BoneMan's Daughters

by Ted Dekker

“How… how do you expect me to do that?”

  “The way I would do it.”

  “I can’t do what you do.”

  “You already do. I am Satan and you’re my daughter. Now we’re just going to be honest with each other.”

  “And if I can’t?”

  “Then I will do what I always do. It might be best anyway.”

  She didn’t know how to respond to what he was suggesting. She could express her outrage, but after six days in this hole, even her outrage was confused with eagerness to please him. She could argue with him, but she didn’t want to anger the one person who could save her.

  She could agree to his terms, but she didn’t think she could bring herself to actually hurt anyone for any reason. Certainly not Ryan. He was a lousy father, but no one deserved this except maybe her.

  Or did he? No, of course not.

  “Could I have some water and some food?” she asked. “I haven’t eaten in a long time.”

  The question seemed to sidetrack him.

  “If you were my daughter I would never let this happen to you,” he said.

  DARKNESS HAD FALLEN. Ryan Evans knew this because the room had grown pitch-dark again, the third night since he’d awoken in the room. So, if he was right, he had been in BoneMan’s basement for two and a half days now.

  For the second time in three months he’d been taken captive and held against his will in a room below the earth. What the man who’d taken him couldn’t know what that his method of capture, injecting Ryan with drugs that rendered him immobile but fully conscious, had actually played to Ryan’s advantage.

  He’d broken out of jail, stolen one of the guard’s cars, and cut across the state of Texas like a bat out of hell, riddled with more emotion than he’d suffered since this madness had begun. The fear that he wouldn’t be taken captive had been taken away the moment he’d been hit. And the long, forced wait in the back of BoneMan’s truck had given him time to accept his new challenge with the same calculation that had saved him in the desert.

  Exhausted from lack of sleep, he’d fallen asleep after being dumped on the bed and when he’d awoken many hours later, the effects of the drugs had worn off.

  He’d examined his room carefully, found no potential avenue for escape, then retreated to his bed where, except to drink water from a large bottle by the door and urinate in the pot, he’d lain in near perfect stillness for nearly two days.

  He would have to say near perfect stillness, because he found himself unable to contain his grief for more than a couple hours before he broke down and let himself weep.

  His chest shook and his eyes flooded and his mind could not shut out the image of his daughter, Bethany, whom he loved more than he had ever thought possible.

  He passed the hours thinking through what he knew of her life, which was so little it must be criminal. His first memory of her was as a baby wrapped in a pink blanket that Celine had purchased at Target a week before they’d finalized the adoption.

  He thought about the small face in that pink blanket, those tiny hands batting aimlessly at the air, and he rolled over on the bed and wept. He’d wept because a week later he’d left for a two-month assignment.

  He could remember the time that Bethany had run into the house with skinned hands and knees, crying after a spill on her skates. They were only superficial wounds and with a stoic nod he’d slapped her on the back and told her it would make her tough.

  But his encouragement did not take away her red face or her squinted eyes spilling their tears. That face haunted him now and he wept.

  If he could go back to that day, he would fly to the door and sweep his angel off her feet and rush her to the kitchen sink, holding her tight and whispering that everything would be all right. He would carefully bandage her small, superficial cuts and then take her to Dairy Queen to celebrate her being such a brave little girl.

  Dear God, what have I done? Why was I so blind?

  He remembered the time his dear little child, only ten at the time, had come into his office and asked if he would play a game of chess with her. He’d been gone for two weeks, at an intelligence conference in Norfolk, and had just returned, tired. He’d said what he always said. Maybe later.

  But he never had played chess with her. Never, not once!

  If only he could do so now. Just one game. He would sell all he owned to buy back that one day.

  Ryan searched his mind for memories and as they came, he stored up the pain that came with them. Then, when he could no longer hold so much pain, he lay on his side and he wept.

  This was his penitence. His heart was being slowly and painfully sliced and these memories were the salt poured into each cut.

  Then he’d run out of memories and he found this even more disturbing than the memories themselves. But finally, after two days, Ryan had finally come to the bitter end of himself, corralled his emotions, and now lay perfectly still on the bed.

  But he wasn’t doing nothing. He was still thinking. Calculating, controlling, saving his will and his resolve for that moment he knew was coming. He would need to leave his emotions behind then and do what was necessary to save Bethany, no matter what the cost.

  He was calculating, and for the first time he was praying. Begging God to understand his pain and save his daughter. No matter what the cost.

  Because for the first time in his life he thought he understood what God must feel like. He would feel like Ryan who was out to rescue his daughter from the Satan who wanted her for his own. Who wanted to break her bones and crush her spirit and possess what was not his.

  34

  RICKI VALENTINE SAT on a metal folding chair, feet planted flat on the concrete floor, hands folded on her lap, staring at the chalk drawings of the human skeleton illuminated by two three-hundred-watt halogen lamps that ran off the portable generator out in the quarry. Father Hortense stood beside her, arms crossed. The artist, almost certainly BoneMan, had used white chalk with a fine point, not the thick one-inch variety that kids used to draw on sidewalks. And he’d applied remarkable skill.

  She was back for her third visit, including the first when they’d taken Ryan Evans into custody, four days earlier. At first viewing the drawings on the wall had shed no new light on the case. She already knew that the killer was obsessed with bones and knew his anatomy well. That he’d proven his knowledge by filling the walls as if they were an anatomy textbook only reinforced what they all knew.

  Following Ryan’s escape a day later, she’d driven back out to take a second look. Admittedly, she was motivated by more than pure investigative curiosity. She was never more than a step away from scrutiny in a case that had literally blown up overnight. She needed the break.

  Three days ago the city had woken to news that District Attorney Burt Welsh had been brutally murdered by the BoneMan or a killer mimicking BoneMan, on the very eve of his announcement that he had BoneMan behind bars.

  To exacerbate the matter came the stunning admission that Ryan Evans, the supposed BoneMan, had escaped from his holding cell an hour after Welsh’s murder. Theories abounded on how, if, and why Ryan Evans, who some still speculated was BoneMan, did what he did. And until more data came in, Ricki wasn’t in the position to be absolutely conclusive one way or the other.

  She knew that Ryan wasn’t BoneMan.

  She knew that the handwriting analysis that had just come in this morning had eliminated him as the author of the notes on these concrete walls.

  She knew that Ryan was a distraught father who was doing exactly what she herself might do were she in his position.

  She knew far more than the public could know about the case because BoneMan was still out there somewhere, plotting his next move. Austin was coming apart in a panic, but her first priority was stopping the man, not holding the public’s hand, and for the time being that meant keeping a lid on certain details.

  Mort Kracker was left with dealing with a city gripped by fear. She’d seen a number of cases terrorize regio
ns of the country before. The DC sniper had virtually shut down Washington, DC. The I-9 killer, the Candy Man in Houston, a long list had left their mark on communities.

  And now BoneMan had left his mark on Austin. Coverage of the astounding series of events that had led to the dead end they now faced blanketed all of the major networks. Blogs and news stories on the Internet had logged tens of millions of hits. In today’s tech-savvy world, information could hardly be contained.

  All of this had only fueled the fear of those in what the media was now calling the kill zone. Not surprisingly, because many of BoneMan’s victims had been students, all public and most private schools in Austin had canceled classes until the FBI could assure them it was safe to return, something Ricki would have done two days earlier. But Kracker was treading water after so many apparent failures in the case.

  A camper had found the white Honda Accord Ryan had stolen in a small campground called Crow’s Nest Ranch in western Texas yesterday. Ryan’s radio message now made perfect sense. He’d likely found the location and sent out a message on the radio waves, challenging BoneMan to meet him at the Crow’s Nest Ranch, precisely as he’d claimed.

  The evidence response team from the Dallas field office had done well to locate and take plaster casts of tire tread that proved to be an exact match to the Ford F-150 pickup truck that BoneMan had used two years earlier.

  He wanted them to know that he had taken Ryan Evans.

  But that knowledge, like the Crow’s Nest crime scene, had led them nowhere. So Ricki had convinced herself to escape the tensions mounting in Austin once again this morning by asking Father Hortense to join her here, in the quarry, to give her his take on the drawings that filled the walls. He was both a religious man and psychiatrist, and as such was uniquely qualified.

  “What stands out to you, Father?”

  “The crosses, naturally. He’s clearly obsessed with them.”

  “As much as the bones?”

  “Well, yes, the skeletons go without saying.”

  “No proof at this point but I think we’ll find that this writing belongs to BoneMan.”

  The priest walked up to the image they were both studying: a full body-length drawing of a complete skeleton floated before a hastily drawn cross with its arms spread wide and its feet pointed down. No nails or rope fixed the skeleton to the cross. Its skull stared at them with two round, empty eye sockets and smiled with a perfect set of large teeth.

  “Is his moniker his own or did someone else name him?” The priest leaned forward and looked more closely at the wrists.

  “The newspaper in El Paso was the first to call him BoneMan. It caught on.”

  He traced a line written in Latin next to the image. “Not one of his bones shall be broken; They will look on the one they have pierced.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Prophecies concerning the crucifixion of Christ.” His eyes scanned the wall. “I would say he’s more obsessed with crucifixion than with bones.”

  “This is the first cross we’ve found,” she said.

  “Just because his victims haven’t been found hanging from crosses doesn’t mean he doesn’t consider each execution a kind of crucifixion. Based on these writings, I would say he’s reenacting Christ’s death.”

  Ricki stood and joined him, moving to her left so as not to block the floodlights.

  “How so?”

  “The Romans always broke the bones of those they crucified with a heavy hammer.” He indicated the fibula with a curved finger. “Breaking the legs made it impossible for the victims to support their weight, forcing them into suffocation quickly. But not so with the crucifixion of Christ, one of the most remarkable aspects of his death.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “Thousands of years before his death, it was prophesied that when the Jews’ messiah was lifted up and killed, none of his bones would be broken. According to Luke’s record the two men crucified with Christ both had their bones broken—”

  “But not him.”

  “Not him. It was the fact that this was prophesied much earlier that makes it remarkable. And it seems that our man is determined to do it right this time. I would say he’s breaking bones in a fitful rage, like a spoiled child.”

  He looked up at Ricki. “If so, your killer is in part motivated by his anger at God. At the father.”

  “Ryan,” Ricki said.

  “You said Ryan claimed that BoneMan called Burton Welsh the father of lies.”

  “That’s right. A reference to Lucifer.”

  “Or a play on words, condemning an imposter. I would say it’s more likely he transfers that name to others because he sees himself as Lucifer but refuses to accept the moniker Father of Lies.”

  Ricki nodded. “Maybe. You said partly motivated. What else is pushing BoneMan?”

  “I would say he wants to punish the fathers and take their place. He wants to be the father.”

  Keen insight, assuming it was right. “All this from a drawing on the wall?”

  He shrugged. “Why else hasn’t he killed Ryan? He’s had ample opportunity. I think he’s playing both Ryan and Bethany. Punishing the father and drawing the daughter.”

  “And he kills the girls why?”

  “Because they don’t measure up to his ideal of a daughter.”

  It made sense, actually. Scary sense. They’d danced all around similar theories, but hearing Hortense put it so plainly, Ricki wondered why they hadn’t vocalized as much earlier.

  “Your man is motivated by hatred and jealousy,” the priest said. Then he shrugged again. “But that’s just me.”

  “And why doesn’t he break their skin?”

  He thought for a moment. “Another anomaly in Christ’s death—”

  “His side was pierced.”

  “Correct. BoneMan is reenacting the crucifixion by doing it right this time. Broken bones and no pierced flesh, both of which were prophesied. He even starts with the hands, but no nails this time.”

  “One very sick puppy,” Ricki said.

  They stared at each other, lost in the notion. It gained them no ground on BoneMan for the moment, but understanding the man would pay dividends soon enough. Assuming Hortense was in the ballpark.

  Her phone rang. Kracker. She slipped it open.

  “Valentine.”

  “Ricki, we have another victim.”

  The basement seemed to tip under her feet. She could feel her face cool. The first name that screamed through her mind was Bethany. Then Ryan. Surely BoneMan hadn’t taken the time to search out an unrelated victim.

  She couldn’t find the voice to respond.

  “The neighbors found Celine Evans facedown in the swimming pool after she failed to answer her phone this morning. No blood. All of her primary bones, including her spine, were broken. It’s his work. I need you back here immediately.”

  “God help us. Does the press know yet?”

  “They will within the hour. Just get back here, Valentine.” He sounded as if he wanted to say more. But he disconnected.

  The priest was staring at her. “What is it?”

  Ricki closed her phone. “BoneMan killed Celine Evans last night.”

  35

  RYAN HEARD THE footsteps in the hall first, but his mind was deep in a well of sorrow and he was applying all of his energy to staying afloat in the black, inky emotions trying to suck him under. The soft padding of feet sounded more like his heart slogging through the stuff.

  And he was succeeding. The pain was there, all around, pressing in on his flesh, but he could tread these brackish waters with relative ease so long as he kept his mind focused and strong.

  Even the pain of his broken hand, now badly swollen, had abated.

  He’d stopped his weeping and gnashing of teeth many hours ago and applied himself exclusively to the task of preparing himself for the moment he knew would eventually come, like the coming of the first winter storm.

  He was the father and BoneMan
had taken him for the exclusive purpose of tormenting either him or Bethany or, more likely, both to drive them apart.

  Evil was predictable, always painfully expected. Even so, whenever the enemy came, whether it be in the form of a suicide bomber bent on blowing up a bus full of women and children or in BoneMan’s form, the shock and pain could be immobilizing.

  Ryan knew that Bethany’s life (assuming that she was still breathing, a prospect that he clung to without regard for the alternative) would likely depend on his ability to disregard those debilitating emotions so that he could do what was needed to save her.

  He would throw himself at this singular objective. And if for any reason he failed, he would live or die with the pain of that failure, but also he would live or die as a father. The father he’d never been. The father he was today, in the deep black pit, where he could only hope for one chance to hold his daughter’s hand and lead her out of darkness.

  Ryan kept his eyes closed and listened to the padding of his heart. To the feet. His eyes sprang wide.

  What was that? Was that—

  All of his reasoning, the hours of careful deliberation, the days of pining for an opportunity to come face-to-face with the one who’d violated his offspring fell away for an instant and his heart bolted against his chest.

  BoneMan. Those were the feet of him, walking toward his door.

  He very nearly threw himself from the bed, intent on rushing the door. Instead he quickly gathered himself, recapturing the practiced resolve and calculation that their lives now depended on.

  Ryan lay perfectly still and swallowed his impulse to panic.

  The rusted latch clicked as the lock disengaged. He heard the door hinges squeal softly. There was a moment of silence as his visitor paused at the door, then walked in. He didn’t close the door.

  And all the while Ryan refused to look. Refused to quickly acknowledge his captor. He lay still, staring at the sea of hairy roots on the ceiling, knowing that BoneMan was watching him with curiosity, courting a sliver of uncertainty.

  Ryan spoke first, for his sake, not for his captor’s. “Hello, BoneMan.”