25

RYAN SAT IN the car as it ticked, cooling still after a full fifteen minutes of sitting in the quarry. Beside him, Welsh was still slumped up against the window, dead to the world. The clouds had just started to break up, allowing starlight to cast a cool glow over the barren depression into which he’d driven. The hum of high voltage from the nearby wires reached past the sealed car.

And ahead there, on the side of the hill, that concrete wall with a painted door. Other than the one arrow on the fence and this crow on the door, there was no sign of BoneMan.

But he was watching. Just as sure as he’d watched Ryan sitting under the tree at the Crow’s Nest Ranch, he was watching now, from the cracks between the boards in the door. From behind one of the boulders that lay around the quarry or from the rim above them.

He stared at the door, fixed to the seat like a skeleton long robbed of life. Bethany was either behind the door or she was not.

If she was behind it, then BoneMan intended for them both to face their greatest fears in the hours to come.

If she wasn’t behind the door, then he would be forced to face his greatest fear, which was that his daughter was still in the killer’s grasp somewhere, and Ryan would be left to do whatever BoneMan required in order to rescue his daughter.

For this reason Ryan found himself immobilized as he stared at the door.

And for what lay ahead of him pertaining to the DA. However guilty Welsh was of countless sins, he was not deserving of what lay ahead any more than the children in the desert were deserving of Kahlid’s hammer.

On the other hand, Ryan didn’t necessarily have to kill the man. Not yet. There had to be another way.

The thoughts ran in circles, but they did not bring any relief. These facts remained: The night was quiet. The night was dark. A captive man lay to his right. The wooden door was shut.

He had to enter that door and do what BoneMan demanded before morning.

Ryan pushed his door open and blinked at the obscenely loud buzz that cut through the air. He collected himself, then stepped out onto the gravel.

If there was any moment in his life he’d been born for, it was this one. No ordinary man could shut down his emotions and do what must be done the way he could. Hadn’t he proved that?

So then he would simply move through this situation in a cold, calculating fashion, without lingering long enough on any moment to allow his nervous system time to react with those chemicals that spawned emotion.

This wasn’t about him or, for that matter, about the man who’d sworn to uphold the law, his captive, Burton Welsh.

This night was about Bethany.

Ryan took one very deep breath, crossed in front of the car, and opened the passenger door. No longer supported, Welsh’s body slipped halfway out. His hands dangled onto the gravel—by all appearances, lifeless.

Ryan checked his carotid for a pulse, found one, and took both of his hands in his. He tugged the man out of the car and managed another ten feet before the man’s weight became too much to manage without slipping.

Removing his belt, he tied Welsh’s arms behind his back as tightly as he could manage. It took only a few sharp slaps on the man’s cheek to rouse him.

Another minute before the man was coherent enough to get his feet under his weight and stand, and Ryan took advantage of the time to shove a paper towel he retrieved from the car into his mouth.

The man made a feeble attempt to protest, but one poke of the gun barrel in his ear shut him up.

“Move.”

The man lumbered forward, up to what Ryan now thought of as a toolshed. It could have been built to house fuses or some other high-voltage parts that were best kept cool underground, or it could have been used to store machinery necessary to operate the quarry back in the day.

None of this mattered to Ryan, but he drew some comfort from the fact that he was able to think clearly enough to make simple deductions. The last thing he should do was react impulsively to whatever greeted him beyond that door.

That unlocked door.

He reached around Welsh, keeping the gun on his neck, and pulled the door open. Orange light from an oil lamp that hung in the middle of the room spilled out.

So then BoneMan had been here. Or was still here.

He used the barrel to propel Welsh into the room ahead of him, then closed the door behind them.

They stood in a room, perhaps twenty feet square, poured from concrete, with three large timbers to support a wood ceiling. The lantern hung from a hook on the center beam.

One glance around the room told Ryan that neither BoneMan nor Bethany was in this place, and he nearly ran back out to search the hillside for another door, another room, anyplace in which they might be hiding.

But there were drawings on the walls and these drawings made the purpose of his invitation here clear. BoneMan had used to chalk to draw dozens of medical diagrams showing the human skeleton. Large circles served as insets that magnified the form’s bones, marking joints and specific points on each.

Instructions were written by each inset, detailing the correct amount of force to use so the bone wouldn’t break with enough force to cut through the skin.

Along one wall sat a metal-framed bed. And on the bed lay several piles of four-by-four wooden blocks. A neatly folded stack of towels and several coils of string had been set at the head of the bed.

Atop them lay a large sledgehammer and vise grips.

At first Welsh just stared, as did Ryan. But when the meaning of what this room might hold for him formed in Welsh’s mind, he protested with a wide-eyed grunt.

He bolted across the room before Ryan could stop him and spun back, tugging at the hasty restraints that held his arms behind his back.

“Stop it!” Ryan pointed the gun at his head, but Welsh showed no signs that he intended to stop anything. He was now yelling into the makeshift muzzle, attempting to spit it out.

“Stop it, I’ll shoot!”

But Ryan knew that he couldn’t shoot because the largest letters on the wall made this fact painfully clear.

Break his skin and he’s no use to me.

Break all of his bones and she goes free.

Father.

The complete absurdity of his predicament struck Ryan broadside for a moment. That he was seriously considering following BoneMan’s instructions felt at once sickening and compulsory. He wouldn’t kill Welsh. He wouldn’t do what Kahlid had done in the desert, no matter what was at stake. He couldn’t kill an innocent man even if it meant saving his daughter.

Or could he?

Because he couldn’t not save his daughter! He couldn’t not do whatever was humanly possible to keep Bethany from death. If he stopped now, Bethany would die, he was certain of it. And so, though he knew he would not, could not kill this man, he could not stop now. Not yet.

A way would come. A ram from the thicket to spare the innocent man. The FBI, BoneMan himself, Ryan’s own death—anything to spare him from abandoning his daughter, no matter what the cost.

Ryan did what he knew best to do. He shut down the emotion and kept the gun trained on the DA.

Welsh didn’t appear concerned that he might take a bullet. He jumped up on the bed and kept pulling at his arms.

He’d chewed up the paper towel enough to spit most of it out and now his voice howled through the storage room.

He tried to protest with cries, but it sounded more like a wounded wolf baying straight from its throat. The sound more than the fear that Welsh might actually escape pushed Ryan into immediate action.

He leapt for the man.

Welsh had the high ground and he feigned first to his right, then to his left. Ryan jumped in both directions, following him with the gun.

Welsh suddenly tore free from the belt. Now Ryan faced a moose who had the strength to clobber him if it were not for the fact that he’d already taken several very hard knocks to the head.

Then again, raw adrenaline returned all of his strength to him. He clamped his mouth shut and made a break to his right.

His foot caught on one of the metal bedposts and he tumbled through the air—and all Ryan could think was He’s going to cut himself. He’s going to break his skin!

But the man caught himself on a desperately extended foot and staggered upright. He carried his full momentum forward and shot toward the front door like a battering ram.

Now panicked himself, Ryan took chase. He cut the man’s angle of flight and reached him just as Welsh’s hand reached the door.

Even as Ryan swung he knew that he would probably break the man’s skin at the back of his head, but he had no choice, and there was a distinct possibility that BoneMan had meant for him not to break the skin of the bones he broke, which did not include the head.

Thunk!

The gun’s butt landed a sickening blow, and Welsh collapsed like a rock.

Ryan stood over him, panting, victorious. But the moment passed almost immediately as his purpose here returned. He was now required to strap the large man at his feet to the blocks of wood on the bed, wrap his bones in the towels, and then break his bones using the sledgehammer.

Welsh moaned. So quickly?

Ryan grabbed one of his legs and dragged the man over to the bed. Working quickly, he set the blocks of wood on the floor, clearing space for Welsh. He hoisted first the man’s upper torso, then his legs up onto the bed, then, using rope from the coils, he tied his arms and legs to the four posts.

He stuffed the chewed-up clumps of paper towel into the man’s mouth as Welsh began to stir.

Ryan stood back, satisfied that he’d secured his victim to the bed. Above Welsh, the detailed drawings flickered by the lamp’s flames. And at the head of the bed the sledgehammer and vise grips waited.

For the first time Ryan was confronted with the task that was now upon him. He’d driven to Austin and taken the father of lies and returned him to this underground chamber prepared by BoneMan, and he’d done it all with near-perfect execution, ignoring all but what was necessary for him to complete his task.

Now he had to break the man’s bones. And Ryan was now sure he could not go through with it.

And he was sure that he must.

AUSTIN WAS STILL in a dead sleep at four AM, when Ricki stepped past Burton Welsh’s front door and looked at the night. Behind her, bright lights aided a full evidence response team that was dusting for more prints, gathering data on the carpet imprints, photographing the rain residue left by a pair of shoes that had come out of the weather earlier in the night, presumably the killer’s. They were still waiting on the results from three sets of prints lifted from the dead bolt an hour earlier and rushed to the lab.

Mort Kracker joined her on the tile landing and pushed aside his long raincoat to shove his hands into his pants pockets. The streets were still wet, but the sky had stopped dumping water on the town and the moon edged broken clouds. By morning the sky would be blue.

“Any word from the lab?” Kracker asked.

“Any minute.”

He nodded, frowning. Not too often he would be found on a crime scene at four in the morning, but the kidnapping of the DA wasn’t exactly a common occurrence. A bulletin had already been circulated to the networks—the FBI now believed that the BoneMan had forcibly abducted Austin DA Burton Welsh from his home in the Spanish Oaks subdivision, west of Austin. New evidence suggested that the perpetrator may have been driving a black Ford Taurus and was last seen headed south on Highway 71.

“The town’s going to explode in the morning,” Ricki said.

“That is the hope. The more eyes we have, the more likely we’ll catch a break.”

She nodded. “Something doesn’t sit right.”

“Nothing like stating the obvious.”

“No, I mean with Ryan Evans.”

“We’ll know soon enough,” her boss said in his deep baritone voice.

“No… not whether this was Evans but whether this is the same killer involved in the seven cases we investigated two years ago.”

“I would have thought this moves us closer to that possibility, not farther away.”

“Except that this isn’t BoneMan’s style. He wouldn’t leave his fingerprints on the dead bolt. He wouldn’t have slopped in with wet feet. BoneMan is a precise, classically calculating serial killer. This”—she nodded at the broken glass—“this is a crime of passion.”

“Isn’t that the point with MPD? Different personalities?”

“Personalities, maybe. But methods as well?”

“Now you’re splitting hairs, Valentine. Look, I’m no expert on MPD, not sure how much I even accept it all, but I know enough to conclude that it’s messed up. As in not neat. This isn’t a precise science. All the evidence we have now points to Ryan being involved on some level. We haven’t been able to establish a single alibi for him in any of the cases; he had the opportunity, the motive, and now, if we’re right, he’s taken the district attorney.”

“And you are right,” Mark said, coming up behind them. “The lab just confirmed that one set of prints matches VICAP’s file on Captain Ryan Evans.”

She’d expected nothing else, but the finality of it gave her one less thing to worry about.

“We haven’t established an alibi in part because we haven’t been able to interview the suspect,” she said, pushing the issue with Kracker. “All the evidence we have is circumstantial.”

“Until now.”

She nodded. He had a point. “Until now.”

“Whether Evans is the BoneMan we investigated two years ago or some nutcase who snapped in the desert and is now imitating those who broke him hardly matters right now. What does matter is that he took Welsh and probably took his daughter. Our first priority is to bring them both back alive. Looks to me like he’s getting sloppy. Let’s hope and pray he’s left a trail we can follow this time.”

Ricki’s phone vibrated in her pocket. She pulled it out, saw that the priest was on the line. He’d heard already?

She stepped over to the railing and accepted the call. “Father Hortense. You’re up early.”

“I have a message,” he said. His voice was tight and low, and she knew immediately that BoneMan had made contact.

She turned and made eye contact with Kracker. “What did he say?”

“He told me to tell you he was going after the father of lies,” Hortense said.

“He asked you to make this call?”

“And he insisted that no one look for him until first light. BoneMan will be watching, and if anyone comes before morning, they’ll all die. He said to look seven miles south of Menard.”

The phone against her ear fell silent.

“Did he tell you who the father of lies was?”

“No. I assumed he meant BoneMan.”

“Ryan Evans took Burton Welsh from his home a couple of hours ago, Father. I think he just told us where he took him.”

“He’s a desperate man,” Hortense said. “I strongly suggest you hold back till first light.”