Murder of Innocence (Murder Is Forever)

by James Patterson

  “I know what they’re going to say in court today,” she says. “They’re going to paint the picture of Mark Putnam as some kind of victim here. ‘He’s a good guy who just made a mistake. Poor pitiful Mark Putnam, with his prep-school education and his athletic scholarship and his fancy FBI badge—if only that hillbilly girl hadn’t thrown herself at him, he might have had a bright future.’

  “Mark Putnam is not the victim—my sister is the victim. He recruited her to work for the FBI. He got her to do his bidding. He had power over her. It was his responsibility to keep the relationship professional. She trusted him, and he repaid that trust by strangling her to death and going to work the next morning with her body in his trunk.

  “All this just sends a message to the world what the federal government thinks about us. If you want to get away with murder, just make sure you come to Kentucky to do it—and make sure your victim is poor and female.”

  As the journalists scratch frantically on their note-pads, Molly says that if they have any more questions, she’ll answer them after the hearing.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” she says, “I want to go inside now and get a good seat. If I get the chance, I’m going to spit in Mark Putnam’s face.”

  This last statement gets a few nervous laughs from the journalists, who don’t know if she’s joking.

  Molly enters the courthouse and joins the queue to go through security. She drops her handbag on the conveyor belt and steps through the checkpoint. She waits for her purse to come out of the x-ray machine. Before she can grab it off the conveyor belt, one of the deputies says, “Wait a minute.”

  He snatches the bag and unzips it. Tucked into an inside pocket is the snub-nosed .38 she always carries in the bag.

  “Oh, hell,” she says. “I forgot that was in there.”

  The security guard stares at her.

  “Ma’am,” he says, “you’re under arrest.”

  CHAPTER 38

  KATHY PUTNAM SITS AT home, waiting to hear from Mark’s lawyer, Dominic Newman, who’d told her that Mark would be able to call her after the hearing, before he was taken to prison.

  Kathy can’t stop crying.

  Her parents, who flew down from Connecticut to help, have taken the kids to the pool so that she can be alone when Mark calls. As she waits, Kathy tries to calm her nerves by pouring herself a glass of vodka and soda. She chose vodka when she was at the liquor store yesterday so that the kids—and her parents—wouldn’t smell alcohol on her breath.

  As she takes a large swallow, she thinks of Susan and how obvious it had been that she was smitten with Mark. But Kathy would never have befriended her if she’d understood the threat Susan posed to her marriage. She could have steered Mark away from her. She could have warned him that Susan would try to worm her way into his life.

  Part of her knows it’s wrong to blame Susan. Whatever mistakes the woman made, she didn’t deserve to pay with her life. When Mark told her what he’d done, initially Kathy had been in shock. Then she’d been angry with him. In the days after he told her, she’d debated what to do, ultimately concluding that she wouldn’t let a mistake—even one this big—tear them apart. Mark had known about Kathy’s own past mistakes, yet he had still stood with her on the altar and vowed to love her for better or worse.

  Now it’s her turn to stand with him.

  As soon as the phone rings, Kathy snatches it up. “Are you okay? What happened?”

  “Everything went as expected,” Mark says with resignation. “I can’t talk long. We’re heading to the airport soon. I can’t believe I’m going to prison.”

  He tells her that it feels weird to wear handcuffs. He’d put cuffs on other people but had never known what they felt like on his own wrists. Kathy’s heart breaks when she thinks of her husband, the FBI agent, now handcuffed like a criminal.

  Not like a criminal. He is a criminal.

  As she starts to cry, he says, for what must be the hundredth time since he broke the news to her about killing Susan, that he’s sorry. “I love you.”

  “I love you too,” she says. “I’ll wait for you. We’ll wait for you. This isn’t the end for our family. We’ll be happy again.”

  But after she hangs up the phone, she sobs into her hands. Then pours herself another drink.

  She doesn’t know how she’ll ever be happy again.

  Epilogue

  Summer 1998. Eight Years Later

  MOLLY DAVIDSON WALKS THE cracked paved path through the cemetery to her sister’s grave. She places a bunch of flowers—begonias, petunias, and zinnias picked from her own garden—on the overgrown grass. Susan’s headstone is a simple bronze marker, paid for by the state of Kentucky. Six feet below, her sister’s bones lie in a child-size casket.

  There had been no need for an adult-size coffin. There wasn’t enough left of Susan to fill it.

  Molly stands sweating in the summer heat. It’s late in the afternoon and there isn’t any shade next to Susan’s grave. The sky is the color of faded denim, and the humidity is oppressive.

  Molly tries to make this trip at least once a month. She comes and tells her sister—if there’s anything left of her spirit in this world or in heaven—about all that’s going on in the family. How Samantha and Alex are doing, how they’re growing like weeds, that she’d be amazed at how tall they’ve become. She tells Susan about her brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews.

  In the past, she’d also updated Susan about developments in the case related to Mark Putnam, but there hasn’t been anything new in that area for a few years.

  While the gun charges were looming over her, Molly had refrained from publicly criticizing the Kentucky law enforcement agencies who investigated her sister’s death and prosecuted the murderer. But once the charges were dropped, Molly continued fighting for some semblance of justice for her sister.

  Molly decried the FBI in the newspapers and filed a lawsuit against the agency, hoping to raise money for Susan’s children. But the suit was thrown out for technical reasons she didn’t understand.

  Apparently, the FBI briefly suspended a couple of people—Mark’s partner Glen Bell and his supervisor Trent Cavanagh—but otherwise, the agency quickly washed its hands of the whole mess and did not take any responsibility for how it had mismanaged its informants, failed to supervise its agent, and looked the other way when it was obvious one of its agents had something to do with Susan’s disappearance.

  Molly had also sued Mark Putnam, but even though the judge awarded her almost a million dollars in damages, the son of a bitch declared bankruptcy, and her family never got a cent.

  That left Susan’s kids without a mother and still as poor as ever.

  Molly prayed for them every night and asked Susan to watch over them from heaven if she could.

  Today, however, Molly is here with different news.

  “I came to tell you,” Molly says, swallowing hard, “about Kathy.”

  A few years after Susan was buried and after the lawsuits had all amounted to nothing, Molly had decided to write Kathy Putnam a letter. She felt Mark’s wife was also a victim of his. He’d killed Susan, and he’d destroyed Kathy’s life too.

  To Molly’s surprise, Kathy wrote her back. They exchanged letters for a while and then began talking on the phone.

  Kathy was easy to talk to; Molly could see why her sister had spent so many hours on the phone with her. And Molly suspected that she somehow filled the void of friendship that Susan’s death had left.

  Molly knew it was an unconventional friendship that nobody else understood, but she and Kathy had bonded over the tragedy of Susan’s death.

  They were both collateral damage.

  Molly knew that Mark had bounced around various federal prisons over the past eight years, some of them essentially country clubs, with tennis courts, swimming pools, and restaurant-quality food. Now he was in Massachusetts and probably had only a couple of years left before he was released. He might be a little grayer, his body a littl
e heavier, but he’d still be alive and well when he got out. Mostly Kathy remained mum about her continued devotion to him, and somehow the two women ignored the fact that Molly hated—despised—the man that Kathy loved.

  Somehow their friendship worked.

  They were united in sorrow, even if they weren’t mourning the same thing.

  On these graveside visits, Molly also often updated Susan about Kathy and her kids. She thought her sister would want to know. But today, she has something difficult to say.

  “Kathy died,” Molly tells her, choking back tears.

  Earlier this morning when the phone rang, Molly had wondered if it might be Kathy, since she hadn’t heard from her in a few weeks. To Molly’s surprise, however, it was Jenny, Kathy’s daughter.

  “I thought you should know that Mom’s dead,” the little girl said, sounding older than her thirteen years. “She would have wanted me to call you.”

  Jenny explained that she’d come home from school to find her mom on the couch, unmoving. Molly knew that Kathy had become a heavy drinker after Mark’s arrest, and it was a regular occurrence for her children to get back from school and find their mom passed out.

  But that day, when Jenny tried to rouse her mother, she found her body cold and stiff.

  The doctors determined that the cause of death was heart failure, but Kathy was only thirty-eight years old. She’d been depressed and consuming alcohol at an alarming rate over the years since Mark had been incarcerated.

  The bottom line was, she drank herself to death.

  Kathy had stood by her husband through everything, but the position he’d put her in had been too much to bear. He’d murdered Susan, but, indirectly, he’d killed Kathy too. Molly can’t help but reflect on how unfair it is that he’ll soon be free while both of the women caught in his love triangle are now dead.

  Molly kneels in the grass in front of Susan’s grave as she tells all this to the empty air. She stares at the cross embossed on the bronze grave marker and remembers the small cross Susan used to wear around her neck.

  Maybe Mark Putnam really did feel guilty for what he’d done, as he claimed in his confession, and maybe he’d become a better person while in prison. Reform was possible, of course.

  But as Molly rises from the grave and walks back to her car, she thinks that she may never be able to let go of her anger at Mark Putnam for causing so much destruction to so many lives. If it had been the other way around and Susan had somehow killed him in a fit of rage, she would have spent the rest of her life behind bars. She might have been given the death penalty.

  But he’ll spend only ten years in prison.

  Molly can imagine him now, walking out of prison, hugging his kids. Taking a breath of fresh air. Getting to start over.

  A second chance.

  Which was more than Susan ever got.

  ‘An unmissable, breakneck ride into Moscow’s dark underworld’

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  ‘Exhilarating, high-stakes action’

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  ‘Difficult to put down’

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  ‘A quick, slick, gripping read’

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  THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

  CRISS CROSS

  James Patterson

  Mere hours after witnessing the execution of a killer he helped put behind bars, Alex Cross is called to the scene of a copycat murder. A note signed ‘M’ rests on the corpse: ‘You messed up big time, Dr. Cross.’

  Was an innocent man just put to death? As the executed convict’s family launch a vicious campaign against Cross, his abilities as a detective are called into question.

  More murders follow, all marked with distressingly familiar details that conjure up decades-old cases and Cross family secrets. Details that make it clear the killer’s main target is Alex Cross.

  THE INN

  James Patterson & Candice Fox

  The Inn at Gloucester stands alone on the rocky New England shoreline. Its seclusion suits former Boston police detective Bill Robinson, novice owner and innkeeper. Yet all too soon Robinson discovers that leaving the city is no escape from dangers he left behind. A new crew of deadly criminals move into the small town, bringing drugs and violence to the front door of the inn.

  Robinson’s sense of duty compels him to fight off the threat to his town. But he can’t do it alone. Before time runs out, the residents of the inn will face a choice. Stand together? Or die alone.

  Also by James Patterson

  ALEX CROSS NOVELS

  Along Came a Spider • Kiss the Girls • Jack and Jill • Cat and Mouse • Pop Goes the Weasel • Roses are Red • Violets are Blue • Four Blind Mice • The Big Bad Wolf • London Bridges • Mary, Mary • Cross • Double Cross • Cross Country • Alex Cross’s Trial (with Richard DiLallo) • I, Alex Cross • Cross Fire • Kill Alex Cross • Merry Christmas, Alex Cross • Alex Cross, Run • Cross My Heart • Hope to Die • Cross Justice • Cross the Line • The People vs. Alex Cross • Target: Alex Cross • Criss Cross

  THE WOMEN’S MURDER CLUB SERIES

  1st to Die • 2nd Chance (with Andrew Gross) • 3rd Degree (with Andrew Gross) • 4th of July (with Maxine Paetro) • The 5th Horseman (with Maxine Paetro) • The 6th Target (with Maxine Paetro) • 7th Heaven (with Maxine Paetro) • 8th Confession (with Maxine Paetro) • 9th Judgement (with Maxine Paetro) • 10th Anniversary (with Maxine Paetro) • 11th Hour (with Maxine Paetro) • 12th of Never (with Maxine Paetro) • Unlucky 13 (with Maxine Paetro) • 14th Deadly Sin (with Maxine Paetro) • 15th Affair (with Maxine Paetro) • 16th Seduction (with Maxine Paetro) • 17th Suspect (with Maxine Paetro) • 18th Abduction (with Maxine Paetro) • 19th Christmas (with Maxine Paetro) • 20th Victim (with Maxine Paetro)

  DETECTIVE MICHAEL BENNETT SERIES

  Step on a Crack (with Michael Ledwidge) • Run for Your Life (with Michael Ledwidge) • Worst Case (with Michael Ledwidge) • Tick Tock (with Michael Ledwidge) • I, Michael Bennett (with Michael Ledwidge) • Gone (with Michael Ledwidge) • Burn (with Michael Ledwidge) • Alert (with Michael Ledwidge) • Bullseye (with Michael Ledwidge) • Haunted (with James O. Born) • Ambush (with James O. Born) • Blindside (with James O. Born)

  PRIVATE NOVELS

  Private (with Maxine Paetro) • Private London (with Mark Pearson) • Private Games (with Mark Sullivan) • Private: No. 1 Suspect (with Maxine Paetro) • Private Berlin (with Mark Sullivan) • Private Down Under (with Michael White) • Private L.A. (with Mark Sullivan) • Private India (with Ashwin Sanghi) • Private Vegas (with Maxine Paetro) • Private Sydney (with Kathryn Fox) • Private Paris (with Mark Sullivan) • The Games (with Mark Sullivan) • Private Delhi (with Ashwin Sanghi) • Private Princess (with Rees Jones) • Private Moscow (with Adam Hamdy)

  NYPD RED SERIES

  NYPD Red (with Marshall Karp) • NYPD Red 2 (with Marshall Karp) • NYPD Red 3 (with Marshall Karp) • NYPD Red 4 (with Marshall Karp) • NYPD Red 5 (with Marshall Karp)

  DETECTIVE HARRIET BLUE SERIES

  Never Never (with Candice Fox) • Fifty Fifty (with Candice Fox) • Liar Liar (with Candice Fox) • Hush Hush (with Candice Fox)

  INSTINCT SERIES

  Instinct (with Howard Roughan, previously published as Murder Games) • Killer Instinct (with Howard Roughan)

  STAND-ALONE THRILLERS

  The Thomas Berryman Number • Hide and Seek • Black Market • The Midnight Club • Sail (with Howard Roughan) • Swimsuit (with Maxine Paetro) • Don’t Blink (with Howard Roughan) • Postcard Killers (with Liza Marklund) • Toys (with Neil McMahon) • Now You Se
e Her (with Michael Ledwidge) • Kill Me If You Can (with Marshall Karp) • Guilty Wives (with David Ellis) • Zoo (with Michael Ledwidge) • Second Honeymoon (with Howard Roughan) • Mistress (with David Ellis) • Invisible (with David Ellis) • Truth or Die (with Howard Roughan) • Murder House (with David Ellis) • The Black Book (with David Ellis) • The Store (with Richard DiLallo) • Texas Ranger (with Andrew Bourelle) • The President is Missing (with Bill Clinton) • Revenge (with Andrew Holmes) • Juror No. 3 (with Nancy Allen) • The First Lady (with Brendan DuBois) • The Chef (with Max DiLallo) • Out of Sight (with Brendan DuBois) • Unsolved (with David Ellis) • The Inn (with Candice Fox) • Lost (with James O. Born) • The Summer House (with Brendan DuBois) • 1st Case (with Chris Tebbetts) • Cajun Justice (with Tucker Axum) • The Midwife Murders (with Richard DiLallo) • Texas Outlaw (with Andrew Bourelle) • The Coast-to-Coast Murders (with J. D. Barker) • Three Women Disappear (with Shan Serafin)

  NON-FICTION

  Torn Apart (with Hal and Cory Friedman) • The Murder of King Tut (with Martin Dugard) • All-American Murder (with Alex Abramovich and Mike Harvkey) • The Kennedy Curse (with Cynthia Fagen)

  COLLECTIONS

  Triple Threat (with Max DiLallo and Andrew Bourelle) • Kill or Be Killed (with Maxine Paetro, Rees Jones, Shan Serafin and Emily Raymond) • The Moores are Missing (with Loren D. Estleman, Sam Hawken and Ed Chatterton) • The Family Lawyer (with Robert Rotstein, Christopher Charles and Rachel Howzell Hall) • Murder in Paradise (with Doug Allyn, Connor Hyde and Duane Swierczynski) • The House Next Door (with Susan DiLallo, Max DiLallo and Brendan DuBois) • 13-Minute Murder (with Shan Serafin, Christopher Farnsworth and Scott Slaven) • The River Murders (with James O. Born)