BoneMan's Daughters

by Ted Dekker

  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.”

  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 s
trength 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.