Liar Liar - James Patterson Page 0,78

around the beam. She slipped another tie around my wrists.

I watched Regan as Vada secured me. He was leaner than I had anticipated, his body probably worn from the chase and his injury in the Georges River. His hair was longer. Even with a face that had been windswept and hardened, his eyes were a little too big, too blank, like those of a man reminiscing and not really focusing. I thought of those cold eyes gazing over Eloise Jansen as he worked on her, or staring down the hallway at little Isobel Parish as she ran desperately from him.

Regan didn’t look at Vada as she stepped away from me. Those dead eyes were only for me.

“Did she give you any trouble?” he asked.

“No,” Vada said. “She was fine.”

“He was talking to me, you idiot,” I snapped at Vada. Anything I could do to undermine her confidence in him. To try to warn her about what was coming. I turned back to Regan. “No, she was fine. Now let her go. Let her turn herself in. She might be able to convince a prosecutor that you brainwashed her, threatened her, maybe. Stockholm syndrome. I’m sure you could come up with something, Vada. You’re a shrink. You could get parole in fifty years if you play your cards right.”

“She’s convinced you’re going to kill me.” Vada gave a little laugh, coming to Regan’s side.

He put an arm out, and she slipped under it, curling against him.

“I tried to explain to her that you need me for what comes next. Your new life. Our new life. But I’m not sure she understands.”

Vada looked me up and down, and there was a flicker of pity in her eyes. But the light was soon gone, and her eyes were taking on a blankness now that was almost as complete as his. She was dehumanizing me in her mind, the way he’d taught her to. Detaching herself from the idea that I didn’t deserve what I was about to get.

She sneered. “She said that now I’ve done my job, I’m no good to you.”

“You have done a very good job, Vada,” Regan said gently. He gave her a squeeze and let her go, taking a step away from her.

Suddenly free of his embrace, she looked impossibly small. Childlike. Her features were twitching with sudden confusion. She could see in his eyes the same thing I had seen in her—detachment forming. The false warmth dissipating.

I opened my mouth to tell Vada to run, but I knew it was hopeless.

Her eyes flicked to me. We could both feel it. The change in him. The switch flipped. The mask fallen away.

She didn’t even have time to voice her surprise. Her heartache.

Regan lifted the arm that held the gun and shot her point blank in the face.

Chapter 99

I WATCHED VADA RESKIT jolt as though shocked with electricity, her head snapping back. She staggered once and then crumpled to the floor, her head hitting the ground hard. Regan’s gun was small and silenced. He looked at Vada’s body, her head and shoulders lying in the shadow of the rickety old work table, and then turned to me like her death had been of only passing interest.

“She thought you loved her,” I said. “What did you tell her? That you were going to run away together? Assume new identities? Two broken, misunderstood souls finally united?”

“I didn’t have to tell her much,” Regan said, refusing to look at her. “Vada had plenty of experience piecing together fantasies. I just told her that if she did what I said, I’d give her everything she wanted. Isn’t that what all women want to hear?”

“Not me,” I said. “I want to hear the noise you make when I feed you into a woodchipper.”

The words were coming, but I wasn’t paying attention to them. I was focused on the cable tie around my wrist. Vada had pulled it tight, but I was sweating, so there was some lubrication. I tried to shift the thick plastic locking mechanism sideways from the back of my right hand to the gap between my wrists. The edges of the plastic were cutting, scratching my flesh.

Regan was approaching me. Moving cautiously, as though trying to corner a bird he planned to pounce on. As he came nearer, I found myself pressing against the beam, trying with all my might to shift the taut plastic.

“Vada was very different from you,” Regan said. “Some people, they need someone to save. The more damaged