Liar Liar - James Patterson Page 0,1

fire the gun at her, or Isobel. Long enough for him to swing one of those huge fists.

The wounds were days old. He’d clearly been hiding somewhere filthy, waiting for the strength to enact his plan.

“You’re him, aren’t you?” she said, low enough that her daughter couldn’t hear. “The one they’ve been looking for. Regan Banks.”

He didn’t answer. She watched his cold eyes appraising the scalpel in her hand.

“You’re not going to let us live, are you?” she said.

Again, no answer came.

Five weeks later

Chapter 2

I DIDN’T SLEEP MUCH. But when I did, my mind turned in circles, repeating their names like a mantra, connecting them end to end. When I was really tired, my lips moved. I sometimes woke to the sound of my own whispering.

Rachel Howes, Marissa Haydon, Elle Ramone, Rosetta Poelar.

Regan’s girls. The innocent lives he had taken. He had left their bodies ruined on lonely stretches of sand, horrors to be discovered by strangers.

Tox Barnes, my friend, left for dead in my own apartment.

Caitlyn McBeal, a smart young American woman reduced to skin and bones, traumatized, crawling on her belly out of Regan Banks’s grasp.

“Samuel Blue,” I whispered through my dreams.

My brother. All I’d had left in the world. The only man who would never abandon me, never judge me.

I didn’t know why Regan Banks had seized on my brother. But my research, my gut instinct, and what my friends had been able to determine was that Regan Banks was obsessed with him. Regan, a boy from the suburbs, a foster kid like me, had spent fifteen years in prison, incarcerated for the brutal murder of a young woman when he was just seventeen. Regan had found Doctor Rachel Howes working late in a veterinary clinic and unleashed his first deadly passion on her, paying for it with hard time. Not long after his release, girls began appearing on the shores of the Georges River, beaten and strangled, sexually violated. I had wanted in on the case, but no one would approve my assignment. Soon enough, I found out why. My colleagues already had a suspect for the murders, and he was my own flesh and blood.

I knew Sam was innocent. But I was the only person making that claim. There had been evidence in my brother’s apartment, put there, he said, by someone else. While I’d fought to secure my brother’s release, I’d managed to convince two friends to help me, Tate “Tox” Barnes and Edward Whittacker. Together we’d found the man we’d believed to be the real Georges River Killer. A man who’d set out to destroy my brother’s life. Tox had taken Regan on and almost got himself killed. Whitt had got achingly close to catching him, only to have him slip away, wounded and wild, into the night.

I’d thought it was over. That once we caught Regan, my brother would be set free.

But that dream was snatched away from me. My brother was stabbed in prison and died only hours before I’d planned to visit him and tell him the good news.

I was the only one left to speak for Sam now. For him and all of Regan’s victims. But my plan had changed. I wasn’t just going to clear my brother’s name by forcing Regan to admit to framing him. Regan deserved to die for the lives he had taken.

I, Detective Harriet Blue, needed to be the one to kill him.

A sound broke through my dreams. I snapped awake, bolted upright in the stiff motel bed. For a moment, I had to orient myself. I had been on the run for five weeks, shifting from motel room to motel room, trying to stay under the radar while I hunted my brother’s killer. I had looked for him where I knew bad men felt safe. I’d wandered homeless camps, where armies of wanted men hid their faces in shadowed hoods and blankets, huddled around campfires. I’d squinted into the corners of blackened, stinking barrooms and drug dens, the basements and attics of city brothels. I had searched for Regan through the underworld, following whispers between depraved men, chasing rumors through the streets. In five weeks, I hadn’t found him, but I hadn’t given up.

There were no warrants for my arrest. But to my colleagues in the Sydney police, my intentions were clear. I had gone off the map so that Regan couldn’t find me, so that I could get my revenge for what he had done to my family. I had disappeared because