by Torre, A. R.
PRAISE FOR A. R. TORRE
Every Last Secret
“Deliciously, sublimely nasty: Mean Girls for grown-ups.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Torre keeps the suspense high . . . Readers will be riveted from page one.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A glamorous and seductive novel that will suck you in and knock you sideways. I love this story, these characters, and the raw emotion they generated in me. I devoured every word. Exceptional.”
—Tarryn Fisher, New York Times bestselling author
“Raw and riveting. A clever ride that will make you question everyone and everything.”
—Meredith Wild, #1 New York Times bestselling author
OTHER TITLES BY A. R. TORRE
Every Last Secret
The Ghostwriter
The Girl in 6E
Do Not Disturb
If You Dare
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2021 by Select Publishing LLC
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542020169
ISBN-10: 1542020166
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant
Dedicated to Eva. I love you.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER 1
The prestigious street still held secrets of the horror. The missing-person flyers were tacked into the Canary Island palms, their colors faded from the elements, the edges of them curled from rain and wind. The white-brick mansion at the end of the street no longer had police cars parked in its circular drive. The press vans and cameras had slowly moved on to other stories. The iron gates, which had been necessary to keep the well-intentioned public at bay, were deserted. The weight of silence hung in the sunny Los Angeles air.
Scott Harden stumbled down the palm tree–lined sidewalk and toward the large gates. As he moved, the white house swayed before him, the view blurred by sweat burning the corners of his eyes. His monogrammed polo shirt, stained from weeks of wear, stuck to his back. Bruises and cuts from the stiff rope circled both wrists, and he quickened his steps, moving into a jog as he grew closer to the home. As blood oozed from the incision on his chest, he staggered to a stop at the gates’ security panel.
He pressed the code into the keypad, leaving bloody fingerprints behind. The gates chimed and hummed as they slid open.
Nita Harden stood before the bathroom mirror and tried to find the energy and motivation to pick up her toothbrush. Her counter, once clustered with perfumes and expensive cosmetics, was empty. Her blonde locks, which had always been kept up with biweekly visits to the salon, now had a half inch of dark-gray roots. Wearing a black yoga suit that hung from her frame, she looked nothing like the put-together socialite who had clawed her way to the top echelon of Beverly Hills society. Did bad breath matter when your son was missing? Did anything when each day was just a horrible waiting game for someone to discover his body?
The Bloody Heart Killer was reliable. He kidnapped handsome and popular teenage boys, like her Scott.
He held each boy prisoner for a month or two, strangled them and mutilated their bodies, then discarded them like bags of trash. There had been six boys before Scott. Six naked bodies found, a heart carved into their chests. It had been almost seven weeks since Scott had disappeared. Any day, his body would show up, and she would be called to the morgue to identify her son.
The tones of their security system chimed, and she looked up from her toothbrush, listening as it played one of the custom sounds of the front gates. When they built the home, each of them had picked a unique gate code and notification sound. Every time she pulled her Jaguar up to the gates and used her remote or personal code, the gentle tinkling of bells would sound. Her husband’s was the UCLA fight song. Scott’s was a simple trill . . . Her toothbrush clattered into the sink as Scott’s personal chime sounded through the large bathroom.
A fresh pang of raw emotion ripped through her heart, and she let out a painful cry at the familiar ring, one she had taken for granted for years, one that instantly brought to mind Scott’s big grin. He always came bounding in with his backpack slung over one shoulder, beelining for something to eat. She moved to the large window at the end of the bathroom and peered down at the front yard, expecting to see one of his friends’ cars, or the van of their cleaning crew or landscapers, any of whom Scott might have given his code to. No vehicle appeared through the foliage, and she cupped her hand to the glass and tried to see down to the entrance gates.
A figure moved stiffly down the center of their crushed-shell drive, one leg dragging a bit and drawing a long line behind him. Her breath caught painfully in her throat at the familiar gray polo, identical to the dozens that still hung in Scott’s closet. His face wasn’t visible, his attention forward, but she knew that build instantly. Whirling, she tripped over a copper clawed foot of the tub and fell to her knee. Hiccuping out a sob of emotion and pain, she bolted to her feet and through the arched opening that led to their bedroom. Barreling into the hall, she knocked past a maid as she rounded the staircase and sprinted down the stairs, her hand tight on the banister, her vision blurring with tears.
“GEORGE!” she screamed, her head whipping in the direction of her husband’s study, where he often worked from home. “GEORGE!” Without pausing to see if he was home or had heard, she yanked at the heavy bronze handle of the front door and swung it open far enough to squeeze out.
Her bare feet churned against the crushed shells, the pain ignored as she tore down the middle of the drive, screaming out her son’s name.
Scott’s head lifted, and he staggered to a stop, his features exhausted as his mouth wobbled into a smile. He slowly lifted his arms, and she crashed into them.
Her son, against all odds, was home.
CHAPTER 2
I listened to John Abbott’s voice mail and wondered if this was the day he would kill his wife.
“Dr. M
oore,” he rasped, his voice uneven and emotional, “call me back. She’s gonna leave me for him. I know it. This is it.”
John—who always arrived five minutes early for our appointments, in pressed clothes and meticulous shape, who wrote my checks in painfully neat block writing—sounded as if he was falling apart. I listened to the end of his voice mail, then pressed the screen and played it again.
Sighing, I returned his call. I had determined, over a year of one-on-one psychiatry sessions, that John suffered from pathological jealousy. We had spent the first two months focused on his wife and her supposed infatuation with the landscaper. John was resistant to behavioral therapy and staunchly opposed to the thought of taking phenothiazines. After weeks of urging, he took my advice and fired the landscaper, which resolved the situation. He had now found a new source of worry—their neighbor. His suspicions seemed to be unfounded, which wouldn’t be too alarming if he didn’t also suffer from a growing compulsion to kill said wife.
As I waited for him to answer, I opened up the fridge and pulled out a gallon of milk. Whether John Abbott had the capacity to kill was up for debate. Still, the fact that he had consistently considered it for almost a year was validation enough.
He didn’t answer, and I ended the call and set my phone on the counter. I poured a tall glass, then moved aside the stiff lace curtains and peered through the window above the sink. Through a fine layer of pollen, I saw my cat knead her claws along the polished red finish of my convertible’s front hood. Knocking at the glass, I tried to get her attention. “Hey!”
Clementine ignored me. I downed the milk in one long gulp and tapped the window harder. No reaction.
Rinsing out the glass, I stacked it in the top shelf of my dishwasher and eyed my cell phone. This was the first time John Abbott had called my cell. Unlike Rick Beekon, who couldn’t book a tee time without getting my approval, John was the sort of client who viewed a call for help as being weak and incapable. For him to leave a voice mail on a Tuesday morning was significant. Had he caught Brooke? Or had his paranoia and jealousy hit a breaking point?
She’s gonna leave me for him. I know it. This is it.
Loss, for a man like John, could be a world-breaking concept, especially since he had a singular focus on and distorted view of his wife. That focus had grown into an obsession, one with a violent thread that hovered toward maniacal.
I called him again, my concern mounting as the phone rang and rang with no response. The possibilities appeared, unwelcome in my mind. The pharmacist with the perfect handwriting and two missed appointments this month standing over his wife, a bloody knife in hand.
No, I corrected myself. Not a knife. Not with Brooke. It would be something else. Something less hands-on. Poison. That had been his recent fantasy of choice.
I checked the clock on the microwave. Over two hours since he had called me. Anything could have happened in two hours. That’s what I got for sleeping in. The Ambien, which had seemed like a great idea at 3:00 a.m., had cost me this missed call.
One more call, I told myself. I’d wait a little bit, then try him once more and then move on with my day. Obsession, as I frequently told my clients, never affected outside situations. They only made your internal struggles—and resulting personal actions and decisions—worse.
I fixed a piece of toast and ate it, chewing slowly and deliberately as I sat at my dining room table and watched an episode of Seinfeld on my cell phone. After I’d wiped down the counters, rebagged the bread, and washed my hands at the sink, I tried him again.
And just like the first two times, he ignored my call.
At nine forty-five, as I headed to the office for my first appointment, John Abbott failed to show up for his shift at Breyer’s Pharmacy.
There was immediate concern. The man was a tyrant about punctuality, so much so that two junior pharmacists had quit in tears after being subjected to his long and almost violent rants on time accountability. After his tardiness stretched to ten thirty, then eleven o’clock, and repeated calls to his cell phone went unanswered, the three staff members convened at the back of the medical racks over what to do. The line of customers, which had never extended past the adult-diapers section of the aisle, now stretched all the way into herbal remedies. At the front, a man with a bushy white mustache and cowboy hat cleared his throat.
A decision was made to find John’s wife on Facebook and send her a message. With that task complete, they waited another fifteen minutes, then dispatched the most junior and expendable member of the team to drive to his home.
Joel Blanker was twenty-one years old and a pharmacy intern from Little Rock, Arkansas. He liked Dungeons and Dragons, Latin women, and chicken tenders with extra ketchup. As I listened to Phil Ankerly mull over a documentary he’d watched on Ted Bundy, Joel parked on the street and texted the assistant pharmacist to let him know that John’s car was there, parked in the drive behind a white sedan. The instructions Joel received were simple: Ring the doorbell. Ask John if he’s coming to work. Duck and cover if he starts to yell.
Joel began at the one-story home’s front door, his armpits damp from the Los Angeles heat as he listened to the chime echo through the house. After a second ring, and with no sounds from inside the home, he moved around to the carport. Knocking gently on the side door, he waited, then hesitantly cupped his hands to the glass and peered in.
At the sight of the blood and the body, he stumbled back, his dress shoe catching on the carport’s curb. His cell phone skittered across the ground and came to a stop against a support pillar. He crawled across the cleanly swept surface and picked up the phone. Ignoring the fresh spiderweb of cracks across its display, he unlocked the device and jabbed the digits for 9-1-1.
After my second morning appointment, I swung by the Forty-Fifth Avenue gym. My concerns over John Abbott’s voice mail faded as I changed into gym clothes and climbed onto a treadmill. I dialed up the speed and scanned the row of television screens, zeroing in on one that showed a newscaster’s face, the words BH KILLER in bold font under her chin. Settling into a comfortable jog, I kept my eyes on the press conference’s closed-captioning thread, trying to understand what the update was covering. The camera view switched to show a handsome teenager in a button-up shirt and khakis standing beside his mother, a bashful grin on his face as she gripped him around his waist.
“. . . grateful to have him home. Please give us privacy as we spend this time with our son . . .”
I jabbed the “Stop Session” button on the treadmill and grabbed my phone. Despite the halt in pace, my heartbeat increased. Had the latest Bloody Heart victim escaped? Along with most Angelenos, I’d spent the last three years glued to the coverage, following each tragic case from disappearance to death. An escaped victim, especially one in healthy condition, seemed impossible. This was the time frame when a victim’s dead body was typically found, his penis crudely removed, his nude corpse given the same amount of care as a discarded cigarette.
This killer was unique and precise, his expertise proven through six victims. I was stunned that he would be careless enough to allow for an escape. Could this be a copycat killer? A hoax? Or a weak moment in strategy and execution? I unlocked my phone and searched for the latest news article, then glanced back up at the muted television.
“. . . escaped from the BH Killer and ran for miles until he found his way home . . .”
There it was. Confirmation in black and white. How had Scott Harden escaped? I stepped off the machine, hurried through the busy cardio area, and hit the stairs, jogging down the wide steps toward the gym’s lower level. As I reached the bottom step, the phone’s display changed and my ringtone sounded through the headphones. The call was from my office, and I put my second earbud in place and answered it. “Hello?”
“Dr. Moore?” Jacob spoke in a hushed tone. I pictured him at our reception desk, his wire-frame glasses slipping down his nose, a bead of sweat already halfway down one side of his acne-scarred forehead.
“There’s a detective here to see you. Ted Saxe. He said it’s urgent.”
I squeezed past a cluster of neon-clad yoga enthusiasts and found my locker. “Did he say what it’s about?”
“He won’t tell me, and he’s refusing to leave.”
Shit. It had been almost six hours since my voice mail from John Abbott, and I’d heard nothing but silence. Had something happened? Or was this visit about one of my other clients? “I’ll head back now.” I balanced the cell phone against my shoulder as I worked my running shorts past my hips. “Oh, and Jacob?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t let him go in my office. And don’t give him any information. I don’t care what he asks for.”
Our part-time receptionist, who tuned pianos and ate shark-shaped gummy snacks for lunch, didn’t miss a beat. “Done and done.”
“Thanks.” I ended the call and paused, my shorts around my ankles, my red-cotton thong in full display of anyone in the area. Scrolling down to John’s voice mail, I quickly deleted the file, then went into my deleted voice mails and cleared out the backup record of it.
The act was instinctual. My psychiatry training would blame it on a childhood history of covering my tracks and hiding anything that would spur my alcoholic mother into rage. But here there wasn’t a risk of a belligerent housewife slapping me across the face. The ramifications of John Abbott harming his wife—if that’s what this was about—would be much worse. A potential investigation into my practice. A review by the medical board. Media attention on me and my clients—clients who demanded complete confidentiality.
After all, I didn’t treat workaholics with insecurity issues. I specialized in killers. Depraved, volatile killers.
Setting my cell on the bench, I stepped out of the shorts and spun the combination dial of the locker, anxious to get to the office and get this over with.
Detective Ted Saxe was a tall officer in a cheap gray suit, his shield hanging from a lanyard around his neck. I unlocked my office and gestured to the duo of soft green chairs that faced my desk. “Please, take a seat.”