1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,43

It must have been incredibly frustrating.

Then he mouthed my name—Angela.

“That’s right,” I said, and moved a little farther down the bed so he could see me more easily. But nothing I did seemed to calm him down. Not that I expected it to. He’d just lost his entire world.

“One more question,” Keats assured him. “Did this man say anything to you, Justin?”

Yes.

He pulled his hand out of mine then and brought both of his own together in some kind of gesture.

“What is it?” Keats asked.

Justin was insistent, motioning as emphatically as he could, which wasn’t much. He pointed with his right index finger and moved it back and forth across the other palm.

“Do you want to write something?” I asked. He tried to nod and winced from the pain.

“Stay still,” Keats said. “We’ve got you.”

Keats pulled a pen out of his jacket pocket. I managed to find a small legal pad in my bag. I put both of them into Justin’s hands. He was shaking and dropped the pen, then waited for me to put it back in his grasp.

“Take your time,” Keats told him. “Tell us what this guy said, and then we’re going to let you get some rest.”

Justin was clearly struggling to get something down. The pen scratched and shook across the page, forming three barely readable words. When he finally stopped and dropped the pad, Keats came around to see what it said.

I’d already read it. I wasn’t even sure if I could believe what I was seeing. But I did know one thing now. They never meant for Justin Nicholson to die. He was their messenger.

And right there, in a faint wavering scrawl, was his message from the killer.

Tell Angela hello.

CHAPTER 47

OUR DAY ENDED with a 6:00 p.m. shift meeting at the field office.

This time around, everyone knew who I was, partly because I’d been around the block a few times by now. But mostly, it was because of the way my name had been so suddenly introduced into the mix of this case. Word about Justin’s message to me from the killers had obviously reached the field office ahead of this meeting. And judging from the looks I kept getting around the room, I think they were expecting me to be more freaked out than I felt.

But the truth was, we’d already been targeted by these people. They’d taken our picture. They’d sent us running up to Maine, where I had no doubt they’d kept an eye on us.

And now this. It smacked of bully tactics, going after the perceived weak link—the young female intern. It was predictable, and in a strange way, I was losing respect for whoever was behind it. Up to now, they’d shown some real chops with the app in a way that I couldn’t help admiring. But this move almost felt like a cheap shot in comparison.

On the other hand, I’m not stupid, and I’m not suicidal. So I didn’t say a word when Keats insisted on a security detail for me. Starting that night, I was going to have my very own conjoined twin, courtesy of the FBI. It didn’t thrill me, but it was better than moving home and, God forbid, letting my parents know what had happened.

Meanwhile, at the meeting, we heard from all corners of the investigation, starting with Keats’s report on the last thirty-six hours.

Word from Reese Sapporo was that she’d been lured out of her room at two in the morning, attacked, and then drugged in the dark woods behind her house. She’d told the authorities in Portland that she remembered feeling a sharp stab under her arm before passing out. Then she remembered waking up in the trunk of a car. That was it.

She never saw anyone’s face, including whoever took her picture. That person, she’d said, was wearing a ski mask. Probably because he knew he’d be letting her go.

She wasn’t sure, either, if it had been a lone assailant or if there had been more than one of them. It was all hazy in her memory, and there hadn’t been much to see in the dark.

“We’ll be following up with Justin Nicholson as soon as his medical team lets us back in,” Keats reported. “Not sure how much of a description we’re going to get from him, though. It was dark in that house, and his memory of the whole thing is sketchy at best.”

“Where are we on the larger picture?” one of the DC contacts asked from a screen