Liar Liar - James Patterson Page 0,13

questions asked. A styrofoam cup of steaming brown soup topped with floating cubed pieces of ham and potato, two slices of toast, and a coffee. I took my tray and moved off toward a low sandstone wall in the middle of the park. A decent dinner that wouldn’t eat into my already substantially diminished funds. I ate as I spread Regan’s papers out before me, reading them for the third time.

Regan had my police personnel file. In it, details of every promotion, every infraction, every unusual occurrence during my eighteen years in the police. He had my medical records, my yearly physical results, and details of every case I’d ever worked on. He also had a duplicate of my Department of Community Services file, which the police had dragged out to question me about when I applied to join the force. I was a state-care baby. They’d been concerned about my time “in the system.”

I didn’t have nearly as much on Regan. But I had his childhood in my hands. It was clear to me that there had been something wrong with Regan from the moment he entered foster care.

At his first institution, a group home for children in Blacktown, a seven-year-old Regan Banks had set fire to a young girl’s dress. The girl’s injuries had been cataloged in the report—second- and third-degree burns to her legs and torso. The institution’s manager had put the incident down to a young boy’s curiosity, a mischievousness he didn’t think warranted isolating the boy from the other children. Three weeks later, Regan had dropped a full can of house paint on a toddler’s head, fracturing her cheekbone. He’d been shipped out immediately to a foster home.

When Regan was nine he’d been moved out of a foster home after a girl of similar age complained he’d choked her. When he was ten he’d been moved again after cutting all his foster mother’s clothes to shreds with a pair of scissors.

He was not only violent, it seemed, but also manipulative. There were a host of mysterious nonviolent explanations for Regan being moved from one foster home to the next. One report read, “Foster mother reports Regan coming between her and husband, creating marital problems.” Another read, “Regan’s nighttime activities scaring foster parents.” Yet another, “Foster father fears Regan’s influence on young sons.”

I flipped all the way through the reports to the back stack of pages, looking for the report that would explain why Regan had come into the care of the state in the first place. I’d seen my own Care Initiation Report, the accompanying photographs of my brother and me, our undernourished, bruised bodies, the filthy drug den where the police had found us. But in place of Regan’s CIR, I found a scan of a yellow sheet of paper signed with a flourish by a Judge Edgar Boscke.

The report on Regan’s parents was missing.

Chapter 19

MY PHONE RANG. Some of the girls in the posse of prostitutes nearby gave a whoop of excitement out of habit, thinking one of their own had been summoned for a job. I answered the call, trying to swallow the white-hot rage that immediately rose.

“Good evening, Harry,” he said.

“Good evening, Mr. Sick Fuck,” I sneered. “Set any little girls on fire today?”

“Not yet,” he said. “How are you enjoying my files? Find anything surprising?”

“No.” I gathered the files against my chest, as though he could see them. “Nothing at all. I knew from what you did to those women that you weren’t right in the head. I just don’t see where my brother comes into all this.”

He didn’t answer. My stomach dropped. I hadn’t seen any mention of Sam in the paperwork, but his silence made me feel as though I was missing something obvious. Regan had spent plenty of time in the suburbs of Sydney, moving from house to house as foster parents gave up on him. Had he been in care with my brother? And if so—what did that mean? I realized I was bracing for Regan to reveal what I’d dreaded all along: that I had been wrong about Sam. That they had indeed killed together. That my brother was the monster everyone thought he was.

“Were you in care together?” I asked. “Did you meet him then?”

“It’s hard for me to talk about Sam,” he said.

I was lost for words. Some homeless men were watching me from a picnic table nearby, one with his beard in tiny braids.

“I’d rather talk about you,” Regan said. “Did you