Liar Liar - James Patterson Page 0,67

wasn’t going to do this to myself. I wasn’t going to let Regan get into my head.

I crossed the empty damp plains of Nungatta, the southward highway a gray streak in the distance to my left. Herds of goats lifted their heads as I approached, eyes luminescent in the dark, skittering away when I came near. My sneakers became clotted with mud and grass, which I shook off as the land became drier.

I thought about Regan’s parents. The mother he had felt no love for, the “empty shell” she had been to him. I’d heard a lot of terrible stories in my time in foster care, both the sudden violent incidents that saw children confiscated from their parents and the long, slow, drawn-out situations that did the same. I’d seen kids pockmarked with circular scars, spotted like leopards from parents who thought getting high and putting out their cigarette butts on their kids was a lark. I’d listened to the tales of kids left alone with an abusive grandparent, their parents returning to find their child completely changed, terrified, and bruised, the grandparent denying everything. I’d known kids who’d watched one parent murder the other; had listened to their whispers from across the dorm-room aisle in group homes.

Whatever had happened to Regan, it was so bad that a judge had decided it should never be known to the public, lest Regan have to suffer the humiliation of the event being revealed in his adult life. I walked and wondered what a person could possibly to do a seven-year-old that warranted that. I had some ideas, and just considering them made me sick.

I wondered if what happened to Regan had made him the monster he was deep down inside. Was he born bad, or was he taking me to the place where he had been made that way?

I had turned back toward the highway, half formulating a plan to catch a ride to the nearest town with a car-trouble story, when I spied the stone building on the edge of the next paddock. An old house with darkened windows, a car parked, still shimmering with rain. My ride to the meeting that I knew would end a life.

Regan’s or mine.

Chapter 84

THE FIRST INDICATION that they were in the right place might have been missed by a careless onlooker. Tox hadn’t been entirely sure he was on the right track but had set out with Whitt on a half-theory, unable to stand the motel room any longer.

Al Cerullo had been more helpful than he’d anticipated. Instead of simply giving Tox the password to Vada’s email account, Al had unlocked her whole work profile for him, giving him the woman’s login to the prison’s intranet. There wasn’t much in the email account to drive Tox’s search, but he had discovered that the prison recorded each employee’s Google search history to ensure staff didn’t get up to any unsavory online behavior during work hours. There, between searches for academic articles on antisocial personality disorder and the relative benefits of Clozaril as an antipsychotic medication, he’d spotted a Google Maps search. The land was in a place called Bellbird Valley.

Now as Tox slowed the Monaro before the row of roadworks signs, he felt his curiosity piquing at the apparently ordinary scene before him. A dusty yellow digger had been parked by the side of the highway, three men standing around it, not doing much of anything, their high-vis vests painfully bright in the light of the lamps rigged around the roadblock. Tox was behind two other cars. He eased off the brake and let the car roll as he was directed west by a large “detour” sign and another man with flashing handheld pointers.

“This is it,” he told Whitt.

Whitt shuffled upward in his seat, having been resting against the window.

“How do you know?” he asked, squinting into the dark.

“They’re not using that crawler excavator to pull up the road,” Tox said as they drove away from the roadblock. “It’s built for muddy earth. Probably borrowed it from a local farm for show. Those three goons standing leaning on their shovels didn’t look like they’d ever done a day’s manual labor in their lives, and they’ve got bulges under their jackets which I’d hazard are too big for radios. They’ll be undercovers making sure a couple of country bumpkins on their way home from the local rodeo don’t drive through the middle of the country’s biggest manhunt.”

Tox parked the car not far from the detour and