Liar Liar - James Patterson Page 0,29
Harry’s honor?” she asked.
“It was never going to come to that.” Whitt yanked open the door of the car. “At least I said something.”
“You’re right. I should have stood by you.” Vada slid into the car beside him. “I’m really camera shy. I get all tongue-tied.”
Whitt’s phone rang. He picked it up quickly when he saw the unidentified number. “Harry?”
“She was one of mine,” Harry said.
Chapter 37
IT WAS WINDY where she was. Her voice was uncharacteristically shaky, and she sounded like she was walking fast. “Bonnie Risdale was a victim in one of my Sex Crimes cases a few years ago.”
“Shit,” Whitt seethed. “Are you here? Are you in town? Did he call you?”
“He called me. And I went to the crime scene.”
“She what?” Vada’s eyes widened. In the closeness of the car, she could hear Harry’s voice over Whitt’s phone. He frowned at her.
“How did you get into the crime scene?” Whitt asked. “Are you still there?”
“Whitt, I need you to look back through all my case files, get a readout of every victim I’ve ever dealt with. Prioritize the women—we know he likes them young. Brunettes, late teens to midtwenties. But, Whitt, I have children whose cases I’ve handled. Maybe their mothers…We have to warn these people.”
“I’m on it,” Whitt said. He wanted to reach through the phone and grab Harry, draw her to safety.
“Do you have any guesses at all about who Regan might go after next?”
“I have no idea,” Harry said. “I don’t know why he chose Bonnie. I’ve had hundreds of cases. He would have had the pick of any of the dozens of young women living in and around Sydney. Why risk traveling two hours south to kill her?”
“He didn’t say?”
“He said when we come together, it’s going to be somewhere that shows me the real him.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Harry said. “He’s probably got a fucking dungeon somewhere full of victims he wants to show me. He wants me to see what he can do. He’s called me a few times, rambling bullshit about discovering the real me.”
“Did he tell you why he’s doing this?”
“He said Sam was responsible for him going to prison,” Harry said.
“Oh, my God.”
“I don’t know anything about that.” She struggled for words. “Sam never told me anything about it. I think the two of them knew each other. Regan said he’d come after Sam when he left prison, and now he’s after me. He said that this is my unraveling,” Harry said. “He’s pulling me apart. He’s trying to undo everything good I’ve ever done in this life, Whitt. He’s trying to hold a mirror up to me, to show me that deep down inside, we’re the same.”
“You’re not the same, Harry. You’re—”
“I’m a good person,” she insisted. “I’m a good cop, and a good human being. Maybe I do bad things sometimes, and I enjoy doing bad things, and I wasn’t the best kid in the world. And no, I don’t have many friends. I’m weird. People don’t like me…”
She didn’t seem to be able to go on. The only sound on the line between them was the howling of the wind.
“His plan is not going to work,” Harry said.
Whitt thought she sounded deeply uncertain.
Chapter 38
I RAN, THE BACKPACK thumping on my shoulders, back through the forest behind Bonnie’s house and along a dark, deserted road. The rain had come and gone, but my shoes were soon drenched. Between the clouds, the moon was occasionally revealed, lighting the fields.
After the call with Regan, I’d turned on Bonnie’s home computer and logged into the police database. It was an old computer, her laptop having been removed to search for evidence about her death. My case-file list was twenty-seven pages long. I’d only had the nerve to stay for the printing of twenty pages, watching through the front windows of the house as one of the officers guarding the crime scene patrolled the rear of the house again. I packed my bag and left through the back door, knowing that within seconds of my login to the police personnel system, an alert would have been raised at headquarters in Sydney. They would have tracked my login to Bonnie’s IP address, known I was there. I called Whitt briefly at the edge of the forest and then sprinted into the dark.
As I’d predicted, after ten minutes of jogging down the road, I heard the sound of sirens on the wind. It would have been too risky to return