Liar Liar

by James Patterson

  He checked the other aisles, one at a time, sweeping his gun before him. No one. He heard running footsteps, shouting. His colleagues arriving at the distant hall.

  “I’m here!” Whitt went back to the dying constable on the ground. “Karmichael, I’m—”

  He was gone. The blood that had been gushing from his throat had stilled. Whitt stood, listening to the alarm, blood dripping from his fingers onto the floor, sliding down the barrel of his gun. On the ground nearby was another collection of files and papers, a heap lifted from an open drawer nearby and dumped. Whitt went to the cabinet where the drawer stood open and looked at the sign above it.

  PERSONNEL: A–F.

  He didn’t touch the files scattered near the body of the dead officer. He read the names he could see as though in a dream. Brummer. Brown. Blake. Billett. Benson.

  He knew which file was missing.

  Chapter 11

  A DOUBLE SHOOTING in their own command building. Whitt couldn’t fathom it. He sat dumbfounded at the table in an interview room after giving his statement. He’d been told the CCTV had switched off ten minutes before the shooting. The concrete walls had suppressed the sound of gunfire.

  “Harry’s personnel file is missing, isn’t it?” Whitt asked his chief.

  Chief Morris and Deputy Commissioner Woods were the last detectives to interview Whitt. He had given his statement three times over. They sat across from him, reading his statement.

  “Details of the crime scene aren’t your concern right now, Detective,” Woods said. “You’re signed off for the day. Go home. Walk it off. We’ll resume interviews in the morning.”

  “It was him.” Whitt couldn’t stop the words tumbling out. “Banks. I think I passed him on his way out. He came to get Harry’s records. That means he’s got everything we have on her. Her childhood. Her academy results. Her disciplinary—”

  “Whitt,” Morris said.

  “He was here. Banks. He was in the building.”

  “That’s enough, Detective.” Woods stood, towering above the men still sitting at the table, his bulk casting a shadow over Whitt. “Shut up and go home. That’s an order.”

  In the men’s change room, while collecting his belongings, Whitt jumped at the touch of a hand on his shoulder.

  It was a female detective he’d not met before, her black cotton top cinched at the underarms by her holster.

  “Edward Whittacker?” she said.

  “Oh, yes, hi.” He closed his locker. “Sorry—you’re from Forensics? Is there more I need to—”

  “No, I’m Detective Vada Reskit.” She put out a hand. “I’m your new partner on the Banks case.”

  A partner. That made sense. Someone to lean on while he dealt with the events of the morning, someone to keep an eye on him for the top brass as he carried on with the case. Leave time was not in abundance right now. He’d be expected to suck it up and keep looking for Banks and Harry.

  Whitt shook the offered hand. Vada’s grip was firm, warm. The first comforting thing he’d felt in hours. He focused on her bright white teeth. Her red hair. Her ponytail. “I see. Chief Morris assigned you, did he? Or was it Woods?”

  “Woods. But Morris approved it.”

  “Right, right.”

  “Come on, let’s get going. You’ve had yourself a pretty hard day. We all have. We’ll have a few drinks, blow off some steam. You can talk about it, or not talk about it, as you like.”

  “Oh,” Whitt said. He never had “a few drinks.” Not anymore. It had taken years to climb his way out of the hole drinking had sunk him into after a bad case he’d worked on back home in Perth. A little girl had died, and Whitt had not been able to bring her killers to justice. Worse yet, he’d planted evidence and all but secured their freedom.

  Old tingles of desire rippled through him at just the mention of a few drinks. He said nothing about his problem. It was too awkward to bring up at the outset. His ritual was to allow himself a single standard glass of red wine at 5:30 p.m. Not a drop more. Sometimes, on his worst days, he had a Scotch. Just one.

  He’d have that drink with his new partner and explain it all to her then.

  “Let’s go,” he said, the dread almost choking off his words.

  Chapter 12

  I SAT AT the back of the bar in a shadowy corner, my eyes on my glass, listening to the talk of the men at the counter. The tumbling and crashing sounds of the poker machines. The cars rushing by in the wet street.

  In the time I’d been on the run, I’d learned plenty of things, but the most important had been how essential the sense of hearing is to a fugitive. I kept my ears pricked for mentions of my name at all times. For sirens, or the unmistakable stern, direct talk of cops. I made eye contact with no one. I’d kept my head so low in my first week in hiding, my neck had been stiff and sore at the end of each day.

  On the television screens above the bar, a cricket game, a cooking show, and the national evening news. I listened as the bartender howled above the general din of conversation from the men crowded at the tables nearest the bar.

  “Shut up, you guys! I wanna hear this!”

  The men’s volume lowered. The sound of the news program rose. I turned my drink on the tabletop before me, watching the ice melt.

  “…shocking scenes. Police are saying they have no reason to believe the shooting at Sydney Police Center in Surry Hills is linked to the ongoing search for Regan Banks…”

  I dropped my head, realizing I’d almost risen out of my seat, eyes glued to the screen, my cover forgotten. My thoughts were racing. A shooting at the police command center. Did they mean inside the building? How was that possible?

  I realized with sudden, shocking clarity how many people I cared about had probably been in the building that day. Pops. Whitt. I thought briefly about Nigel Spader. He was a jerk, a jerk who had been partly responsible for my brother’s incarceration. But I didn’t want him dead. There were others—old partners, people I knew from the academy. Who was dead? Who’d done the shooting?

  “…in total lockdown, as you can see. The names of the two officers who were killed have not been released, but sources are saying a shootout inside the station records room resulted in…”

  The records room. I chanced another look at the screens from under the ball cap pulled low on my brow. The reporter was standing outside a barricaded command center, his face demonstrating his shock at the story he was reporting. Rage flickered in me. Regan Banks. Why had the reporter mentioned Regan Banks at all? Of course, the country was in terror at the idea that Regan was running around, ready to kill again. They were horrified at the police’s apparent inability to capture him. But a shooting at the station—nothing about that brought Regan Banks and his crimes to mind. Banks was a rapist. A strangler. A stabber. A torturer of women. He was not someone who entered buildings crowded with cops and shot people.

  But there was one possibility: the reporter had mentioned Regan Banks because someone had mentioned it to him. A press release from police headquarters might have specifically said the shooting was not linked to Regan Banks.

  Which meant, of course, that it was.

  Regan. Why would he break into the records department? Was it to kill the people working there? The records room was a dumping ground for the department’s bad kids. I’d worked there plenty of times myself. The room was a weak access point for the building, now that I thought about it. If Regan just wanted to kill a cop, any cop, the records staff were sitting ducks.

  Or had the records room itself been the target, and the staff there collateral? But what in the records room could Regan possibly—

  I knew, even before I’d completed the thought.

  I drained my drink and rose from my seat.

  Two could play at that game.

  Chapter 13

  BEING ON THE lam is harder than you think. It takes a lot of setup. I’d been given the news of my brother’s death only minutes after landing at Sydney Airport, coming home from my last
case. From there I’d walked out, got a cab to my apartment, which was a crime scene, taped and locked up after Tox’s showdown with Regan. I’d taken no time to survey the chaos, the smashed coffee table and the blood pool where my friend had fallen. Numb, working purely on cold, calm directions coming from somewhere deep in my subconscious, I’d packed a bag with some clothes, the cash that was lying around my home, my phone, and all my IDs. I’d locked the apartment, gone straight to a bank, and emptied my accounts of the few thousand dollars I had left after my brother’s trial. This I’d put straight into the backpack.

  I’d copied essential numbers from my phone, switched it off, dumped it, and got a taxi back to Kings Cross, where I’d spent many of my first cases in Sex Crimes taking statements from working girls abused by their pimps or clients. I found someone I knew and, on her recommendation, headed for a back-alley phone dealership where I purchased an untraceable sim card and handset. Standing in the alley under blinking LED lights strung over the battered doorway, I’d called my boss. In the small, dark storage room where I’d bought the phone, a Chinese family was sitting down to dinner surrounded by unopened boxes of phones in every shape, color, and size. The laptop that served as their television set was being pawed at by a toddler in pajamas. My brother’s face was warped by the angle of the screen, the banner under his chin half hidden by Chinese subtitles.

  Breaking news: GRK accused Samuel Jacob Blue dead after prison fight

  I’d been so out of it, Pops was on the line for a long moment before I spoke. I barely remembered dialing.

  “I can’t let him get away with it,” I’d said finally.

  “Harry? Harry, listen.” Pops had sounded puffed, the way I’d always known him, an old man trying to control a much younger, much angrier fighter in the ring. “I know this hurts. But don’t do anything. I’m warning you. Don’t—”

  “I’m sorry,” I’d said.

  I’d never stopped being sorry. I was sorry for every night that I didn’t come in, for every phone call I knew Whitt and Pops were making to my original, switched-off phone, leaving messages that would never be picked up, hoping to talk me down. I was sorry that I had not gone to Sam’s funeral. That I had not called our mother. That I had not visited Tox in hospital. I regretted what I was about to do now, as I sat in the darkened car park of the Department of Family and Community Services, smoking a cigarette and watching the automatic back doors opening and closing as workers left for the night.

  I’d committed plenty of crimes since I went underground. Theft. Fraud. Fare evasion. The crimes were getting worse.

  Resisting arrest. Assaulting a police officer.

  When there was one car in the parking lot, I stood and flicked open the blade on my pocketknife.

  I was about to commit my worst crime yet.

  Chapter 14

  THE REMAINING CAR was a brand new Toyota Corolla, rose red and shining in the light of the moon. I snuck up to the side of it and punctured the front passenger-side tire with my blade before dashing behind a row of bushes.

  Only minutes passed before a plump woman in a long denim skirt came wandering out of the back doors of the building, locking the glass door behind her and shouldering a heavy handbag. She was typical of the child-services women I’d traipsed after for most of my childhood in foster care. The long skirt was good for a little kid to hide behind, and the handbag, if squeezed, would crackle with the sound of lolly bags. I waited while the woman crossed the lot and slid into the car, dumping her handbag on the seat beside her with the crackle I’d expected. For a moment or two, she appreciated the new feel of the car, the strange slant toward the front left side. When she exited the vehicle and walked around the front of it, I crouched, ready.

  “Oh, shit,” she wailed, looking around the empty lot. “Shiiiiiit!”

  I waited. She grabbed her phone and dialed while she popped the boot and went around the back. As she began speaking, I snuck forward and went for the driver’s-side door.

  “It’s me,” I heard her saying. “I’ve got a flat tire. Can you believe it? No, I’m just gonna change it myself. But stay on the line with me, will you? I’m all alone out here. I’ll put you on speaker.”

  I squatted in the doorway as the car shifted all around me, the FACS woman unloading the tire from the boot. The keys were in her handbag on the passenger seat. I snuck away as the sound of another female voice came from the phone’s speaker.

  “Just call roadside service! There’s a serial killer running around out there, haven’t you heard?”

  “Why do you think I called you, Mum?” The FACS woman sighed. “If you hear me scream, you’ll know he’s got me. Hang up and call the police.”

  “Maria, if I hear you scream, I’m gonna have a stroke!”

  The key to the back door of the FACS building was the biggest and thickest on the key ring. I closed the door quietly behind me and stood in the dark, listening. It had been nearly two decades since I had been here, but it smelled the same. Baby powder and sterilized plastic toys, soiled nappies, and sour milk. In the hall were posters with happy, smiling teddy bears and elaborately illustrated dinosaurs giving advice on how to be brave if you’re feeling scared. How nobody should ever make you keep a secret. How the police and your care workers were to be trusted above all others, how they would always keep you safe.

  Bullshit.

  I passed a wall displaying domestic-violence pamphlets and rounded the corner of a service desk.

  Behind it I found the computer still turned on and gritted my teeth at the password system, until I found a Post-it note on a nearby shelf with the login details helpfully written out. I logged in and went straight to a record search. I realized how sweaty my hands were when I began to type in Regan’s name.

  The sound of my phone ringing in the silence made me yelp. I looked instinctively back toward the hall that led to the rear door, expecting to see Maria the FACS worker standing there, drawn by the noise. No one had the number of this phone. I’d never heard it ring, never bothered to turn the sound off. I assured myself it was some kind of mistake and rejected the call. But as I was switching the phone to silent, it rang again.

  “Hello?” I answered.

  “It’s me,” Regan said.

  Chapter 15

  IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE that it was him. This number was unlisted, untraceable, unobtainable by anyone but the man in Kings Cross who I’d bought it from.

  It was impossible that he would call to speak to me, after everything he had done to me and my brother and my friends. Impossible that I would know it was him, having never heard his voice.

  But I did know. It was him. Every cell in my body confirmed it. I couldn’t speak. My hands shaking, tears already rising, I threw the phone from my ear as though it were red hot and scrabbled with it on the counter, fumbling for the button to hang up.

  I was panting. Making faint whimpering sounds. Regan’s name was on the computer screen in front of me, his voice still in my brain, searing itself into my memory.

  It’s me. I’m back. I’ve found you, Harry.

  The phone rang again. The computer screen went dark, timed out. I caught a glimpse of my own horrified face, lips trembling.

  “Get a grip, bitch,” I snarled at my reflection.

  I grabbed the phone and answered.

  Chapter 16

  I DIDN’T LET him speak this time. I hadn’t known I had anything I wanted to say to Regan Banks, but apparently there was plenty. I squeezed the phone so that the plastic creaked with the pressure, and I spewed vitriol at him down the line. I called him every name I could think of, trying with each new sentence to make him understand how much I hated him, what a vile and worthless creature he was. Slowly I realized that the words were weak. Nothing I said came close to expressing what I felt. I gasped for breath at the end of my tirade, rounding it off in the only way I knew how.

  “So fuck you,” I said. “Fuck. You. Regan. Banks.”

  “Harriet,” he said, after giving me
time to regain my composure, which I failed to do, “that was some impressive speech.”

  I didn’t answer. I wasn’t going to take his bait, acknowledge a compliment from the man who had ruined my life. I woke the computer, hit the search button, and started running through the findings, the phone wedged between my ear and shoulder.

  “Your brother called you Harry,” Regan said. His voice was heavy, slow. Unflappable. “Can I call you that?”

  “You better call me the Grim Reaper, arsehole,” I said. “Because I’m going to find you, and I’m going to end you. I’m gonna put you in the ground. And I’m gonna come back to visit you every year on the anniversary just so I can tell your rotting, worm-riddled corpse to go fuck itself.”

  I glanced toward the doorway, hearing my own voice rising and being unable to stop it. I’d bitten the inside of my cheek in my fury. The hatred was intoxicating.

  He was laughing softly. I felt something wild inside me throwing itself about inside its cage, yanking painfully hard on its chains.

  “I believe you, Harry,” Regan said. “There’s not an instance here in your personnel file that makes me believe you’re not a woman of your word.”

  My file. I’d been right. He’d killed two cops to get what he could on me. I ground my teeth, selected his record on the screen, and hit print.

  “I see you’ve been questioned multiple times about revenge attacks on the men you’ve dealt with on the job,” he said. I heard papers being shuffled. “You were questioned after a luxury Mercedes belonging to a man who was accused of molesting his teenage daughter was set on fire.”

  I remembered the case. The daughter had been too scared to testify. I recalled the warmth of the flames as I stood in the dark across the street. The man was trying to put out the fire with a blanket as his neighbors slowly emerged from their houses.