BoneMan's Daughters (40 page)

Ryan put his head down and plunged down the road, ignoring the pain in his foot now, pushed forward by a flash of anger. Gravel
crunched with each footfall.

One mile. In one mile he would come to the road and flag down a car and call Ricki Valentine. But Bethany would be gone long
before any help could arrive. He pushed on, breathing hard through his nostrils now.

Bethany’s captivity was a terrible tragedy that had filled him with fear, the kind of horror most refused to even consider
for all of its pain. But her rejection of him was even worse.

His mind was numb with rage.

He pushed himself faster, clenching his teeth to push back the pain in his heel. The gray ground passed by underfoot, but
it was only an abstraction behind the raw emotions now throbbing through his mind. The paved road stretched across the horizon
and he would reach that line in the sand. He would go on with his life, he had to, he had no other choice but to die and he
was tempted, so tempted to run off the road and throw himself into the ditch.

But that was impossible. Killing himself wasn’t in his psyche. No, instead he would cut her off from his emotions.

Ryan was panting now, gasping for reason as much as air. Thumping down the road in an uneven gait, like a wounded horse headed
for slaughter. He’d made it halfway to the road ahead, and he could see a truck shimmering along the blacktop.

The only way to survive was to accept the fact that Bethany was dead to him. It was the only way. It was the only way to live
with this pain.

She’d rejected him. Crushed his heart. Destroyed him. He would return her favor by searing his emotions and putting what was
left of his love in a box, never to be opened.

Ryan came to an abrupt stop, panting, terrified by the thought. An image of the broken children in the desert ran through
his mind. Of Bethany standing over him with the sledgehammer while Alvin Finch held the rope and screamed for her to swing
it.

How could he dare to think of shutting her out of his mind? How could he feel even a moment of bitterness toward her? How
could he leave his one and only daughter in the hands of that monster? How could he take even one more step toward the safety
of the road? How could he live with the pain now spreading from his bones into his chest and heart and mind? He would rather
be dead.

He stood immobilized in the middle of the dirt road as the world tipped crazily around him.

But he didn’t dare go back so that BoneMan could break her teeth off. So that he could take that sledgehammer to her frail
bones. So that he could brutally murder her and leave them both for dead!

So then what?

He could do nothing. Nothing!
Nothing!

Panic overtook him. His limbs felt like they were on fire.

Nothing…

The trembles hit him suddenly, his whole body at once, and he knew that he was going to have a nervous breakdown right here
in the middle of the road. A groan broke from his parted lips because he didn’t know what else he could do but stand and shake
and groan.

His daughter was alive but now she was dead. His daughter was alive and now she was going to die. She was dead already, not
at BoneMan’s hand, but in her own mind. She was becoming him, sick with deception, wallowing in her own desperation to live,
even if it meant the death of herself. She needed to be saved from herself now as much as from him!

Before he fully realized any implications of what he was doing, Ryan was screaming, full-throated, at the sky.

The moment he realized he could be heard back at the house even from this distance he shut his mouth. But in that moment,
screaming at the sky, Ryan knew something.

He knew that he could not survive alone in BoneMan’s hell. He could not live in this walking death.

Ryan turned around and faced the distant compound now hidden by trees. BoneMan had left the road. He’d gone back in for his
daughter.

A slow calm settled over Ryan’s body. No, he could not live in BoneMan’s hell. And so he would not.

Ryan began to run. Back to the house.

Back into hell.

FIVE DAYS HAD passed since Ryan Evans had vanished. Two days since Celine Evans had been found floating in her pool. And Ricki
had turned up nothing that seemed to lead the investigation closer to stopping whatever was happening in BoneMan’s world.

She sat at her desk, twirling a pencil, watching Greta Van Susteren on
Fox News
break down the case with a retired profiler from the FBI, Marybeth Arnolds. The media had been dancing around all kinds of
speculation, but they were slowly putting together the pieces with the public.

Evans most likely wasn’t the BoneMan.

BoneMan had Bethany and she was probably alive.

BoneMan might have Evans in captivity as well.

If Evans wasn’t the BoneMan, he had gone to great lengths to save his daughter and had been used as a pawn when he took Welsh
captive and broke his arm. If so, and they kept repeating the word
if
, Ryan Evans might be one of the bravest fathers who’d made the news in a very long time. They should give him a medal.

The toolshed drawings of crucified skeletons had been withheld from the public, and they had shed some light on the killer’s
motive—this reasoning that BoneMan justified everything he did as a natural part of a worldview that rotated around God, Satan,
and their battle over the children. Typical pattern-killer psychosis.

Psychotics often believed the rest of the world was twisted, when in reality it was they who were tied up in knots. But there
was always enough truth in their worldview to support reason.

Case in point: Kahlid, the terrorist who’d emulated BoneMan and thrown Ryan into his psychological tailspin to begin with.
That Kahlid would equate the death of so many of his country’s wives and children to a few children he was willing to sacrifice
to make his case could be at least understood on some broad scale.

BoneMan was doing the same thing in his world. He was inflicting perfectly reasonable punishment on a segment of society to
make a point. In the broadest possible terms, what was the death of a few Philistines to save a nation of Israelites?

What was the death of the world in a flood to teach the world that it had strayed? What was a few in hell to save those willing
to embrace salvation?

If they were all going to hell anyway, what was a few broken bones and the death of eight young women if it woke up the nation
and set it on the straight and narrow?

BoneMan clearly had a God complex. Or worse, he thought he was the devil.

“Anything?”

Ricki lifted her head and looked at Mark, who had just poked his head in. “Nothing.”

“Nothing. The world is screaming for answers and all we can tell them is
nothing
.”

“Tell them they created BoneMan. Then tell them that it’s out of our hands now.”

“I wasn’t aware that we were giving up. Who’s going to save the world from BoneMan?”

She tapped the pencil eraser on her desk and nodded. “The father,” she said. “Ryan Evans.”

THERE WERE THREE thoughts pounding through Ryan’s mind as he sprinted back to the compound. The first was that he had saved
Bethany. The other seven daughters had died by BoneMan’s hands quickly, but by giving Alvin Finch another target on which
to inflict his sadistic rage, Ryan had kept his daughter alive.

The second was that his daughter had surely embraced Alvin Finch’s game because she was blinded by his world and didn’t see
the alternative. Classic Stockholm syndrome.

The third thought was that the only way to save his daughter was to end Alvin Finch’s bid for her, and the only way to do
that now was to kill the man.

In the end only this thought mattered: Kill him. Kill the monster. Kill the BoneMan. Crush him so that he can never, never
stalk another daughter in the darkness again.

How to kill BoneMan wasn’t the issue. How a man with a broken heel and no weapon, worn to a thread from days without food,
could possibly hope to kill a large man like Alvin Finch hardly entered his mind.

Live as Bethany’s father or not at all.
Kill or be killed.

Then he sprinted into full view of the house with not a soul in sight and he realized that he wouldn’t be killing anyone because
in reality this was BoneMan’s world, and in BoneMan’s world, BoneMan did the killing.

But Ryan didn’t stop or slow because Bethany was inside that house and he was her father.

He
, not BoneMan.
He was Bethany’s father!

He nearly cried it out as he sprinted across the yard, but a wedge of reason stopped him and brought with it the realization
that he couldn’t just crash into the house and expect Alvin Finch to step aside while he liberated his daughter from his basement.

He came to a jerking halt thirty feet from the front door, wheezing. His right foot throbbed with pain but he refused to give
it any space in his mind. He limped up the broken path, keenly aware that he had no plan other than to kill BoneMan.

Kill or be killed.

Paint that had once been white peeled away from the house in flaking strips, revealing rotting gray wood beneath. The front
door hung at a slight angle on only one hinge, following the whole house’s tilt to the right.

Gasoline fumes wafted from his right. The barn. The house hadn’t yet been soaked. Alvin Finch was busy wandering around inside,
paying his last respects to the house of hell. Or in the basement with Bethany, putting her in chains.

For a few brief moments, stumbling up to the house, Ryan’s mind cleared. He saw the glassless windows, the empty hall beyond
the front door, the darkening sky. He felt the breeze on his face and smelled the scent of gasoline. And for a single second
he considered stopping and developing a more stealthy approach.

But then his emotions pushed the thought aside and he grabbed a rusted handle, pulled the door open, and stepped into BoneMan’s
house.

The hinge squealed as the door shut behind him and slapped against the frame. He turned to his right and walked quickly, not
because he knew where the hall led, but because he wasn’t here to know anything any longer, he was only here to act. His breathing
came in steady pulls through his nostrils and he held his hands in fists without regard for his broken thumb.

There had to be a stairway. Somewhere a stairway that led down.

The interior of the house was in no better repair than outside but there was a floor under his feet and under that floor there
was a basement and that was all he cared about now.

He rounded the corner at the end of the hall, saw the kitchen, saw the opened door next to an old rusted refrigerator. Saw
the opening in the wall on his right and the wood railing sloping down.

There were other details now, the smell of bleach, a crooked picture of a rooster on the wall, an old cookbook with a red-and-white
checkerboard cover.

But there was the door, open to the basement, and Ryan was already halfway across the kitchen.

The floor moved under him and he knew that if Alvin was directly below him, he’d already heard the weak foundation moving.
Like the creaking hinge and the banging door, the protest from the floor only seemed to push him.

He was known now. There was no chance of outwitting BoneMan any longer. There was only Ryan’s rage against the man who had
broken his daughter’s fingers and corrupted her mind.

Ryan was about to enter the stairwell when an image seen through the opened door next to the refrigerator stopped him. Through
the doorway he could see a bedroom with a bed. But it was the pictures on the wall beyond the bed that sent a chill down his
neck. There was no mistaking the black-and-white photograph of Bethany, standing in her window at the house in Austin. The
freak had stalked her and taken this picture with a zoom lens?

A newspaper clipping hung next to his trophy.
BoneMan Takes Another Victim.

A second picture had been pinned to the wall on the other side of the larger image. An old, yellowing photograph with a crease
running diagonally across the upper left corner. And even from this distance Ryan knew the small child grinning with chubby
cheeks.

This too was Bethany. When she was only a baby.

Ryan blinked. Walked into the room and stared at the wall, mesmerized. He knew that he should be rushing down the stairs.
He knew that at any moment BoneMan could rush up behind him and put his hammer through his head. He knew he had come to kill
or be killed.

But he also knew something else that now rendered him immobile. The picture of the baby was his baby, his Bethany, his angel,
but it was a photograph taken before he’d adopted her.

He’d never seen this picture before. This wasn’t something that BoneMan had taken from their house. So then where had he found
it? And why was it on his wall? The larger one showing Bethany within the last year he understood. But the small, worn photograph
reached into Ryan’s chest and tightened a fist around his heart.

Ryan moved around the bed, like a man walking dead and unseen, fixated on the picture. He stood before the image and lifted
his hand to the wall. Ran his fingers over the image of Bethany as an innocent angel, smiling dumbly. It was paper clipped
to an envelope addressed to a post office box.

The postmark was just over one month earlier. BoneMan had received this picture just thirty days ago?

A knot was already locked in his throat, but now something else joined it. Nausea.

The rest of the room was very plain, but the bed was made with white sheets, and four half-burnt candles the thickness of
his arm sat on an old dresser. BoneMan slept here. He lay here and he dreamed of being Bethany’s father.

Ryan plucked the picture off the wall. The envelope floated to the ground.

Surely there was no real significance behind finding a baby picture of Bethany in this monster’s room. No, that… that
wasn’t right. No, no, no, that just couldn’t…