BoneMan's Daughters, Page 3

  Maybe he was dead.

  “Wake up. Wake up!”

  Something struck his cheek and the sting jerked him away from the murmuring crowd into a lonely, dark place.

  “Wake up!”

  Another hard slap chased away the darkness. The horizon turned red and he heard himself groan.

  “Yes? Yes, you’re going to finally join us?”

  His memory of the firefight lit up his mind like a bomb blast. The Humvees had been hit… he’d survived… the staff sergeant had survived… he’d been struck and knocked unconscious…

  He was alive and in the presence of someone who spoke with a heavy Arab accent.

  “Open your eyes.”

  His eyelids fluttered open to see a dimly lit room. The details fell into his mind; simple facts that painted a picture that could only be interpreted in its entirety. No conclusion yet, no need to rush to judgment. Bad intel got more soldiers killed than bullets.

  Concrete walls. An old wood door. No windows. A metal table on his right, stacked with papers. He was seated in a chair and his hands were bound behind him. One dim bulb hung overhead, shrouded by a green metal shade. An empty corkboard hung on the wall directly ahead of him.

  Three Arab men dressed in dirty tan slacks and shirts stood in the room. Two of them leaned against the wall and cradled AK-47s. The third, presumably the speaker, paced directly in front of Ryan, one hand resting on his holstered pistol, the other limp by his side.

  So then he had been taken captive by what appeared to be three insurgents or terrorists who held him either deep within a building, judging by the lack of windows, or underground, a more likely scenario.

  Ryan shifted his arms, heard the chains around his wrists more than he felt them, and settled. To say that he wasn’t concerned would have been a gross understatement, but he refused to allow fear to gain any foothold.

  He was alive, which was far better than the fate the others had suffered. Or was it? They would either torture him for what information he could give them, a thought that he shoved away, or they would use him as a political tool and eventually kill him.

  The man who’d slapped him leaned close enough for him to head-butt—clearly he’d been born a fighter rather than a thinker. Ryan was a man of considerable size, weighing in at a hundred and ninety pounds, give or take, standing at just six feet, and the navy kept him fit, but he’d never struck or taken a blow in his life.

  “Can you hear me?”

  The man’s breath smelled like clean dirt. Like most Middle Easterners, he valued cleanliness far more than your typical westerner—even here in the desert, assuming he hadn’t been out long enough to have been driven to a city, the man would take care to bathe each day. Ryan could still smell the soap on him.

  He tried to speak but nothing came from his parched mouth, so he cleared his throat and tried again.

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” He closed the distance so that his nose came within inches of Ryan’s. He wore a beard and red-checkered headdress, which placed him firmly in the camp of what most hastily called extremists. But the Middle Eastern psyche wasn’t so easy to categorize. There were dozens of ideologies, each with its own long history, each with its own complaints, all with an understandable perspective, if you looked at the world through the right lenses.

  “You may call me Kahlid. And until I know your true name, I will call you Kent. You’re a race of Supermans, you Americans, aren’t you?”

  One of the men behind him murmured in Arabic, “And we are the Lex Luthor.” The other chuckled.

  If they didn’t know his name or rank, they wouldn’t know that he spoke a fair amount of Arabic.

  Kahlid, clearly not his real name, pulled back and placed both hands behind his back. “If you’re wondering, the rest of your friends are dead. We were able to escort you away from the scene before the helicopters arrived. You’re now alone here with us, for us to use as we see fit. Does this bother you?”

  Ryan answered honestly, “Yes.”

  “Good. Then I don’t mind telling you that we have the full intention of bothering you even more. Much more, I would say, judging by your relative lack of concern.”

  The man’s impeccable grasp of the English language, spoken without a hint of a British accent, meant he’d probably studied at an Ivy League school in the States. Harvard or Stanford, perhaps. The education wasn’t surprising, but the fact that such a valuable man would be involved in a simple hit-and-run outside of Fallujah was highly unusual.

  Which could only mean that their mission hadn’t been designed as a simple hit-and-run.

  A slight smirk crossed Kahlid’s face. “What are you, Kent? Hmm? An intelligence officer? Special Forces? Hmm? Why do your eyes show no fear? Or perhaps you are stupid. Unfamiliar with the methods we use to press back the butchers who have invaded our land.”

  Ryan found some encouragement in the man’s assessment even though he knew he was being manipulated.

  “You are here for a purpose, Kent. You are our poster child and with you we will send a message to the world. To do that we will need to break you. Because our mission is so critical, we will use any and all means to break you. If you’re as intelligent as you appear, you know we’ve already begun. Do you know this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. This bunker is thirty feet beneath the ground, too far from any housing for your spies to notice any coming or going. No one will find you, no one will hear your screams. You should be wishing we’d pointed the RPG at your Humvee instead, yes?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  “Well then. You can say more than ‘yes.’ Do you mind telling me, Kent, why you are here in my country?”

  Ryan hesitated, considering his options. He could clam up and hasten the inevitable smashing of bones or electrocution or a myriad of other techniques perfected in these deserts. Or he could engage them, hoping to stall them while he looked for alternatives. He opted for the latter.

  “I’m following orders,” he said.

  “Yes, I’m sure you are. As am I. In the end does it really matter which of us does a better job? Will lives be saved? Freedom won?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The man paced back and forth now, hands still behind his back, like an interrogator from an old World War II movie.

  “Then let me help you know a few things. Assume for a moment that you are God. That this is really all about you and your children.” He motioned to the outer wall as he spoke. “Can you think in terms of God, or are you an atheist like so many of your countrymen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes you are an atheist, or yes you believe in God?”

  “I believe in God.”

  “And you believe he loves his children. All of his children.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, tell me, if you can, how God feels when he looks down and sees this war of yours.”

  “Assuming God feels anything, I’m sure war bothers him.”

  “If you were God, Kent, how would you feel? Please try to stay in character.”

  Ryan glanced around the room. The only way out was through the wood door, but that hardly discouraged him. He was shackled in place—there would be no escape from this hole. All he had was his mind, and he had to keep it active.

  “Focus, please.”

  Ryan looked back at his interrogator. “I suppose I would feel disturbed.”

  “Why? Why would you feel disturbed? Because your children were being killed?”

  “Yes.” But he didn’t feel any emotional connection with the man’s point.

  “So then, like me, on at least one level, you are saddened by this war.”

  “Yes. But also like you, I’m bound by my duty to those who have my loyalty.”

  “Your loyalty is to man, not God?”

  “God hasn’t issued any orders lately,” Ryan said.

  “And if he did, would you follow them, or would you follow the orders given to you by
man?”

  Ryan didn’t respond. He knew where the man was headed, but his approach was meaningless because, unlike many Muslims who believed they were following God in political matters, his own belief in God was far too distant to consider in the same thought.

  “In truth, everything that happens here in the desert leads back to God,” Kahlid said. “But I can see you don’t follow God the way I do. As I thought. So I’m not going to bother manipulating you with an appeal to his will. I’ll have to follow our original plan and attempt to test your own will. Is that okay with you?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “You’re honest, I like that. We’re going to find out just how honest you are.” He nodded at the man closest to the door, who pulled open the latch, spoke quietly to someone outside, and disappeared into a dark hall. A tunnel.

  “It may take us a few days, that’s up to you, but eventually you will see the world the way we see it.”

  The soldier returned with a camera case and a tripod. He latched the door and began setting it up.

  “We’re going to film you so that we can show the world what we have learned here today. I hope you don’t object. It’s the truth we want, nothing more. We don’t care about your rank and serial number; you’ll gladly give us that before we’re done. We’re more interested in your heart. In God’s heart, assuming you’re still in character.”

  A thin chill snaked down Ryan’s spine. The interrogation was taking a turn that, for all of its similarities to the hundreds of cases he’d been exposed to during his career, felt profoundly different, beginning with the choice of Kahlid’s language.

  He looked at his interrogator, who was now smiling. “You don’t have enough footage of American soldiers condemning the war?”

  “We do, yes. And we won’t need any more from you.”

  Then what?

  An unnerving quiet settled over them as the soldier with the camera carefully set up the tripod, mounted the Panasonic, inserted a tape, and plugged the unit into an extension cord.

  “We have enough gasoline to run the generator for three days. If it takes longer, we will refill the tanks. But it’s not gasoline that I’m concerned with running out of.” He glanced at the cameraman, who was looking through the lens. “Are we set?”

  The man nodded.

  “Turn it on.”

  A red light was the only indicator that the camera was live.

  Kahlid crossed to the table, scooped up a stack of papers and a handful of tacks, and then stepped over to the corkboard. He began to pin 8 1/2 × 11 inch sheets of photocopied images up on the board in a neat row.

  Pictures of collapsed buildings, chunks of concrete immediately recognizable as the handiwork of explosives. The photographs had been taken on the ground, some slightly blurred, as if the photographer had taken them in haste.

  He’d seen volumes of war images, enough to deaden his mind to all but the worst. But there was something about the presentation of these pictures that he found disturbing.

  Then he saw it: hardly distinguishable from the chunks of rubble, broken and twisted limbs. The evidence of bodies that had been trapped and crushed under the weight of the crumbling building.

  Kahlid went calmly about the business of pinning more photographs on the wall, one at a time, until he had twelve of them in two rows of six each. The last eight were close-ups, showing a dusty arm thrust out from the space between several large blocks. A very thin, small hand that was attached to a boy or girl younger than ten, hidden under tons of stone. Three different pictures of this arm, broken above the child’s elbow, hanging limp, dusty but not bloody.

  Ryan now saw limbs between the cracks in the rubble. All children, noticed only upon a second look, then noticed singularly, as if the mounds of broken building didn’t even exist. His stomach turned.

  Kahlid turned around and stepped aside. “Do you recognize these, Kent?”

  Did he? No, he didn’t think so.

  “Mr. Kent?”

  “Umm… no. No, I don’t.”

  “Of course you don’t. Your pictures come from high in the sky, where your collateral damage is safely hidden from the public eye.”

  Kahlid took a deep breath. His lip quivered.

  “I, on the other hand, do recognize these photographs because I took them. If you look carefully you will see my daughter’s arm in the third photograph from the left at the bottom. The next two are also Sophie. And the next one is of my son’s leg.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly, then he stepped to his right. “They were seven and nine when your bombs fell from the sky and crushed the apartment next to the one I’d sent my wife and four children to for safekeeping. They all died that day. Their bones were broken and crushed. It is hard for me to imagine the pain they must have felt.”

  Ryan didn’t know how to respond to this man’s obvious heartache.

  “I’m going to leave you with these pictures for a while, Kent. I want you to stare at my children. At God’s children, lying broken on the ground, and I want you to feel their pain… the way God feels pain. And when you have done that, I will return and we can go to the next step. Fair enough?”

  For the first time since waking, Ryan felt completely out of his element.

  Kahlid dipped his head and left the room, followed by the others. Ryan sat alone under the steady gaze of the camera’s red blinking light and the handiwork of collateral damage.

  4

  RICKI VALENTINE SAT with her right leg crossed over her left, slowly swinging her foot as she studied Mort Kracker’s brooding gray eyes. A crew cut topped the Assistant Director in Charge’s large square head, giving him the appearance of a softer, kinder version of Frankenstein, sans scars.

  The conversation in the room had stalled. If the defense attorney’s latest filing with the court bore up under judicial scrutiny, Phil Switzer, aka BoneMan, could very well be walking the streets two weeks from now and all eyes would be on the DA who’d put him behind bars.

  Burton Welsh, the man who now served as Austin’s district attorney in large part because of his highly touted prosecution of BoneMan two years prior, stared at them from his perch against the windowsill, one hand across his waist, the other stroking up his chin, as though scratching at a thought.

  Welsh might be on the bubble here, but Ricki had been the FBI’s lead investigator in the case. She, more than the DA, had been responsible for BoneMan’s capture and conviction. There would be more than enough scrutiny to go around if the folder on the chief’s desk contained the truth.

  “So?” Welsh demanded.

  “So”—Kracker glanced between them—“we have us a problem.”

  Although not directly responsible for the investigation, Mort Kracker’s oversight of the case wouldn’t be dismissed. Not to mention the well-known fact that Kracker had essentially fed the case to Burt Welsh, whose relationship with him extended all the way back to UT School of Law.

  Here, in this room, sat the three law enforcement professionals who may very well have put an innocent man behind bars; even worse, they had possibly left a serial killer to take more victims, always careful to cover his tracks.

  “You’re not actually suggesting you believe this load of crap,” Welsh said, shoving a thick finger at the wall. “That man is as guilty as a pregnant nun. That’s why we prosecuted; that’s why he’s serving time.”

  He crossed the room and towered over Ricki. “You led the investigation; the file on him is a foot thick.”

  Uncomfortable under his shadow, Ricki stood. Welsh wore a tailored blue suit that hid his muscled frame well, but at six foot three, there was no hiding his power. Standing a mere five feet two if she stretched, Ricki felt like a mouse next to him.

  She walked toward the window he’d vacated. “And you know as well as I do that the blood samples from the last victim connected the evidence and sealed the case.”

  Kracker put his elbows on his desk. “Which they say was contrived. Defense says
that they can prove it came from the same sample taken to run him through VICAP, and that we broke the chain of evidence. Like I said, we have a problem.”

  “Assuming this evidence of theirs pans out,” Welsh said. He took a seat in the chair Ricki had left. “Either way, Switzer’s as guilty as sin.”

  Ricki nodded. “Probably. But that doesn’t help us in appellate court. Double jeopardy—he can’t be tried for the same crime twice. Unless and until we find another victim to link to the case, we’re stuck.”

  “I understand the legal problem,” Welsh shot back. “But if you think I’m just going to sit by and wait for him to take another victim before I do anything, you don’t know me. When news of this leaks, the city will go nuts.”

  TheBoneMan, so dubbed by Ricki for his MO of killing his victims by breaking their bones without breaking their skin, had left a total of seven victims behind, all in plain sight, all in quiet Texas neighborhoods, from El Paso to Austin, where he’d taken his last two before being caught.

  Assuming the man they’d put away really was BoneMan.

  “I’m not saying we have the wrong man,” Ricki said. “I’m simply pointing out the challenge we’re facing.”

  Welsh exposed his true concern. “I don’t need to restate what this means to me, Mort. Personally.”

  “We all have both professional and personal stakes in this case,” Mort returned. “That doesn’t change the challenge Ricki’s addressing.”

  “Don’t patronize me.” He took a breath. “There’s more at stake here than BoneMan and his victims. I’m trying to run a city. The last thing the city needs is more fear-mongering over a case like this. The media will sensationalize and speculate for millions of people who don’t think for themselves. Next thing you know, schools will close and people will be hiding in their homes. Like happened in DC, with the sniper.”

  “I thought the mayor ran the city,” Ricki said. “Does he know yet?”

  The man shot her an angry glare.

  Easy, Ricki.

  “Of course he knows. I have his full support.”

  “Support for what?”