SERIAL KILLERS UNCUT - The Complete Psycho Thriller (The Complete Epic)

by Blake Crouch

  I’m running later this morning, but normally I arrive at our building around 8:10. I always park in a visitor space since they’re the closest to the main entrance.

  Our offices are located on the seventh floor, but I only take the elevator if I have it all to myself. I don’t excel at chitchatting with people. I learned this neat trick: once I’m inside, I press seven, and then as long as I hold the button down, the elevator won’t stop until it reaches our floor. But I don’t even like riding by myself. The walls consist of mirrors, and the light is dim and eerie.

  So nine times out of ten, I huff it up the stairwell like I’m doing today, downside being that I’m always sweaty when I reach our floor.

  Our suite is already in full operation when I enter. Heading through the conference room into the break room, I open one of the four refrigerators and stow the lunch mom prepared for me inside.

  I walk down the hallway. File Rooms A-D are on the right, the partners’ offices on the left. Through their windows, I see morning light spreading over the green piedmont forest and reflecting off a distant pond. I always see that glinting pond on the way to my desk, except when it’s cloudy. The buildings of uptown Charlotte shimmer in early sun.

  At the end of the hall, I enter the large room of cubicles. Mine sits in the center grouping. It’s very neat. The other paralegals keep messy workstations. They’re more concerned with plastering the walls with pictures of their husbands and children. I don’t display any pictures. The only non-work-related item I have is a cutout from a magazine article in Hollywood Happening. I taped it to the top of my monitor a year ago. It’s just two letters: JJ. Janine once asked me what it meant, but I didn’t tell her.

  I turn on my computer and pull out a case file I’ve been working on since Friday. My duties involve corresponding with clients. It’s not terribly exciting stuff…Dear Mr. Smith: We are pleased to inform you that the above-identified U.S. patent application has been granted a Notice of Allowance by the United States Patent and Trademark Office…that sort of thing.

  I’m getting ready to begin the first letter of the day when footsteps stop at my cubicle.

  “Lance?”

  I swivel around. It’s Janine, the Office Manager. The other paralegals despise her. I don’t really have an opinion. She’s kind of pretty—highly blond, tan, quite a dresser.

  “Jeff wants to see you in his office first thing.”

  “Now?”

  “First thing.”

  I follow Janine back up the hallway, watching the points of her high heels leave tiny, diminishing marks in the avocado carpet.

  Jeff has a corner office. He’s the Hardy from Lewis Barker Thompson Hardy. I wonder why she’s leading me to his office, as if I don’t know where it is.

  Partner Jeff is dictating a patent application when Janine pokes her head through the doorway.

  “Jeff, Lance is here to see you,” she says reverently. He’s the scary partner.

  He stops the recorder, says, “Send him in and shut the door.”

  I walk inside and sit down in a chair in front of his desk. The door closes behind me. Jeff is thin-lipped and very sleek, and the only time he smiles is when he speaks to one of the other partners.

  He just stares at me. I look out the windows. I count the framed diplomas and plaques on his walls (nineteen). His desk is buried under case files. There’s a stack of resumes and cover letters on the floor by my feet. I’ve just begun to read the body of the top letter when Jeff says, “Lance, how long have you been here?”

  “Five years next month.”

  I try to meet his eyes. I can’t. He’s so intelligent—only 34 or 35. I’m 38. I could be his big brother. I tell myself this over and over but it doesn’t help. I stare out the window again at the Charlotte skyline. I wish I could see the pond from his office. I feel the zeroing-in of his glare, smell waves of his cologne lapping at my face. His suit looks so expensive. Custom-tailored even.

  “Lance, you heard of eye contact?”

  I meet his eyes.

  “Why are you sweating, Lance?”

  “I, uh, took the stairs up.”

  Opening a drawer, he pulls out a 9” by 12” Tyvex envelope and tosses it into my lap. Our return address label has been circled and “Return To Sender” stamped on the envelope. “We received that in the mailroom Friday afternoon. Take out the letter.”

  I remove the single sheet of paper.

  “Recognize that, Lance?”

  “No.”

  “You should. You wrote it for me a week ago. See your initials at the bottom?” Beneath Jeff’s signature, I see JH:lbd. I’m lbd.

  “I remember this now,” I say.

  “Look at the envelope.”

  I look at the envelope.

  “You sent it to the wrong client.” He pauses to let the weight of this crush me. “Dr. David Dupree, to whom you misdirected it, fired us this morning, before you graced us. He called me and said, among other things: ‘if you aren’t taking care of your other clients, how do I know you’re taking care of me?’ He’s got a point.”

  “I’m sorry. That was just—”

  “A big fuck-up, Lance. A big fucking fuck-up. Do you know what we invoiced him for last month?” I shake my head. “$8,450.00 I invoiced him for that. And that was a light month. I was on the verge of writing five new patent applications for him. You cost this firm money. You cost me money. Go clear out your cube.”

  I stand. My head throbbing. Jeff stands, too, his eyes wide and angry. I look out the windows, Charlotte Douglas International Airport visible in the distance, the speck of a jet lifting off a runway.

  “Here’s a tip,” he says. “When you go in for your next job interview, dress like you give a shit. No one appreciates you walking around here like a slob. This isn’t your living room. It’s my office. It’s the office of hard-working, brilliant men.”

  My face is hot. I can stare at him now.

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m nothing. I could be your big brother.”

  “Get out of my office.”

  And now an excerpt of SNOWBOUND by Blake Crouch, featuring Javier Estrada…

  1

  In the evening of the last good day either of them would know for years to come, the girl pushed open the sliding glass door and stepped through onto the back porch.

  “Daddy?”

  Will Innis set the legal pad aside and made room for Devlin to climb into his lap. His daughter was small for eleven, felt like the shell of a child in his arms.

  “What are you doing out here?” she asked and in her scratchy voice he could hear the remnants of her last respiratory infection like gravel in her lungs.

  “Working up a closing for my trial in the morning.”

  “Is your client the bad guy again?”

  Will smiled. “You and your mother. I’m not really supposed to think of it that way, sweetheart.”

  “What’d he do?” His little girl’s face had turned ruddy in the sunset and the fading light brought out threads of platinum in her otherwise midnight hair.

  “He allegedly—”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Allegedly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Means it’s not been proven. He’s suspected of selling drugs.”

  “Like what I take?”

  “No, your drugs are good. They help you. He was selling, allegedly selling, bad drugs to people.”

  “Why are they bad?”

  “Because they make you lose control.”

  “Why do people take them?”

  “They like how it makes them feel.”

  “How does it make them feel?”

  He kissed her forehead and looked at his watch. “It’s after eight, Devi. Let’s go bang on those lungs.”

  She sighed but she didn’t argue. She never tried to get out of it.

  He stood up cradling his daughter and walked over to the redwood railing.

  They stared into the wilderness that bordered Oasi
s Hills, their subdivision. The houses on No-Water Lane had the Sonoran Desert for a backyard.

  “Look,” he said. “See them?” A half mile away, specks filed out of an arroyo and trotted across the desert toward a shadeless forest of giant saguaro cacti that looked vaguely sinister profiled against the horizon.

  “What are they?” she asked.

  “Coyotes. What do you bet they start yapping when the sun goes down?”

  After supper, he read to Devlin from A Wrinkle in Time. They’d been working their way through the penultimate chapter, “Aunt Beast,” but Devlin was exhausted and drifted off before Will had finished the second page.

  He closed the book and set it on the carpet and turned out the light. Cool desert air flowed in through an open window. A sprinkler whispered in the next door neighbor’s yard. Devlin yawned, made a cooing sound that reminded him of rocking her to sleep as a newborn. Her eyes fluttered and she said very softly, “Mom?”

  “She’s working late at the clinic, sweetheart.”

  “When’s she coming back?”

  “Few hours.”

  “Tell her to come in and kiss me?”

  “I will.”

  He was nowhere near ready for court in the morning but he stayed, running his fingers through Devlin’s hair until she’d fallen back to sleep. Finally, he slid carefully off the bed and walked out onto the deck to gather up his books and legal pads. He had a late night ahead of him. A pot of strong coffee would help.

  Next door, the sprinklers had gone quiet.

  A lone cricket chirped in the desert.

  Thunderless lightning sparked somewhere over Mexico, and the coyotes began to scream.

  2

  The thunderstorm caught up with Rachael Innis thirty miles north of the Mexican border. It was 9:30 P.M., and it had been a long day at the free clinic in Sonoyta, where she volunteered her time and services once a week as a bilingual psychologist. The windshield wipers whipped back and forth. High beams lit the steam rising off the pavement, and in the rearview mirror, Rachael saw the pair of headlights a quarter of a mile back that had been with her for the last ten minutes.

  Glowing beads suddenly appeared on the shoulder just ahead. She jammed her foot into the brake pedal, the Grand Cherokee fishtailing into the oncoming lane before skidding to a stop. A doe and her fawn ventured into the middle of the road, mesmerized by the headlights. Rachael let her forehead fall onto the steering wheel, closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath.

  The deer moved on. She accelerated the Cherokee, another dark mile passing as pellets of hail hammered the hood.

  The Cherokee veered sharply toward the shoulder and she nearly lost control again, trying to correct her bearing, but the steering wheel wouldn’t straighten out. Rachael lifted her foot off the gas pedal and eased over onto the side of the road.

  When she killed the ignition all she could hear was the rain and hail drumming on the roof. The car that had been following her shot by. She set her glasses in the passenger seat, opened the door, and stepped down into a puddle that engulfed her pumps. The downpour soaked through her black suit. She shivered. It was pitch-black between lightning strikes and she moved forward carefully, feeling her way along the warm metal of the hood.

  A slash of lightning hit the desert just a few hundred yards out. It set her body tingling, her ears ringing. I’m going to be electrocuted. There came a train of earsplitting strikes, flashbulbs of electricity that lit the sky just long enough for her to see that the tires on the driver side were still intact.

  Her hands trembled now. A tall saguaro stood burning like a cross in the desert. She groped her way over to the passenger side as marble-size hail collected in her hair. The desert was electrified again, spreading wide and empty all around her.

  In the eerie blue light she saw that the front tire on the passenger side was flat.

  Back inside the Cherokee, Rachael sat behind the steering wheel, mascara trailing down her cheeks like sable tears. She wrung out her long black hair and massaged the headache building between her temples. Her purse lay in the passenger floorboard. She dragged it into her lap and shoved her hand inside, rummaging for the cell phone. She found it, tried her husband’s number, but there was no service in the storm.

  Rachael looked into the back of the Cherokee at the spare. She had no way of contacting AAA and passing cars would be few and far between on this remote highway at this hour of the night. I’ll just wait and try Will again when the storm has passed.

  Squeezing the steering wheel, she stared through the windshield into the stormy darkness, somewhere north of the border in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Middle of nowhere.

  There was a brilliant streak of lightning. In the split second illumination she saw a black Escalade parked a hundred yards up the shoulder.

  Thunder rattled the windows. Five seconds elapsed. When the sky exploded again, Rachael felt a strange, unnerving pull to look through the driver side window.

  A man swung a crowbar through the glass.

  3

  Will startled back into consciousness, disoriented and thirsty. It was so quiet—just the discreet drone of a computer fan and the second hand of the clock ticking in the adjacent bedroom. He found himself slouched in the leather chair at the desk in his small home office, the CPU still purring, the monitor switched into sleep mode.

  As he yawned, everything rushed back in a torrent of anxiety. He’d been hammering out notes for his closing argument and hit a wall at ten o’clock. The evidence was damning. He was going to lose. He’d only closed his eyes for a moment to clear his head.

  He reached for the mug of coffee and took a sip. Winced. It was cold and bitter. He jostled the mouse. When the screen restored, he looked at the clock and realized he wouldn’t be sleeping anymore tonight. It was 4:09 A.M. He was due in court in less than five hours.

  First things first—he needed an immediate and potent infusion of caffeine.

  His office adjoined the master bedroom at the west end of the house, and passing through on his way to the kitchen, he noticed a peculiar thing. He’d expected to see his wife buried under the myriad quilts and blankets on their bed, but she wasn’t there. The comforter was smooth and taut, undisturbed since they’d made it up yesterday morning.

  He walked through the living room into the den and down the hallway toward the east end of the house. Rachael had probably come home, seen him asleep at his desk, and gone in to kiss Devlin. She’d have been exhausted from working all day at the clinic. She’d probably fallen asleep in there. He could picture the nightlight glow on their faces as he reached his daughter’s door.

  It was cracked, exactly as he’d left it seven hours ago when he’d put Devlin to bed.

  He eased the door open. Rachael wasn’t with her.

  Will wide awake now, closing Devlin’s door, heading back into the den.

  “Rachael? You here, hon?”

  He went to the front door, turned the deadbolt, stepped outside.

  Dark houses. Porchlights. Streets still wet from the thunderstorms that blew through several hours ago. No wind, the sky clearing, bright with stars.

  When he saw them in the driveway, his knees gave out and he sat down on the steps and tried to remember how to breathe. One Beamer, no Jeep Cherokee, and a pair of patrol cars, two uniformed officers coming toward him, their hats shelved under their arms.

  The patrolmen sat in the living room on the couch, Will facing them in a chair. The smell of new paint was still strong. He and Rachael had redone the walls and the vaulted ceiling in terracotta last weekend. Most of the black and white desert photographs that adorned the room still leaned against the antique chest of drawers, waiting to be re-hung.

  The lawmen were businesslike in their delivery, taking turns with the details, as if they’d rehearsed who would say what, their voices so terribly measured and calm.

  There wasn’t much information yet. Rachael’s Cherokee had been found on the shoulder of Arizona 85 in Organ Pip
e Cactus National Monument. Right front tire flat, punctured with a nail to cause a slow and steady loss of air pressure. Driver side window busted out.

  No Rachael. No blood.

  They asked Will a few questions. They tried to sympathize. They said how sorry they were, Will just shaking his head and staring at the floor, a tightness in his chest, constricting his windpipe in a slow strangulation.