The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2021 by James Patterson
Excerpt from Fear No Evil copyright © 2021 by James Patterson
Cover design by Anthony Morais
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ISBN 978-1-5387-0458-5 (trade pb) / 978-1-5387-0459-2 (HC library edition) / 978-1-5387-0722-7 (large print) / 978-1-5387-0460-8 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number 2021939654
E3-20210830-DA-NF-ORI
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
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Prologue
She was a killer.
Jacob Kanular knew it, as soon as the girl put the gun to his head. It was the way she angled the barrel of the revolver: straight down from forehead to neck so that when she pulled the trigger, the bullet would pass cleanly through his brain to his spinal column. She wasn’t trying to scare him. Wasn’t messing around by putting the gun against his temple or his mouth. Whoever she was, she knew how to kill.
This was the only rational thought Jacob could manage. Everything else was just desperate internal screams. For himself. For his wife. For his baby.
There were five of them—three males, two females—and they were young and angry. They wanted to hurt, to destroy. There was at least one phone filming, a bright light too painful to look right at but illuminating snippets of what was happening next to him. Jacob was glad at least that they were binding his daughter, Beatrice, and wife, Neina, to chairs and not to the bed. Someone hacked Neina’s ponytail off with a pair of scissors. A Taser zapped, threateningly, in Beaty’s face. Jacob looked at the girl with the gun on him, and his thoughts focused on what he’d do to these people if he survived. But the duct tape across his mouth prevented him from speaking.
“I could kill you,” the girl said, as though she could read his thoughts. She seemed to really be weighing it up, tapping on the trigger so he could feel the vibration through the metal, through his electrified skin. An eighth of an inch from death. “But I’m a nice girl. So I’ll teach you a lesson instead.”
The others heard what she said and came for him. They pushed Jacob’s chair over, and he lay strapped to it in his boxer shorts, trying to fold himself in two to defend against the blows. The girl took a golf club from the bag in the hall and came back, showed it to him before she raised it over her shoulder with professional ease and smashed it into his ribs. He tried to focus on something, another cold, emotionless thought to get him through. He saw a single curl of blond hair poking out from beneath her hood. He squeezed his eyes shut and thought about that curl, that golden spiral, as they kicked him half to death.
Beyond the huge glass windows, the ocean off Palos Verdes was calm and gray and flat, sparkling with moonlight.
The girl with the curl grabbed a hank of his hair and lifted his head.
“You learned any manners yet?” she asked.
“Hey, Ash. Look,” someone said.
Ash, Jacob thought.
“Oh, man.” A boy’s voice. “She’s not breathing right.”
“Chill. She’s faking it.”
Through the pounding in his head Jacob strained to listen, and in the hot bedroom air he could pick out Beaty’s wheezes and coughs and groans. She hadn’t had an asthma attack since she was four years old. Six years since he’d heard that hellish noise. They didn’t even keep an inhaler in the house anymore.
The girl leader stepped on Jacob’s face. He felt the rubber grip of her boot tug down the corner of his eye.
“If she dies, it’s on you.”
Then they were gone, the sound of their running footsteps echoing off the high ceilings.
In the darkness of the car, Neina spoke for the first time, sitting in the back seat with their daughter in her lap. Jacob could hardly hear his wife’s voice over Beaty’s distraught, struggling breaths. The garage door seemed to take a year to slide up and let them free. There was still tape hanging from his left wrist as he gripped the wheel and floored it for the nearest hospital.
“Who the hell were they?” Neina cried.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly.
Chapter 1
“Your Honor,” I said. “My client is an artist.”
The courtroom had been rippling gently with the sounds of conversations between the clients waiting in the stalls and their defenders, and of family members moving in and out of the wide double doors. At my words, the room fell silent. Judge Mackavin rested his chin on his palm, a single bushy eyebrow raised.
“Get on with it, Rhonda,” the judge said as I soaked in the dramatic silence I’d created. Everyone was looking at me—for once a spectacle based on my words rather than my appearance.
As big as I am—260 pounds, some of it well-earned muscle and some of it long-maintained fat—there’s no point trying to fit in with the crowd. The pink hair was just the latest shade in a rotating kaleidoscope of colors I applied to my half shaved, wavy quiff, and I always wore rock band shirts in the courtroom under my blazer.
“Mr. Reece Donovan comes from a long line of artists,” I said, gesturing to my client, who slumped meekly in his chair. “His mother, Veronica, is a talented glass blower. His father sold portrait sketches on Main Street in Littleton as a youth. For the entirety of his sixteen years on Earth, this young man has been lectured by his parents on the importance of art as a commentary on the folly of humankind, and—”
“Counselor.” Judge Mackavin leaned forward in his big leather chair. “You’re not about to tell me that what young Mr. Donovan did was performance art, are you?”
There was a cough at the back of the crowded room. The only sound. Young Reece Donovan chewed his fingernails and looked like he wanted the ground to open up and swallow him.
“Hear me out,” I said. “I’m just getting momentum.”
“From the brief of evidence I have here,” the judge said, lifting a page from those spread before him, “I’m to understand that Mr. Donovan was so upset by his mom’s plan to marry her boyfriend that he filled the sprinkler system at the Colorado National Golf Club with red paint and rigged it to go off in the middle of their ceremony on the ninth green. Is that right?”
“That’s correct, Your Honor,” I said.
“I see.” He nodded. “And his ingenious plan worked, it says here. He bathed the entire wedding party in paint, turning the ceremony into what visually resembled a violent bloodbath.”
The judge held a picture of the dripping, mortified wedding party, snapped by the photographer moments after the sprinkler system launched. It looked like a scene from a horror film.
“It’s a striking image, Judge,” I said. “Some would say bold. Some would say inspired.”
“He also managed to douse seventeen golfers standing at various stations on the course.”
“Mr. Donovan didn’t realize the whole sprinkler system was connected,” I said. “He thought he’d isolated the ninth green and the wedding party.”
The entire courtroom looked at my young client, who was wringing his long, slender fingers. In the front row of the audience, his mother and new stepfather looked exhausted. They’d forgiven him, but it had been hard work. I’d seen that expression on countless sets of parents over the course of my career.
“You know I support artistic expression in all its forms, Rhonda.” Mackavin looked pointedly at my flamingo-pink hair and Metallica shirt. “But you’re right out on the ledge here.”
“The kid was angry,” I said. “He wanted to make a statement. Yes, a lot of people got painted, but they were painted red, Your Honor. The color of passion. Of love! Of lifeblood, desire, longevity. An informed choice, I’m sure you’ll agree, and a visually spectacular execution. And, Judge, where would modern expressionism be without Jackson Pollock’s reckless determination to splash everything within ten feet of him with paint?”
The judge stifled a laugh, shook his head.
“Damages to the golf course, the sprinkler system, and the other golfers in attendance are into the tens of thousands of dollars,” the judge said, regaining his frown.
“We’re aware, Your Honor, and my client is very remorseful.”
The judge looked at me, thought for a moment. A small smile played about his lips.
“I’m willing to reward your creativity, Rhonda, in trying to pass Mr. Donovan’s actions off as anything more than pure idiocy here today,” Mackavin said, writing up his decision in the big book before him. “You’ve amused me, which is not an easy feat. Four hundred hours of community service.” The judge waved me away. “And tell the artist to keep it in the studio next time.”
I turned and smiled at my client, but like the judge’s, my humor was short-lived. Across the room I spied my next client, a handsome young man in an expensive blue suit, being led out from the holding rooms. Unlike the slouching, fidgeting juvenile offenders lined up on the bench behind the rail, Thad Forrester was cuffed. The bailiff escorted Thad Forrester to the end of the row and uncuffed him, and I felt the dread manifest at the center of my stomach as I headed over to greet the most dangerous kid on my list.
Chapter 2
Thad looked me over from head to foot as I approached, obviously skeptical, on the edge of disbelieving laughter. I get that look a lot, and not only from entitled frat boys up on rape charges. Thad would be just one in a crowd of people who’d underestimated me based on my appearance that morning.
“Mr. Forrester.” I offered my hand, injected as little warmth into my words as possible. “I’m Rhonda Bird, your public defender.”
“You can’t be serious.” He snorted. “Is this what passes for legal aid these days?”
“This is exactly what passes for legal aid these days,” I said. “Passes with summa cum laude and a fifty-thousand-dollar research grant.”
I hadn’t actually taken the research grant, or the PhD offer. I’d wanted to get out there, into the courtroom, among the young and vulnerable people who I felt so deserved my service. People like Reece Donovan. Not people like Thad Forrester.
He smirked. “You should have spent the grant money on a personal trainer. And what the hell are you wearing? You look like you just stepped out of some lame-ass rock concert.”
“You shouldn’t judge people by their appearance, Mr. Forrester,” I said. “The Metallica shirt doesn’t make me any less of a lawyer, just like your Hugo Boss one doesn’t make you any less of a rapist.” Thad shook his head ruefully. I checked off his attendance on my clipboard. “I assume, because you’re on my list, your expensive lawyer from New York hasn’t arrived yet.”
“That’s right,” he said. “So you need to get this thing canceled.”
“It’s an advisement hearing,” I said. “The judge is just going to tell you what you’re charged with
.”
Thad’s charges were laid out vaguely on my list, but I’d heard the story from other lawyers in the courthouse halls. Thad’s arrest related to an incident six months earlier, in which a local college sophomore had been found lying half-naked in bushes outside a frat-house party in the early hours of the morning. The girl hadn’t reported a sexual assault, probably because she couldn’t remember it, but pictures of her involved in sexual activity while obviously unconscious had circulated on the phones of some young men on campus in the following weeks. The girl had made an attempt on her own life, which had brought the whole tragedy to the attention of the police. The police had acquired the photographs and identified a scar on the wrist of her assailant as identical to that on Thad Forrester.
“You don’t need a pricey lawyer for this stage of the legal process,” I told Thad. “No rulings will be made on your case today.”
“How about you let me decide what I need,” the kid snapped, with the practiced tone of someone used to giving commands. “I’ve had friends wrapped up in this kind of bullshit before. Every second I’m in the courtroom is being analyzed, and the last thing I want is to be associated with some freaky fat clown for my very first hearing.”
I smiled and leaned in. “Mr. Forrester, from the brief of evidence attached to your file, these charges don’t look like bullshit at all. That’s your wrist in those pictures. Even this ‘fat clown’ can see that.”
“It won’t matter,” he said with a smile. “We have a plan.”
I backed up. I could see the rest of the case playing out as others had so many times before. There would be a large financial offer from the Forrester family to the girl’s in exchange for a withdrawal of the charges. If her family didn’t bite, Thad’s expensive legal team would invade the girl’s life like a disease, going after her sexual history, her grades, her family life, and her friends. Every slipup she’d had since she was in grade school would be exposed and examined under hot lights.
I’d dealt with scumbags like Thad a hundred times across my career as a juvenile public defender. I had to defend them, but that didn’t mean I had to stop them from digging their own graves. I matched Thad’s smile with my own.
Because I also had a plan. I would have the advisement hearing postponed, as he’d demanded, then I’d bring him to an interview room at the back of the courthouse under the guise of having him sign some release papers. There, while he relaxed, already mentally detached from the fat clown with the pink hair and the threat she posed to his courtroom reputation, I’d get Thad chatting about the night he assaulted the girl at the frat party, challenge his manhood, poke and prod him until he snapped. Little boys with big mouths like Thad didn’t want to listen—especially to women. They wanted to talk. They wanted to be listened to. Obeyed. That’s why witnesses had heard him bragging, why he’d taken and shared the pictures of the girl’s assault. Boys like Thad couldn’t keep quiet, and I knew the recording light on the front of the camera in interview room 3 wasn’t working.