Liar Liar

by James Patterson

  I hit the emergency exit button and pried the automatic doors apart. The jump seemed higher, somehow, now that the doors were open.

  I had no choice. I closed my eyes and jumped.

  Chapter 31

  WHITT TOOK THE on-ramp to the highway at breakneck speed, causing Vada to grab onto the handle above her window.

  “Edward, you’re driving like a crazy person. Can you slow down? I know Nowra is a long way off, but I want to get there in one piece.”

  “Sorry. Sorry. I’m just anxious to get to the crime scene. You know.” He pushed his hair back and tried to ease off the accelerator.

  Not even twenty-four hours, he told himself. The previous evening at 5:30 p.m., he’d relapsed, broken his promise to himself that he would not succumb to drugs or alcohol again. Now he’d stumbled once more, talking himself into taking a couple of Dexedrine to wipe out the hangover and get him moving. The great weight that Deputy Commissioner Woods’s words had dumped on him had made it difficult to breathe. But as he’d cracked open the plastic baggie of pills he’d stolen from the evidence room, he’d felt the weight lifting. He deserved this, needed to take care of himself, needed to be kinder to himself. How else was he supposed to keep going? Regan was escalating—so Whitt needed to escalate, too, if only for one day.

  By 5:30 p.m., he promised himself, he’d be sober again—mentally strong, emotionally impenetrable, ready to continue the hunt. The Dexedrine pills would have worn off. He would be clean. Everybody gets a day off once in a while, right? he thought. As long as Vada didn’t notice he was high, he would be fine.

  “Edward, slow down!”

  “Sorry.”

  “What did the report say, exactly?” Vada gripped her seat belt. She’d had to take a phone call when Whitt was called up to the emergency briefing in the command center.

  “It just said a woman’s body was found in a house,” Whitt said. “A big man, broad shoulders, white, late thirties, not a regular from the neighborhood was spotted leaving the scene in her car late morning. We haven’t found the car yet, but we’ve got an alert out on it. They’re erecting roadblocks, but they may be too late. Local cops say the scene was only discovered because a neighbor got curious about the door standing open for a couple of hours.”

  “What did they say about the scene?”

  “Only that it was bad.” Whitt glanced at his partner. Heard the tremor in his own voice. “Really bad.”

  Chapter 32

  CUTS AND SCRAPES: I could deal with them.

  The leap from the train had done something funny to the tendons in my elbow: nothing major.

  The shoulder of my backpack had torn and it now hung crooked: that was all right; I’d get used to it.

  But I’d left my hoodie on the train, and it was cold.

  Goddamnit, I hate the cold.

  The cold makes me unreasonably angry. Pair it with a strong wind, and I become near homicidal. I gathered my arms around myself and trudged, head down, through the rough, battered landscape north of Nowra station, keeping an eye on the highway in the distance. I decided overland on the isolated roads stretching between farms was the safest route. There was no need to make a spectacle of myself.

  It started to rain. I ground my teeth, my fingers gripping my shoulder straps so tight, the tough fabric bit into my palms.

  Regan called. I didn’t answer. I was not his plaything. He didn’t get to just call me up to whisper sadistic sweet nothings whenever he pleased. I was going to be this man’s killer. His righteous punisher. It was all I could do not to throw the phone into the dry grass of a nearby field.

  After an hour of walking through farmland, my phone rang again. I had a brief moment of weakness and answered.

  “Hello, shit biscuit,” I said.

  “Hello, Harry,” Regan said. “What are you doing?”

  “Thinking about breaking all of your fingers.” I sniffed and wiped my eyes on the back of my wrist. “With a hammer.”

  “Sounds windy where you are,” he said. “Don’t catch a cold, Harry.”

  “Thanks, I’ll try not to. I hope you’re snuggled up somewhere warm. Perhaps very close to a crackling fire, enjoying a steaming mug of gasoline.”

  He laughed.

  “What are you going to show me in Nowra?” I asked. It was quiet where he was. I pictured him sitting in a car somewhere, maybe watching me. I glanced toward the highway. A big truck lumbering slowly along. “Are we going to take a tour of your childhood family getaways? This is where baby Regan had his first swim. This is where teenage Regan disemboweled a cat.”

  “I do have something to show you,” he said. “But it’s not about me. It’s about you.”

  “Well, I’ve got some sad news for you,” I said. “I have no personal relationship with Nowra whatsoever. I think I might have had some excellent fish and chips here once. That’s about it.”

  “We’ll see,” he said. I could hear the smile in his voice. I hesitated before I asked the next question, wondering if I would give the monster on the other end of the line any ideas.

  “Does my mother live in Nowra?” I didn’t want to tempt Regan to go after my mother, though something told me that he knew she wasn’t the most important person in my life. My mother had taken $40,000 to do a magazine interview on Sam and me only days after his death in prison. She’d posed for pictures by the ocean, staring out at the waves, a single tear sliding down her drug-ravaged face. All my life, she’d been uninterested, unreliable, a junkie who popped up in my life periodically, looking for money or shelter and nothing more. I had no idea where she lived.

  He gave no answer.

  “Are you there?”

  “I’m here,” he said. “I’m thinking. Trying to analyze your tone. Do you want your mother to die, Harry?”

  “No.”

  “No one would be surprised if you did,” he said. “I’ve been looking at the reports on her in your records. On your fourteenth birthday, she turned up three hours late to the McDonald’s where you were scheduled to meet. She was high as a kite, on the nod. She had a black eye, and some thug who wouldn’t give his full name was with her. She stayed for fifteen minutes, then tried to punch a DOCS worker when he accused her of being under the influence.”

  “I’ve tried to punch a few DOCS workers in my life,” I reasoned.

  “She did a good job of looking torn up about Sam,” Regan said. “Did she even know anything about him?”

  “Sure,” I lied. “In fact, I think they were pretty close at times.” I was hoping to bait Regan into talking about Sam, maybe revealing something about their relationship.

  “Sam grew out of nothing, Harry,” Regan continued. “That something so complex and beautiful and unique could grow out of the beginning that Sam had is just amazing to me. He was full of potential. He refused to be what he should have been, another scavenger. It took a long time to understand what Sam did to me.” He struggled with the words. “For me.”

  “You loved him, didn’t you?” I said. “You were in love with him. What did he do to you?”

  Regan hung up on me. I saw a house through the trees before me, a car sitting in the gravel driveway. The lights in the house were off. With regret stinging in my chest, I approached the house and made a cautious circuit, looking for the best way in. I needed a car and a new jacket, and my food supplies were running low. I hated to steal from innocent people, but right now I had no choice.

  As I shoved open a window left ajar at the side of the house, my phone beeped. The text message contained an address.

  Chapter 33

  KILLERS HAVE THEIR RITUALS. I’d seen them before. A murderer comes into a house and cuts the phone lines, turns all the family photos face-down, maybe tours the victim’s underwear drawer as he waits for her to return home from work. He draws the curtains. Sits on the living-room sofa in the dark and gets a feel for the house. The ritual allows him to do the deed, move on, and do it again. A well-practiced routine.

  Cops have the
ir murder rituals, too. They unfurl blue-and-white crime-scene tape and festoon the house and surrounds like they’re preparing for a party. They close off the street. Set up roadblocks. Video the cars, the people emerging curiously from their houses. They go in, turn the lights on, push back the blinds.

  I crouched in the bush behind the house that had been identified in Regan’s text and watched the goings-on, well acquainted with everything that was happening and the reasons for it. The Nowra police had the scene but seemed to be holding off processing it, waiting for someone. They’d set up a perimeter around the house and gathered in a neighbor’s yard to smoke and chat under umbrellas. When a car arrived and two detectives got out, the most senior officer broke away and approached, hand out in greeting.

  Whitt and a woman I didn’t recognize walked up and identified themselves before being led into the scene.

  I gasped at Whitt’s appearance. Usually immaculate, his shirt and hair were rumpled and his eyes were restless, like he was afraid. He walked with a sharp, determined stride. It hurt to be so near to my friend and unable to go to him. I envisioned myself walking up from the back of the house and simply presenting myself to the Nowra officers. But I knew if I did that, I would be shoved in a patrol car and driven right back to Sydney, perhaps without even getting to talk to Whitt.

  I had to know whose life Regan had taken. What he had done. I decided to wait.

  The hours passed by with agonizing slowness. I knelt in the bush, huddling against a tree.

  It was dark when three officers wheeled a stretcher from the house. I stood, resisting the urge to move closer. There was no telling who was dead—but the figure in the body bag looked to be female. Whitt and the red-haired woman he was with followed the body out, got into their car, and disappeared. If it was possible, Whitt looked even more awful as he walked toward the car, his head down, eyes searching the ground. I thought I saw a thin sheen of sweat on his brow, despite the chill.

  As night fell, the Forensics staff left the house one at a time, taking with them their various envelopes and packages of samples. The lights flicked off. A pair of officers took up stations in the concrete driveway, visible from where I hid. The smoke from their cigarettes curled in the orange light of a streetlamp. As I expected, one of them walked away from his position at the front of the house and did a lap of the property every fifteen minutes, squinting into the dark, shining a torch over the bushes, causing me to duck. I counted off three of these patrol rounds and then crept forward into the yard to see what Regan had left for me.

  Chapter 34

  I WAS SHAKING as I entered the house. I paused in front of the crime-scene tape over the back doorway to the kitchen, telling myself I needed to be calm before I carried on, but already I could see signs of what had happened here. Everything had been left as the Forensics team found it, the debris on the floor scattered around stainless-steel steppers the officers had placed to preserve any footprints. I trod carefully across the little platforms, a tourist taking a path through a macabre art installation.

  The fight had begun here.

  There was no blood yet. But the dish rack had been upended from beside the sink, spilling a couple of plates and glasses and some cutlery on the floor. There had been a knife in the fray. A big one, probably taken from the block that sat overturned on the counter. A stab mark punctured the center of the fridge door, another wayward slash carving a chunk out of the doorframe that led into the living room.

  I looked about desperately for some sign of who lived here, but there were no pictures on the walls. They had probably been taken down for release to the media.

  I walked carefully into the living room.

  His victim had been hit here for the first time. Blood on the wall, a small spray, then a handprint on the carpet as she tried to get up. He’d stabbed her, maybe a couple of times, just to take the wind out of her. Upward drip marks, flung up on the ceiling as the knife went up and came down. Drag marks in the hall. He’d taken her into the bedroom. I followed the invisible couple writhing and fighting before me, saw him shove her onto the bed. He’d made the effort to get her up onto the mattress, to do it there, to leave the sheets twisted and torn. So that I would know. So that we would all know what she had endured.

  It hadn’t ended there. I followed the blood trail back into the living room. Had she gotten up? Tried to get away? Or had he simply let her go, let her run for her life for a few paces, the cat playing with the half-chewed mouse? The television was lying flat on the carpet. Cushions off the couch. Broken glass. The blood pools here were bigger, the drag marks shorter and thicker. A big handprint on the wall, the fingers spread wide. A man’s hand.

  There was no sound. Only my own frantic breathing, the air struggling to squeeze through my throat into my lungs. I crouched in the doorway and closed my eyes. In my terror, the questions kept coming. Who was this person, and how was she connected to me? How was this “personal”? Was this what Regan had planned for me when we finally came together? Was he giving me a preview of my suffering, or an insight into the last moments of the girls he had already taken?

  I went back into the kitchen, retching, almost collapsing at the sink. I ran the tap and put a hand under the cold fount, washed my face. There was a collection of unopened pieces of mail on the counter, laid out for photography by the Forensics specialist. I looked at the nearest one in the dim light from the streetlamps outside.

  Bonnie Risdale.

  One of my old case victims.

  Chapter 35

  THE MEMORIES CROWDED forward, bursting into my mind through an unlocked door. Bonnie Risdale, a slim brunette, a website designer or tech-support person, I recalled—something with computers. Nerdy, sweet, naive. I’d been assigned to her case and called up to the Prince of Wales Hospital, where I’d found her sitting upright in a clean hospital bed looking broken and empty, the way victims often do. I’d sat by her bed and taken down her story.

  She’d been out on a girls’ night with a group of friends, got drunk, misinterpreted where they were all supposed to meet when she got back from the bathroom. She’d gone looking for her group in an alleyway behind the back of the nightclub, having spotted the taillights of a car through one of the windows. She’d thought it was a taxi waiting for her.

  The man raped two other women before I caught him. I didn’t kill him. But I’d wanted to.

  Bonnie Risdale. A woman who had come into my life wanting justice. I’d assured her that I would find her attacker. And I had. I’d told her then that she was safe. That nothing like this was ever going to happen to her again.

  She’d obviously believed me, moved here to Nowra, set up this beautiful home, lived in some semblance of the peace and happiness she’d known before her ordeal.

  But I’d been wrong.

  Because of me, she’d once again known the horror of a man’s hand clasping her wrist, dragging her down. She’d once again fought in vain as he tore at her clothes. I found myself crouching in the corner of her kitchen, gripping my skull, trying to drive out the images. My brain pounded with the terrible truth.

  This happened because of me.

  Because of me. Because of me. Because of me.

  When Regan called, I answered immediately. But I couldn’t speak.

  “She told me some things about you,” he said.

  I gripped the phone, shaking, my eyes wide in the dark kitchen.

  “She said you’d been fierce.” Regan’s voice was soft. Almost apologetic. “That’s a good word for you, I think. Fierce. Bonnie told me that almost as soon as she met you, Harry, she felt like she was going to be taken care of. That meeting you was like taking an outstretched hand. You rescued her from the fear.”

  “You bastard,” I managed. My voice was weak. “You…evil…bastard.”

  “I told her that I’d chosen her because she was one of your cases,” Regan said. “So she knew, at the end, that what I did was all because of you.”

  I couldn’t breathe. All I
could do was hold on to the phone.

  “I’m not trying to torture you,” Regan said. “I’m trying to unravel you. Do you understand?”

  I bit my lips.

  “Harry, you being a cop—it doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Yes, it does,” I breathed.

  “Liar,” Regan said. “Listen to yourself. You’re lying. Deep down, you know it. Being a cop is just a protective layer of bullshit you wrap around yourself. When I killed Bonnie, I undid all your good work on her case. I destroyed one person’s positive memories of you. They’re gone now. It was that easy to erase the goodness you’d done in the world, Harry.”

  Outside, one of the patrol officers was making another round. I didn’t know if he’d notice my presence. In the moment, I didn’t care. I almost wanted to be discovered. To give up, to be taken away from the awful voice on the phone.

  “If I wanted to, I could go on and on undoing all your hard work as a police officer, Harry,” Regan said. “One at a time, I could cross off every woman, man, and child you’d acted the hero for. And then where would you be, without your shiny badge and your big gun? Without the gratitude of your case victims?”

  “I—”

  “What Sam did for me,” Regan whispered, “is he got me thrown in prison.”

  “He what?”

  “I was angry at first. But in there, I was stripped of all my bullshit layers. All the lies fell away. I was exposed, bare bones. I found out what’s inside me, Harry. What’s at my core. It sounds bad, but actually it was incredibly freeing. It was wonderful. I realized what Sam did to me was one of the greatest, most loving gifts he could ever have given. He released the real me, the one that had always been there. I’ve always been bad. Bad at the core. And every time I was beaten in prison, every time someone abused me, stomped on me, spat on me, used me for their perverted games, another layer came off.”