by Mason Cross
Tonight’s going to be quiet. Nobody’s going to be out in this weather who doesn’t need to be. My plan is to hike the mountain. I’ve never tried to go all the way to the top at night, or in weather like this, but I don’t want to go home until they go to bed.
And then I see a glint of light on the wet leaves ahead of me. I turn around and see a car approaching up the hill. Whoever it is has taken the wrong turn off the north road. Nobody else is crazy enough to be up here in the rain. I shrink back into the side of the road, hearing the rush of the swelled river down in the ravine behind me. He’ll go past me, realize his mistake when he gets to the lot at the start of the trail, and turn back.
But even as I’m thinking it, I know that’s not what’s going to happen. The gun seems to gain weight in the holster on my hip, and I know what comes next. I step out into the road and hold my left hand up. My right hand is tucked under the raincoat, drawing the .38 from the holster and cocking it.
The car slows. It’s a dark-colored Ford. The windshield wipers are working overtime. The windshield is a little more misted up than it would be with only one person in the car. The driver turns and pulls into the shoulder, drawing level with me. He buzzes down the window. I can hear a rock song playing on the radio. The singer’s saying he’s not scared. The driver is a bald, middle-aged guy, his expression amused for some reason. I wonder what the joke is. I can see there’s someone in the back seat. Front passenger seat, too. From my angle I see only the skirt and bare legs of a girl in the front seat.
“You break down, man?”
An assumption I’ve heard before. I’m tall, and with the raincoat … well, who would expect a girl to be out here all alone in the middle of the night? No telling what could happen.
I ignore him, feeling the contours of the gun in my hand, and wondering if I’m just going to turn and walk away. I’ve done it before.
“Are you okay?”
Without thinking about it, I raise the gun. Bang. The inside of the car lights up in the muzzle flash. I see the legs of the girl in the passenger seat twitch in shock. Bang. The second shot at the driver sprays his blood over the passenger and she starts to scream. I’m aware of movement in the back. Whoever is there yells out a word that sounds familiar and tries to open the door. I put a bullet through the window. The girl in the front is screaming and trying to get out of her seatbelt. I swing the gun back around and shoot her, the angle a little difficult. I see her blood spatter the interior, mingling with the blood of the dead driver, but I don’t lean in for the second shot. I’m distracted by the way the one in the back yelled. And then with a cold chill I realize what he was yelling, and what that means.
I reach out and open the back door. I see my father slumped in the seat. His dead eyes staring back at me.
My name. He was yelling my name.
After that, everything is a blur. I stuff the gun in my pocket and close my eyes. When I open them, the car is still there. The song on the radio is still playing. It feels like I’ve stumbled on the scene of a horrible accident, like somebody else other than me did this. I look around. The rain is still coming down hard. I know what I have to do.
I’m lucky that the ground at the edge of the road is on a slight slope. The hard part is getting the car moving. As it starts to roll I’m able to twist the wheel around and angle the car toward the drop. It starts picking up speed and I barely let go before it rolls over the edge and crashes down into the darkness. And then it’s quiet, except for the sound of the raindrops falling through the trees and hammering off my hood.
It takes me an hour to walk back home.
Mom is waiting for me at the door, a look on her face like I’ve never seen before. I mumble something about how sorry I am and collapse in front of her, holding the gun out in both hands like a sacrificial offering.
83
Carter Blake
“By the time you hear this, you’ll know, I guess. Adeline knows, I think, or she’s working it out. Maybe she’s told you already. Either way, Feldman knew, and he left all his notes. That means it’s over. Did you suspect? Sometimes I wondered. Like when you talked about how Adeline made herself into a new person, how that was how she was able to fool you at first, because she fooled herself. That’s exactly what I did too. What I said was true, the Devil Mountain Killer is dead. She died fifteen years ago.”
Green’s recorded voice spoke to me from the speaker of my phone as I sat in the driver’s seat, looking straight ahead. The message was only a couple of minutes, but it felt longer. She laid it all out. How she had wanted to talk to someone about it forever. She said she didn’t know why she killed those people, back then. She understood there was no explanation as to why some people were like her. Some of them have an excuse: childhood trauma, drugs, bad wiring. She thought she was just born that way; born to kill. But she said she had it under control.
“One day at a time. That’s all it takes. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Every day, you don’t kill anyone. And I did that for fifteen years of days. But I already killed one person today, so I figure Waylon Mercer is a freebie. And I’m doing the world a favor.”
As I listened, I saw one of the deputies come out of the front door of the house. He took his hat off and scratched his head, still lagging a long way behind events. I knew exactly how he felt.
“Under control”. Little things came back to me. The running, the abstention from alcohol or cigarettes or even caffeine. Hints of a fiercely disciplined personality that had been holding a lot more in check than anyone had realized.
Green’s voice kept talking to me, telling me that although she couldn’t explain the urge to kill those people, she knew why she had stopped. Her mother and father had been concerned for a while. They didn’t know for sure, but they were starting to piece things together. They had fought that night, and Green had gone out in the storm. She didn’t learn until later that her father had gone out to look for her. A twist of fate and three people being in the wrong place at the wrong time had led to him being in a stranger’s car with Adeline Connor.
She started talking about what happened afterwards that night, but I had already worked it out from what Kathleen Green had told me. Green had confessed and begged her mother’s forgiveness. Kathleen had helped her, buried the gun and burned her clothes. She could have provided an alibi for her daughter too, but none was ever needed. No one ever suspected the young, beautiful, functional psychopath.
No one until Feldman worked it out.
I could fill in the rest of the blanks, now. Kathleen had told Feldman something as her control began to slip. Maybe the whole story, maybe just enough to put him on the right track. Feldman was in love with Green, so he had kept the knowledge secret, even from Green herself.
When David Connor had hired someone to look into his sister’s disappearance, Feldman had seen to it that the trail went nowhere, by killing Wheeler and González in Atlanta, and then Haycox when he realized he was looking into it. When I appeared on the scene, he realized the problem was getting worse. It was no longer something that could be dealt with quietly. He killed more people; tried to frame me first, and then David Connor, using the Devil Mountain Killer’s MO and hoping that people would buy the explanation that Connor was obsessed with the case.
Green’s message was almost finished, now.
“Will the feds go public with this? I don’t know. I think they’ll keep it hush-hush. Whatever Feldman found, McGregor won’t be able to truly believe it until he talks to me, and he’s never going to talk to me. They’ll look hard for me at first, but when they don’t find me, they’ll leave it be. Something else will come up for the FBI, and McGregor will be only too happy to put this back in the past. The Devil Mountain case has been dormant for fifteen years, because the killer has finished. But I want you to know, Blake. I want you to be sure, and to be sure that it really is over now.
“I know what you’re t
hinking. Now I’ve started again, I won’t be able to stop. I don’t know, but it doesn’t feel like it. I’m not that person anymore. I can control it. But if I’m wrong about that, then there will be a trail. And I’m counting on you to follow that trail, and stop me. But I don’t think I’m wrong.
“If I do this right, no one will ever hear from me again.”
The message ended and I was left alone in the car with the silence.
She sounded reasonable, reassuring. But perhaps that was why the end of Isabella Green’s message chilled me more than any of the details that had come before. It wasn’t her words so much as the way her voice sounded.
She sounded like the kind of person you absolutely want to believe.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Every year the task of writing a novel seems borderline impossible, but once again, it’s somehow managed to happen. This is due in no small part to the support I get from an ever-expanding group of people.
Thanks as always to Laura and the kids for letting me disappear for hours on end to write. Special mention to Ava for making sure the BBC, TIME magazine and George Takei have heard of us – ice cream on me. Thanks to my editor Francesca Pathak for doing a fantastic job helping me knock this one into shape, and contributing some really great ideas along the way. Luigi Bonomi, my agent, and Alison Bonomi were brilliant as usual, and always available for ideas and advice. Thanks to everyone else at Orion, particularly Bethan Jones and Jon Wood for their enthusiasm and suggestions for this story, and Lauren Woosey and Laura Swainbank for making sure people know about me and the books. And the people who did the awesome cover – this one is my favourite.
My ace advance readers Mary Hays, James Stansfield, Liz Buchanan and Eve Short. All of my overseas publishers, especially Pegasus for a warm welcome in a wintry New York. The whole crime writing community, who never fail to support, boost and occasionally intimidate me (in a good way).
Finally, as always, a heartfelt thank you to all of the readers, bloggers, booksellers and librarians who read the books and tell the world about them. Ice cream for all of you, too.
Discover your next compulsive read from
Richard and Judy Book Club pick
MASON CROSS
‘Mason Cross is a thriller writer for the future who produces the kind of fast-paced, high octane thrillers that I love to read’ Simon Kernick
It was a simple instruction. And for six long years Carter Blake kept his word and didn’t search for the woman he once loved. But now someone else is looking for her.
Trenton Gage is a hitman with a talent for finding people – dead or alive. His next job is to track down a woman who’s on the run, who is harbouring a secret many will kill for.
Both men are hunting the same person. The question is, who will find her first?
Click here to buy now!
‘One of the best new series characters since Jack Reacher’
Lisa Gardner
When Blake parted ways with top-secret government operation Winterlong, they brokered a deal: he’d keep quiet about what they were doing, and in return he’d be left alone.
But something has changed and now they’re coming for him.
Blake may be the best there is at tracking people down, but Winterlong taught him everything he knows. If there’s anyone who can find him – and kill him – it’s them.
It’s time for Carter Blake to up his game.
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A Richard and Judy Book Club Pick Spring 2016
A serial killer dubbed ‘The Samaritan’ has been operating undetected for a decade, preying on lone female drivers who have broken down.
With no leads and the investigation grinding to a halt, Carter Blake volunteers his services. But he shares some uncomfortable similarities with the man he is tracking.
As the slaughter intensifies, Blake must find a way to stop it – even if it means bringing his own past crashing down on top of him.
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‘My kind of book’
Lee Child
Caleb Wardell, the infamous ‘Chicago Sniper’, escapes from death row two weeks before his execution. One man is sent to find him, a man with certain specialised skills at finding those who don’t want to be found. A man to whom Wardell is no stranger.
Carter Blake.
Blake must track Wardell down as he cuts a swathe across America, killing people apparently at random. As he tries desperately to track a man who kills for the thrill, he uncovers widespread corruption. Now Blake must break the rules and go head to head with the FBI if he is to stop Wardell and expose a deadly conspiracy that will rock the country.
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All available in paperback and ebook
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ALSO BY MASON CROSS
The Killing Season
The Samaritan
The Time to Kill
Don’t Look For Me
Copyright
An Orion ebook
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Orion Books.
Ebook first published in 2018 by Orion Books.
Copyright © Mason Cross 2018
The right of Mason Cross to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 4091 6505 7
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