by Ted Dekker
The man piled into the passenger seat, cursing bitterly now. Not the sign of humility and cooperation that Ryan was looking for.
He reached in, grabbed the larger man by his black hair, tugged his head out of the car door, and slammed the gun on his temple with as much force as he could manage, working in the tight space.
The DA slumped, unconscious. Ryan shoved him in, slammed the door after him, and raced around the car.
He’d succeeded thus far because of his urgency, not through any finesse, and he made no attempt at it now. He whipped the car through a tight turn and flew through streets running like rivers.
Beside him, the father of lies’ pajama-clad form leaned against the door. He’d known from the first mention of the term that BoneMan had been very careful in his selection of Bethany. This was far more than retaliation for the district attorney’s bravado in swearing to bring him to justice.
BoneMan knew that both he and Ryan agreed on at least one thing: Welsh was a pretender who had no claim to Bethany. He was the father of lies, and of all those BoneMan could have asked him to take, Ryan felt less conflicted about taking this one.
He had to slow down at the exit gate and wait for it to open, but he was already on Highway 71 before the first cop car flew by and peeled into Spanish Oaks.
The DA began to moan, and Ryan leaned over to give him another blow to the head. He simply could not allow the man to give him any trouble in the middle of his flight from the city.
Going northeast on 71 and then directly east on 29, the trip to Menard would take about two hours if he moved quickly.
Ryan moved. He cleared the city limits in under ten minutes and took the car up to eighty again. Now a nearly frantic urgency consumed him to get the man he’d abducted into whatever hole in the ground that BoneMan had prepared for them. He didn’t know what awaited them, only that it would involve breaking Welsh’s bones, and for the time being he refused to think through what that might entail.
The man stirred again thirty minutes east of Austin. The human head could only take so much trauma, and having been knocked out twice, the DA’s head wasn’t a good candidate for surviving yet another blow to the head.
“Whad…” the man was slurring, “whad… whad…” His head wobbled on his neck as he tried to climb back into consciousness.
Ryan rested the gun across his waist, trained on the man’s chest. “Don’t give me an excuse to shoot you. Dead or alive, that’s what he asked for, and I’d just as soon it be dead.”
Not true, but the only way Ryan could go through with this was to play his part without compromise. He’d set aside his emotions for the time being and if he did allow any to resurface, they’d best be anger rather than a sudden pang of guilt.
The man eyed him curiously, eyes taking in the gun as if he wasn’t sure it was real.
“What’s… what’s the meaning of this?”
“Are you going to make me hit you again?”
The DA studied the road ahead for a moment. His abduction was coming back into focus, Ryan thought. The man was a bull and would not make for an easy prisoner.
As if to confirm his suspicions, Welsh frowned. “Now you’ve done it. Now you’ve really gone and done it.”
This was a revelation that either gave the man courage or was meant to frighten Ryan. But the fact that he had “gone and done it” was no news at all.
“Do you have any idea how many officers are out looking for me now?”
“More than were looking for me? It doesn’t matter, they won’t find either of us until morning.”
“And then what?”
“And then the FBI will follow the directions I left for them. They’ll find us.”
The man didn’t seem capable of digesting this frank admission. He blinked repeatedly in the darkness.
“You’re giving yourself up?”
“Not yet.”
“What are you going to do? You’ll never get away with this—”
“Do you see any cops? I think I just did get away with it.”
“They’ll find us. I’m the district attorney—”
“Do you love her?”
“What?”
“Do you love Bethany?”
“That’s what this about? You’re throwing your life away because I’m sleeping with Celine?”
“Do you love them?”
It took the man a while to form his answer, and when he did he spoke in a low, rushed voice. “I swear I’ll never touch them again. Just let me go. I won’t press charges, I won’t say a thing—”
Ryan hit the man on his temple again. The DA collapsed in a limp heap on the front seat.
He pulled out the blue note and wedged it into the seam above the radio.
FATHER OF LIES.
MENARD–7 MILES SOUTH
WEST–2 MILES
BENEATH THE CROWS
I’LL BE WATCHING, FATHER.
Highway 29 intersected Highway 83 just south of Menard, and they made the junction at just past two in the morning. The two-lane roads were deserted and the rain had long ago tapered off to hardly more than a mist.
Ryan turned right on Highway 83, away from the tiny town of Menard, Texas, and headed south into the darkness.
No streetlights out here. No stars to light the sodden ground. Just his headlights, and as he approached the seven-mile marker headed south, he felt conspicuous, so he turned off the headlights as well.
Now he rolled along the asphalt in a quiet darkness that he found even more disturbing. He turned up the radio. The soft, melodic voice of Karen Carpenter singing “Bless the Beasts and the Children” sliced the silence.
He scanned the fields on either side. The man who they called BoneMan had Bethany out here in a hole somewhere, but no one driving by would ever guess it. The world didn’t like to look at the dark underside very often. But that didn’t change the ugliness; it only ensured that those who perpetuated the ugliness were left alone to kill and maim and rape.
The melancholic sounds of the Carpenters suddenly struck him as obscene and he turned off the radio and drove on in silence.
He stopped the Ford Taurus at the seven-mile marker. A dirt road headed directly east into the field on his right. The green sign that hung at a slight angle said it was called Landers Lane. He could just see the white letters by the light of a moon that was now trying to gleam past the breaking storm clouds.
Ryan held the car at the intersection for a few long breaths. He wiped his palms on his pants and looked over at Burton Welsh, the man who’d seduced his wife while he was in the desert.
The gravel under his rubber tires popped as he turned and rolled down Landers Lane. Cornstalks rose on either side. The road veered left—south—and he followed it with one eye on the odometer. But there was no need because the huge switching station rose from the earth at about the right distance, and Ryan knew immediately that he’d arrived.
The crows would perch themselves on the high-voltage lines that ran into the switching station. And under these lines somewhere there was a room. An old storage room that had sat unused for a long time while it waited to be occupied this night.
Then he saw it, a board on the fence that surrounded the switching station. A crudely marked red arrow pointed to the right, where a large mound of gravel stood against the dark sky.
He angled the car for the hill and saw that the ground dipped into a large pit beyond. This was a switching station, but it was also an old gravel pit. Or a mining pit.
The storage facility was built into the side of the hill. He could see that it sat closed on the face of the concrete, and on this wood door was the rough outline of a bird.
A crow.
RICKI VALENTINE JERKED upright with dreams of a sunny day in Saint John, Virgin Islands, still ambling through her head. She’d spent two weeks there after the apprehension of Phil Switzer, basking in the careless sun as far from the hot Texas summer as possible. She spent the time wandering the beach and visiting small e
stablishments that catered to tourists by selling overpriced trinkets and water-sporting opportunities, and all the while her mind had returned to the BoneMan only a few times. Amazing how a change of geography could jar the mind out of its deep, dark trenches.
The clock on her nightstand read 2:43 AM in large red letters. Her phone was still chirping. She wasn’t in the Caribbean now and BoneMan wasn’t behind bars.
“Hello?”
Mark sounded like he’d been up for a while. “Sorry for the hour, Ricki. We have a development. Burton Welsh’s house was broken into and he seems to be missing.”
The data swirled through her mind.
“Seems to be?”
“Well, he lives alone and the neighbors say he has a habit of coming and going at all hours, so the police can’t be sure he isn’t shacked up somewhere else.”
“But?”
“But his door shows signs of forced entry and his bed was slept in. His car’s still in the garage.”
Ricki stood from the bed. “So he was taken. When was this?”
“Almost three hours—”
“What?” She hurried to the bathroom, flipping on lights as she went. “You’re just now being told?”
“Evidently the man was a bit of a womanizer and someone down at the department has been sitting on a theory that this is woman trouble, nothing more. You go public only to learn that Welsh left with a jilted lover and… well, you get the picture. He’s an elected official.”
“Okay, text me the address. I’m on my way.”
“You gotta hand it to the guy, he’s got a set.”
That he did. If this was Ryan Evans, and Ryan Evans was indeed the killer, he’d come back to take the man whom he perceived as being the spoiler of his family. BoneMan had never taken male victims that they knew about, but the circumstances provided the perfect opportunity.
There was a kind of ironic beauty to it, Ricki thought. And then she scolded herself for such a crude thought.
“He’s breaking his own pattern and escalating. You realize what this means, Mark.”
“That the daughter is still alive.”
“That’s right. He’s involving Welsh. We find Welsh, we find the girl. No obvious leads.”
“A police cruiser remembers a black Ford sedan on Highway 71 as he responded to the call. Not too many cars on the road at that time.”
A black Ford Taurus had been flagged as stolen and put into the search grid along with another hundred possible vehicles Evans could have used for his escape.
“Nothing else?” She pulled on her jeans, cradling the phone between her shoulder and ear.
“They’re running prints from the door now. Nothing else.”
“Find that Taurus. Flood the airwaves with it. Anyone who drives a dark-colored Ford Taurus gets pulled over.”
“They’re on it. We could use some light; he couldn’t have picked a better night.”
“We may not have the time to wait for light.”
25
RYAN SAT IN the car as it ticked, cooling still after a full fifteen minutes of sitting in the quarry. Beside him, Welsh was still slumped up against the window, dead to the world. The clouds had just started to break up, allowing starlight to cast a cool glow over the barren depression into which he’d driven. The hum of high voltage from the nearby wires reached past the sealed car.
And ahead there, on the side of the hill, that concrete wall with a painted door. Other than the one arrow on the fence and this crow on the door, there was no sign of BoneMan.
But he was watching. Just as sure as he’d watched Ryan sitting under the tree at the Crow’s Nest Ranch, he was watching now, from the cracks between the boards in the door. From behind one of the boulders that lay around the quarry or from the rim above them.
He stared at the door, fixed to the seat like a skeleton long robbed of life. Bethany was either behind the door or she was not.
If she was behind it, then BoneMan intended for them both to face their greatest fears in the hours to come.
If she wasn’t behind the door, then he would be forced to face his greatest fear, which was that his daughter was still in the killer’s grasp somewhere, and Ryan would be left to do whatever BoneMan required in order to rescue his daughter.
For this reason Ryan found himself immobilized as he stared at the door.
And for what lay ahead of him pertaining to the DA. However guilty Welsh was of countless sins, he was not deserving of what lay ahead any more than the children in the desert were deserving of Kahlid’s hammer.
On the other hand, Ryan didn’t necessarily have to kill the man. Not yet. There had to be another way.
The thoughts ran in circles, but they did not bring any relief. These facts remained: The night was quiet. The night was dark. A captive man lay to his right. The wooden door was shut.
He had to enter that door and do what BoneMan demanded before morning.
Ryan pushed his door open and blinked at the obscenely loud buzz that cut through the air. He collected himself, then stepped out onto the gravel.
If there was any moment in his life he’d been born for, it was this one. No ordinary man could shut down his emotions and do what must be done the way he could. Hadn’t he proved that?
So then he would simply move through this situation in a cold, calculating fashion, without lingering long enough on any moment to allow his nervous system time to react with those chemicals that spawned emotion.
This wasn’t about him or, for that matter, about the man who’d sworn to uphold the law, his captive, Burton Welsh.
This night was about Bethany.
Ryan took one very deep breath, crossed in front of the car, and opened the passenger door. No longer supported, Welsh’s body slipped halfway out. His hands dangled onto the gravel—by all appearances, lifeless.
Ryan checked his carotid for a pulse, found one, and took both of his hands in his. He tugged the man out of the car and managed another ten feet before the man’s weight became too much to manage without slipping.
Removing his belt, he tied Welsh’s arms behind his back as tightly as he could manage. It took only a few sharp slaps on the man’s cheek to rouse him.
Another minute before the man was coherent enough to get his feet under his weight and stand, and Ryan took advantage of the time to shove a paper towel he retrieved from the car into his mouth.
The man made a feeble attempt to protest, but one poke of the gun barrel in his ear shut him up.
“Move.”
The man lumbered forward, up to what Ryan now thought of as a toolshed. It could have been built to house fuses or some other high-voltage parts that were best kept cool underground, or it could have been used to store machinery necessary to operate the quarry back in the day.
None of this mattered to Ryan, but he drew some comfort from the fact that he was able to think clearly enough to make simple deductions. The last thing he should do was react impulsively to whatever greeted him beyond that door.
That unlocked door.
He reached around Welsh, keeping the gun on his neck, and pulled the door open. Orange light from an oil lamp that hung in the middle of the room spilled out.
So then BoneMan had been here. Or was still here.
He used the barrel to propel Welsh into the room ahead of him, then closed the door behind them.
They stood in a room, perhaps twenty feet square, poured from concrete, with three large timbers to support a wood ceiling. The lantern hung from a hook on the center beam.
One glance around the room told Ryan that neither BoneMan nor Bethany was in this place, and he nearly ran back out to search the hillside for another door, another room, anyplace in which they might be hiding.
But there were drawings on the walls and these drawings made the purpose of his invitation here clear. BoneMan had used to chalk to draw dozens of medical diagrams showing the human skeleton. Large circles served as insets that magnified the form’s bones, marking joints and
specific points on each.
Instructions were written by each inset, detailing the correct amount of force to use so the bone wouldn’t break with enough force to cut through the skin.
Along one wall sat a metal-framed bed. And on the bed lay several piles of four-by-four wooden blocks. A neatly folded stack of towels and several coils of string had been set at the head of the bed.
Atop them lay a large sledgehammer and vise grips.
At first Welsh just stared, as did Ryan. But when the meaning of what this room might hold for him formed in Welsh’s mind, he protested with a wide-eyed grunt.
He bolted across the room before Ryan could stop him and spun back, tugging at the hasty restraints that held his arms behind his back.
“Stop it!” Ryan pointed the gun at his head, but Welsh showed no signs that he intended to stop anything. He was now yelling into the makeshift muzzle, attempting to spit it out.
“Stop it, I’ll shoot!”
But Ryan knew that he couldn’t shoot because the largest letters on the wall made this fact painfully clear.
Break his skin and he’s no use to me.
Break all of his bones and she goes free.
Father.
The complete absurdity of his predicament struck Ryan broadside for a moment. That he was seriously considering following BoneMan’s instructions felt at once sickening and compulsory. He wouldn’t kill Welsh. He wouldn’t do what Kahlid had done in the desert, no matter what was at stake. He couldn’t kill an innocent man even if it meant saving his daughter.
Or could he?
Because he couldn’t not save his daughter! He couldn’t not do whatever was humanly possible to keep Bethany from death. If he stopped now, Bethany would die, he was certain of it. And so, though he knew he would not, could not kill this man, he could not stop now. Not yet.
A way would come. A ram from the thicket to spare the innocent man. The FBI, BoneMan himself, Ryan’s own death—anything to spare him from abandoning his daughter, no matter what the cost.
Ryan did what he knew best to do. He shut down the emotion and kept the gun trained on the DA.