1st Case

by James Patterson

  “Check the van in the driveway,” Keats said into his radio.

  “Already there, sir,” a voice came back. “We have Ms. Abajian.”

  If it was possible to breathe a sigh of relief, I did just then.

  Keats looked at the Engineer again. “All right. It’s going to be at least twenty minutes before we’re mobile. See if you can find a more comfortable position.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said.

  “I’m not,” Keats said, and stuck out his chin at me. “I’m worried about her. You can’t keep that stance for twenty more minutes. You’re already exhausted. I can tell.”

  For a second, nothing happened. Then the Engineer yanked me by the shoulder, pushing back and downward, pressing me into a kneel. I tried to do it, but my right leg had stiffened way up. I came halfway down instead, landing on my left knee.

  At the same moment, a loud popping sound came, like a stun grenade, from out on the lawn. I saw a flash of blue light from the corner of my eye and turned to look. So did the Engineer.

  Everything happened fast. I saw the red dot of a laser site appear on his forehead. On instinct, I dove out of the way as much as I could in that small space. It was a blind move and I crashed into my own nightstand, bringing the lamp down on top of me.

  At the same time, I heard a small sound of breaking glass. The Engineer’s head cocked back, like someone had punched him in the face. His knees bent first, but the rest of him followed.

  “Shot fired!” Keats was saying into his radio. The bedroom door opened and personnel were flooding back in.

  Billy was there in a second. He scrambled across the bed to reach me.

  “Are you okay?” he practically shouted, shielding me against anything else that might come flying.

  “I’m okay!” I said. I really was.

  Because over Billy’s shoulder, I could see where the Engineer had come to a rest on the floor. A dark, impossibly round circle showed on his forehead, and his eyes seemed frozen wide open.

  He was dead already. The sniper’s bullet had found its mark.

  And the longest night of my life was finally over.

  CHAPTER 92

  THE NEXT SEVERAL minutes are a blur in my memory. There were EMTs to check me out. Billy wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and helped me walk out of the room after I flat-out refused the gurney they wanted to use for me.

  He explained a few things as we slowly made our way down the stairs.

  “We assumed some kind of home invasion was a possibility as soon as you disappeared,” he said. “Your family was under guard the entire time. It turns out your parents are just as stubborn as you are, and they insisted on keeping up appearances for as long as possible. But it worked.”

  The house had been surreptitiously vacated just after lights out, he told me. All of the previous home invasions had taken place between midnight and 4:00 a.m., and this one had been no exception.

  As soon as we made it out to the front lawn, my mother, father, and sisters rushed up from the curb to enclose me in the most welcome group hug in the history of group hugs.

  “My God, Angela, you’re bleeding!” Mom said.

  “I’m okay,” I told her.

  “You’re not the judge of that,” she said. A second later, my mother was literally grabbing an EMT to take another look at me. It was my knee that needed attention, but I didn’t say that out loud in front of Mom.

  “How are you still alive?” Dad asked, kissing my head over and over, hugging me as gently as he could. My sisters were clinging on either side of me, crying happy tears.

  In the midst of that, I caught sight of Eve, laid out on a gurney in the back of an open ambulance. I gently extracted myself from the family cluster and climbed in to see her.

  “Look who it is,” she said groggily.

  “Billy told me they’re bringing Marlena to the hospital,” I told her. “You’ll see her soon.”

  A tear rolled out of the corner of Eve’s eye. It was the first time I’d ever seen her cry, if that even counted. And it broke the seal on my own tears, too.

  “Eve … I’m so sorry,” I said, choking it out through a sob. There were no definitive words for what I was feeling. Regret, relief, joy, love, and everything in between.

  “Don’t be sorry,” she told me. She put a hand under my chin and got my eyes to meet hers. Maybe it was the narcotics, but she’d never touched me so tenderly before. I waited for some sage piece of wisdom from her.

  “Remind me not to get you any more internships,” she said.

  I laughed through my tears and blew snot down my shirt without giving a hoot.

  “Duly noted,” I said, and kept the rest of my mushy feelings to myself. Like for instance, I sent a little prayer of thanks up to God for bringing Eve Abajian into my life in the first place.

  And for making sure the two of us weren’t done with each other yet.

  CHAPTER 93

  IT TOOK ME several days to get all the info I’d been dying for, but there was finally an unofficial team meeting on my first shift back at work.

  We had it in SAC Gruss’s office, marking the first time I’d been invited to the top of the pyramid like that. Not bad. She had a killer view of the harbor, a private bathroom, and the kind of imposing mahogany desk you might expect. She seemed to fit perfectly behind it. Audrey Gruss wasn’t afraid to lead, and I admired that about her.

  I sat on one of Gruss’s two couches, listening to the debrief and looking over the file of materials Keats had passed around.

  The killers in this case were Aaron and Michael Dion, legitimate biological brothers, ages seventeen and twenty-three. They’d been left behind by two very wealthy parents whose double murder had never been solved—until now.

  Back at that time, the brothers had been separated by the foster system, both passed from home to home, until the older one, Michael, had aged into his trust fund at twenty-one.

  The younger one, Aaron—the Poet and the Engineer, as it turned out—was a bona fide genius in his own right. He’d been a prodigy all his life, graduating high school at age thirteen, well ahead of my own accomplishments.

  He’d also been in and out of psychiatric care, until the system lost track of him. In classic fashion, his known file was hip-deep in reports on his inability to attach to anyone beyond his brother. It all tracked with everything I knew about him from our brief time together.

  Michael was dead, I knew by now. But Aaron was going to pull through.

  “I think Hoot put a permanent dent in his head,” Keats said, trying not to smile. “What did you use on him, anyway?”

  “Brute strength,” I said with a straight face. Several of the others, including Gruss, seemed to approve.

  The truth was, none of it sat entirely well with me. Aaron had been right about one thing: he and I shared some common ground. I know what it’s like to live inside a crowded mind like that. It can manifest in all kinds of ways, but history is littered with the miserable lives of brilliant people. It was tragic, in a way.

  “So what happens to him now?” I asked.

  “He’ll be in psychiatric custody at least until he’s eighteen, and then his case can be retried,” Gruss reported. “Let’s just say my hopes aren’t too high for this kid.”

  Mine weren’t, either. But in a way that I never could have predicted, some small part of me was pulling for him. He was all alone in the world now, and nobody deserves that.

  No exceptions.

  Then, as the meeting was breaking up and I was turning to go, Gruss called my name.

  “Angela? Got another minute?” she said.

  Of course the answer was yes. I sat back down while she closed the door and resituated herself across the desk from me.

  I couldn’t help getting a little case of nerves. Unlike most people, Ms. Gruss intimidated me.

  “So tell me,” she said. “You’ve been through quite a lot in a short time. What are your feelings about continuing on?”
/>   Oh, man. Here it came.

  “I’d like to finish out the internship very much,” I said. “If you’ll have me, I mean.”

  “Actually, I was asking about the longer term,” Gruss said. She took a packet of some kind out of her drawer and slid it across to me. “So when your six months is up, I’d like you to consider our training program at Quantico.”

  I coughed out a little laugh before I could help myself.

  “I’ll be honest,” I told her. “That’s not what I thought you were going to say.”

  “I can tell,” she said.

  I tried to maintain eye contact with her, but it was hard not to jump into that packet right away. It looked like some kind of pre-application.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I said. “Thank you very much. I’ll be filling this out the first chance I get.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said. “Just make sure you’re ready. This training program isn’t the easiest thing you’ll ever take on.”

  “Considering the last few weeks, I’m pretty sure it won’t be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, either,” I said. “With all due respect.”

  She smiled then, as briefly as ever, but warmly, and dismissed me back to my desk.

  As I headed out of the room, I could feel my thoughts turning toward the future in a whole new way. Most of all, I just kept thinking, What next?

  Because I was all out of predictions.

  CHAPTER 94

  THE CRAZINESS AROUND the case went on for nearly a week. The press coverage was absurd, and I had to lie low for a while.

  But finally, I got to have a nice dinner, one-on-one, with my bestie, A.A.

  And by dinner, I mean I brought a loaded pizza and a bottle of Jameson to our old apartment. That’s where life could start to feel something like normal again.

  I’m not naive enough to say that everything I’d been through meant never sweating the small stuff again. But I wasn’t going to waste any more opportunities, if I could help it.

  So once A.A. and I got through all the brouhaha about this case, I brought the subject around to her.

  And me.

  And us.

  “Listen,” I said. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while now. I should probably ask you about it first, but … I don’t know. I guess this whole experience has left me in a ‘Just go for it’ kind of mood.”

  “Excuse me?” she said. “Since when have you not been that way?”

  “Good point,” I said.

  So I leaned in, put a hand on her cheek, and kissed her. I did it lightly and slowly. Then I lingered. And she let me. The whole thing sent a swimming feeling through my body before I leaned back again.

  “O … kaaay,” she said. “Was that for real? Or are you just—”

  “It was for real,” I told her. “And maybe a little late in coming.”

  There were a million other things in my head, but nothing that actually needed saying.

  A.A. took a swig of Jameson from the bottle. “I didn’t even know you were bi,” she said. “I mean … are you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not really down with the label, if that’s what you’re asking. But does it matter?”

  “God, Piglet, I’m not sure what to say,” she told me. “Believe me, if I was going to go for a girl, you’d be at the top of the list. Actually, scratch that. You’d be the list.”

  Her smile was warm, like the whiskey glow I could feel in my chest. This wasn’t a rejection. It was just loving honesty, the kind you’re lucky to get once or twice in a lifetime.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, okay?” she said. “I just don’t think I’m interested. But if you tell me we can’t be friends now, I’m totally going to hunt you down, take you captive, and tie you up in the woods.”

  “Very funny,” I said.

  “Too soon?”

  I shook my head. “For anyone else, maybe. Not you.”

  “Friends, then?” she asked, putting her hand on top of mine.

  “Sisters,” I said. “For life.”

  CHAPTER 95

  AT MY FAMILY’S insistence, Keats came to the house in Belmont for dinner that Saturday night. It didn’t stand for as much as I think they all wanted it to.

  “Come outside for a second,” he said when I answered the door. I followed him down to the curb, where he was parked. He popped the hatch on his car.

  In the back was a brand-new, twenty-seven-inch Giant Talon. It was exactly like my old bike, but newer, better—and double suspension. Those puppies aren’t cheap.

  “I figured you deserved it,” he said.

  “But you didn’t have to buy it,” I said.

  “It’s from all of us at the office,” he told me.

  “Oh.”

  I was a tiny bit disappointed, in a way that I wasn’t going to admit to myself, much less to Billy.

  “Well, I’m overwhelmed,” I said. “Thank you. Really. In fact, maybe I’ll skip dinner and go out for a ride right now.”

  “And leave me alone with your family?” he said. “Move. Inside, Hoot. That’s an order.”

  Dinner was actually a lot of fun. I liked watching Billy squirm under the Hoot microscope.

  “Are you the one Angela dropped out of college for?” Sylvie asked.

  “She didn’t drop out,” Hannah said. “She was kicked out.”

  “Drop-kicked, maybe?” Billy tried, which scored a couple of huge grins at the table.

  Not from Mom, though. She still had no sense of humor about my MIT debacle. If she had her choice, I’d be out of the FBI and back at school.

  But lucky for me, that wasn’t up to her.

  “Angela’s going to make an excellent trainee at Quantico,” Billy said. “We’ll miss her at the office while she’s gone, but then it’ll be great to have her back.”

  “Angela 2.0,” Hannah said. “Superagent extraordinaire.”

  “Next subject?” I said. It was crossing into embarrassing territory now.

  “So, Agent Keats,” Mom started in as she poured some cabernet. “What’s your favorite fairy tale?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sleeping Beauty? Snow White?” Mom asked. “Which story stuck to you most from your childhood?”

  Billy looked at a loss, like the question was some kind of personality test. Which it basically was.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never been much into fairy tales.”

  A round of knowing looks circled the table as my mother reached out to take Billy’s hand.

  “I can help,” she said. “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  It was funny, but also true. Because deep down inside, my mother knew exactly what she was talking about. Everything would be fine one of these days. Even if Billy wasn’t the happily-ever-after type.

  Then again, neither am I.

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to Kevin Swindon and the staff of the Computer Analysis Response Team at the Boston FBI field office.

  AN UNLIKELY DETECTIVE BRINGS LIFE INTO THE WORLD BY DAY — THEN BRINGS JUSTICE TO THOSE WHO TAKE IT AWAY.

  FOR AN EXTRACT, TURN THE PAGE.

  IT’S MONDAY. IT’S AUGUST. And it’s one of those days that’s already so hot at 6 a.m. that they tell you to check on your elderly neighbors and please don’t go outside if you don’t have to. So of course I’m jogging through the stifling, smelly streets of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, with a dog—a dog named The Duke. Yes. Not Duke, but The Duke. That’s his name. That’s what my son, Willie, who was four years old when The Duke was a puppy, wanted. So that’s what we did.

  The Duke is a terrific dog, a mixed-breed German shepherd, terrier, and God knows what else from the Brooklyn Animal Resource Coalition—BARC—animal shelter. He’s cuter than any guy I ever dated, and Willie was instinctively right about the dog’s name. He’s The Duke. The Duke is snooty and snobby and slow. He actually seems to think he’s royalty. His Highness belongs to Willie, b
ut for forty-five minutes a day, The Duke condescends to be my running buddy.

  The Duke doesn’t seem to know or care that I’ve got places to be. I’m a certified nurse-midwife, so I do my work by the schedules of a lot of pregnant women. On a normal day like today, I’ve got only a small window of time to exercise before getting breakfast on the table, because although Willie is now nine years old, he still needs a lot of looking after by me, his single mom. Then it’s a half hour subway ride into midtown Manhattan. Back to work, although I’m tired as hell from delivering a preterm last night. (Emma Rose, the infant, is doing just fine, I’m relieved to say.) Yeah, I’m beat, but I love my job as much as I hate running.

  Get away from that rotten piece of melon, The Duke. Those pigeons got there first!

  I tug hard on the leash. It takes The Duke a full city block to forget about the melon. Don’t feel bad for the dog; he’ll find some other rotten food to run after. If not, there’s a big bowl of Purina and some cold Chinese takeout beef and broccoli waiting for him at home.

  I turn up the volume in my headphones. Okay, it’s the same playlist I listened to when I was a teenager, but Motörhead’s Ace of Spades never gets old, does it? Willie says that every band I like—Motörhead, Korn, Cake—is “definitely old school.” He’s right. But, hey, you like what you like, right? And, hey, old school isn’t so awful. At least not for me.

  No, no, no. We’re not stopping to talk to Marty … “Hey, Marty, how ya doing, man?” No, no, The Duke, we don’t need any cocaine today. Keep moving. Keep moving.

  Pep talk to self: Come on, Lucy Ryuan, you can do it. Keep moving. Even on just four hours’ sleep, you can do it. A little bit more. One more block. Then one more block.