drawn blinds, now regretting his decision to climb the ladder. He couldn’t possibly go inside!
But he had to. He had to know what his daughter had felt and seen when BoneMan had come.
Pushing back a dreadful ache, he tried the door, found it open, and slid it wide. The room inside was a storage room, not the bedroom. Bethany’s bed was in the next one over.
Her white sheets were tucked in at the bottom, otherwise strewn about as if ripped from her and left to lie half off the bed. He could still see the indentation of her head in the pillow.
This was his first time in her room since his return, and he hated himself for it. If he could have even one day back, he would deny every court authority known to man to make his love evident to his daughter.
He’d buy her a car. A room full of roses. He’d fly her to Dubai and put her up in a suite that cost four grand a night and demand the staff bring her anything she wanted without the slightest thought of cost.
He would fall to his knees and beg her forgiveness and tell her how much he loved her.
Seven days, as of yesterday, when the message had been left. That left just over six days.
Ryan turned from the room, wiped his eyes, set his jaw, and walked downstairs.
They were in the living room; he could hear them before he saw them.
“Every hour you delay is one more he’s got.”
“We need more.”
“Then get more. You have Celine’s testimony, that’s enough to bring him in. For God’s sake, we don’t have time to sit around on this.”
Ryan stopped in the doorway and looked at them. Burton Welsh, the man whom he’d attacked, tall, cleanly shaven. The smell of aftershave had to be his.
Ricki Valentine, the FBI agent who’d interrogated him in the hotel two months earlier. The small woman with a big heart.
Celine, dressed in a green flowered dress, pacing, nursing a bandaged forefinger at the end of her slung arm.
He tried to say something but his voice suddenly felt inadequate. He didn’t belong here; he belonged out where BoneMan wanted him, bartering for his daughter’s life.
“Ryan?”
Ricki Valentine had seen him. They all turned to look at him, and he wanted to run because he knew that even now the effects of that empty bed upstairs were haunting his sanity.
But there was nothing to do. He couldn’t turn and run because that would only make him the object of their search rather than BoneMan. He couldn’t say anything to them because there was nothing to say that made sense to him.
He could only stand there and return their stares.
“Well, speak of the devil,” the DA said. “What are you doing here?”
The FBI agent shot him an angry glare and closed half the distance between them. “I’m sorry, Captain, I’m sure this is very upsetting.”
“Why didn’t anyone call me?” he asked.
“Get him out of here.” Celine glared at him like a wolf standing off a bear. “Get him out!”
“Celine?” Something was wrong. He’d come with news, but…
And then he understood. The DA had been talking about him when he’d walked up. Welsh wanted to bring him in for questioning.
Rage flared up his back. “What’s going on?” he demanded.
“For starters, you’re in violation of the court’s order,” Welsh snapped.
Ryan’s last restraint was severed. “My daughter has been kidnapped!” He thundered the last word, face flushed and hot. “And no one even bothered to call me?”
“I’m sorry, Captain,” Ricki said. “I know these aren’t ideal circumstances for you, but we have to be careful.”
Celine had taken several steps backwards, where she stood against the couch, trembling. “What are you doing, Ryan?”
“Don’t stand there shaking as if I was the one who broke your finger. Our daughter’s out there!”
“Why didn’t you tell Agent Valentine the truth about your association with the BoneMan in Iraq, Captain?” Welsh asked, head tilted down slightly.
“I… What association? It’s classified. I don’t see what that has to do with—”
“You just happen to come out of the desert spinning tales of your nightmares about the BoneMan and now he takes your daughter as his next victim after a two-year absence? Forgive me if it doesn’t all seem just a bit much.”
The man was accusing him? “He… Serial killers! He was comparing us to serial killers. I said BoneMan for effect. Why did you tell the media about my claims? That’s how he found me!”
“Is that right?” Clearly the man didn’t believe a word he said.
Ryan turned to the Ricki. “What about you?”
She shrugged. “There are a lot of questions that need answering.”
Ryan turned on Celine, furious and unable to hide his anger. “How could you think this?”
But her eyes were fired with fear and he knew that something very definite had convinced her that he might present a danger to her.
“You just, what, left the alarm off so that he could walk in here and take my daughter!?”
“I’m waiting for your full file, Ryan,” Welsh said. “But I really don’t need to see it to know that the BoneMan killings just happen to line up with the dates you were between tours.”
“Don’t be asinine! That’s pure coincidence.”
“Is it? And when you broke Celine’s finger, you told her to tell me it was payback. Is that what all of this is, Captain? Payback for your own bitterness?”
A uniformed police officer had presented himself in the doorway leading to the kitchen, blocking any escape. Surely they didn’t really think he was the BoneMan!
“If you’ve read my file, then you know I was a victim of torture, not the torturer. You’re wasting time while he’s out there with my daughter.”
“It must have been hard, watching all those children die,” Welsh said. “I can understand why you snapped.”
“That is irrelevant!” He was breathing hard. “We only have six days to find him—”
Ricki’s right eyebrow arched. “Six days? Care to elaborate?”
“He called me. He said that it took the father seven days to create her and now he was going to give me seven days to save her.”
“Really?” Welsh smirked. “He just happened to call you?”
So that was it, then. Between Celine’s harrowing experience the night of the kidnapping during which BoneMan had broken her finger and Ryan’s experience in the desert, the DA was ready to pin the abduction on him.
A jealous father suffering from PTSD, caving in to his true nature by taking his own daughter.
He looked at Ricki. “You buy this?”
“Like I said, there’re some questions that need answering. Do you mind telling us where you were two nights ago?”
“Home. Asleep.”
“Alone?”
Something else occurred to him. BoneMan had issued him a personal challenge. Bethany’s life hung in the balance of his choices now. And looking in the DA’s eyes, there was little doubt that the man had no intention of letting Ryan walk from this room a free man to make any choice at all.
He stared at Welsh and saw him for what he was, an obstacle to saving his daughter’s life.
“Alone? No, actually, I was with some good friends who stayed over after a night of poker. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if you called them.”
“We will. Father Hortense tells me you’ve been pretty much a hermit these last two months. Hard to imagine you having a whole passel of close friends.”
Both doors were now blocked. Where the second cop had come from, Ryan didn’t know, but he was hemmed in.
“None of this should be that difficult to settle,” Ricki said. “You say he called you?”
“Yes.” Ryan nodded and eased closer to the kitchen entryway. “He left me a message.”
“Where’s the message?”
Erased, he almost said.
“At home.”
The urge to panic was now fully grown and biting its way out of his chest. He had to get out!
Follow me where the crows fly alone. As in, where the crow flies by itself.
Or was it Follow me where the crows fly, alone? As in, come by yourself.
Either way, he had to get out and he had to get out now!
“Then you don’t mind going with me to get it,” the agent said.
“It’s… I live in Waco now.”
“Then we should get started.”
The DA stepped forward. “I’m sorry, Agent Valentine, I can’t allow you to take this man out of my custody.” He nodded at the cop behind Ryan. “He’ll have to tell you where it is. I’m sure you can appreciate my concern, but—”
Ryan threw himself backwards into the cop. His back was met by a startled shove, precisely the reaction he’d hoped for. He ducked and spun while the cop’s hands were still up, blocking his charge.
The forty-five semiauto slid out of the man’s holster like butter. And then Ryan was by the wall, gun up, trained on the cop who guarded the front door.
“Gun on the floor, gun on the floor, now! You too, Agent Valentine!”
The man glanced at the DA, then slowly complied.
Ricki eyed him. “This is no way to save your daughter, Ryan.”
“You, Agent, know nothing about me or my daughter. Put your gun on the floor and kick it over to me. Now!”
She slipped a nine-millimeter out of her shoulder holster, slowly set it on the floor, and kicked it over.
Ryan grabbed the gun and stuffed it behind his belt. He motioned to both cops and nodded at the wall. “Against the wall. All of you.”
Welsh cursed bitterly.
“Get. Against. The wall!” Ryan shouted.
The man reluctantly stepped up to the wall next to Celine, who was whimpering. They stood five abreast now, facing the wall.
“On your knees.”
Ricki began to protest, but Ryan told her to save her breath.
The room quieted while Ryan spun through his options. Beyond this point he hadn’t considered any elaborate plans. He knew that he had to find Bethany, he knew that he would do anything and everything in his power for even one chance to stop BoneMan. If need be he would gladly sacrifice his or any of these five lives for Bethany’s life.
The thought stopped him behind them. Would he?
But he couldn’t think straight enough to answer the question. He backed to the front door.
“Stay there,” he said. “Just stay there.”
Then he slipped out and ran for his car.