RYAN DROVE INTO Austin under cover of darkness, thankful for the hard rain, which alone might have been responsible for the ease with which he drove to his destination undetected.
The black Taurus had surely been reported stolen by now, but no one had publicly connected the car to him. Even if they were looking for it, on a dark stormy night it suited him.
He knew his destination precisely because he’d been there twice before, two months earlier, before the restraining order had forced him out of town. The gated community sat on the west side of Austin, in a neighborhood called Spanish Oaks. He was surprised that the construction code he’d acquired earlier still worked. Either way, he would have simply followed another car past the gate.
He parked under a tree a full block from the large white colonial and slid down in his seat to wait. Rain pelted the roof and windshield, a thunderous cacophony that smothered the sound of passing tires on the wet pavement. Not that it mattered; he had committed himself. The time for careful planning and meticulous execution was now far past.
The rain was on his side. The brashness of what he was about to attempt was on his side. Speed was on his side. His gun was on his side.
Time was against him. Sanity was against him. The law was against him. Reason was against him. Morality was against him.
He could do nothing but sit low and urge his mind to shout over the voices of caution that kept filling his mind.
The rain had eased enough by ten o’clock to give him full view of the Cadillac that pulled into the driveway and disappeared behind a rolling garage door. Ryan waited another two hours before he shouted down the last warning barking in his head, fired the Taurus, and pulled up to the sidewalk that led up to the front door.
He withdrew his pistol, disengaged the safety, and stepped out into the drizzling rain.
Without bothering to look to his right or to his left, he walked up to the front door and tried it. Locked, naturally. He pulled his collar up, hunched his shoulders, and shoved the metal stock of the gun through the door panel.
The glass broke and crashed to the floor inside. Rain muted the sound, but not entirely. He reached in, twisted the dead bolt, and pulled the door open to the sound of a loud beep that accompanied a countdown to the alarm.
Ryan cut to his right where a large door looked like it might lead to a bedroom. But it turned out to be a darkened study.
The alarm’s warning began to speed up. At any moment it would begin to blare.
Dripping on the large tiles, he ducked into a second hallway and this time was greeted by a large atrium that led to an entire wing. His rubber soles squealed with each step now, but the sudden wailing of the alarm on all sides shattered any thought of creeping in unnoticed.
He spun into the master bedroom just as the form on the four-poster bed rose from its slumber. The man was too stunned to react properly, and Ryan moved in while he still had the full advantage.
He shoved the gun barrel in the man’s face, grabbed his collar, and jerked him from the bed.
“Shut up!” The man hadn’t uttered a peep, but he said it anyway. Again. Because it covered the shame he felt. “Shut up!”
The gun’s barrel had already split Welsh’s lip but he found his voice and began to deliver the expected protest. “What in God’s name—”
Ryan hit him upside the head. “I said shut up.”
He dragged the district attorney around and shoved him forward, out into his own living room, where the sound of the shrill alarm was nearly deafening. “Outside, if you want to live.”
The man wore thin cotton pajamas but his feet were bare. He stumbled through the front door, pushed by Ryan, but pulled up when the rain hit him.
“In the car!”
The man stood in a crouch, as if unsure what to do, so Ryan helped him out. He kicked the man with his heel in the small of his back. “Move!”
He moved, grunting with pain.
“In the car.”
Burt Welsh was still reeling from the suddenness of the attack, but he was a big man and he wouldn’t just take such a violation lying down for long. Not without Ryan’s help.
The man piled into the passenger seat, cursing bitterly now. Not the sign of humility and cooperation that Ryan was looking for.
He reached in, grabbed the larger man by his black hair, tugged his head out of the car door, and slammed the gun on his temple with as much force as he could manage, working in the tight space.
The DA slumped, unconscious. Ryan shoved him in, slammed the door after him, and raced around the car.
He’d succeeded thus far because of his urgency, not through any finesse, and he made no attempt at it now. He whipped the car through a tight turn and flew through streets running like rivers.
Beside him, the father of lies’ pajama-clad form leaned against the door. He’d known from the first mention of the term that BoneMan had been very careful in his selection of Bethany. This was far more than retaliation for the district attorney’s bravado in swearing to bring him to justice.
BoneMan knew that both he and Ryan agreed on at least one thing: Welsh was a pretender who had no claim to Bethany. He was the father of lies, and of all those BoneMan could have asked him to take, Ryan felt less conflicted about taking this one.
He had to slow down at the exit gate and wait for it to open, but he was already on Highway 71 before the first cop car flew by and peeled into Spanish Oaks.
The DA began to moan, and Ryan leaned over to give him another blow to the head. He simply could not allow the man to give him any trouble in the middle of his flight from the city.
Going northeast on 71 and then directly east on 29, the trip to Menard would take about two hours if he moved quickly.
Ryan moved. He cleared the city limits in under ten minutes and took the car up to eighty again. Now a nearly frantic urgency consumed him to get the man he’d abducted into whatever hole in the ground that BoneMan had prepared for them. He didn’t know what awaited them, only that it would involve breaking Welsh’s bones, and for the time being he refused to think through what that might entail.
The man stirred again thirty minutes east of Austin. The human head could only take so much trauma, and having been knocked out twice, the DA’s head wasn’t a good candidate for surviving yet another blow to the head.
“Whad…” the man was slurring, “whad… whad…” His head wobbled on his neck as he tried to climb back into consciousness.
Ryan rested the gun across his waist, trained on the man’s chest. “Don’t give me an excuse to shoot you. Dead or alive, that’s what he asked for, and I’d just as soon it be dead.”
Not true, but the only way Ryan could go through with this was to play his part without compromise. He’d set aside his emotions for the time being and if he did allow any to resurface, they’d best be anger rather than a sudden pang of guilt.
The man eyed him curiously, eyes taking in the gun as if he wasn’t sure it was real.
“What’s… what’s the meaning of this?”
“Are you going to make me hit you again?”
The DA studied the road ahead for a moment. His abduction was coming back into focus, Ryan thought. The man was a bull and would not make for an easy prisoner.
As if to confirm his suspicions, Welsh frowned. “Now you’ve done it. Now you’ve really gone and done it.”
This was a revelation that either gave the man courage or was meant to frighten Ryan. But the fact that he had “gone and done it” was no news at all.
“Do you have any idea how many officers are out looking for me now?”
“More than were looking for me? It doesn’t matter, they won’t find either of us until morning.”
“And then what?”
“And then the FBI will follow the directions I left for them. They’ll find us.”
The man didn’t seem capable of digesting this frank admission. He blinked repeatedly in the darkness.
“You’re giving yourself up?”
“Not yet.”
“What are you going to do? You’ll never get away with this—”
“Do you see any cops? I think I just did get away with it.”
“They’ll find us. I’m the district attorney—”
“Do you love her?”
“What?”
“Do you love Bethany?”
“That’s what this about? You’re throwing your life away because I’m sleeping with Celine?”
“Do you love them?”
It took the man a while to form his answer, and when he did he spoke in a low, rushed voice. “I swear I’ll never touch them again. Just let me go. I won’t press charges, I won’t say a thing—”
Ryan hit the man on his temple again. The DA collapsed in a limp heap on the front seat.
He pulled out the blue note and wedged it into the seam above the radio.
FATHER OF LIES.
MENARD–7 MILES SOUTH
WEST–2 MILES
BENEATH THE CROWS
I’LL BE WATCHING, FATHER.
Highway 29 intersected Highway 83 just south of Menard, and they made the junction at just past two in the morning. The two-lane roads were deserted and the rain had long ago tapered off to hardly more than a mist.
Ryan turned right on Highway 83, away from the tiny town of Menard, Texas, and headed south into the darkness.
No streetlights out here. No stars to light the sodden ground. Just his headlights, and as he approached the seven-mile marker headed south, he felt conspicuous, so he turned off the headlights as well.
Now he rolled along the asphalt in a quiet darkness that he found even more disturbing. He turned up the radio. The soft, melodic voice of Karen Carpenter singing “Bless the Beasts and the Children” sliced the silence.
He scanned the fields on either side. The man who they called BoneMan had Bethany out here in a hole somewhere, but no one driving by would ever guess it. The world didn’t like to look at the dark underside very often. But that didn’t change the ugliness; it only ensured that those who perpetuated the ugliness were left alone to kill and maim and rape.
The melancholic sounds of the Carpenters suddenly struck him as obscene and he turned off the radio and drove on in silence.
He stopped the Ford Taurus at the seven-mile marker. A dirt road headed directly east into the field on his right. The green sign that hung at a slight angle said it was called Landers Lane. He could just see the white letters by the light of a moon that was now trying to gleam past the breaking storm clouds.
Ryan held the car at the intersection for a few long breaths. He wiped his palms on his pants and looked over at Burton Welsh, the man who’d seduced his wife while he was in the desert.
The gravel under his rubber tires popped as he turned and rolled down Landers Lane. Cornstalks rose on either side. The road veered left—south—and he followed it with one eye on the odometer. But there was no need because the huge switching station rose from the earth at about the right distance, and Ryan knew immediately that he’d arrived.
The crows would perch themselves on the high-voltage lines that ran into the switching station. And under these lines somewhere there was a room. An old storage room that had sat unused for a long time while it waited to be occupied this night.
Then he saw it, a board on the fence that surrounded the switching station. A crudely marked red arrow pointed to the right, where a large mound of gravel stood against the dark sky.
He angled the car for the hill and saw that the ground dipped into a large pit beyond. This was a switching station, but it was also an old gravel pit. Or a mining pit.
The storage facility was built into the side of the hill. He could see that it sat closed on the face of the concrete, and on this wood door was the rough outline of a bird.
A crow.
RICKI VALENTINE JERKED upright with dreams of a sunny day in Saint John, Virgin Islands, still ambling through her head. She’d spent two weeks there after the apprehension of Phil Switzer, basking in the careless sun as far from the hot Texas summer as possible. She spent the time wandering the beach and visiting small establishments that catered to tourists by selling overpriced trinkets and water-sporting opportunities, and all the while her mind had returned to the BoneMan only a few times. Amazing how a change of geography could jar the mind out of its deep, dark trenches.
The clock on her nightstand read 2:43 AM in large red letters. Her phone was still chirping. She wasn’t in the Caribbean now and BoneMan wasn’t behind bars.
“Hello?”
Mark sounded like he’d been up for a while. “Sorry for the hour, Ricki. We have a development. Burton Welsh’s house was broken into and he seems to be missing.”
The data swirled through her mind.
“Seems to be?”
“Well, he lives alone and the neighbors say he has a habit of coming and going at all hours, so the police can’t be sure he isn’t shacked up somewhere else.”
“But?”
“But his door shows signs of forced entry and his bed was slept in. His car’s still in the garage.”
Ricki stood from the bed. “So he was taken. When was this?”
“Almost three hours—”
“What?” She hurried to the bathroom, flipping on lights as she went. “You’re just now being told?”
“Evidently the man was a bit of a womanizer and someone down at the department has been sitting on a theory that this is woman trouble, nothing more. You go public only to learn that Welsh left with a jilted lover and… well, you get the picture. He’s an elected official.”
“Okay, text me the address. I’m on my way.”
“You gotta hand it to the guy, he’s got a set.”
That he did. If this was Ryan Evans, and Ryan Evans was indeed the killer, he’d come back to take the man whom he perceived as being the spoiler of his family. BoneMan had never taken male victims that they knew about, but the circumstances provided the perfect opportunity.
There was a kind of ironic beauty to it, Ricki thought. And then she scolded herself for such a crude thought.
“He’s breaking his own pattern and escalating. You realize what this means, Mark.”
“That the daughter is still alive.”
“That’s right. He’s involving Welsh. We find Welsh, we find the girl. No obvious leads.”
“A police cruiser remembers a black Ford sedan on Highway 71 as he responded to the call. Not too many cars on the road at that time.”
A black Ford Taurus had been flagged as stolen and put into the search grid along with another hundred possible vehicles Evans could have used for his escape.
“Nothing else?” She pulled on her jeans, cradling the phone between her shoulder and ear.
“They’re running prints from the door now. Nothing else.”
“Find that Taurus. Flood the airwaves with it. Anyone who drives a dark-colored Ford Taurus gets pulled over.”
“They’re on it. We could use some light; he couldn’t have picked a better night.”
“We may not have the time to wait for light.”