Liar Liar - James Patterson Page 0,56

power that would come with being a police poster boy, and then suddenly his own daughter was on trial for murder. Tonya had escaped with good lawyers and convincing stories about not having any knowledge of what her friends had planned to do. But she had been in and out of the newspapers in the years since; drunk, high, on the periphery of violent crimes.

“Whatever daddy-daughter issues Joe has with his child, they can’t come into this investigation,” Pops said. “He can’t punish Harry because he doesn’t have the balls to rein in his kid.”

“What can I say?” Judge Boscke held up his hands. “You’ve got an impasse, the two of you.”

Pops leaned forward, clasped his hands as though in prayer.

“I know you’ve tried thousands of cases in the family court,” he said. “And Regan was taken into state care more than thirty years ago. You couldn’t possibly remember the details of every single case. But is there anything at all that you can remember from the Banks case? Do you remember what happened with his parents? Why you sealed the file? Did you look at the file before you approved for it to be released to Woods?”

“Morris.” The judge shook his head slowly. “These days I struggle to remember my own damn phone number. I didn’t look at the file when I signed the release.”

Pops hung his head.

“All you could do,” Boscke carried on, “is have a look at my notes from the year Banks entered the system. I always kept a journal, especially when I was in the Family Courts. Some of those hearings went on for years.”

The judge stood and went to a set of shelves nearby. He selected a red leather book from a vast collection, opened it, and leafed through the pages idly.

“I might have written about sealing the Regan Banks file. I might not. If there’s anything about it, it’ll be in here somewhere.”

Pops found he’d risen from the chair without meaning to, his fists clenched in anticipation. He could hardly wait to launch into the books as the old man left the room. He took down the one the old man had picked out, but it was the wrong year. He fumbled through the books, sliding them out and dumping them on the little desk, flipping pages and staring at dates. The sections were uneven, the judge’s handwriting almost indecipherable.

Regan had gone into care in 1982 at seven years old. But when had the state decided they would pursue full custody of Regan? Had Regan’s custody automatically been handed over to the foster-care system after the incident that got him removed from his parents, or had there been a hearing? Had his parents fought to have him back? Pops needed to know exactly when the decision to seal the file had been handed down in all the proceedings after the incident, and he didn’t even know exactly when the incident, whatever it was, had occurred. Pops found his head was pounding. He sat down at the desk, slightly woozy, and forced himself to advance more slowly through the yellowed, scrawled pages.

Chapter 70

AT FIRST, WHITT tried to get through it one second at a time. Tick, tick, tick. He set his features, cleared his mind, nodded, and did what he had to do, his hand on his phone in his pocket, waiting for the safest moment. All afternoon he directed the techs as the bodies were removed and the evidence and photographs taken, standing beside Vada as she took reports from the teams searching for Regan in the local area. As evening descended, senior officers arrived from Bombala and surrounds and took over some of the required duties, cordoning off the street and keeping the neighbors and press who gathered on the nearby lawns at bay. When he was convinced it was safe, Whitt walked in the dark toward his car. With apprehension sitting sharp and heavy like a rock in his stomach, he glanced back toward the house, where he had left Vada supervising the crime scene, and dialed.

Pops answered on the second ring.

“I was just going to call you,” Pops said before Whitt could speak. “I’m chasing down what I can on the Regan Banks CIR file. I feel like we need to take a different angle on this. The answers are right here. I just need to find them.”

Whitt drew a deep breath, tried to keep his voice steady. He couldn’t think how to respond to Pops’s comments about the files,