BoneMan's Daughters

by Ted Dekker

  A fist pounded on the door. “Sir?”

  “Give us a moment,” he called out.

  “Thank you, this won’t take long.”

  “I hope not,” Burt said, steely eyes locked on Ryan. “You’re already on very thin ice.”

  “I’m just trying to get your attention. Surely I deserve that. You’re sleeping with my wife.”

  “Am I? I was at Celine’s home because she feared for her life.”

  The comment was unexpected. Welsh was posturing. He had to be.

  “Celine tells me you’ve had a rough couple of weeks,” the district attorney said, stepping forward, hand in one pocket, “but the fact of the matter is, your wife wants a divorce. You’ve never cared before, I suggest you not care now. This has nothing to do with you. Go back to your desk at the navy, become an admiral or whatever, catch some terrorists, do whatever you want. Just stay away from Celine and Bethany.”

  It took all of Ryan’s concentration to keep from shaking.

  “She… she doesn’t understand.”

  “Understand what? That you’re a loser?”

  “What happened to me,” Ryan managed. “You have to let me explain myself, at least to my daughter. Please, you have to understand what I’ve been through. I was taken by insurgents and forced to watch some terrible things. I’m not the same person I was when I left.”

  “But you did leave, didn’t you? That was your choice. Just like leaving my office now before I throw you out is your choice.”

  “The man who took me compared the United States to a serial killer,” Ryan said. “Ted Bundy. Didn’t you prosecute Phil Switzer? The BoneMan?”

  Welsh stilled.

  “The killer who played games with me, who killed all those children in the underground chamber they kept me in, said he was only doing what BoneMan did. That I was like BoneMan. That I was BoneMan. That we were all like BoneMan.”

  That got the man’s attention. Actually, Kahlid had used Ted Bundy as an example, not BoneMan, but they were essentially the same, and the use of BoneMan would have far more connection with the district attorney.

  “You put BoneMan behind bars. So you know what it was like for all the mothers and fathers of the women he killed. Please,” he begged softly, “please don’t take my daughter away from me.”

  “I didn’t stop BoneMan,” the district attorney said. “Phil Switzer was released from prison this morning.”

  Ryan didn’t care at the moment. He took a step closer to the man. “I’ll do whatever you want, just help me repair the damage I’ve done with Bethany.”

  “I love them, Ryan. I love them both and I’d just as soon see you disappear forever than have you hurt them again. Now if you know what’s best for you, you’ll turn around, leave this office, sign the papers when they come to you, and find a way to get yourself back to Iraq, where you can do some good.”

  Ryan could feel the waves of heat rolling down his neck. But he maintained perfect control because he knew he must.

  He stepped over to the wall, removed the painting of the large brown stallion, walked to the window that overlooked 11th Street, and slammed the picture against the glass. The frame shattered and he dropped the torn horse on the floor. It was all a bit juvenile, he realized. But he couldn’t come up with any good alternatives.

  When he turned around he saw that Burt had turned to watch him but otherwise hadn’t moved.

  “Sorry. I’m just trying to get your attention.”

  Without so much as a nod of acknowledgment, the man who intended to take his wife and daughter calmly turned his back and pressed a button on his phone.

  “Brooke, please have security come to my office immediately. And call the police—”

  It was as far as Burt got, because as he spoke, Ryan crossed the carpet behind him, grabbed him by the back of his white collar, and with more strength than he knew he had, pulled the man off his feet. The phone clattered to the desk and Burt grunted as his back slammed onto the floor.

  Ryan stood over him, legs spread on either side of his head.

  “Sorry. Sorry, but you aren’t listening to me.” He was breathing heavily both from emotion and exertion. Burt was a big man.

  The man cursed and started to lift his head. Only then did it occur to Ryan that he’d made an unrecoverable mistake. In a moment of panic he’d done the one thing that would almost assuredly make this man an enemy for life.

  And now Burt, a much bigger man, was going to rise to his feet and maim him.

  Ryan dropped his knee into the man’s chest, slamming him back onto the carpet. He shifted his leg so that his shin pushed hard into Burt’s throat. The larger man grabbed his leg and tried to jerk it off, but Ryan had the full advantage of leverage on his side. He might not be a marine, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know how to kill a man without a weapon. And for the briefest moments, Ryan wanted nothing more than to end this man’s life.

  Knuckles pounded the door again, this time with a demand that the door be opened immediately.

  Ryan lowered his face and spoke in a low, biting tone, “She’s my daughter.”

  “Open this door!” Crash! The frame splintered under the weight of an assault.

  Reason reclaimed Ryan then, while the DA was thrashing under him, face now red as a beet. He rolled off and came to his feet just as the door flew open.

  “Hold up!” A security officer had his sidearm out and trained on Ryan.

  He lifted both hands. “Easy. Just talking.”

  “Put your hands on your head!”

  Reason had reclaimed his mind, but reasonable courses of action had yet to present themselves. “He’s sleeping with my wife.”

  “Hands on your head!”

  Three security officers faced him in a semicircle, eyes bright as if they’d just busted a terrorist in the act of blowing up the Travis County Administration Building. But he was only a man who’d learned how much he really did love his daughter. This was a mission of love, not of terror.

  “Put your hands on your head before I blow your head off!” the guard screamed.

  “He’s stealing my daughter,” Ryan said and put his hands on his head.

  13

  RICKI VALENTINE PULLED up to the Super 8 Motel, parked her car in a visitor’s space near the entrance, and made her way to the elevator.

  Room 312, Evans had said. She pushed the call button and waited for the elevator car.

  She’d spent the three days that had passed since Kracker had authorized her to open a new investigation conducting interviews of all those linked in even the most limited ways to the last victim, Linda Owens, on whom someone had supposedly planted blood as evidence. At least that’s the way she was viewing the blood evidence—everything she did was predicated on the assumption that Switzer really was the wrong man, which could only mean the blood had been planted.

  Although they’d conducted a full investigation of Linda Owens’s murder, the interviews had come to a screeching halt when the lab had matched the blood sample found in Linda Owens’s hair to their primary suspect at the time, Phil Switzer. There was still a string of possible links between the victim and those who knew her at school, which hadn’t been fully explored.

  But that wasn’t the reason Ricki was here this Friday afternoon. It was this business about Burt Welsh, who had somehow managed to tangle with a naval officer whose wife he’d become friendly with. No concern of Ricki’s. But according to Welsh, Ryan Evans had made some unusual claims that linked him to BoneMan in the Iraqi desert. That made Ryan Ricki’s business, if only until she made sense of these claims.

  Ricki had already spent fifteen minutes on the phone with Celine Evans and half an hour at a Starbucks with Bethany Evans, his sixteen-year-old daughter who, interestingly enough, now attended the same school, Saint Michael’s Catholic Academy, that the last victim had. She’d learned more than she wanted to know about their family.

  Nothing of note regarding BoneMan.

  The bell rang an
d the elevator door slid open. Ricki stepped in and patiently waited for the car to grind its way up three stories.

  Ryan Evans. She’d done her homework on the man after Kracker had asked her to check him out. One of the navy’s best, from everything she could gather. His commanding officer had nothing but the highest praise for the captain’s work in Naval Intelligence, most of which was classified. But his record in the military wasn’t classified. By all accounts, Ryan Evans had the kind of character that men like Welsh couldn’t touch.

  The kind of backbone that would lead a man to barge into the DA’s office two days ago and accuse him of sleeping with his wife.

  The idea of Burt Welsh on the floor with a knee in his throat—you had to at least grin. The DA hadn’t pressed criminal charges, but what he had done was probably worse.

  She stepped up to #312 and knocked.

  The man who opened the door looked like he hadn’t set foot in the sunlight or the shower in a week. Ryan Evans was dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, no shoes, at least a few days’ growth on his face, his short brown hair disheveled and dirty. A big man with a naturally strong physique.

  He stared at her out of a dark room with brown lost-puppy eyes. “Yes?”

  “Ryan Evans?”

  “Yes. Oh… FBI?”

  She stuck out her hand. “Agent Ricki Valentine. You mind if I come in?”

  His grip was limp, but he dutifully shook her hand before politely stepping aside.

  “Whew, this place could use some air.” She crossed to the drawn drapes. “Do you mind?”

  “No, no, go ahead. Actually, maybe it would be better to turn the lights on.”

  She withdrew her hand from the cord. “Sure. Yes, light. At least that much.”

  He flipped on the overhead light. One of the two queen beds wasn’t made up. The orange floral on the bedspreads matched well with two impressionistic prints on the wall, typical of so many hotel rooms. Someone had cut a deal with someone to turn virtually all budget-priced hotels into one of five common models, the orange floral variety being the most common.

  “Mind if I sit?”

  “Sure.” He crossed to a small table with an empty ice bucket and pulled out the chair for her. A regular gentleman.

  She set her wallet (the black snakeskin one that was large enough to be called a purse) on the table and sat. “Thank you.”

  Ryan sat on the bed and folded one leg under the other. “You’re welcome.”

  “As I told you on the phone, this shouldn’t take long; just a few questions. You’ve heard about the BoneMan case, I take it.”

  “It’s all over the news.”

  Ricki glanced at the muted television playing CNN. “Of course. By the looks of it, you have all the time in the world to watch the news these days.”

  He just looked at her.

  “When was the last time you left this room, Captain?”

  “I’ve been in the country for just over a week. I’m still getting my bearings.”

  “I have to admit, I’m not accustomed to interviewing an intelligence officer who spends his time reading between the lines.” She crossed her legs and folded both hands over her knee. “So why don’t we skip the cute stuff and get right down to the issue?”

  “That would be fine.”

  “Are you always such a gentleman?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m here for two reasons, Ryan. Can I call you Ryan?”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded. “First of all there’s this business of your assault on the DA after you discovered his relationship with your wife. Frankly, your reaction seemed entirely reasonable to me. Unfortunately, it didn’t help your case any. I’ve been asked by the DA to give you this.”

  She withdrew an envelope from her purse and handed it to him. “You can read it later. It’s a restraining order that prohibits you from stepping within one mile of your wife, your daughter, or Burton Welsh. Seeing as how Welsh is the DA around these parts, I would stick to the terms of this order without compromise. He’s agreed not to press charges for that little stunt you pulled because he’d rather not deal with this in the press. But he made it quite clear that any violation of this order will land you behind bars.”

  The man blinked. “One mile?”

  He looked completely stunned. The police had released him from custody two days earlier with strict orders not to move from the motel, and it looked like he’d abided by their terms. But his good behavior clearly hadn’t earned him what he was hoping for.

  “One mile?” he asked again, standing slowly. “That’s… What about Bethany?”

  “You might want to consider leaving town.”

  He stared for a moment, incredulous, then sank back on the bed and shifted his stricken gaze past her.

  “I’m sorry, Captain. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “They have no idea what it was like. I… I watched them die.”

  “Watched who die?”

  Ryan stood and paced to the window, then back. “This can’t be happening. This just can’t be happening.”

  Ricki felt oddly moved by the sight of this man’s angst. He clearly loved his daughter in particular and was overwrought at the thought of being kept away from her.

  But she was here because the DA claimed that the captain had hinted at a connection with the BoneMan in the desert. She turned to her objective.

  “I understand that you were confronted by a party in Iraq who compared you to the BoneMan.”

  He cast her a side glance but kept pacing, eyes fixed on the carpet as if the fibers at his feet held the answer to his dilemma.

  “You may know that I was the lead investigator on the case against BoneMan two years ago,” she continued. “With Switzer officially exonerated and free, I’m revisiting the case. Your daughter, Bethany, goes to school at Saint Michael’s Academy, the same school the last victim attended.”

  He nodded absently.

  “It’s interesting, to say the least, that you ran into the case in the desert, an ocean away from here. Any details of the encounter would be appreciated.”

  “It’s classified,” Ryan said, then immediately returned to the pressing issue at hand. “She can visit me though, right? How long will this last? Surely they can’t expect me to just… not see my own daughter.”

  He was too distracted by his own loss to focus on his ordeal in the desert, Ricki thought, swiveling the leg that hung over her knee. She felt overdressed here in her black heels and skirt; the only way to draw out useful information was to appear completely comfortable with him.

  She stepped out of her heels, crossed to the curtain, and crossed her arms, leaning back on the darkened window. “I can see you love your daughter very much. This must be very difficult.”

  He stopped and looked up at her, and she could see immediately that Ryan Evans wasn’t going to clear his mind to accommodate her need for information any time soon. He stared at her with those puppy eyes.

  Tears appeared, then snaked down his cheeks. His hands balled into fists and he began to shake, just a little at first, but the tremor overtook his body from head to foot.

  And all the while he stared at Ricki.

  His breakdown was so unexpected, so riddled with anguish, that Ricki didn’t have time to prepare for the sudden emotion that swept over her. This was more than a husband who’d just discovered that his wife was leaving him. Something else was eating away at Ryan Evans.

  She had to say something in the face of such pain. Do something, anything. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  He caught himself and steadied his hands. Blinked away the tears. “Sorry. Sorry…”

  “It’s quite all right; you’ve been through a lot.”

  “I didn’t know… I didn’t know that she felt like this. What could I do? I tried, I tried. I thought I was doing the right thing for my country, for her, for Celine. I was sacrificing everything for what I knew how to do.”

  “Ryan, I—”


  “Where did I go wrong?”

  “This doesn’t mean—”

  “They have to give me another try.”

  “I’m sorry… .” Ricki had wept with mothers whose daughters had been broken up by a horrible monster. She’d stayed awake through the night, seething with anger at the kind of human being who could prey on the innocent with such savagery. She’d held a dead baby in the aftermath of spousal abuse that had gone way too far. The horror haunted her always.

  But there was something different about the sight before her. Fresh tears filled his eyes and he turned away.

  “Ryan…”

  What could she say? She stood and crossed to him. Gently rubbed his shoulder and lowered her voice. “Ryan, please, it’s okay.” A knot filled her throat.

  She had come to interrogate a sailor who might be able to shed a glimmer of light on a killer who’d broken bones and instead she found a father with a broken heart.

  Someone pounded on the door.

  Ricki stepped around the bed and walked to the door. A maid stood in the hall. “Will you be checking out today?”

  “We’ll call the front desk,” Ricki said. “Give us a minute?”

  “Take your time.”

  “Thank you.”

  When she shut the door and turned around, she saw that Ryan was lying on the bed, face buried in the pillow. The bottoms of his white socks were dirty, and his right pant leg was hitched up so that she could see his calf. What was she to do, sit by him and comfort him?

  She had to bring this scene back to earth so that she could do what she’d come to do. If that meant helping him make a little more sense of his world, so be it.

  Ricki slid one of the chairs closer to the bed and sat facing him. “I’m really sorry for all of this, Ryan. But you have to get a hold of yourself and make some decisions. You can’t keep yourself cooped up in this dingy motel forever. It all looks bad now, I know, but bad times have a way of passing. Right?”

  He lay still, back slowly rising and falling with each breath.