26

“STOP IT! STOP moving. I can’t do this with you jerking all around like this!”

The district attorney stared up at him with bulging round eyes and screamed into the strip of cloth Ryan had torn from his shirt and stuffed into his mouth. He couldn’t hear what the man was trying to say, but he didn’t need any auditory confirmation of what was already painful obvious.

Welsh didn’t like what was happening to him.

It had taken Ryan a full hour to prepare the man, in part because handling a two-hundred-pound piece of protesting muscle wasn’t an easy task; in part because Ryan had to retreat into himself often in search of calm and reasoning, which to this point he’d done with only partial success by shutting down his emotions.

He kept telling himself that he wouldn’t kill the DA. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. But he couldn’t stop.

If he was God, perhaps he could swoop out of the sky and save Bethany without hurting a soul. But he wasn’t God. He kept telling himself that this was a war between him and BoneMan and the prize was his daughter.

Welsh was collateral damage.

But he couldn’t kill the man. He wouldn’t.

And he couldn’t not save Bethany.

Once having secured the man spread-eagle to the metal bedposts using the nylon rope, Ryan had decided that he could no longer afford to knock him out with blows to the head. He wasn’t a doctor, but he had been exposed to hundreds of cases involving various forms of forced interrogation and he knew that there was a limit to how much blunt-force trauma the human brain could take before it suddenly turned itself off.

The drawings on the wall provided step-by-step instructions on how BoneMan intended for him to proceed. There were apparently two hundred and six bones in the adult human body—three hundred and fifty in a child, but many fused together as the child grew.

The bones were divided into the two primary systems, the axial skeleton, or trunk, and the appendicular skeleton, or limbs. The former was of no concern to Ryan. His task was to break portions of the appendicular skeleton.

Of the two hundred and six bones in human body, fifty-two made up the feet and fifty-four made up the hands, placing over half of all bones in hands and feet. The smallest of all bones was the stirrup in the inner ear, the largest, the femur, or thigh bone.

BoneMan had drawn a full human skeleton on the back wall, arms spread wide on what appeared to be a crude cross. He’d labeled all the major bones, starting with the skull and working down. The maxilla, the mandible to form a jaw. Vertebrae, clavicles, scapulae, ribs forming the upper torso. Pelvis and sacrum forming the hips. And that was it except for the limbs.

The arms, legs, hands, and feet were covered in much greater detail. These seemed to be BoneMan’s fixation.

Start here with pliers he’d written in chalk, then he’d drawn a long arrow to the skeleton’s front teeth.

Then here and he’d drawn another arrow to an inset that magnified the right hand.

Ask him to stay calm or it will hurt more. It will be easier after he passes out.

Then, break wrist first, as it’s most painful. Scaphoid fracture.

There was also a detailed drawing that showed how to break the thumb so as to collapse the hand, but leaving the victim with continued mobility in the rest of the hand, thus BoneMan’s insistence that he begin with the scaphoid fracture.

Ryan had repeatedly tried to gain Welsh’s cooperation so that he could snap off his front teeth, but getting him to open his jaw proved almost impossible, and he’d given up after several attempts.

Instead, he focused on the wrists. The breaking of teeth was too barbaric. Then again, breaking any bone was barbaric.

As was war, he told himself. As was any war in which any innocent man died. This was no different. No different. That’s what he told himself as he struggled to keep his emotions in check, his mind on the task, his daughter’s face in mind.

Refusing to break Welsh’s bones was tantamount to killing his daughter.

Unfortunately the wrist bones weren’t proving to be much easier than the teeth. Leverage was important because, pound for pound, human bone was the strongest natural substance known to man. Stronger than steel, four times stronger than reinforced concrete, thanks to a mineral called calcium phosphate and a protein called collagen. The pressure required to break healthy bone was far greater than most people realized.

Evidently, as BoneMan pointed out on the wall, the human skeleton was designed to transfer shock distally to proximal skeletal structures. A direct blow to the palms is actually transferred up the arm and is more likely to break the collarbone than the wrist. The body seemed to know that a broken collar- bone heals much more easily than a broken wrist. Thus, he must not use the sledge to break the scaphoid, or he might just end up breaking the collarbone. He needed to break it with leverage.

And if one didn’t apply just the right amount of pressure at the right angle when applying leverage, he was more likely to break the radius bone, which would complicate any subsequent fracture of the wrist bones because, as BoneMan put it, your leverage will be shot.

Ryan stepped back and tried to calm the jitter in his hands. He’d stripped the man of all but his boxer shorts and then strapped his right arm down on two blocks of wood with a six-inch gap between them.

The gap was important, the notes claimed. Too wide a gap, and the bones would separate when broken and tear the skin. Too narrow, and the sledgehammer wouldn’t be able to snap the bone.

Burton Welsh lay shaking and spent, having wasted the majority of his energy by thrashing against his restraints over the last hour. A heavy coat of sweat covered his heaving chest and belly. He closed his eyes and began to sob into the cloth. The man’s closely shaven neck was lined with thin trails of dirt; his neatly trimmed hair soaked and plastered to his skull now. Clear snot ran from both of his nostrils.

The only way Ryan managed thus far was to keep an image of Bethany at the forefront of his consciousness. He made no attempt to foster anger or bitterness toward this man for trying to step into his role as father and husband. He simply held this man’s life next to the life of his daughter and chose to sacrifice him over Bethany.

He would simply do what was needed to reclaim his daughter. No compromise. No hesitation.

Yet he was hesitating.

The idea of following the drawings on the wall was one thing, but as he’d learned in the last half hour, manually contorting another man’s arm until the wrist snapped was an entirely different thing.

Kahlid had possessed the strength to snap innocent bones for what he perceived to be the salvation of many mothers and daughters in his country.

Likewise, Ryan possessed the strength to fracture Burton Welsh’s scaphoid bone, but he was having trouble summoning that strength.

Worse, he was finding it more and more difficult to remember why breaking the man’s scaphoid was the only way to save his daughter from a similar fate.

Yes, of course… in exchange for breaking the man’s bones, not necessarily killing him, BoneMan would extend his daughter’s life. It was a very simple proposition.

Orange light from the lamp silently flickered on the concrete walls, illuminating the numerous drawings, obviously made with great care over the course of at least several hours.

BoneMan was a decent artist.

Outside, the sun was inexorably climbing toward the horizon. The FBI would be coming. And if they arrived before Ryan had complied with BoneMan’s demands, Bethany would suffer more than she already had.

His own arms and hands dripped with sweat. He wiped them on one of the towels, then wiped his face and his neck so that he wouldn’t drip over the man when he resumed the position the drawings instructed him to take if he wanted to fracture the scaphoid cleanly.

Ryan dropped his right knee on the back of Welsh’s forearm and grabbed a foot-long dowel that he’d taped to the man’s palm, as instructed.

Welsh began to sob loudly, even before any pressure had been applied. He struggled against the arm restraints, but what little strength he still had proved no match for Ryan’s knee.

He twisted the dowel so that most of the force that came from bending the hand back would be concentrated on the scaphoid.

Then he pulled back with as much strength as he could summon.

For an extended moment the man’s muscle and connective tissue and bone demonstrated why this particular part of the body was so difficult to break, however small.

Ryan’s own resolve began to break before the bone did. No matter what reason he brought to bear on the situation, the experience of brutally violating an innocent man in this manner brought with it a severe case of revulsion.

Nausea rolled up his stomach and chest and for a brief moment he was sure he would throw up.

Pop.

A bone in the wrist snapped and now Welsh began to scream bloody murder. Ryan released the wood dowel and staggered off the man. He’d broken his wrist?

Welsh stopped screaming and lay still. He’d fainted.

Ryan’s heart crashed in his chest, pumping blood through his neck and ears like a massive hydraulic piston, and his hands shook at his sides, and the flame licked at the walls, but otherwise the room lay perfectly still.

He’d broken the man’s bone. And now he should break his fingers and both of his arms and both of his legs as instructed by the drawings. He should do it now, while the man was out.

He already had the man’s right arm wrapped in towels, bridging the gap between two blocks of wood. He should break it.

How would BoneMan know? He hadn’t seen any closed- circuit camera. There was no indication that he was being watched from a hole in the concrete; he’d examined the walls already. Up to this point he’d trusted that his adversary would know, but now that he’d taken this step and actually broken Welsh’s bone, he dearly hoped BoneMan wouldn’t let him down!

The sun would soon rise. Father Hortense had made the call. It had been a mistake to tell him, but one now out of his control.

He leapt over to the wall and hefted the heavy sledge- hammer.

A ring cut through the room. The ring of a phone.

He released the hammer and dropped to his knees. The cell phone had been taped to the underside of the bed’s metal springs. He reached under, tore at the tape, and ripped it free.

Shoved the receiver to his ear, still on his knees.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Father. How are we doing?”

Ryan tried to stand but couldn’t, so he sank to one leg.

“Is he unconscious?”

Ryan glanced around, wondering if he was being watched. “Yes.”

“You please me,” the man said. “I wasn’t sure you had what it took. Did you enjoy it?”

“I… where are you? What am I supposed to do?”

“I thought I made that clear. Are you losing focus?” He could hear the man’s steady breathing. “Perhaps I could… help you focus.”

“No. No, that’s not necessary. I’m focused.”

“When you’re finished breaking ten of his bones like the drawings show, I want you to leave him there and return to the place of the crows. If you’ve been a good father, I’ll bring you in and let you see Bethany. Would you like that?”

“Yes.” Rage, the kind of bitter rage that wipes away all reason, clouded his mind.

“Then you’d best be hurrying. She’s waiting for you. Remember, seven days. I’m going to do it Sunday at dawn.”

“I… I can’t kill him. I can’t do this.”

Silence.

“You can’t make me do this!” he cried.

When BoneMan spoke his voice had softened and he sounded tired, even exhausted.

“I’m sorry.”

Click.

“No, wait! Wait, I didn’t mean—”

But the line was dead.

Ryan sat with the phone pressed to his ear for a full thirty seconds without being able to muster the strength to move. He knew he’d just crossed a line but he couldn’t bring himself to consider the cost of his mistake.

He slowly pushed himself to his feet, set the cell phone on the bed, picked up the sledgehammer, and approached Burton Welsh’s unconscious form.

“FORTY MILES west of your current location.” The radio crackled in Ricki’s lap. She couldn’t see the helicopter that relayed the information to them because the sky was still dark despite a graying line on the western horizon. The clock read 6:07 AM.

“We have a dark-colored sedan, I repeat we can see a dark-colored sedan parked at the bottom of a small quarry near the switching station in question.”

A pause.

“Do you want us to go in and take a look?”

Ricki lifted the transmitter and keyed the talk button. “No, hold on that.” To Mark who was driving: “How long?”

“Twenty-five minutes.”

“Make it fifteen.”

“I’m not sure the old Buick will do more than a hundred.”

She switched back to the radio. “I need you to stay back. Copy that? I don’t want anyone on the ground to know they’ve been spotted.”

“Copy that. But if they’re outside, they’ve already heard us.”

“Then back off. Get out of there.”

“Roger that.”

She set the radio back down, studied the graying sky dead ahead. A farmhouse sat in predawn slumber off the road. She remembered a similar country house, peaceful and sleeping, ten years earlier. Approaching the house you could see nothing out of place, certainly nothing that indicated the kind of tragedy hidden by the four white walls of the Heath homestead. Inside they’d found four dead bodies, two of whom were the parents of the seventeen-year-old daughter who’d agreed to help her manipulative boyfriend kill her family because they had forbidden her to see him.

It happened. It happened all around the country, all the time. Typically not as dramatic as the Heath slayings, but signs of society’s evils just the same. Bruised faces, strung out druggies, torn hearts…

On January 1, 2008, for the first time in history, a full one percent of all Americans were locked behind bars (one in every 99.1 persons, to be precise). The number had shocked those who took the time to consider its magnitude because America did a wonderful job of hiding its ugly underbelly.

No one wanted to look at the common evils of society. Very few were willing to put aside their own pursuit of happiness long enough to consider the effects of greed and jealousy around them. From what she’d seen, humans were essentially troubled. For every one behind bars, another ten deserved to be behind bars, but that would put one in ten Americans behind bars.

So what do you do? You focus on the big ones and let the rest go. You put a killer like BoneMan in front of them and they went ballistic, but BoneMan was really only the tip of the iceberg, and agents like Ricki had to learn to bear that burden on their own.

They wound around a rare corner and she looked to her right to watch the two black Lincoln Continentals careening behind them. The train extended back to the seven highway patrol vehicles that flew around the corner, lights flashing in silence.

“Would you say it’s morning?”

“First light,” Mark said. “I think this counts. Hard to believe that we’re actually going to find anything after all this time. You know you hound someone for years and they never give you a peek. Then you get one phone call and it’s all over.”

“Somehow I doubt that,” she said. “You’re forgetting that the phone call came from him. Why is BoneMan leading us to himself?”

“Because he’s not the same BoneMan we went after two years ago.”

ACCORDING TO THE stamp on the side of the sledgehammer, it weighed seven pounds. How hard did you have to swing a seven-pound hammer to break the ulna and radius without forcing their jagged edges through the skin?

This was the question that clawed at Ryan’s mind as he stood over Burton Welsh’s heaving body.

The man had been wakened by Ryan’s second blow, which had bounced off his forearm (the first had missed entirely). He’d given up on the screaming and now just glared up at Ryan, breathing hard.

“Sorry,” Ryan said. “I don’t want to do this.”

The man yelled something that approximated a string of curse words, then settled back to his heavy breathing.

“I only have to break ten bones,” he said. “I have to do it, I don’t have a choice, he has my daughter.”

Another string of curse words.

Ryan considered his predicament again, for the hundredth time, searching for any way around breaking these bones, but all of his reasoning ended in the same place. BoneMan was going to kill Bethany. The only way to possibly stop him was to hurt this man.

And morning was coming, maybe here.

He lifted the sledge to his shoulder and lined it up with Welsh’s arm. If he stepped back and just took a full natural swing, he would hit the ceiling, and even if he didn’t, he would likely smash the arm. Instead he had to line up the sledge and drop it with more force than the last time.

His arms shook. What was a broken bone? What was just one broken bone in the grand scheme of things? What was just one broken bone next to his daughter’s life?

But Ryan couldn’t stop his shaking, which now began to spread to his legs. He was suddenly terrified that if he didn’t swing now, he might lose his resolve altogether. He might not be strong enough to save his daughter.

Pushed now by panic, he began to scream as he stood at the ready over the man’s arm.

And when the scream began to run out of air, he closed his eyes and he swung the sledgehammer with all of his might.

“LEFT.”

Mark turned left on Highway 83 and flew south, followed by the black Continentals and the cruisers with flashing lights. They drove in silence now, drawing closer, ever closer to the quarry the air patrol had identified as the likely target.

Cornstalks rose on both sides of the two-lane road, late-fall feed variety that looked gray in the growing light. It could be any lazy fall morning and no one would be the wiser that somewhere, someone was in trouble.

A young child prostitute in Bangkok.

A village of mothers in Afghanistan.

A district attorney in Texas.

Her radio crackled. “You’re approaching the road.”

The first two would have no cavalry to come to their rescue.

She was Burton Welsh’s cavalry.

“Here, here!”

She pointed to the cockeyed sign that read LANDERS LANE, and Mark swung the Buick onto a dirt road, cutting between the fields.

They blasted over gravel, sending clouds of dust back into the cars that followed.

“Okay, slow down. You’re about two hundred yards out. The quarry is to the right of the switching station.”

Ricki keyed the radio. “Okay. Mark and I are first in. We’re going for the door as soon as we’ve established close-in perimeter. I need a team on the car, clear it, then we go.”

“Copy that,” said Roger Clemens, with the tactical unit.

Mark brought the Buick to a slow crawl as they drove up to the fence surrounding the huge transformers and electric poles that made up the switching station.

“Follow the sign,” Ricki said, voice low even though there really was no need for quiet.

He guided the car into a shallow quarry and the lights played over the black Taurus parked at the center. The sky was now gray and getting brighter by the minute, but the sun hadn’t yet broken the horizon.

“Hold up.”

He shoved the stick into park and they both stepped out into the cool morning air. Dust roiled past them as the cars came to a stop behind them, forming a wide arch across the quarry.

No sign of life from the car.

All eyes were now on the door that led into what the electric company had identified as an unused storage shed.

Ricki slipped a nine-millimeter Glock from her shoulder harness and covered the door as she waited for the rest of the team to take their positions. The precaution would cost them a few seconds, but it was well worth the delay in any unknown situation, and this qualified.

Mark spoke in a whisper. “Ready.”

She moved forward on the balls of her tennis shoes, not bothering to crouch. More important to keep her barrel trained on the door in the event that it flew open.

But it didn’t fly open.

A soft wail, the sound of a man weeping, came to her from beyond the door now. A chill washed down her back. It sounded like a wounded animal. Maybe it wasn’t a man.

Mark reached the door just ahead of her, gripped the handle, and, after a quick nod from her, threw it wide to offer her a full view of the interior.

She stepped in, gun trained and ready, finger pressing lightly on the trigger. Mark was already there beside her.

The first moment into a crime scene was always a moment stuffed with adrenaline and heightened sensitivity. You never knew if you would meet a slug, a victim, or a vacant room. None of them were particularly good outcomes, which made the moment of truth an unpleasant one, regardless.

No exception here; Ricki saw it all in less than a second and felt her stomach sink.

Orange light showed a nearly naked man whom she recognized as Burton Welsh strapped to a metal bed. His legs were stretched between two bedposts as was one of his arms.

The other was wrapped in a towel and cinched down to two blocks of wood. The forearm was folded between the blocks at an obscene angle. The DA’s chest rose and fell, but he lay unconscious.

On the floor lay another man, facedown, hugging what appeared to be a large sledgehammer, weeping. “No, no, no, no…”

The man turned his tear-streaked face slowly toward her and stared up, disoriented. This was Ryan Evans.

“I can’t.” Tears streamed down his knotted face. “I can’t do it. I can’t.”

He just kept saying that, and Ricki’s heart broke.

Mark stepped past her, gun on the man’s head. “Not a muscle, boy.”