1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,41

for all I knew.

So I went ahead and did it for him.

“Do you want to come in?” I asked, stepping back to open the door a little wider.

I was wearing a cheap hoodie I’d bought on the fly that afternoon. It had a big red lobster on the front and didn’t exactly scream Take me now, but Keats didn’t seem to mind.

He smiled again. Then he stepped inside, took the hoodie’s zipper between two fingers, and pulled me closer.

“Yeah, I do,” he answered, shutting the door behind him. “I really do.”

CHAPTER 45

SO, YEAH. THAT HAPPENED.

It wasn’t the night I was expecting to have. I’m guessing that Keats would have said the same thing, up to a point. But no regrets. I needed that, even if it did mean getting about two hours’ sleep, max.

When Keats’s phone rang at around dawn, I thought it was my own and jerked up in bed to answer.

That’s also when I remembered I wasn’t alone. Or wearing anything.

“Yeah?” Keats said into his phone.

I lay back and pulled the sheet up to my shoulders. It suddenly felt a lot weirder to be naked than it had when I’d fallen asleep, all cozy and satisfied.

But there wasn’t much time for feeling awkward, anyway.

“What?” Keats said. He sat up on the edge of the bed. “Wait, wait, wait, wait. How many—”

“What is it?” I asked, but he ignored me. He shouldered the phone, stood up, pulling on a pair of white boxers, and went into the bathroom.

“What time was she found?” I heard him say. And then, “How much?” Then, “Well, give me a range.”

I was up now, too, heart pounding as I reached around for whichever clothes were closest at hand. The clock said five twenty, and it sounded like Reese Sapporo had been found.

But what did that mean? Found how? Alive?

“Yeah, yeah, okay,” Keats said over the sound of running water. “Text me the location. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

A second later, he came back into the room, moving with a purpose.

“Sorry about this,” he said.

“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “What’s going on? Did they find her?”

“Yeah. She was dropped out of a car, blindfolded, in a parking garage at the Portland airport,” he said. “Maybe half an hour ago.”

Thank God. With the Nigella Wilbur case, I’d been hugely relieved to find her alive. This was like more of the same, but on steroids. If I was being honest, I really hadn’t been expecting Reese Sapporo to make it back from whatever had happened to her. I wasn’t sure if Keats had been thinking the same thing, but a palpable sense of relief rushed through me.

“They just … let her go?” I asked. “Unharmed?”

“That’s right,” he said, yanking on his pants. His jaw was set tight against whatever else he wasn’t saying. Something more had obviously happened, but Keats tended to clam up whenever he took a hit.

“Come on, Billy. Spit it out or tell me to stop asking questions,” I said. “What’s going on? Am I allowed to know?”

He grabbed his shoes off the floor and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Another family was attacked last night,” he said. “Three dead, including a nineteen-year-old girl with the same app loaded on her phone.”

Even now, after everything else that had happened, I couldn’t believe it. Any sense of reprieve from the Reese Sapporo case had just been snatched away and replaced with this, like tripling down on the stakes in a blink. Three more people had just died.

“No,” was all I managed to say.

“There’s a fourth victim who survived,” Keats went on. “An older brother home from college they probably weren’t expecting to be there. The kid was shot in the throat and left for dead. He’s in surgery now, but ought to be out by the time we get there.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

I was throwing things into my bag as fast as I could. Keats was ready to leave. He pocketed his phone and put a hand on the doorknob.

“Mass General,” he said. In other words, we were headed back to Boston. “That’s the other kick in the nuts. This family lived in Harbor Towers condos off Atlantic Avenue.”

And the hits just kept on coming.

“You mean—?”

“Yeah,” Keats said. “While we were chasing our tails up here, they were taking out their next targets five goddamn blocks from our office.”

CHAPTER 46

OUR CHOPPER LANDED on the roof of Massachusetts General Hospital at nine thirty that morning, and we went straight to