Liar Liar - James Patterson Page 0,63

field toward the mountains, I called Pops on the new number Whitt had given me.

“Jesus Christ, Harry,” he breathed. “All day I’ve been sitting waiting for them to tell me you were dead. Were you hit?”

“Yes,” I answered. “Not badly. Scratch on the leg. Who shot me?”

“Her name’s Vada Reskit,” Pops said.

He told me about her. In her time as a prison psychologist in Long Bay’s maximum-security unit, she had gained access to some of the country’s worst serial killers and rapists, and a couple of men imprisoned for their role in terrorist plots targeting Australian cities. For six years, Vada and Regan had sat together twice a week talking about the ins and outs of his twisted mind. Evidently, she had grown close to him. Learned to love him, perhaps. Pops told me that in the past twenty-four hours, while I had slept, the news media had already begun digging into what they could about Vada, had drawn out her shocked mother and brother for interviews and started spinning write-ups on her childhood.

She’d been a strange, isolated teenager. Vada had been taken out of her high school at sixteen for having an “inappropriate” relationship with her married physical education teacher. She’d been married herself at twenty-one to a poker-machine mogul who was edging into his seventies, an abusive, manipulative man who dumped her for his personal assistant when they’d been wed only three weeks.

Vada was not only a mixed-up, lonely woman, she was a gifted fraud. No one had been able to confirm exactly where she’d obtained her psychology degree or what year she’d graduated, and a raid on her house that morning had uncovered a real-estate agent’s blazer and badge and dozens of folders crammed with paperwork for a mortgage company she didn’t appear to work for. Vada Reskit been known by four other names. Homicide detectives had obtained CCTV footage of her in the street one block away from the Parramatta police headquarters on the morning of the shooting in the records room, crossing the street with a bag on her hip.

I listened to Pops’s tale and remembered the woman I’d glimpsed marching into the crime scene with Whitt, totally at ease pretending to be a law-enforcement official. I remembered her face above the gun, suddenly colder and devoid of life compared to the stern, determined look she’d had the first time I’d seen her. Mask on, mask off.

Vada had probably learned the art of deception from the men she drew to her. The teacher who preyed on his students. The older billionaire who burned through people like he did dollars. The dangerously attractive serial killer who, for years, bent and twisted her mind to his will. But maybe I was being too kind to Vada. Maybe she was as darkly clever as the predatory men she had partnered with over the years. Maybe all along I had been dealing with not one psychopath, but two.

Pops told me of Whitt’s near miss with Vada.

“I haven’t spoken to Whitt,” Pops said. “He won’t answer his phone. I’m getting all this information second-hand from officers in Bombala. I don’t know how he got away, but he’s safe, they tell me. They’re searching for Vada now.”

“They won’t find her,” I said. “She’ll go to Regan now.”

“Harry,” Pops said carefully, “I know you won’t listen to me. But I’m going to implore you anyway. Please come in. We know Regan’s not alone now. He’s going to lure you into a trap, and you’re going to go willingly because you think it’s your duty or something. Harry, I know why Regan went into foster care. I know more about this man than you do.”

A chill came over me. I stood, had to steady myself in the doorway.

“He’s a monster, Harry.”

“Tell me what happened,” I said.

Pops sighed.

“If you know what happened to Regan as a child, you know where it happened,” I pressed. “Tell me.”

“I’m not going to help you put your head in the lion’s mouth,” Pops said. “I’m not even sure he’s leading you there. The house isn’t there anymore. It was lost…” He paused. “Harry, please, you have to listen to me, vengeance for your brother is not—”

I hung up and grabbed my bag from inside the farmhouse, gritting my teeth through the pain. Night had fallen. If Pops wasn’t going to help me, I wasn’t going to waste my time trying to convince him. Regan was out there, and now I knew he had a friend, a woman who’d