BoneMan's Daughters (12 page)

“I’d feel better with Burt there, just the same.”

One small benefit of Ryan’s sudden announcement that he was coming home was that she and Mother were on the same side of an
issue for once. Bethany thought she could grow used to the feeling.

“What if he comes this afternoon?” she asked.

“I don’t plan on being there. You have practice till six, right?”

“Right.”

Her mother paused. “I’m going through with it this time, Bethany. If he shows up, I’m going to tell him.”

“I think you should. Don’t worry, Mother. Go make a call to one of your friends or something. Take your mind off it.”

“See you tonight.”

She hung up thinking it might be nice to see the DA again. He was a snake; even
Mother
could see his shiny scales. But Celine was attracted to snakes, and at least this particular one was well-behaved, caring,
and successful. More important, her mother seemed crazy about him.

“She’s going through with the divorce?” Patty said.

And with those words Bethany’s world darkened, as if her friend had flipped a switch. It was the word
divorce,
she thought. It suddenly reminded her just how pointless all of this nonsense about New York really was.

All the cool clothes in the world didn’t cover up a black heart. For a passing moment Bethany hated herself for going along
with Celine’s dreams for a modeling career. Did her mother think fancy dinners and trips to New York could make up for her
and Ryan’s own sickness?

For that matter, the whole world was sick, Bethany included.

Seeing her darkening mood, Patty shrugged. “It’s not like he’s around anyway, right?”

“Right.”

But none of it felt right.

Despite the fact that she was the envy of half the school, Bethany felt as low as she could remember feeling. Which in and
of itself was a pretty sick thing.

——

FEW PEOPLE UNDERSTOOD how much of the best investigative work depended on intuition. There was the patience required to sift
though mounds of data or to sit for hours in a car, waiting for something to happen. There was the eye for detail to ascertain
which minutiae were askew, what oddity or normality was out of place. There was the logic required to string together dots
on a graph to form a meaningful picture. Intuition could point you to where none of the other evidence pointed. Evidence became
the case. Sometimes, intuition was the voice that whispered a suggestion or two when all else failed.

After eight days back on the case, intuition was telling Ricki Valentine that her failure to produce new evidence that would
implicate Phil Switzer in the BoneMan case wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. But she knew by the tone in his voice that her
boss, Mort Kracker, wasn’t a happy camper.

She nodded at Derek Johnson, a junior investigator she’d worked with a couple of times, and knocked on Kracker’s door.

“Come in.”

Ricki stepped in and closed the door. “Afternoon, sir.”

“Have a seat, Agent Valentine.”

She sat and crossed her legs. Kracker sat behind his big oak desk facing her with his large, square head. She could swear
someone had taken a cricket bat to the man’s forehead when he was a kid. They’d missed his bulbous nose but flattened the
top of his head proper.

Kracker set his elbows on the desk and folded his hands together to form a large teepee. “The ruling just came down from the
judge,” he said.

Ricki’s heart skipped a beat. “Already.”

“Exactly.”

Meaning a quick decision meant a definite decision in a case that felt anything but definite to both of them.

“And?”

Kracker put a large hand on a sheet of paper and slid it next to a neatly stacked pile on his meticulously arranged desk.
“He threw the whole thing out.”

Ricki blinked. She’d half expected this to happen. It wrenched her gut to hear that the case she’d spent over a year on was
just tossed out because of a judicial hearing on the evidence. The possibility of planted lab specimens.

“Switzer’s going free,” Kracker said.

“When?”

“Now. He’ll be out before nightfall.”

Ricki nodded. She wasn’t sure what kind of reaction he expected, but judging by his steady gaze, he wasn’t pleased. A few
foul words appropriately expressing her rage at such a terrible turn of events might serve her career well. But she wasn’t
feeling enough rage to work up the words.

“You look crushed,” he said.

“I’m tired. Just tired.”

“You don’t look tired. You look… fine.”

“I’m not.”

“Good. Neither am I. We just had our faces rubbed in it, in case you hadn’t figured it out.”

“That I’m okay with,” Ricki said. “What bothers me more is that BoneMan is free. Whether or not Switzer’s guilty.”

He nodded once, very slowly.

She added to her assessment. “Unless, by chance, he just happened to get picked up for another crime.”

Kracker’s lips formed a meaty frown. “I’m receiving some pressure to take you off the case. I hope you can understand that.”

“I can, sir. The public has to be fed someone, why not me?”

“This isn’t about appeasing the public. It’s about your failure to put or keep the right man behind bars.”

“Then reassign me. Put someone better on the case. Some junior agent who knows more about BoneMan than I do. Heck, tell the
whole city that they can now sleep easy because the one agent who is best equipped to nail BoneMan to the wall has been removed
from the case so the FBI can save face.”

“I wouldn’t put it so succinctly, but I see you get the point.”

“And I suppose the DA would love you for it.”

“I wouldn’t know; I haven’t talked to him since I heard.”

“I thought you two shared all your secrets.”

He went on without a hint of offense. “We work closely, yes. It’s better that way. And one way or another, we’re going to
get to the bottom of this case. The only question right now is whether we do that with you or without you.”

Ricki stood and walked to the window, hands on hips, aware of her black skirt hanging delicately just above her knees, her
black power heels that looked too prissy, too refined. At times like this she wouldn’t mind being a foot taller and six inches
broader in the shoulders. A few extra parts in the right places wouldn’t hurt either.

She faced Kracker. “Your call, obviously. But you know that it’ll take any other investigator a month, best case scenario,
to settle on the same understanding I have of this case.”

“
What
understanding, Ricki? What exactly do you know?”

“For starters, there is a better than even chance that we do have the wrong guy,” she snapped, pointing out the window at
some imaginary suspect. “The evidence fits, yes, and with the blood dangling in front of us we made sure of that. But the
evidence also fits a thousand other men walking the streets. Don’t tell me you’re sure we have the right man.”

“I didn’t say we did. But yes, I believe we do.”

“There’s two ways you can approach this. You can either spin your wheels, scouring the evidence from one of the three cases
we didn’t try Switzer for so we wouldn’t get hammered by double jeopardy—be my guest. Or you can assume that BoneMan’s out
there, snickering at all the foolishness in the papers. At the very least, let me lead a new investigation. Let me pick up
where I left off two years ago.”

“Pick up where? You don’t have another body.”

“No.” She crossed her arms. “But I have some new thoughts.”

His brow arched.

“Just thoughts, that’s all they are now.”

He waited.

“Okay.” Ricki paced back and forth in front of him. “The last thing I was working on before the blood evidence surfaced was
a standard military-issue KA-BAR knife we found in the barn at El Paso and another at the murder scene on Fourth Street. The
first one couldn’t be linked directly to the El Paso case, but we were quite sure the second knife had been used to sever
one of the cords that held the girl.”

“The evidence proved useless.”

“Yes, at the time it did because we honed in on Switzer and found no connections between him and the knives or the military.
Could have been anyone who picked them up at any army surplus store, right?”

“Go on.”

“Assuming that Switzer’s not our man, I’m left wondering what kind of military man might have killed seven women in the space
of six months and then disappeared.”

“And?”

“And I can’t help thinking its someone who isn’t killing in Texas because he’s
not in
Texas.”

“Because he’s been deployed for the last two years.”

“It’s a thought.” Ricki shrugged. “We don’t know. The point is, until we get off Switzer and start looking at other possibilities,
we’ll never ask the right questions. I should be talking to the military instead of trying to get permission to do my job.
My only priority should be to stop him before he kills again.”

“Assuming he hasn’t.” Kracker blew out some air. “Now you have me talking like you.”

“If I’m wrong? What’s the downside?”

They both knew there was none.

Kracker spread his huge hands on the desk and padded the surface with thick fingers. “Okay, Valentine. Go chase this ghost.
But if the evidence even sniffs Switzer’s way, I want to know about it.”

She started toward the door. “You should know that one of the threads I have to track back to the source is the blood evidence.”

“No, Ricki, I don’t believe I do know that.”

“Someone planted the blood, sir. I need to know who.”

“You’re
assuming
that someone planted the evidence.”

“I’m assuming that Switzer’s not the guy, which means someone set him up. Knowing who did could lead us—”

“Leave it alone, Valentine. If someone from inside this office planted evidence, I’ll deal with it. But that’s my call, not
yours. I don’t want you sniffing around my operation, you got that?”

Ricki lifted both hands in a sign of surrender. “Got it. No sniffing around our beloved FBI. I swear it.”

She pulled the door open.

“Or the DA’s office,” Kracker said.

But she was already walking down the hall and was in no mood to ask for any clarification.

RYAN HANDED THE cabdriver two twenties and stepped out onto Barton Creek Boulevard. The bold numbers on the mailbox read 1300,
which was the address Celine and Bethany had moved to after his last deployment. This was it.

Six days had passed since he’d first realized how desperately he needed to rush home and embrace his wife, and this was it.

Austin was hot in August, but not uncomfortably so, not after two years in the desert, where temperatures regularly ran in
the hundred-and-twenty-degree range during the hot season. A light breeze cooled the sweat on his neck. Crickets…

He had missed the crickets. The constant chirping of insects hidden in the dense foliage that bordered the large lot.

Ryan stepped up to the edge of a driveway that sloped down to a large white house all but hidden from the road. The Mediterranean
architecture featured a large carport that fed into the glassed twin doors.

Home
.

The thought faded as quickly as it had entered his mind. In reality the house below didn’t look anything like home. He’d tried
to contact Celine a dozen times since arriving in the United States—on her cell phone, which he knew she carried with her
at all times. She’d ignored the calls.

Not a problem, she was just frightened. Confused. By now, she probably knew at least some of the details of his breakdown
and it had brought to her mind the first time he’d broken down, during basic training. But as soon as she realized how profoundly
he’d been affected in the desert, her confusion would fall away. If there was one thing Ryan did particularly well, it was
understanding the human psyche and response. The inner workings of the mind.

That’s why Ryan was here, to show Celine that his own mind had changed. That he finally could see it all so clearly.

A car’s horn blared behind him, and he glanced after the black Mercedes that had objected, hardly noticing.

He returned his eyes to the house. This was why he was here. To make all things right. To show his remorse. To beg their forgiveness.
God help him, please help him.

Ryan walked down the drive. His heart hammered and the crickets sang, but his feet moved in silence, stealing their way back
into a world he’d snuck out of many years ago. He wasn’t foolish enough to think that there wouldn’t be some challenges in
reconciling with Celine and Bethany, but he would lie himself down at their feet if he had to.

He would never use another angry word with Celine.

He would buy her whatever she wanted no matter what it cost him.

He would make her breakfast in bed and wash the clothes and smile at her lovingly from across the room. And roses, he would
fill her world with roses, enough red and pink roses to make the neighbors think he’d lost his mind, which he just might have.

As for Bethany… He’d silently cried his way through a numb existence these last six days, walking to the cafeteria, sitting
through four separate debriefings, lying in bed late at night, boarding the airplane, staring out the window as the sea passed
far below, disembarking the AC-130 with his seabag over his shoulder, talking to the psychiatrist at Bethesda Naval Hospital,
and while flying home to Austin, where he’d had the courtesy to rent a hotel room.

Here now, thinking again of Bethany, tears stung his eyes and he blinked, telling himself that he wouldn’t allow emotion to
muddy the waters once he stepped inside.

The thought stopped him two feet from the door.
No, Ryan, avoiding emotion has been your downfall. Show them, show them how you feel
.

But he’d decided he wouldn’t seek their sympathy. The details of his abduction in Iraq could not play a part in winning them
back. He’d lost them before the incident, of his own doing or lack of doing. He would win them back on his own merit.

Ryan stepped up and rang the doorbell with an unsteady hand.