by Ted Dekker
“He’s dead, Ricki. For God’s sake, the district attorney of Austin, Texas, was just brutally murdered in the same manner as the victims he’d sworn to avenge. And it happened right under our noses! Do you have any idea how this looks?”
But Ricki couldn’t care less how it made anyone look. Her mind was suddenly full of one thought, and one thought only.
“What about Ryan?”
“He’s locked up in—”
“Have you called down there?”
“He’s in a cell, Ricki.”
“But have you checked?” she demanded with enough force to rattle her phone.
Pause. “No. My first call was—”
“I’ll call you back.” She pressed the end button. Quickly scrolled down the recent calls log, selected her last outgoing call, and hit send.
The phone rang seven times without an answer. She hung up, checked that she’d dialed the right number, and called again. This time a receptionist picked up after ten rings.
“Please hold.” That was it. The woman abruptly cut the line and placed her on hold. Ricki holstered her Glock and headed to her car. Fired it up and pulled out onto the street. Still nothing but a silent line.
She cursed, hung up, and called Kracker back.
“Kracker.”
“I need your help. Do you have an alternate line to the Eighth Street station? The main line isn’t responding.”
“What do you mean, not responding?”
“I mean something’s going down there and I need you to connect me!” she yelled.
“Hold on.”
He punched her off. She pulled onto MoPac and headed south. The highway was nearly empty at two in the morning, and she took the car up to a hundred. According to state law, any speeding infraction over a hundred miles an hour earned the driver an immediate escort to jail. That’s where she was headed anyway.
She’d covered a mile before Kracker came back on with the sound of a ringing phone behind his voice.
“Ricki?”
“Here.”
“I’m conferencing. This is the only number I have on me so I’m not—”
“Fourteenth Street Prison Division, please hold—”
“Mort Kracker, FBI here. What’s your name, son?”
“Sergeant Joseph Spinelli.”
“Fine, Joseph. I need to speak to someone in charge.”
“I’m… This is about the incident?”
“What incident?”
“I’m sorry, it’s a bit of a zoo down here. We had a prisoner break out of a cell. He knocked out a guard and managed to get out of the station before an alarm was sounded. The night chief—”
“What prisoner?” Ricki demanded.
“Evans,” the man said. “The prisoner who took the district attorney.”
But of course. They should have expected nothing less. She took the car up to a hundred and ten.
“When?”
“About half an hour ago,” Spinelli said.
“As of now, consider the scene part of a federal investigation,” Kracker snapped. “Lock it down. Do you understand me, Sergeant Spinelli? We’ll have an evidence response team there within half an hour. Don’t let anyone touch anything. This is a federal matter now.”
“The chief would like to talk to you, sir.”
“Put him on.”
“Hold on.” He set the phone down with a clunk.
“Ricki?”
“I’m already on my way, sir. Tell them I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
RICKI HELD THE shackles in her gloved hands, slowly turning them over, mind spinning with the story they told. Mark Resner had just arrived after she’d woken him with the news.
A crime scene investigator was already dusting and probing, but there were very few unanswered questions to investigate. They all knew what had happened.
They knew who the prisoner was; they’d put him in the cell themselves.
They knew that he’d managed to get out of his restraints. They knew that he’d called for the guard so that he could use the bathroom. They knew that Johnson had responded to the request and had, by all appearances, followed proper protocol by unlocking and entering the cell only when the restrained prisoner was safely against the wall with his shackled hands in plain sight.
They knew that Evans had overpowered Johnson and rendered him unconscious before the guard could raise an alarm. The prisoner had then taken the man’s gun and his uniform and made it all the way out of the building before another guard had gone looking for Johnson and found him in the cell in his boxers.
They also knew that Ryan had taken Johnson’s keys and that his white Honda Accord was missing from the parking lot out back.
What they didn’t know was where Ryan had gone.
Or how he’d managed to get out of his restraints.
Mark stared at the flat steel ring in Ricki’s hands. “You’d think they could come up with a more efficient way of restraining prisoners.”
“It’s a temporary arrangement. They don’t hold prisoners here very often, only special parties on the request of the DA.”
“Special parties? Is that what our man is?”
“Their term, not mine.” She turned the black shackle over and tried to slip her hand into the small opening, but it wouldn’t go. Maybe with a little Vaseline.
“Evans isn’t a small man. His hands have to be quite a bit larger than mine.”
“Only one way out.”
“He broke his thumb.”
“At the very least.”
She handed the restraint to Mark. “That’s what I call commitment.”
“He seems to be developing a taste for this.”
Ricki looked at him. “I don’t think anything could be farther from the truth. I think there’s nothing in the world that terrifies him more than the thought of his daughter’s bones being broken. To the point where he’s willing to break his own with his own hand, for the slimmest chance to save hers.”
“Well, that’s one way to look at it.”
“He was here, locked in chains when BoneMan killed Welsh. Ryan Evans is a father who will do anything to save his daughter. That is now the only way to look at it.”
Mark nodded, point conceded, and dropped the shackle on the bed, where it clanked in its chains. “Back to square one,” he said.
“A Honda Accord speeding on a back highway somewhere. At least it’s not black.”
“Somehow I don’t think it’ll matter. By morning the Accord will be long gone and Evans will be with BoneMan.”
The idea sent a shudder through her bones.
“God help him.”
31
THE NIGHT WAS dark, the night was cold, the night was hell there just ahead, beyond the car’s long-reaching high beams, around the next corner, at the Crow’s Nest. Ryan held the accelerator pedal to the floor, gripped the wheel tightly with his right hand, and prayed he was not too late.
Pain throbbed up his arm from the bone he’d broken next to his thumb. He’d wedged the shackle between the bed frame and one of the posts and positioned his hand so that all of his weight would fall on his thumb when he threw himself backwards, but even then the bone had survived two failed attempts.
When it had finally popped, he passed out from the pain.
And he’d passed out a second time trying to slide his collapsed hand through the shackle. But he had succeeded, and after a five-minute reprieve to collect his senses, he’d wound the chain around his wrist so that it appeared he was still bound by it, and he’d called the guard.
If there was one bit of grace in breaking a hand bone, it was that the swelling was limited because there was far less flesh to tear around a thumb than around many other bones, like the femur or the radius.
His left hand was still puffy, as if it belonged to someone a hundred pounds heavier than him, and it throbbed like a steam train struggling up a long hill, but the pain was bearable next to the true pain that he faced.
No amou
nt of nerve damage could compare to the terror that had drummed itself into his mind as the Honda roared due west over vacant predawn roads.
A dozen potential scenarios whispered like serpents, most with sinister flickers of the tongue, suggesting that she was already dead. That Bethany, the child whom he’d ignored in his passion to serve his own career, was dead and broken in a hole somewhere.
And if she was alive—which he finally convinced himself she must be, if for no other reason than that BoneMan was too fixated on tormenting them both to end it so quickly—she could be badly hurt. Disfigured for life. Broken and twisted even now as he pushed the car to the breaking point.
He’d already decided that if the police found him before he reached the Crow’s Nest, he would not stop until he reached Fort Davis, where he would surrender and demand to speak to the FBI agent Ricki Valentine about leading them the last few miles to the meeting spot.
To Crow’s Nest Ranch.
Trapped for four hours in a car with only his thoughts proved to drive him only further from the calm, reasoned state that would serve him in this crisis. He found himself unable to hold back tears on numerous occasions, and because he was alone with nothing to do but drive, he allowed them to run down his cheeks. But then they began to interfere with his ability to drive at high speed, so he wiped his eyes, set his jaw, and swallowed his fear.
The faintest hint of gray edged the eastern sky as he left Fort Davis in his wake and brought the car back up to speed.
By the time he hit the dirt road that led into the ranch, the horizon was brighter, unquestionably so, but he still needed his lights to see the road ahead. BoneMan had said first light, or was it dawn? Either way, this was neither dawn nor first light. This was predawn.
Ryan slowed when he crossed under the arching Crow’s Nest Ranch sign—he’d made it this far undetected. Just a few hundred more yards. And now he began to worry in earnest that he really was too late.
He drove the car into the same camp he’d used two days earlier, turned off the engine and the lights, and stared into the darkness.
He opened the door and stepped out into the dirt, between the door and the car. Faint night sounds, crickets, breeze, a lizard or two. The car’s engine cooling.
But the night sounded vacant to him, and the memory of his previous long wait pushed him into a sudden panic. He rounded the car and stared at the camp’s perimeter.
“Hello?”
Nothing but silence answered him.
“I’m here.”
But BoneMan was as unlikely to step out and take his hand as he was to release Bethany for good behavior. What was he thinking?
“Hello? I’m here, for the love of God!” His voiced carried into the night and a lizard took flight to his right, but nothing else seemed to take note that he was even there.
Ryan loosened his fists and walked to the same tree he’d sat under the last time he’d waited. He stood there and looked around, mind ragged after being battered for over twenty-four hours without sleep.
There was nothing else he could do now. Nothing.
So he slowly sank to his seat, rested his arms on his knees, and sagged, exhausted. He took several deep breaths in an attempt to calm his frayed nerves, but nothing seemed to still the palpable throb in his hands and arms.
Nothing would except sleep, and he didn’t dare fall asleep now. The man had said first light, and first light was approaching. Then it would grow warm and he would be alone again, at the whim of a man who might very well be watching at the moment, or might decide not to come for another day or two or never.
And what would Ryan do then? Whom would he confide in? What brilliant decision would he make except to wait, and then wait some more until finally, a day later, a week later, he finally accepted the terrible truth that Bethany was gone? Or had been found.
No father could do this. No mind could withstand this much…
The blow came then, like a locomotive from the night. It struck his head from behind with enough force to jerk the light from his mind and drop him to the ground like a side of butchered beef.
32
Eden, Texas
ALVIN FINCH PULLED the Ford F-150 pickup truck into the barn and hauled both doors closed, shutting out most of the light. He stood there for a moment, collecting his thoughts, grateful for his fortune.
But it wasn’t just fortune that had brought him to this place of such unprecedented opportunity. Luck had little to do with the fact that the FBI hadn’t come sniffing anywhere near him yet. It wasn’t chance that he’d just driven a third of the way across Texas in broad daylight without being stopped.
He was here in the musty old barn with the father of lies because of meticulous planning and he was here because he was Alvin Finch who had become Satan for this day.
Even he hadn’t understood it all until that moment, standing before the girl, Bethany, while she placed her hands on his chest. When the final knowledge had come he’d begun to shake, an uncommon reaction for him.
The girl who would be his daughter was the most beautiful creature he had ever shared space with, a perfect specimen of unblemished flesh, a pristine vessel that contained everything that was desirable in life.
Bethany was a perfect creation and Alvin hated her more than he’d hated anything in his life, including his mother, whom he’d hated very, very much. However beautiful Alvin was, he’d seen that she was far more than he could ever hope to be. The realization had forced him to bring the last reserves of his control to bear for fear that he would reach out and snap her forearms as she tried to seduce him.
Only the fact that she was going to be his daughter stopped him. And now he wanted more than ever to win her undying love, her complete devotion.
He must be her father! She had to be his daughter. It was the only thing that could possibly satisfy him now.
There were two things that Alvin loved; three that he would kill for. The adoration of a girl who would be his daughter. The unflinching devotion of that daughter. The opportunity to share a jar of Noxzema with a daughter who would rather die than upset him.
He knew that these truths were all wrapped up a metaphorical mess that mind-prodders would call mad, but wouldn’t they also call Satan mad?
The thought brought a flutter of contentment to his belly. Although his was often a tortured existence, there were some fringe benefits that came along with being Satan.
He lowered the tailgate and eyed the prone form he’d wrapped in the blue tarp. The father was conscious inside, but immobilized by the drug. It was important that he be fully aware of just how terribly he had failed.
Alvin pulled off the tarp and pulled the man out by his heel. But the boot tore free, leaving only a brown sock to cover the man’s foot. He grabbed the heel and tugged him.
He paused when the body was halfway out, struck by the feel of the heel in his hand. The calcaneus. He’d never broken a heel bone before, preferring instead metatarsals in the toes. The heel would require a hammer blow. Holding Ryan’s heel, Alvin decided that this would be where he started.
The man’s eyes were open, staring at the ceiling, and his eyelids fluttered once. The drug was wearing off.
Alvin lowered the foot with both hands and dragged him out of the bed. The body landed on the old barn’s straw floor with a thump. No grunt, no snap because the man wasn’t able to use his vocal cords and the fall was too small to break bones.
He leaned over the man’s face, knowing that the wide eyes could see. “They call me BoneMan,” he said. “But I’m really Satan and I have your daughter.”
He offered the man a smile, but the man did not return it.
Alvin picked up the body and slung it over his shoulder and grabbed the fallen boot. He walked out of the barn without checking to see that they were alone. The old farm that his mother had left him was ten miles off the nearest paved road and visited only by the occasional hunter who ignored the NO TRESPASSING signs that Alvin had erected around the eight
y-acre lot.
Cypress trees formed a natural boundary around the barn and house and an acre of brown, long overgrown lawn. After burying his mother in the back over twenty years ago now, he’d locked the property down and left for the cities. He hadn’t bothered to keep the house up and it had become virtually unlivable for a man of his tastes. He now used the house only for its basement, where he’d perfected his craft.
He stopped halfway to the house and turned around, studying the perimeter. They could be out here for a year and no one would know. All around Texas they were looking for BoneMan, and here he was, twenty miles south of Eden, in the basement with the father and his daughter.
Alvin entered the house and walked down the hall to the door that blocked off the basement. He’d carefully scrubbed the kitchen and the bathroom and the smell of bleach filled the house still. As soon as he placed the man in his own room, he would take a shower and clean himself. It was best to be clean before he talked to his daughter again.
He left the door open and descended the concrete stairs. The electric power to the farm had been cut off a dozen years ago, but oil lamps suited the place. They hid all the dirt.
Alvin stopped at the bottom and looked down the hall to his daughter’s door, which remained locked. He wondered what she was doing now. Had the lamp burned out? Was she wondering how she might please him? Or was she examining the cross he’d fixed to the wall?
His breathing thickened and he turned away. The door to the second room, the one in which he’d kept the girl for the first few days, lay open to the darkness beyond.
Alvin shifted the body on his shoulder and walked down the hall into the room. He dumped the man on the bed and left him as he landed, with one arm across his neck and the other under his back, staring up at the ceiling.
He considered talking to the man but decided it would be a waste of time. The basement room was dimly lit by daylight that entered through several cracks in the foundation at the corners. The sedative would wear off soon and the man would discover his room. He’d proven to be quite resourceful.