BoneMan's Daughters Read online

  “Don’t be so naïve. We have to shut this down. For all of our sakes, for the sake of the city, for the sake of justice on behalf of millions, not just one man.”

  Ricki wasn’t sure she understood him correctly. She’d always thought of Welsh as a bull, stomping to run over anyone who stepped into his ring, but she’d never pegged him as one to subvert the laws he’d been elected to uphold.

  Her boss leaned back in his chair and cast a furtive glance at her. “I don’t think any of us disagree that we need to deal with this in an appropriate manner,” he said carefully. “We have over two thousand man-hours logged on a case to bring a criminal to justice; no one’s suggesting we just let him walk. But we’re facing evidence here that undermines our position. We can’t just ignore it.”

  Welsh slammed his palm on the chair’s arm. “Then find me more evidence!”

  Ricki thought about asking him what he meant by find. But she held her tongue.

  “There has to be something we can use to nail this shut. Another blood sample, maybe overlooked by the lab, DNA evidence that was overlooked because we had what we needed. Anything!”

  Her boss spread his palms. “Ricki?”

  Her mind quickly rehearsed the details of the case she’d lived and breathed two years earlier.

  BoneMan’s first victim had been found in El Paso, Texas. Seventeen-year-old Susan Carter, who’d gone missing after going out for milk on a Tuesday night, had finally turned up in an abandoned barn. The police had immediately asked the FBI for assistance and Ricki had been the federal agent assigned to the case.

  The image of Susan’s bruised and broken body staked to the ground in a circle of candles had haunted Ricki’s nights for a year. Though she’d been missing for a week, post-mortem evidence from blood pooling, edema, and decomposition revealed that she’d been dead less than thirty-six hours when they’d found her. The evidence response team from the Dallas field office revealed a dim reflection of Susan’s ordeal during the four days she’d spent with her captor.

  The killer had gone to great lengths to break the victim’s bones, one at a time, without so much as scratching the skin, likely beginning with her fingers and working his way to larger bones over a period of days. The only blood found at the scene had come from rope burns at her wrists and ankles.

  No evidence of sexual assault. No bodily secretions that didn’t belong to the victim. No hair, no fiber, no prints.

  They took castings of tire tracks where a vehicle had been parked and of boot impressions left, apparently without any effort to conceal them. The hemp rope was a common variety, as were the tent stakes used to pin the body down. So the killer shopped at True Value and paid in cash. Nothing traceable.

  Lab analysis later told them that they were likely looking for a Ford F-150 truck, based on the position and depth of the tire impressions, but half the county drove similar trucks. The size-thirteen boots were made by Brahma and were as common in Texas as tumbleweed.

  They had a male killer who weighed roughly a hundred and seventy to two hundred pounds, wore Brahma boots, and drove a Ford F-150 pickup. Helpful, but by no means isolating. In the Republic of Texas, everybody wore boots and drove trucks and could sing “Dixie” from memory.

  Although the motivation wasn’t clear, Ricki had been the first to suggest that they were looking at a twisted kind of crucifixion taken from the Roman tradition of breaking the bones of those they crucified to speed their death. The bones of Jesus hadn’t been broken at his crucifixion, an unusual detail that had been foretold by the prophet Isaiah and often cited by Christians as one piece of evidence that Jesus was the Messiah.

  Either way, they knew they were looking for an acutely psychotic individual who found some kind of justice or deviant satisfaction in going to such great lengths without a clear cause. Motive? Rage rather than pleasure was his reason for what appeared to be a ritualistic killing. The killer was new to VICAP, and his profile presented an entirely new case study in motivation. Not sexual, but predatory. Not bloody, but extremely violent. It was a murder of detailed planning, and there was nothing on the Web to profile this level of intensity with an unclear motive.

  Thirty-nine days later, BoneMan’s second victim was found in Lubbock, Texas, roughly three hundred miles northeast of his first victim. This time in an apartment building. He was on the move. A traveling salesman with an alter ego or a deeply antisocial sense of self?

  Another girl, Heather Newlander, thirteen years old. No tire or boot prints this time, but the execution had occurred in precisely the same manner as before. Now they had a transient serial killer.

  The news had picked up on the story and worry began to spread. A murderer, now being called BoneMan, was at large in Texas.

  The third victim had been found in Abilene, Texas, roughly one hundred and fifty miles southeast of Lubbock, two months later. Photographs of young Eileen Ronders’s broken body found their way to the press. In the space of twenty-four hours the BoneMan became national news and horror began to take root in Texas.

  They now had three dead young women on a clear path headed east toward the larger cities in Texas. On the television screen the maps looked as though they were plotting a black plague methodically working its way east. A monster of the most sinister kind, out of the FBI’s reach, breaking the bones of the Republic of Texas’s most innocent children.

  An exaggeration of course, but in Ricki’s way of thinking, not by much.

  The fourth victim had been found in Mansfield, near Fort Worth. The fifth in Waco, south.

  The last two in Austin, Texas. Brandi Lewis, a nineteen-year-old grocery clerk who worked at the H-E-B on the corner of Highway 71 and Bee Cave Road, and Linda Owens, a fourteen-year-old high school freshman who attended Saint Michael’s Catholic Academy.

  Austin had reacted as it should have: With outrage. With fear. With a cry for the mayor, the governor, the FBI, the police, anybody and everybody to do something. Anything, just stop this madness.

  Standing in Kracker’s office now, mind spinning over the past, Ricki wondered if the district attorney hadn’t done just that. Anything. Or more to the point, planted the one drop of blood they’d found in Linda Owens’s hair as a means to take the one suspect they all suspected off the streets.

  Ricki had built her case methodically, in the same manner she’d built a dozen other cases during her ten years with the FBI. She’d already garnered a strong reputation in the bureau as a motivated investigator who did not know how to quit.

  But the BoneMan case had worn her to a thread. Welsh was right; they had a file full of evidence that pointed to Phil Switzer, but only the blood was definitive. Only the blood placed him at the scene—of only the last victim. And now the sample was being challenged.

  Switzer had first shown up on Ricki’s radar when police had responded to neighbors’ complaints of odors emanating from his mobile home in Waco. There they found a forty-seven-year-old male who lived alone in a house full of cats, six of which he’d strangled. Disturbing, but by no means a connection to the BoneMan.

  The fact that he drove a 1978 Ford F-150 with Bridgestone tires matching the tread they’d found at three of BoneMan’s crime scenes was more interesting to Ricki. The fact that Switzer also wore size-thirteen boots that matched the impressions of those left at the crime scenes was enough to move him to the top of the FBI’s suspect list.

  A complete search of his mobile home turned up the man’s penchant for Bibles and pictures of his mother, who’d passed away one year earlier. All the evidence matched the BoneMan’s new FBI psychological profile on VICAP.

  But they had no direct evidence of Phil Switzer’s movements over the previous year. Further complicating the matter was the fact that Switzer was a deaf-mute who refused to cooperate with any form of interrogation. Ricki had persuaded local law enforcement to back away from any prosecution for his animal cruelty and ordered twenty-four-hour surveillance.

  On the day that Linda Owens was killed, th
e surveillance on Switzer had failed, for reasons still unclear. Sloppy police work. An agent negligent on a camera system. But when a drop of blood had been found in the victim’s hair, probable cause had forced Switzer to give the FBI a sample of his blood.

  Six hours later they had the match. The blood sample taken from Phil Switzer matched the drop of blood found on the victim.

  They had found BoneMan.

  Four months later a jury of twelve convicted Phil Switzer on one count of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death.

  “Any ideas?” Kracker asked, prodding her from her recollection.

  She shook her head. “Except for the blood…”

  This wasn’t what Welsh wanted to hear. “Come on, you can’t possibly be telling me—”

  “The rest is all circumstantial, you know that as well as I do,” she snapped, letting her frustration with his insistence break through.

  The DA stood and paced to the oak bookcase on the far wall, hands on hips. “We took a serial killer off the streets. The murders stopped when we put him away. The whole world knows we got the right guy.” He turned back and stared at both of them. “And now you’re telling me we can’t pull together any evidence to keep him where he belongs?”

  “You’re the prosecutor, you tell us,” Kracker said.

  “I am telling you. I need evidence, and I need it in the next two weeks.”

  “We have closed the case, Burt.”

  “Then open it. Focus on the other murders. I need enough to convince the judge to let me hold Switzer as a person of interest while we build another case. You’re the FBI, so it’s a federal case now. Yes, they got an appeal, so let’s get enough on this guy to obtain a stay of appeal from the judge. Double jeopardy is only on his side if he gets an acquittal. Let’s not give him that chance.”

  In a common-sense way what the DA was suggesting made perfect sense, but they all knew that legal proceedings didn’t necessarily follow common sense. He was asking for the impossible.

  Ricki asked the question that none of them seemed eager to put on the table. “And what if we really did put the wrong man behind bars?”

  “We didn’t.”

  “Even worse, what if the blood really was planted by someone on our team? Switzer’s attorneys are hinting at a lawsuit that could do some damage.”

  The DA’s steady look said it all. Bingo. And we can’t let that happen.

  “I think we all understand the situation,” Kracker said. “Let’s reopen the case, Ricki.”

  5

  KAHLID’S DECISION TO leave Ryan alone with a camera and twelve pictures of broken limbs worked both against Ryan and for him.

  Against him in that the photographs were disturbing.

  For him in that Kahlid’s intentions gave his mind something to consider. A puzzle to piece together. A string of new dots to connect with the picture he was already forming. Data to process with the absorption and care that he’d trained his mind to apply when confronted with disconnected pieces of information.

  The camera’s purpose was obviously to record his every reaction on tape and transmit those reactions real-time to a monitor now being watched by Kahlid himself. In addition, the camera was meant to keep Ryan on guard. Like any organ, the mind could only function so long before tiring, and remaining on guard would hasten that exhaustion. An obvious intention on Kahlid’s part.

  Less obvious were the photographs of the broken children. Again, the mystery of them was undoubtedly designed to wear on his mind as much as the horror they presented.

  It was unlikely that Kahlid had any idea what Ryan’s occupation was, but he’d scored one small victory because Ryan couldn’t help but to set his mind on overdrive in an attempt to understand the mystery put before him.

  What did Kahlid, who had been very thoughtful in this abduction, hope to gain by making this particular choice? Beyond pointing out the obvious connection between the U.S. military bombing Iraq and the unfortunate collateral damage resulting from war, Kahlid had little to gain. He surely could have found a far more manipulative incentive than this attempt to disturb him with pictures, however gruesome they were.

  Which meant that Ryan was missing something. Kahlid had more up his sleeve. He was manipulating Ryan in a subversive way. There was more meaning here. Much more meaning.

  Ryan slouched in the chair with his arms shackled behind him, searching his mind for answers. He left no stone unturned, no possibility unconsidered, no thread unexplored. But the answer eluded him.

  Unless there was no answer, the possibility of which only added to his mental gymnastics.

  The light overhead flickered once; otherwise the only movement in the room came from the blinking camera light and his own periodic shifting to keep blood flowing to his extremities.

  An hour went by. Two hours. Three. He began to lose track of time. Also part of Kahlid’s plan.

  Most humans gave up on unsolved puzzles within a matter of minutes. Those who purchased and played games like Myst could contemplate a single puzzle for twenty or thirty minutes before growing bored with the lack of progress and pulling out the cheat sheet.

  The best code breakers could spend days or weeks on a single challenge and remain engaged. But the conundrum facing Ryan contained an element that shifted the balance in his mind. He was staring at images that began to disturb him, not for the mystery in them but for the brutality in them. Not being an emotional man, he found his reaction awkward.

  The more he studied what he could see of the victims, the more he felt sucked into their plight. Unlike the thousands of similar photos he’d scanned since coming to the desert, he had time with these images.

  Instead of using his mind to understand Kahlid’s purpose in leaving him alone with the images, he began to analyze the puzzle in each broken body like he imagined a forensic scientist might.

  How had the building collapsed? A nearby hit or a direct hit? Did the victims fall to the bottom before the falling concrete blocks? Which bones had been broken first? How much abuse could a human body sustain? How many breaks could one human being suffer before dying from internal bleeding? How long had the children lived?

  Wearing him down was Kahlid’s objective, he knew that much. And he was succeeding on that level. But there was more. There had to be.

  At some point Ryan woke without realizing he’d fallen asleep. Pain flared in his back and right shoulder and he tried to ease it by shifting to his left. The camera still winked red. The photographs still hung on the wall. His BDU trousers were wet from his own urine.

  Nothing else had changed.

  Ryan sat in the chair for yet another long time before the latch finally clacked and the door swung open. Kahlid walked in bearing a bottle of Evian water and some yellow rice cakes. He shut the door behind him, studied Ryan with dark but gentle eyes, and then crossed to him.

  Without a word he opened the bottle, pressed it to Ryan’s lips, and fed him like a mother might feed her child. Ryan sucked down the liquid, surprised at his thirst.

  Kahlid withdrew the bottle and set it on the table next to the rice cakes. “There’s a bucket in the corner. I will remove your chains so that you can relieve yourself and stretch your bones. If you attempt to escape, I will put a bullet through your thigh. Do you understand?”

  Ryan blinked.

  Kahlid rounded his chair, unfastened the shackles, and helped him to his feet. His joints felt like fire and it took him half a minute to loosen the stiffness. Hobbling over to a lone bucket and roll of toilet paper in the back corner, he glanced around his prison, but there was nothing new to see. Just the lone chair, the table, the camera, and the photographs.

  He used the bucket and walked back to the chair. The locks on the chains were made by Master Lock.

  “Go ahead, stretch, get your blood flowing. I need you to be exhausted, but not in pain to the point of indifference.”

  Ryan’s mind began to spin again. Kahlid could hardly utter a word without complicating mat
ters for him. Navy Intelligence could use a man like him.

  “That’s enough. Please”—his captor motioned to the chair —“sit.”

  Thirty seconds later Ryan was back in chains, staring at Kahlid. It occurred to him that the brief reprieve had worked against him. Chained again, he felt a surge of hopelessness that wouldn’t have been as acute without the reminder of freedom.

  All expected techniques, and effective.

  “According to your uniform, you are an officer,” Kahlid said. “Not that it matters. You have extraordinary control of your mind. You don’t express emotion very well. You might even be emotionally repressed. Worse, you might even be proud of yourself for not succumbing to my blatant attempts to affect your emotions. What you don’t know is that this will only work against you.”

  Again, expected.

  A slight, nearly sympathetic smile crossed Kahlid’s mouth. “You’re in intelligence, aren’t you? G-2? Again, just a guess. Tell me, how would you judge the effectiveness of my methods to break you thus far?”

  No harm in engaging the man on this level. “You’re good. Predictable at times and unorthodox at the same time. But I don’t think you understand me very well. We both know that I’m already dead. None of this matters to me. Yes, it would be nice to die quickly, but we both know that you won’t allow that. So I’m left with no option but to suffer whatever you have in mind for a matter of hours, days, or weeks and then die.”

  “So calculating. Arabs are far more passionate than Americans are, I think. Everything makes so much sense in your perfect world, doesn’t it? Now you’ve come over here to show us poor Arabs how to enter your perfect world.”

  Ryan didn’t think a rebuttal would help matters.

  The man’s shoulders sagged and he frowned. “Okay then, you leave me without a choice. We will play our game. But you must know one thing before I tell you what my intentions are. Many would say that I am insane. What I’m about to do will be heralded as inhuman by my own brothers. But you give me no choice.”

  “Like I said, I’m already dead,” Ryan said.