by Ted Dekker
“It’s possible. Classic case of multiple personalities. Fractured by a traumatic event. He wouldn’t have been a multiple before the most recent experience in the desert, naturally…”
“You mean he would have known what he was doing two years ago as BoneMan and carried that knowledge with him when he was deployed to Iraq this last time.”
“Yes. If he fractured, it would have been in the desert. He no longer remembers that he was BoneMan.”
“And so now he’s playing both parts, abductor and father. He’s essentially playing a game with himself.”
“It’s possible, yes. I told you as much on the phone.”
“Right. As the therapist in charge, you probably know Ryan better than anyone. When you hear his voice on the tape, what conclusion do you draw? I just want your gut reaction, Father.”
Hortense’s soft brown eyes flickered. “Hard to say, agent.”
“If you were to guess. If his daughter’s life depended on your guess.”
“Then no.”
“No as in he’s faking it, or no as in he’s not BoneMan?”
“No as in he’s neither faking it nor BoneMan,” Hortense said.
She let his statement stand for a few seconds.
“We have a lot of evidence that suggests he took his daughter, Father,” Mark said.
The psychiatrist nodded at the machine. “Play the rest.”
Ricki depressed the pause button to disengage it.
You’ve taken the daughters before. I know your work. I sat with the children for three days and I heard their bones break. Now take the father. You know that’s what you need, to destroy the father.
Then:
I’ll be waiting where they make their home, BoneMan. Find me before they shoot me out of the sky.
“Understand, MPD is anything but a precise diagnosis, and I can understand the temptation to pin it on Ryan—it would answer plenty of questions. But the man I treated was a distraught father who was just coming to grips with the realization that his failure as a father wasn’t solely his responsibility. He never once broke from that persona while I was treating him. What I hear on this tape is the same man, pushed into regression by the discovery that his daughter whom he loves more than his own life is now in the hands of a killer. He is a desperate man, capable of only God knows what, but I don’t think he’s fractured.”
“Welsh is gonna love that,” Mark muttered.
“It’s just my opinion,” Hortense said. “I’m sure you could find other professionals to disagree. And with more evidence, I myself might change my opinion.”
“But if you are right,” Ricki said, “then this is all a crime of passion, not something that he planned.”
“No, he did plan it. But men like Ryan Evans don’t need a lot of time to plan. They think well on their feet. I would say that what you have here is one very desperate father who is playing along with the killer for his daughter’s sake.”
“And this last statement?”
“Where they make their home?” he said, repeating the tape.
“Mean anything to you?”
“No. Clearly the killer has been in contact with him.”
“He claimed the killer left him a message, but we found no answering machine in his apartment.”
“Really? I left him messages all the time.”
“Then he took it with him.”
An FBI evidence response team had spent six hours tossing the entire apartment and found nothing of earth- shattering import. The lab had confirmed numerous interesting details that filled out his profile as a meat eater who loved Lucky Charms and coffee, wore Armani Exchange boxers, changed his sheets frequently, and read books on foreign politics for pleasure. But nothing in the apartment had led them any closer to understanding the man who’d kidnapped his own daughter after brutally killing seven young women as BoneMan.
“The machine holds the killer’s voice,” Hortense said. “His only tangible connection to the person who holds his daughter. I would take it as well.”
“Where would you go?” she asked. “If you were Ryan?”
“That’s an impossible question. Depends who they are. Where they make their homes. A home or lair somewhere, home to more than one, but who. The victims?”
“Did you ever talk about flying?”
“What?”
She shrugged. “‘Before they shoot me out of the air.’ I know it’s grasping, but that’s all we have now.”
“Birds?” Hortense said.
“What birds?”
But he just shrugged.
Ricki stood and crossed to the window. “Anything else comes to mind, I’m sure you’ll contact us, Father.”
“Of course.”
“And if he calls you…”
“You’ll be the first to know.”
She turned back. “You may be the only person he trusts.”
“You may be right.”
“And you, do you trust him, Father?”
He thought about that for a moment, then frowned. “I trust that he will do whatever love demands he do for the sake of his daughter.”
“Well, he’s running out of time.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He said the killer gave him seven days. He’s down to four days.”
The priest who was also a psychiatrist blinked. “Really? Like the seven days of creation.”
“I would say this is more like un-creation.”
“BoneMan is playing the role of Lucifer.”
“Oh? And what would that make Ryan?”
“I suppose we’ll eventually find out, won’t we? How far would God go to save his child?”
“Not as far as Lucifer would go to possess a child,” Ricki said.
“Oh?”
“Surely a good God would limit himself. I doubt Lucifer, on the other hand, would.”
The man nodded slowly. “Ryan’s not God. He’s a father who has lost his child.”
“And God hasn’t?”
22
ALVIN FINCH DISLIKED two things about the human condition; he truly despised three. Their love of pleasure. Their love of knowledge. Their love of life that was devoid of both pleasure and knowledge.
He’d seen a bumper sticker once that claimed life wasn’t measured by the number of breaths one took but by the moments that took one’s breath away. It was one of those sayings that impressed average humans because, however much they hoped they believed it, they simply couldn’t. In reality they were too fearful of death to consider living any moment of life in a manner that might even harm, much less kill.
In fact, the only humans who risked death for the sake of living, truly living, were those who had lost their minds and did stupid things like jump out of airplanes or off high-spanning bridges with rubber bands attached to their legs.
Alvin had provided those in Texas with a string of moments that quite literally took their breath away, both on a very intimate level and on a social level. Instead of thanking him for exposing such beautiful moments of life, they’d set out to hunt him down and erase him from their petty little world.
Ryan Evans, on the other hand, was proving to be a human being who was willing to explore death for the sake of living well, and this fact disturbed Alvin Finch.
He would flush out the man’s true nature as an imposter soon enough, of course. He would humiliate this traitor and send him away yelping with his tail tucked between his legs. He would destroy the man’s resolve to play father. He would rip out his heart and shove it so far down his throat that he would die from constipation.
Killing the man outright was tempting, and the time for that would come, but not before he convinced the man to wholly reject Bethany first. So that Alvin could truly be her father.
The only way to truly be a daughter’s father was to win her heart, regardless of who contributed the seed. And the only way to truly win a daughter’s heart was to help her reject any other father she blindly accepted as her own so that
she could be free to love Alvin as much as he loved himself.
Thinking these thoughts, he fought a terrible temptation to turn around and rush back to the daughter. He’d spent days watching her through the cracks, studying her every move, resisting only with great effort the temptation to rush in and persuade her to love him.
This time was different. This time he had to deal a decisive and final blow to any living soul who would pretend to be her father.
Alvin slowed the Ford F-150 pickup down as he approached the sign along Highway 166 that read CROW’S NEST RANCH, 2 MILES. Gravel crunched under the tires like popcorn.
He’d heard the message on the radio seventeen hours after Evans had delivered it. He would have heard it sooner because he did like to follow the authorities’ general progress on the case each time he took a girl, but he’d been preoccupied with securing the site with Bethany, which explained his delay.
The moment he heard the challenge his heart had begun to beat strong. He understood where Evans was immediately. A place called Crow’s Nest.
Crows made their homes in crow’s nests, and Evans, an intelligence officer who was accustomed to speaking in code, was telling him that he would wait for him at a place called Crow’s Nest.
An intelligent man would choose a location unlikely to be visited by authorities or a steady stream of patrons, which eliminated the seven restaurants in Texas that incorporated Crow’s Nest in their names.
He dismissed two small bed-and-breakfasts as well.
The Crow’s Nest Ranch was the only place in Texas that Alvin would have chosen to wait, if the shoe was on the other foot. Not only was Evans courageous, he was highly intelligent.
The Internet brochure for Crow’s Nest Ranch claimed that it was a secluded camping retreat eighteen miles west of Fort Davis, four hundred and thirty miles directly west of Austin. Rugged, only for the discriminating traveler who wanted to commune with nature in the most positive way. Evergreens grew from a parched landscape that rose to the mesas surrounding the isolated camping retreat, which offered some cabins as well as RV spots and dry camping.
Alvin drove past the self-service payment box and the cabin near the entrance that announced a manager lived inside and wound past the three motor homes that were parked at the hookups. He knew that all F-150 pickups were suspect now that he’d struck again, but there were far too many of them to raise suspicion every time one drove by. He felt reasonably safe.
A man wearing a blue plaid shirt and a brown cowboy hat walked with his head down. Anyone who came to Crow’s Nest Ranch was probably looking to escape the hustle and bustle of the city. It was an almost perfect hiding spot.
Perhaps he would bring the next girl here, to this remote getaway nestled in the trees eighteen miles away from the closest town. But there wouldn’t be a next girl, because he had finally and fully found his daughter in Bethany, he was sure of it.
He pulled the truck onto a dirt road that wound around the campground to a ravine along the north side. Taking the binoculars, he exited the truck, checked to make sure he was alone, and headed up into the trees to his right.
A large outcropping of rock hid the campsite that Evans had chosen, but from his vantage point above the grounds, Alvin could see him and his car, laid out bare like a dog.
He wiggled in behind a pile of boulders, brought the binoculars to his eyes, and scanned the campsite below. He acquired the man’s form, seated in the dirt, with his back against a tree, slumped over, bored out of his skull.
The black Ford Taurus was parked behind some trees in precisely the same spot Alvin had found it yesterday. By all appearances, the man had not moved a muscle in the last twenty-four hours. He’d raced here after delivering his message and then waited like an obedient father, out of options.
Alvin set the binoculars down and folded his hands. A lizard scattered some pebbles behind him. A faint breeze cooled his neck. The boulders provided some shade here. He wondered how many hikers had found their way to this precise spot. Likely very few. In fact, he might be the first human to touch this soil.
He wasn’t able to shower regularly during a taking, and this time, because he’d agreed to extend the father seven full days, he was concerned that his skin might begin to smell.
Protected as he was from the elements, hidden behind the rocks, he stripped off his shirt, set it next to the binoculars, and then loosened his belt. He pulled out the travel-sized bottle of Noxzema lotion and set it next to the shirt, then he lowered the cotton dungarees and pulled his boxer shorts down to his ankles.
Now he stood naked except for his boots, his underwear and his pants around his lower legs. Not ideal, but it would have to do.
Alvin wiped a generous portion of Noxzema on his right palm and began to apply, beginning at the back of his neck and working his way down over his unblemished chest. He could feel the beginnings of stubble growing around his nipples, and this bothered him some, but it couldn’t be helped.
There was one thing that bothered Alvin, two things that drove him insane. The smell of body odor after three days without a bath. And cologne.
The medicinal smell of camphor associated with Noxzema, however, was the incense of the gods.
He used the contents of half the bottle to smoothe his skin from his neck down to his ankles. At one point a small ladybug had lighted on his naked hip, and he’d flattened it with a loud smack.
A quick check through the binoculars assured him that Evans hadn’t heard the strike. He’d used a stick to scrape the remnants of the bug from his skin before resuming the application of Noxzema between his legs and behind his knees, all the way to his ankles.
Satisfied that he was clean, Alvin dressed, then looked at his subject again.
No movement. Was he sleeping?
He was tempted to go down and talk to the man. Why not? He couldn’t afford to be seen yet, naturally. But why avoid the pleasure of talking to the man instead of leaving the note in his car as he’d planned?
Alvin took his time, letting the idea grow slowly inside of him until he didn’t think he could delay much longer. He thought about reapplying, but the desire to hear the fear in Evans’s voice was so great that he couldn’t even concentrate on thoughts of reapplying, however enjoyable such thoughts might be.
Yes, why not? It was time to talk to Ryan Evans.
HE’D DONE EVERYTHING he could think to do, which was precisely what BoneMan wanted him to do, Ryan thought. But none of this made the task at hand easy or even manageable.
He’d kept telling himself as he’d driven west two nights earlier that he was doing the right thing, that he hadn’t lost his mind, that he was making the kind of move that would give him the highest likelihood of recovering his daughter alive.
That with each mile the Taurus rolled west, his daughter drew closer, although he felt sure he was leaving her behind, hidden in a hole somewhere. He wanted to be close to her bedroom, he wanted to walk around her room and touch her photographs and schoolbooks.
He’d pushed the speed limit as much as he dared and pulled into the campground early the next morning after a five-hour drive. Driving through the darkened camp, following the bright twin beams from the headlamps, he’d suspected that he’d made a mistake. And when he’d finally guided the car under a large pine and turned off the engine, the silence had crushed him with the fierce certainty of utter failure.
He’d sat unmoving in the car until dawn broke. But the rising sun had brought nothing except for more silence.
He’d walked around the camp, relieved to see that he was one of only three campers in the entire ranch. Then he’d climbed to the highest point behind his small clearing and scanned the horizon for most of the day.
All the while he replayed his message, begging the BoneMan to come. Surely he’d heard. Ryan had kept up with the radio coverage of his incursion into the country station, and he’d taken hope in the fact that anyone who turned on a radio in Texas now knew of his challenge.
&nbs
p; You’ve taken the daughters before. I know your work. I sat with the children for three days and I heard their bones break. Now take the father. You know that’s what you need, to destroy the father.
I’ll be waiting where they make their home, BoneMan. Find me before they shoot me out of the sky.
But what if BoneMan didn’t take him up on his challenge? Or what if the man was less intelligent than Ryan had assumed? What if he was in a gully even now, scratching his head, wondering what Ryan had meant when he said he would be where they made their homes?
Then again, BoneMan’s choice of the crow could hardly be the product of an uneducated man. Throughout history the crow had been identified with the messenger of God, whether for good or for evil.
In India, for example, in the Mahabharata, the messengers of death were drawn as crows. The Celts, the Japanese, and the Chinese all identified the crow as a good omen from God. Whether good or evil, the black bird was identified with the forces of creation and destruction wherever it was found.
BoneMan saw himself as a messenger to society, flying high for all to see, and he wanted Ryan, the father of his latest victim, to join him. Ryan had gone one step further by calling BoneMan to find him at the Crow’s Nest.
He’d managed to fall into an exhausted sleep the second night, but when he woke the next morning to the sound of birds chirping in the nearby trees, a depression he didn’t think possible had swallowed him.
There was nothing to do but wait. An agonizing wait that consisted not of hours or minutes but of seconds. Each one ticking off slowly. He’d listened to the radio to get the latest news on the case, but there was no news. Bethany was gone. BoneMan was gone. Ryan Evans was gone.
He’d chanced a quick stop at a gas station halfway across the state and paid cash for several loaves of bread and lunch meat, but he’d lost his appetite and had to force himself to eat after a day of fasting.
There was nothing to apply his mind to. No course of action to take. No puzzle to solve. He sat on the ground with his back to the big tree and prayed to God, the same mantra, over and over.
Please, help her be safe. Keep her alive. Just keep her alive. I’m sorry.