21

BETHANY WAS AWAKENED by the squeal of a metal door opening slowly. It was either that or a cry from her own throat, like the last time. She’d woken crying but so disoriented that she didn’t realize the squeals filling the room were hers until a fly had lighted on her lower lip. The moment she clamped her mouth shut, the sounds ended.

But this time she wasn’t crying. This time she’d heard a door open; she could swear it. BoneMan, assuming that was really who had taken her, had finally come to pay her another visit.

She blinked in the dim light and peered ahead at the door.

Open. It was open, wasn’t it? Her heart pounded through thin ribs.

“Hello?”

She’d managed to dislodge the blindfold a long time ago, maybe more than a day ago. But it hadn’t given her any peace of mind. She knew nothing more than she’d known three days earlier, when she’d first woken in this concrete basement.

The squeal came again, distant but very distinct. Bethany sat up and strained for a better view out through the open door. The hall outside probably led to other rooms, a whole system of rooms for all she knew, and at least one of those rooms had a rusted metal door that was now being opened.

Or… or the hall ended in a concrete staircase that rose to the outer world and someone had just opened the door that welcomed freedom.

“Hello?”

“Shhhhhhh…”

An involuntary shiver ran through her bones. Someone had just hushed her!

“Who’s there?” she whispered.

“Shhhhh…”

It was the first human sound Bethany had heard in over a day and it filled her with enough hope to send her pulse flying.

“Talk to me,” she said. “Who are you?”

“Shh, shh, shh, shhhhhh.”

She wasn’t sure if she should be terrified or encouraged. But now fully to her senses, she realized that the voice couldn’t belong to another prisoner or someone who’d come to rescue her. They would have said something to that effect by now.

Instead all she was getting was this hushing. Shhhhh…

She took a deep breath and calmed herself. Her emotions had ridden a track that dipped and turned and thrust her to the highest peak before sending her plummeting into a deep valley. And all of that in total isolation without a single other human being there to help her take the journey.

She’d cried, she’d wept.

She’d screamed, she’d yelled at the wall until she was hoarse.

She’d begged. She’d argued. She’d cussed and sworn and called the darkness every name her mind could conjure up.

She’d slept and she’d cried again, but above all she’d slowly come to the realization that she was already dead. If the authorities hadn’t found her yet, they probably wouldn’t find her, ever, at least not until BoneMan wanted her found.

Bethany pressed her teeth together and steadied a tremor that swept through her jaw. If no one was coming to save her, then her life hung in the balance of her ability to affect whoever had taken her.

But to affect him, she had to be able to talk to this stranger who’d taken her from her bed. The image of his white face staring with brilliant blue eyes haunted her, but now she wanted to see him, to engage him. Anything but this solitude and not knowing.

“You’re BoneMan, aren’t you? You’re going to break my bones because you hate me. Or you hate my mother and father. Or you’re just a mental case and you’re doing this without even knowing why you’re doing it. Either way, I think I get it because I hate my mother and father too…”

A shadow crossed the hall just beyond the door.

“I was hoping we could talk. Before you broke my bones.”

A hand reached from the shadows, gripped the door handle, and slowly pulled it closed.

“Fine, be that way,” Bethany said.

The door closed.

Feet walked away. After a moment a distant door clanked shut and she was back in her solitude.

Only then did she realize that something had changed. Her hands were by her sides, freed. Her captor had come in while she was sleeping and freed her?

She scrambled to her feet but fell under her own weight before she could get both legs under herself. Her head throbbed and her back flared with pain, but she felt buoyant, full of hope, as light as a feather.

She pushed herself up and stood in the middle of the room, steadying herself as best she could. The commode sat in the corner and she managed to make use of it without soiling herself. Relieving her bladder had never been quite so satisfying.

She tested the door and found it locked, as expected. Apart from the commode and the door handle, the only object in the room was the metal bed. A simple spring frame with a thin mattress.

Light filtered in from the cracks in the corner. If she got her mouth up there and screamed, someone walking past might hear. But somehow she doubted the man who’d done all of this would be so careless.

She walked around the room slowly once, then sat on the bed. The springs creaked softly, then silence returned to the room.

So… her bones didn’t ache for the moment. What did it matter, they would soon feel all the pain they could stand.

She lay down and put both feet on the bed. The concrete ceiling was etched in old, dead vines. A lizard scampered across, eyeing her with a cocked head.

There would be no escape. He’d set her free in preparation for the next step. Her only hope was to understand him and to help him achieve what he wanted. He was looking for something. Gratification of some kind, justice—he had a mission, a task he felt he needed to accomplish.

Bethany was now the means to something very important to him. She had to discover what that was and help him achieve it while remaining alive.

She lifted her arm and stared at the thin red line on the back of her wrist where she’d cut herself that night. Seeing it now, she felt like vomiting. In a small way, as small as this cut, she did understand him.

BoneMan was only a more advanced version of her.

Bethany lowered her arm and shook.

THE SITUATION ROOM at the FBI’s Austin bureau had grown vacant in Ricki’s way of thinking. Agents still milled about wall maps and spoke urgently into phones, treating each and every lead with as much attention as they’d been trained to do. Files were strewn about the tables and desks, sleeves were rolled up, half-eaten boxes of takeout Chinese sat here and there—all the signs of the last forty-eight hours, which had worn them all to a frazzle.

But it was all for nothing. Vacant. There hadn’t been one solid lead on BoneMan’s whereabouts since he’d made his plea on the airwaves two days earlier and then walked out of their lives.

Ricki had spent an hour with Brent Styles, Vicki Sandburg, and Paul John, the three staff members at the country station Ryan had chosen to deliver his message to the world. Clearly, in Ryan’s mind, he wasn’t BoneMan.

In fact, listening to them explain the fifteen-minute ordeal, one would think that Ryan was a sympathetic character in all of this. Ricki had brushed the thoughts aside and focused on the one overriding objective they all had, regardless of Ryan’s guilt or innocence in the abduction of his daughter.

Either way, he was a fugitive who had to be located and brought to justice.

The door opened and Mark walked in with Father Hortense, the psychiatrist who’d been treating Ryan on the navy’s orders. Ricki sighed and cut across the room to Mark’s office. She followed them in and eased the door shut behind.

“Thank you for coming, Doctor. Or should I call you Father?”

“Either is fine.” He sat in one of the side chairs and crossed his legs.

“I know we went over all this on the phone, but seeing as how we’re not exactly banging down the door of progress, I wanted to get your thoughts on the tape.”

“Like I said, no problem. The navy has instructed me to cooperate fully, given the PR disaster this could end up being for them. I’ll do what I can.”

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?”