Liar Liar - James Patterson Page 0,6

his coffee to the sink and poured it out without drinking it. He knew by the time he returned, it would be unsafe to drink.

He rode the clunking, shuddering elevator down to the darkened car park and traversed the concrete floor lined with police vehicles to another elevator down to the lowest floor of the building. Records was housed where the command center held its armory, and it had the added benefit of being a suitably dark, damp, and cold place for insubordinate officers to be sent as punishment. Officers who stepped out of line were sent to do time either in records, where they could wither away filing paperwork, or in the armory, where cleaning and servicing the weapons would allow them sufficient time to think about what they had done.

Whitt knew who was in the records department now—a young patrol officer named Karmichael, who had been filmed dancing suggestively in uniform with a couple of ladies in a nightclub in Kings Cross. Constable Karmichael’s movie had made it onto YouTube and, inevitably, to the top brass’s e-mail in-box. And then there was a long-term inmate of the dungeon, Inspector Mia Fables. Fables was in her fifties and had clawed her way to inspector through decades of shoddy police work and bad attitude.

Whitt exited the elevator and pushed open the door of the long hall leading to the lowest floor of the building.

The lights were off. It was his first clue that something was amiss.

Chapter 9

WHITT STOOD HOLDING open the heavy door. He seemed to recall that there had been some mention of the lights and electrics on the dungeon floor playing up. He called out into the infinite blackness and received no reply. Surely Karmichael and Fables weren’t working in pure blackness? The door at the other end of the hall must have been shut. Whitt let the door close behind him, sealing him in the dark. The sound of his shoes on the concrete as he walked seemed so loud now, his eardrums pulsed.

A smell. Gunpowder. Not the lingering reek of the armory up ahead, but a whiff of it, a cloud suddenly enveloping him. Whitt felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He stopped short, his hand reaching instinctively for the gun in his shoulder holster.

“Hello?”

No answer. Whitt wouldn’t have put it past his colleagues to try to give him a fright in the dark down here. He cleared his throat, trying to ease a little of the fear out of his words. “Is someone here?”

Nothing. He kept walking and, with relief, opened the door at the other end of the hall.

He would have looked back, just to check, to see if the strange sense that someone was in the hall behind him had been correct. That in the blackness someone had waited as he passed.

But he didn’t check.

He was distracted by the blood.

Chapter 10

JUST ONE DROP. A big drop, searing red in the fluorescent light.

Whitt looked back into the hall. No one. He crouched, squinted at the bloodstain. It was wet. He pulled out his weapon but didn’t call out this time.

It was only one drop of blood, but the feeling he’d experienced in the dark hall had put him on edge. His back teeth were locked, muscles tensed.

Whitt walked silently to a T-intersection in the hallway and peered around the corner. To the right of him, the door to the armory. To the left, the door to the records room. He looked down before he reached for the records-room doorknob. He noticed another drop of blood on the floor.

From inside the room, a moan.

Whitt threw open the door. The small reception space before the caged records room was empty. He went to the barred door and peered in, saw a pair of legs jutting from behind a filing cabinet.

“Karmichael?” Whitt tried to see more, but there was only blood—not single drops of it now but smears and streaks, a dark pool. He rattled the door. There was no sign of Mia Fables. He climbed atop the counter and slid his body through the gap across which the records were usually handed, landing almost on top of Constable Karmichael.

“Oh, Jesus,” Whitt breathed, spreading his hands instinctively on the officer’s bloodied chest, trying to stem the flow from two gaping holes. “Oh, Jesus!”

The young man had been shot three times, twice in the chest, once in the throat. He was alive. Trying to speak. His mouth moving open and closed, a