Liar Liar - James Patterson Page 0,55

forward, a family member maybe, and put a hand on Ms. Parish’s shoulders. Tears were streaming down the woman’s face.

“Make him suffer,” she said, her blazing eyes looking right down the camera. “Make him suffer the way my sister and my niece suffered.”

The crowd of reporters burst into questions, yelling, microphones rising out of the gathering below the stage. Pops watched as the news program cut back to the anchors, and then he shut his phone.

So much for the two-pronged plan.

Chapter 69

POPS WALKED TOWARD the judge’s house, caught glimpses of the sparkling harbor between the mansions, the golden bridge yawning across the shores. After he was admitted through the gates of the Boscke residence, Pops stood watching a marble water feature bubbling by the front door for an inordinate amount of time. Judge Boscke answered the door himself, wearing black slacks and a T-shirt pulled down over a belly rounded by wealth.

The library was on the second floor. It wasn’t often that Pops felt young these days, but he did following the judge up the stairs, pausing to give him a better lead every three steps or so. They sat in leather armchairs, and no drink was offered, though there was an elaborate drinks table by the windows. It was a bad sign.

“Joe Woods’s father was a great man,” Boscke said by way of beginning. “I spoke at his funeral.”

Pops felt the air leave his lungs heavily, pressed out by a new, great weight.

“I’m not trying to make waves here.” Pops put his hands up in surrender. “Obviously, Joe and I have our differences. We’re not on the same page about running this investigation, and that’s fine. But disarming me so that he can go ahead and do things his way? That was wrong.”

“He shouldn’t have suspended you,” the judge reasoned. “From what I know of Joe, he was probably just trying to be the big man in town. He’s a hothead. It works for him. Sometimes you need the swift, heavy-handed players in this game and sometimes you need the slow, methodical types, like yourself. But the two types shouldn’t interfere with each other.”

“I’m not going to obey the suspension,” Pops said.

“Nor should you,” the judge said. “This Banks fellow is a runaway train and we’re all his terrified passengers. We need everyone we’ve got on this.”

Pops shifted, preparing to begin his request.

“I know why you’re here,” Boscke said before he could speak. “The sealed report. I can’t help you with that.”

Pops slumped in his chair.

“In accessing the sealed files on Banks, he’s inadvertently cut you out,” the judge said. “Even if I wanted to tell you what those records say, I couldn’t. I don’t have them here, and the approval was for Woods only. I rushed it through because I know the man. If you want to see them, you’ll have to have Joe show you or you’ll have to make an application to the court yourself, which will take time.”

“Woods isn’t going to let me see the file.”

“What’s your interest in it, exactly?” Boscke asked.

Pops explained his theory that something in Regan’s early childhood might be calling him, that maybe he was heading south, leading Harriet toward a place that was meaningful to him.

“If there was some clue in the files, why would Joe keep that from you?”

Because he’s an arsehole, Pops thought.

“Maybe he’s missed something in there.” Pops sighed. “He doesn’t see the file’s significance. He’s very focused on finding Harriet. He doesn’t trust her.”

“I think we can both understand why that is,” the judge reasoned. Pops hadn’t considered it before, but perhaps part of Woods’s hyper-focus on Harriet was to do with his own daughter’s troubles. At seventeen years old, Tonya Woods had been in the back of a vehicle full of her less-than-reputable friends when a pair of patrol officers pulled them over in Blacktown, in Sydney’s Western suburbs. The officers had made the car as identical to one described driving by a house only minutes earlier and opening fire on the front of a property. The house that was fired upon had seven people in it. A man had been killed, and a six-year-old boy had taken a bullet in the arm as he slept in the front bedroom.

The papers had loved the story. Joe Woods had been an up-and-coming Homicide star not yet faded from the national news, the head of a team who had solved a serial-rapist case a month earlier. He’d caught a whiff of celebrity, of the promotions and