BoneMan's Daughters

by Ted Dekker

  He released the hammer and dropped to his knees. The cell phone had been taped to the underside of the bed’s metal springs. He reached under, tore at the tape, and ripped it free.

  Shoved the receiver to his ear, still on his knees.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Father. How are we doing?”

  Ryan tried to stand but couldn’t, so he sank to one leg.

  “Is he unconscious?”

  Ryan glanced around, wondering if he was being watched. “Yes.”

  “You please me,” the man said. “I wasn’t sure you had what it took. Did you enjoy it?”

  “I… where are you? What am I supposed to do?”

  “I thought I made that clear. Are you losing focus?” He could hear the man’s steady breathing. “Perhaps I could… help you focus.”

  “No. No, that’s not necessary. I’m focused.”

  “When you’re finished breaking ten of his bones like the drawings show, I want you to leave him there and return to the place of the crows. If you’ve been a good father, I’ll bring you in and let you see Bethany. Would you like that?”

  “Yes.” Rage, the kind of bitter rage that wipes away all reason, clouded his mind.

  “Then you’d best be hurrying. She’s waiting for you. Remember, seven days. I’m going to do it Sunday at dawn.”

  “I… I can’t kill him. I can’t do this.”

  Silence.

  “You can’t make me do this!” he cried.

  When BoneMan spoke his voice had softened and he sounded tired, even exhausted.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Click.

  “No, wait! Wait, I didn’t mean—”

  But the line was dead.

  Ryan sat with the phone pressed to his ear for a full thirty seconds without being able to muster the strength to move. He knew he’d just crossed a line but he couldn’t bring himself to consider the cost of his mistake.

  He slowly pushed himself to his feet, set the cell phone on the bed, picked up the sledgehammer, and approached Burton Welsh’s unconscious form.

  “FORTY MILES west of your current location.” The radio crackled in Ricki’s lap. She couldn’t see the helicopter that relayed the information to them because the sky was still dark despite a graying line on the western horizon. The clock read 6:07 AM.

  “We have a dark-colored sedan, I repeat we can see a dark-colored sedan parked at the bottom of a small quarry near the switching station in question.”

  A pause.

  “Do you want us to go in and take a look?”

  Ricki lifted the transmitter and keyed the talk button. “No, hold on that.” To Mark who was driving: “How long?”

  “Twenty-five minutes.”

  “Make it fifteen.”

  “I’m not sure the old Buick will do more than a hundred.”

  She switched back to the radio. “I need you to stay back. Copy that? I don’t want anyone on the ground to know they’ve been spotted.”

  “Copy that. But if they’re outside, they’ve already heard us.”

  “Then back off. Get out of there.”

  “Roger that.”

  She set the radio back down, studied the graying sky dead ahead. A farmhouse sat in predawn slumber off the road. She remembered a similar country house, peaceful and sleeping, ten years earlier. Approaching the house you could see nothing out of place, certainly nothing that indicated the kind of tragedy hidden by the four white walls of the Heath homestead. Inside they’d found four dead bodies, two of whom were the parents of the seventeen-year-old daughter who’d agreed to help her manipulative boyfriend kill her family because they had forbidden her to see him.

  It happened. It happened all around the country, all the time. Typically not as dramatic as the Heath slayings, but signs of society’s evils just the same. Bruised faces, strung out druggies, torn hearts…

  On January 1, 2008, for the first time in history, a full one percent of all Americans were locked behind bars (one in every 99.1 persons, to be precise). The number had shocked those who took the time to consider its magnitude because America did a wonderful job of hiding its ugly underbelly.

  No one wanted to look at the common evils of society. Very few were willing to put aside their own pursuit of happiness long enough to consider the effects of greed and jealousy around them. From what she’d seen, humans were essentially troubled. For every one behind bars, another ten deserved to be behind bars, but that would put one in ten Americans behind bars.

  So what do you do? You focus on the big ones and let the rest go. You put a killer like BoneMan in front of them and they went ballistic, but BoneMan was really only the tip of the iceberg, and agents like Ricki had to learn to bear that burden on their own.

  They wound around a rare corner and she looked to her right to watch the two black Lincoln Continentals careening behind them. The train extended back to the seven highway patrol vehicles that flew around the corner, lights flashing in silence.

  “Would you say it’s morning?”

  “First light,” Mark said. “I think this counts. Hard to believe that we’re actually going to find anything after all this time. You know you hound someone for years and they never give you a peek. Then you get one phone call and it’s all over.”

  “Somehow I doubt that,” she said. “You’re forgetting that the phone call came from him. Why is BoneMan leading us to himself?”

  “Because he’s not the same BoneMan we went after two years ago.”

  ACCORDING TO THE stamp on the side of the sledgehammer, it weighed seven pounds. How hard did you have to swing a seven-pound hammer to break the ulna and radius without forcing their jagged edges through the skin?

  This was the question that clawed at Ryan’s mind as he stood over Burton Welsh’s heaving body.

  The man had been wakened by Ryan’s second blow, which had bounced off his forearm (the first had missed entirely). He’d given up on the screaming and now just glared up at Ryan, breathing hard.

  “Sorry,” Ryan said. “I don’t want to do this.”

  The man yelled something that approximated a string of curse words, then settled back to his heavy breathing.

  “I only have to break ten bones,” he said. “I have to do it, I don’t have a choice, he has my daughter.”

  Another string of curse words.

  Ryan considered his predicament again, for the hundredth time, searching for any way around breaking these bones, but all of his reasoning ended in the same place. BoneMan was going to kill Bethany. The only way to possibly stop him was to hurt this man.

  And morning was coming, maybe here.

  He lifted the sledge to his shoulder and lined it up with Welsh’s arm. If he stepped back and just took a full natural swing, he would hit the ceiling, and even if he didn’t, he would likely smash the arm. Instead he had to line up the sledge and drop it with more force than the last time.

  His arms shook. What was a broken bone? What was just one broken bone in the grand scheme of things? What was just one broken bone next to his daughter’s life?

  But Ryan couldn’t stop his shaking, which now began to spread to his legs. He was suddenly terrified that if he didn’t swing now, he might lose his resolve altogether. He might not be strong enough to save his daughter.

  Pushed now by panic, he began to scream as he stood at the ready over the man’s arm.

  And when the scream began to run out of air, he closed his eyes and he swung the sledgehammer with all of his might.

  “LEFT.”

  Mark turned left on Highway 83 and flew south, followed by the black Continentals and the cruisers with flashing lights. They drove in silence now, drawing closer, ever closer to the quarry the air patrol had identified as the likely target.

  Cornstalks rose on both sides of the two-lane road, late-fall feed variety that looked gray in the growing light. It could be any lazy fall morning and no one would be the wiser that somewhere, someone was in trouble.

  A
young child prostitute in Bangkok.

  A village of mothers in Afghanistan.

  A district attorney in Texas.

  Her radio crackled. “You’re approaching the road.”

  The first two would have no cavalry to come to their rescue.

  She was Burton Welsh’s cavalry.

  “Here, here!”

  She pointed to the cockeyed sign that read LANDERS LANE, and Mark swung the Buick onto a dirt road, cutting between the fields.

  They blasted over gravel, sending clouds of dust back into the cars that followed.

  “Okay, slow down. You’re about two hundred yards out. The quarry is to the right of the switching station.”

  Ricki keyed the radio. “Okay. Mark and I are first in. We’re going for the door as soon as we’ve established close-in perimeter. I need a team on the car, clear it, then we go.”

  “Copy that,” said Roger Clemens, with the tactical unit.

  Mark brought the Buick to a slow crawl as they drove up to the fence surrounding the huge transformers and electric poles that made up the switching station.

  “Follow the sign,” Ricki said, voice low even though there really was no need for quiet.

  He guided the car into a shallow quarry and the lights played over the black Taurus parked at the center. The sky was now gray and getting brighter by the minute, but the sun hadn’t yet broken the horizon.

  “Hold up.”

  He shoved the stick into park and they both stepped out into the cool morning air. Dust roiled past them as the cars came to a stop behind them, forming a wide arch across the quarry.

  No sign of life from the car.

  All eyes were now on the door that led into what the electric company had identified as an unused storage shed.

  Ricki slipped a nine-millimeter Glock from her shoulder harness and covered the door as she waited for the rest of the team to take their positions. The precaution would cost them a few seconds, but it was well worth the delay in any unknown situation, and this qualified.

  Mark spoke in a whisper. “Ready.”

  She moved forward on the balls of her tennis shoes, not bothering to crouch. More important to keep her barrel trained on the door in the event that it flew open.

  But it didn’t fly open.

  A soft wail, the sound of a man weeping, came to her from beyond the door now. A chill washed down her back. It sounded like a wounded animal. Maybe it wasn’t a man.

  Mark reached the door just ahead of her, gripped the handle, and, after a quick nod from her, threw it wide to offer her a full view of the interior.

  She stepped in, gun trained and ready, finger pressing lightly on the trigger. Mark was already there beside her.

  The first moment into a crime scene was always a moment stuffed with adrenaline and heightened sensitivity. You never knew if you would meet a slug, a victim, or a vacant room. None of them were particularly good outcomes, which made the moment of truth an unpleasant one, regardless.

  No exception here; Ricki saw it all in less than a second and felt her stomach sink.

  Orange light showed a nearly naked man whom she recognized as Burton Welsh strapped to a metal bed. His legs were stretched between two bedposts as was one of his arms.

  The other was wrapped in a towel and cinched down to two blocks of wood. The forearm was folded between the blocks at an obscene angle. The DA’s chest rose and fell, but he lay unconscious.

  On the floor lay another man, facedown, hugging what appeared to be a large sledgehammer, weeping. “No, no, no, no…”

  The man turned his tear-streaked face slowly toward her and stared up, disoriented. This was Ryan Evans.

  “I can’t.” Tears streamed down his knotted face. “I can’t do it. I can’t.”

  He just kept saying that, and Ricki’s heart broke.

  Mark stepped past her, gun on the man’s head. “Not a muscle, boy.”

  27

  BETHANY LAY ON the bed, curled up on her side, shaking from the cold. It wasn’t really that cold, she knew, but her skin had gone prickly a few hours ago and nothing she did seemed to stop the shivers.

  Thing of it was, she’d been strong up to this point. She’d kept her head stretched just above the pool of fear and breathed as calmly as she could, careful to process as much information as she could.

  Like father, like daughter. And she hated him for making her like him.

  Then again, if she’d been more like Celine, she’d be a puddle of flesh now, overwhelmed by emotion.

  Days had passed, she didn’t know how many, but she did know that each passing hour lessened the chances of her being found alive in this tomb. How long could the human body go without eating? She’d seen a show on it once, a movie about the guy who’d starved to death in Alaska after trying to find himself by disappearing. Had it been days or weeks? She couldn’t seem to remember. But he’d had water, right? She hadn’t had food or water for a long time; hadn’t felt the need to relieve herself for just about as long.

  Even her tears had stopped flowing.

  These were the least of her problems. The fact of the matter wasn’t what she was or wasn’t doing here in this concrete room. It was who had placed her here.

  That was the issue. That was the problem.

  That was what had been gnawing at her as the minutes crawled by and became hours without any change. And knowing a little about her captor, even without having seen him yet, she was sure that her being alone with the dread of knowing his identity was the whole point.

  BoneMan was leaving her alone to break her down and it was working.

  First her mind. But then her body. He was going to break her bones as he’d broken the bones of the other girls.

  Why? Because he was who he was and she was who she was. And really, the more she thought about it, they weren’t nearly as different as she might have once thought.

  She hated him for who he was and she hated herself for being the kind of person he wanted.

  Thoughts of suicide had come and gone over the days, but whenever she came close to convincing herself that running full speed into the wall with her head lowered would solve all of this, she learned that she didn’t want to die yet. In fact, that was the whole point. If she didn’t care, she wouldn’t be so tormented, lying here thinking of the sick coward who’d taken her.

  There was one thing that gave her hope. Only one that she could put her finger on, anyway. That was her anger.

  She discovered while lying in complete silence that when her self-pity turned to anger her heart beat stronger, and when her heart beat stronger she wanted to live longer. It would make her stand and pace on occasion, clenching her hands into fists.

  Her survival all came down to who BoneMan really was and who she really was, and how she could relate to the man.

  When Bethany thought of him, of what she would like to do to him if he were sitting on the floor right now and she had a gun or a rock—they wouldn’t be able to recognize him after she got through with him.

  But his sitting down and handing her a gun so that she could shoot bullets into his face was about as likely as her growing teeth that could bite through the wall and tunnel to freedom.

  More likely was that BoneMan would eventually walk into the room and begin preparations to break her bones. Until then, Bethany was powerless. When he came to her, she would change who she was so that he would find her unsuitable.

  Or she would try to help him change who he was so that he no longer had the need to use her in the way he intended.

  She’d spend endless hours thinking about what a sixteen-year-old girl could do to make the match between her and her abductor a bad match. His needs weren’t sexual, she knew that from the news reports two years earlier. It was at least something to build on.

  He wanted to be needed. Isn’t that what they all wanted? The pain of not being wanted drove him to this. She could at least understand that part of him.

  Or maybe revenge was driving him. Maybe his mo
ther had beat him or kept him in a closet and only fed him on weekends. She’d decided long ago that this must be at least partially correct. Something had happened to the man as a child to make him the kind of person he was.

  Maybe his father had abandoned him. It had happened to her. She hadn’t stooped to this level, nor could she.

  How far could someone go to be accepted and loved?

  Or maybe he was trying to teach society a lesson. A crusader on the warpath, striking down girls to make a point that somehow made him feel like a hero. Justifying himself, and ultimately feeling needed as a result.

  Or maybe he was just plain sick in the head and did this all for fun, like a child who lights the tails of cats on fire for fun.

  It made her wonder what made people do evil things in the first place. Why did some bullies beat up on dogs? Why did fathers walk out on their daughters? Why did thieves shoot gas-station attendants in the head? Why did pimps prostitute girls younger than she was? Why did politicians hate those who got in their way?

  In the end it was all about being needed. Being wanted.

  Bethany moaned, rolled slowly over so that her left arm was under her body, and pushed herself up. Dizziness spun the room and she sat still for a moment until it passed, then lowered her feet to the floor.

  Dirt from the mattress had smudged her blue plaid flannel pajama bottoms and turned her white T-shirt a light gray brown.

  As odd as it might seem, perhaps her greatest desire now was for BoneMan to walk into the room and make his intentions clear. Until then, she was left with her own crumbling mind and she didn’t know how much longer she could take it.

  She’d been telling herself that since the first time she’d woken up here. But something had begun to change these last few hours. The anger that had given her a small amount of hope had started to fade, replaced by a sense of being totally alone. Forgotten even. Abandoned.

  The feeling was what destitute must feel like. What if not even BoneMan came for her?

  What if no one really cared if she lived or died; only that BoneMan be stopped?

  What if all of her hopes and dreams and aspirations ended in a slow, mocking death in this oversized tomb?