BoneMan's Daughters (29 page)

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.