Liar Liar - James Patterson Page 0,30

to the car I’d stolen and drive it to the crime scene. Looking back across the darkened plains, I saw a police helicopter hovering over the distant highway, a searchlight picking through the trees. I’d once again lifted my criminal game. I’d lied. I’d hurt people. I’d stolen a car. Now I had breached an active crime scene and tampered with evidence.

I tried to call Pops, but someone unfamiliar answered his phone. A man with a hard, unyielding voice. I didn’t speak. He sounded superior and annoyed, though he couldn’t possibly have known who I was. I wondered if this was Deputy Commissioner Woods. If he had taken Chief Morris’s phone in case I called.

When I was sure I was out of the search zone, I turned south and started heading back toward the highway in a long, slow curve. Luminescent eyes appeared now and then in the fields, watching me go by, some low and slanted—foxes or feral cats—others higher and wider—kangaroos. As the hours passed, I kept up a good pace, my body warmed by the adrenaline still pumping through my system from the walk through the crime scene. I turned Regan’s words over and over in my mind.

When Sam died, everything that he could have been died with him.

…everything that he could have been…

Regan thought he was going to teach me something. Help me to find the real Harry buried deep inside, the thing he’d seen in Sam that he’d never had a chance to bring out. Regan thought I was a monster like him, and that by killing my case victims, undoing my good work, he was going to help me embrace what I truly was.

I was sure he didn’t know it, but Regan was right on the money.

I’d always wondered if, deep down inside, there was a different me waiting to come out. A Harry that relished causing pain to others. I did get a kick out of hurting people sometimes. I’d only ever turned my violence on the rapists and molesters and abusers I encountered in my work…

But no, even that wasn’t exactly true, was it? I had, in my time, hurt innocent people. I’d punched Nigel Spader a couple of times, just because he pissed me off. And now and then when a witness connected to a case stood in my way, I got rough before I put in the time and the effort to get what I wanted gently and professionally. I was known for it.

I felt a terror creeping over me as I trudged through the wet, windy night. If Regan did scratch deep enough below my surface, what would he find?

Chapter 39

WHEN I FINALLY reached the highway again, I was exhausted. I rested on the roadside barrier beneath the huge concrete base of a streetlight and tried to focus. Whether or not I was evil was a question that could be answered later. For now, there were lives in my hands. I stood and pulled the papers I’d printed at Bonnie Risdale’s house out of my backpack and held them in the light.

I had no addresses or telephone numbers, but I did have names and case-file numbers, beginning and concluding dates of investigations. To get any more would have risked staying logged in to the police database too long. I looked helplessly at the hundreds of names, memories rising here and there. A teenager groped by a man in a darkened cinema. A young boy abused by his uncle. A middle-aged woman assaulted at work after-hours. Rain was falling on the paper in my hands. Losing hope, I was about to pack the pages back into my bag when I stopped at the sight of a name.

Melina Tredwell.

That had been a bad one. She had been confronted by her attacker in a public toilet in a park on a rainy night just like the one swirling around me now. I’d thought she’d been mad to go into the cold, isolated building at all, but she’d been driving home from Sydney and had a long journey ahead of her. Melina had lived in Narooma, another two hours south of Nowra.

Melina had been brunette, a striking beauty. I remembered complaining to Pops about the three- or four-hour drives I’d had to make down to Narooma to interview her. The incident had happened in my jurisdiction, and I’d not wanted to conduct probably trauma-inducing interviews with Melina over the phone.

Regan wanted my victims. And for some reason, he’d chosen Bonnie Risdale, two hours