4

RICKI VALENTINE SAT with her right leg crossed over her left, slowly swinging her foot as she studied Mort Kracker’s brooding gray eyes. A crew cut topped the Assistant Director in Charge’s large square head, giving him the appearance of a softer, kinder version of Frankenstein, sans scars.

The conversation in the room had stalled. If the defense attorney’s latest filing with the court bore up under judicial scrutiny, Phil Switzer, aka BoneMan, could very well be walking the streets two weeks from now and all eyes would be on the DA who’d put him behind bars.

Burton Welsh, the man who now served as Austin’s district attorney in large part because of his highly touted prosecution of BoneMan two years prior, stared at them from his perch against the windowsill, one hand across his waist, the other stroking up his chin, as though scratching at a thought.

Welsh might be on the bubble here, but Ricki had been the FBI’s lead investigator in the case. She, more than the DA, had been responsible for BoneMan’s capture and conviction. There would be more than enough scrutiny to go around if the folder on the chief’s desk contained the truth.

“So?” Welsh demanded.

“So”—Kracker glanced between them—“we have us a problem.”

Although not directly responsible for the investigation, Mort Kracker’s oversight of the case wouldn’t be dismissed. Not to mention the well-known fact that Kracker had essentially fed the case to Burt Welsh, whose relationship with him extended all the way back to UT School of Law.

Here, in this room, sat the three law enforcement professionals who may very well have put an innocent man behind bars; even worse, they had possibly left a serial killer to take more victims, always careful to cover his tracks.

“You’re not actually suggesting you believe this load of crap,” Welsh said, shoving a thick finger at the wall. “That man is as guilty as a pregnant nun. That’s why we prosecuted; that’s why he’s serving time.”

He crossed the room and towered over Ricki. “You led the investigation; the file on him is a foot thick.”

Uncomfortable under his shadow, Ricki stood. Welsh wore a tailored blue suit that hid his muscled frame well, but at six foot three, there was no hiding his power. Standing a mere five feet two if she stretched, Ricki felt like a mouse next to him.

She walked toward the window he’d vacated. “And you know as well as I do that the blood samples from the last victim connected the evidence and sealed the case.”

Kracker put his elbows on his desk. “Which they say was contrived. Defense says that they can prove it came from the same sample taken to run him through VICAP, and that we broke the chain of evidence. Like I said, we have a problem.”

“Assuming this evidence of theirs pans out,” Welsh said. He took a seat in the chair Ricki had left. “Either way, Switzer’s as guilty as sin.”

Ricki nodded. “Probably. But that doesn’t help us in appellate court. Double jeopardy—he can’t be tried for the same crime twice. Unless and until we find another victim to link to the case, we’re stuck.”

“I understand the legal problem,” Welsh shot back. “But if you think I’m just going to sit by and wait for him to take another victim before I do anything, you don’t know me. When news of this leaks, the city will go nuts.”

TheBoneMan, so dubbed by Ricki for his MO of killing his victims by breaking their bones without breaking their skin, had left a total of seven victims behind, all in plain sight, all in quiet Texas neighborhoods, from El Paso to Austin, where he’d taken his last two before being caught.

Assuming the man they’d put away really was BoneMan.

“I’m not saying we have the wrong man,” Ricki said. “I’m simply pointing out the challenge we’re facing.”

Welsh exposed his true concern. “I don’t need to restate what this means to me, Mort. Personally.”

“We all have both professional and personal stakes in this case,” Mort returned. “That doesn’t change the challenge Ricki’s addressing.”

“Don’t patronize me.” He took a breath. “There’s more at stake here than BoneMan and his victims. I’m trying to run a city. The last thing the city needs is more fear-mongering over a case like this. The media will sensationalize and speculate for millions of people who don’t think for themselves. Next thing you know, schools will close and people will be hiding in their homes. Like happened in DC, with the sniper.”

“I thought the mayor ran the city,” Ricki said. “Does he know yet?”

The man shot her an angry glare.

Easy, Ricki.

“Of course he knows. I have his full support.”

“Support for what?”

“Don’t be so naïve. We have to shut this down. For all of our sakes, for the sake of the city, for the sake of justice on behalf of millions, not just one man.”

Ricki wasn’t sure she understood him correctly. She’d always thought of Welsh as a bull, stomping to run over anyone who stepped into his ring, but she’d never pegged him as one to subvert the laws he’d been elected to uphold.

Her boss leaned back in his chair and cast a furtive glance at her. “I don’t think any of us disagree that we need to deal with this in an appropriate manner,” he said carefully. “We have over two thousand man-hours logged on a case to bring a criminal to justice; no one’s suggesting we just let him walk. But we’re facing evidence here that undermines our position. We can’t just ignore it.”

Welsh slammed his palm on the chair’s arm. “Then find me more evidence!”

Ricki thought about asking him what he meant by find. But she held her tongue.

“There has to be something we can use to nail this shut. Another blood sample, maybe overlooked by the lab, DNA evidence that was overlooked because we had what we needed. Anything!”

Her boss spread his palms. “Ricki?”

Her mind quickly rehearsed the details of the case she’d lived and breathed two years earlier.

BoneMan’s first victim had been found in El Paso, Texas. Seventeen-year-old Susan Carter, who’d gone missing after going out for milk on a Tuesday night, had finally turned up in an abandoned barn. The police had immediately asked the FBI for assistance and Ricki had been the federal agent assigned to the case.

The image of Susan’s bruised and broken body staked to the ground in a circle of candles had haunted Ricki’s nights for a year. Though she’d been missing for a week, post-mortem evidence from blood pooling, edema, and decomposition revealed that she’d been dead less than thirty-six hours when they’d found her. The evidence response team from the Dallas field office revealed a dim reflection of Susan’s ordeal during the four days she’d spent with her captor.

The killer had gone to great lengths to break the victim’s bones, one at a time, without so much as scratching the skin, likely beginning with her fingers and working his way to larger bones over a period of days. The only blood found at the scene had come from rope burns at her wrists and ankles.

No evidence of sexual assault. No bodily secretions that didn’t belong to the victim. No hair, no fiber, no prints.

They took castings of tire tracks where a vehicle had been parked and of boot impressions left, apparently without any effort to conceal them. The hemp rope was a common variety, as were the tent stakes used to pin the body down. So the killer shopped at True Value and paid in cash. Nothing traceable.

Lab analysis later told them that they were likely looking for a Ford F-150 truck, based on the position and depth of the tire impressions, but half the county drove similar trucks. The size-thirteen boots were made by Brahma and were as common in Texas as tumbleweed.

They had a male killer who weighed roughly a hundred and seventy to two hundred pounds, wore Brahma boots, and drove a Ford F-150 pickup. Helpful, but by no means isolating. In the Republic of Texas, everybody wore boots and drove trucks and could sing “Dixie” from memory.

Although the motivation wasn’t clear, Ricki had been the first to suggest that they were looking at a twisted kind of crucifixion taken from the Roman tradition of breaking the bones of those they crucified to speed their death. The bones of Jesus hadn’t been broken at his crucifixion, an unusual detail that had been foretold by the prophet Isaiah and often cited by Christians as one piece of evidence that Jesus was the Messiah.

Either way, they knew they were looking for an acutely psychotic individual who found some kind of justice or deviant satisfaction in going to such great lengths without a clear cause. Motive? Rage rather than pleasure was his reason for what appeared to be a ritualistic killing. The killer was new to VICAP, and his profile presented an entirely new case study in motivation. Not sexual, but predatory. Not bloody, but extremely violent. It was a murder of detailed planning, and there was nothing on the Web to profile this level of intensity with an unclear motive.

Thirty-nine days later, BoneMan’s second victim was found in Lubbock, Texas, roughly three hundred miles northeast of his first victim. This time in an apartment building. He was on the move. A traveling salesman with an alter ego or a deeply antisocial sense of self?

Another girl, Heather Newlander, thirteen years old. No tire or boot prints this time, but the execution had occurred in precisely the same manner as before. Now they had a transient serial killer.

The news had picked up on the story and worry began to spread. A murderer, now being called BoneMan, was at large in Texas.

The third victim had been found in Abilene, Texas, roughly one hundred and fifty miles southeast of Lubbock, two months later. Photographs of young Eileen Ronders’s broken body found their way to the press. In the space of twenty-four hours the BoneMan became national news and horror began to take root in Texas.

They now had three dead young women on a clear path headed east toward the larger cities in Texas. On the television screen the maps looked as though they were plotting a black plague methodically working its way east. A monster of the most sinister kind, out of the FBI’s reach, breaking the bones of the Republic of Texas’s most innocent children.

An exaggeration of course, but in Ricki’s way of thinking, not by much.

The fourth victim had been found in Mansfield, near Fort Worth. The fifth in Waco, south.

The last two in Austin, Texas. Brandi Lewis, a nineteen-year-old grocery clerk who worked at the H-E-B on the corner of Highway 71 and Bee Cave Road, and Linda Owens, a fourteen-year-old high school freshman who attended Saint Michael’s Catholic Academy.

Austin had reacted as it should have: With outrage. With fear. With a cry for the mayor, the governor, the FBI, the police, anybody and everybody to do something. Anything, just stop this madness.

Standing in Kracker’s office now, mind spinning over the past, Ricki wondered if the district attorney hadn’t done just that. Anything. Or more to the point, planted the one drop of blood they’d found in Linda Owens’s hair as a means to take the one suspect they all suspected off the streets.

Ricki had built her case methodically, in the same manner she’d built a dozen other cases during her ten years with the FBI. She’d already garnered a strong reputation in the bureau as a motivated investigator who did not know how to quit.

But the BoneMan case had worn her to a thread. Welsh was right; they had a file full of evidence that pointed to Phil Switzer, but only the blood was definitive. Only the blood placed him at the scene—of only the last victim. And now the sample was being challenged.

Switzer had first shown up on Ricki’s radar when police had responded to neighbors’ complaints of odors emanating from his mobile home in Waco. There they found a forty-seven-year-old male who lived alone in a house full of cats, six of which he’d strangled. Disturbing, but by no means a connection to the BoneMan.

The fact that he drove a 1978 Ford F-150 with Bridgestone tires matching the tread they’d found at three of BoneMan’s crime scenes was more interesting to Ricki. The fact that Switzer also wore size-thirteen boots that matched the impressions of those left at the crime scenes was enough to move him to the top of the FBI’s suspect list.

A complete search of his mobile home turned up the man’s penchant for Bibles and pictures of his mother, who’d passed away one year earlier. All the evidence matched the BoneMan’s new FBI psychological profile on VICAP.

But they had no direct evidence of Phil Switzer’s movements over the previous year. Further complicating the matter was the fact that Switzer was a deaf-mute who refused to cooperate with any form of interrogation. Ricki had persuaded local law enforcement to back away from any prosecution for his animal cruelty and ordered twenty-four-hour surveillance.

On the day that Linda Owens was killed, the surveillance on Switzer had failed, for reasons still unclear. Sloppy police work. An agent negligent on a camera system. But when a drop of blood had been found in the victim’s hair, probable cause had forced Switzer to give the FBI a sample of his blood.

Six hours later they had the match. The blood sample taken from Phil Switzer matched the drop of blood found on the victim.

They had found BoneMan.

Four months later a jury of twelve convicted Phil Switzer on one count of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death.

“Any ideas?” Kracker asked, prodding her from her recollection.

She shook her head. “Except for the blood…”

This wasn’t what Welsh wanted to hear. “Come on, you can’t possibly be telling me—”

“The rest is all circumstantial, you know that as well as I do,” she snapped, letting her frustration with his insistence break through.

The DA stood and paced to the oak bookcase on the far wall, hands on hips. “We took a serial killer off the streets. The murders stopped when we put him away. The whole world knows we got the right guy.” He turned back and stared at both of them. “And now you’re telling me we can’t pull together any evidence to keep him where he belongs?”

“You’re the prosecutor, you tell us,” Kracker said.

“I am telling you. I need evidence, and I need it in the next two weeks.”

“We have closed the case, Burt.”

“Then open it. Focus on the other murders. I need enough to convince the judge to let me hold Switzer as a person of interest while we build another case. You’re the FBI, so it’s a federal case now. Yes, they got an appeal, so let’s get enough on this guy to obtain a stay of appeal from the judge. Double jeopardy is only on his side if he gets an acquittal. Let’s not give him that chance.”

In a common-sense way what the DA was suggesting made perfect sense, but they all knew that legal proceedings didn’t necessarily follow common sense. He was asking for the impossible.

Ricki asked the question that none of them seemed eager to put on the table. “And what if we really did put the wrong man behind bars?”

“We didn’t.”

“Even worse, what if the blood really was planted by someone on our team? Switzer’s attorneys are hinting at a lawsuit that could do some damage.”

The DA’s steady look said it all. Bingo. And we can’t let that happen.

“I think we all understand the situation,” Kracker said. “Let’s reopen the case, Ricki.”