Liar Liar - James Patterson Page 0,44

always stayed with me. It confirmed an idea that I already had about Regan.”

“What was it?” Pops asked.

“He said Regan gave him the impression of someone who knew how to kill.” Diane lifted her eyes to his. “Because he’d done it more than once.”

Chapter 53

I APPROACHED MELINA’S house from the rear, having walked the motorbike from the end of a narrow alleyway behind the property. I remembered parking at the front of the house years earlier, in what felt like such a carefree time in my life—the hard-nosed cop striding up to the house in the daylight, folders of perp photographs clasped against my chest. The properties here were wide and sprawling, divided by an asphalt lane where kids had left their tricycles and footballs, and a small fort constructed in a bottlebrush tree in the neighbor’s yard. There wasn’t the thick forest cover I’d had behind Bonnie Risdale’s house, so I left the bike by a fence and walked forward on my own, settling by a low stone wall.

The sun was sinking on the horizon. All was still. A strange calm settled over me, as though simply by being here I was protecting Melina from Regan. He wasn’t going to touch her. If I had to, I would give my life to make sure of it.

An hour passed. I knelt in the wet grass, a loyal sentry, watching the house. Doubt drifted through my mind, a haze that descended and rose unpredictably. I didn’t know for sure that Melina was Regan’s next target. I didn’t know where he was leading me, or when he would decide it was time for us to face each other. Was he planning to torture me until he became bored, or was there some special date he was waiting for, a day selected in his sick diary on which he would mark our union? Our first date. The first steps after our journey of getting to know each other. When was that day? There were so many important moments in Regan’s life he might choose. The day he killed Rachel Howes. His first day in prison. The day he met Sam. The day Sam died.

I had perused Regan’s file and knew none of those dates were soon. It was only weeks since my brother had been laid to rest. I brought my knees up to my chest and stared at Melina’s house and tried to think.

I could see down the left side of the building from my vantage point, right to the empty front yard and the street beyond. But the right side of the house was a mystery to me.

So I had no warning when, from that direction, he appeared.

Chapter 54

POPS PERCHED ON the edge of the pool table and looked at the whiteboard before him. Deputy Commissioner Woods had commandeered his office and banished the chief from the bullpen where the Robbery, Homicide, and Sex Crimes divisions were based. He had entered paperwork for Pops’s suspension, but the old man hadn’t bothered to hang around to wait for it to be issued to him. His new center of operations had been easy to find. He’d spent many years here on the first floor of the command building in a small, dingy room off the car park. The night patrol’s rec room.

It didn’t have the glamour of his office upstairs. To one side stood a row of wooden bunks, four of the six beds neatly made and unoccupied, two sporting lumps beneath the blankets where tired patrol officers slept between shifts. On the walls, nude Playboy centerfolds that had been ignored by the female officers for years had become faded and cracked, some enhanced with speech bubbles or crude bodily appendages. The pool table, vending machine, and couches were the originals from Pops’s time as a recruit.

No one seemed overly curious about the senior officer using their rec room as a command center. As the shifts changed and the officers came and went, some glanced his way and whispered, or greeted him respectfully, but they otherwise let him be.

On the board before him, Pops had pasted the composite sketch of Regan Banks given by Bonnie Risdale’s neighbor, and the photograph of the man from his time in prison. Stretching out from the photographs, following his lines of inquiry with connecting arrows, were notes about possible means of finding Regan, some of them reaching outward from the center before being abruptly cut off after only a few stages.

One of the short arms of the