by John Lutz
Highest Praise for
John Lutz
“John Lutz knows how to make you shiver.”
—Harlan Coben
“Lutz offers up a heart-pounding roller coaster
of a tale.”
—Jeffery Deaver
“John Lutz is one of the masters of the police novel.”
—Ridley Pearson
“John Lutz is a major talent.”
—John Lescroart
“I’ve been a fan for years.”
—T. Jefferson Parker
“John Lutz just keeps getting better and better.”
—Tony Hillerman
“Lutz ranks with such vintage masters
of big-city murder
as Lawrence Block and Ed McBain.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Lutz is among the best.”
—San Diego Union
“Lutz knows how to seize and hold the
reader’s imagination.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“It’s easy to see why he’s won an Edgar
and two Shamuses.”
—Publishers Weekly
Pulse
“One of the ten best books of the year.”
—Strand magazine
“Grisly murders seen through the eyes of killer
and victim; crime scenes from which clues slowly
accumulate; a determined killer . . . compelling.”
—Booklist
Serial
“Wow, oh wow, oh wow . . . that’s as simple as I can
put it. You gotta read this one.”
—True Crime Book Reviews
Mister X
“A page-turner to the nail-biting end . . . twisty,
creepy whodunit.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Urge to Kill
“A solid and compelling winner . . . sharp
characterization, compelling dialogue and graphic
depictions of evil.... Lutz knows how to keep
the pages turning.”
—BookReporter.com
Night Kills
“Lutz’s skill will keep you glued to this thick thriller.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
In for the Kill
“Brilliant . . . a very scary and suspenseful read.”
—Booklist
“Shamus and Edgar award–winner Lutz gives us
further proof of his enormous talent . . . an
enthralling page-turner.”
—Publishers Weekly
Chill of Night
“The ingenuity of the plot shows that Lutz
is in rare form.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A dazzling tour de force . . . compelling, absorbing.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Fear the Night
“A tense, fast-moving novel, a plot-driven page-turner
of the first order . . . a great read!”
—Book Page
Darker Than Night
“Readers will believe that they just stepped off a Tilt-
A-Whirl after reading this action-packed police
procedural.”
—The Midwest Book Review
Night Victims
“John Lutz knows how to ratchet up the terror.... He
propels the story with effective twists and a fast pace.”
—Sun-Sentinel
The Night Watcher
“Compelling . . . a gritty psychological
thriller.... Lutz draws the reader deep into the
killer’s troubled psyche.”
—Publishers Weekly
Final Seconds
“Lutz always delivers the goods, and this is
no exception.”
—Booklist
ALSO BY JOHN LUTZ
*Pulse
*Switch (e-short)
*Serial
*Mister X
*Urge to Kill
*Night Kills
*In for the Kill
Chill of Night
Fear the Night
*Darker Than Night
Night Victims
The Night Watcher
The Night Caller
Final Seconds (with David August)
The Ex
Single White Female
* featuring Frank Quinn
Available from Kensington Publishing Corp. and
Pinnacle Books
JOHN LUTZ
TWIST
PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Praise
ALSO BY JOHN LUTZ
Title Page
Dedication
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
PART TWO
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
PART THREE
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
EPILOGUE
BEAUTY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright Page
For James Richard Pope
Too soon gone
PART ONE
Who is this woman with us in the dawn?
Whose is the flesh our feet have moved upon?
—HART CRANE, The Harbor Dawn
1
Medford County, Kansas, 1984
Abbey Taylor trusted to God and Ford to get her into Medford so she could buy some groceries. She was driving the family’s old pickup truck. It was harder and harder for her to get around, much less into town, so she figured she should take advantage of feeling good on a nice sunny day and load up on whatever she could afford.
Billy had stayed home from work again today and was sleeping off another night out with his buddies. That involved plenty of meth, which was why he was in no condition to go in to work as an auto mechanic in Medford. All he wanted was to lie on the old vinyl couch and listen to some natter-head on the radio railing about how crooked the government was. Hell, everybody knew that already.
So Abbey, in her ninth month of pregnancy, left Billy to his anarchist dreams and waddled out to the old truck parked in the shade.
The truck was black, so it soaked up the sun, and as soon as she managed to climb inside, Abbey cranked down the windows. That let a nice breeze in, scented by the nearby stand of pine trees.
She turned the ignition key one bump, and needles moved on the gauges. The gas gauge, which
was usually accurate, indicated over a quarter of a tank. Abbey knew from experience that would carry her into town and back.
The engine stuttered once and then turned over and ran smoothly enough, though it did clatter some. She released the emergency brake, shoved the gear-shift lever into first. The truck bucked some when she turned onto the dirt road, but she got it going smoothly in second and kept it in that gear so she could navigate around the worst of the ruts and holes. One particular bump was so jarring that she feared for the baby.
Soon she was on blacktop, and she put the truck in gear and drove smoothly along. The ride into town was pretty, the road lined with conifers and old sycamore trees and cottonwoods. The warm breeze coming through the open windows whisked away most of the oil and gas odor seeping up through the floorboards.
About halfway to town, on a slight hill, the motor began to run rough and seemed to lose power.
Abbey stomped down on the clutch and jammed the truck into a lower gear. That got her more power, but only briefly.
Then the engine chattered and died, and she steered the truck to the slanted road shoulder.
Abbey cursed herself for trusting the old truck. And she was worried about how Billy was going to react when he found out she’d run out of gas on the little traveled county road to Medford.
She heard a hissing sound and saw steam rising from beneath the hood. A closer look at the gauges showed that she hadn’t run out of gas at all. The truck had simply overheated. She thought of Billy at home on the couch.
Where’s a mechanic when you need one?
At least it had happened where she’d been able to steer the balky vehicle into the shade.
Abbey tried to judge just where she was stranded. It was almost the halfway point, and a far walk for anyone, much less a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy.
What if . . .
But Abbey didn’t want to think about that.
She opened the door and kicked it wide with her left foot, then wrestled herself sideways out from behind the steering wheel. It was less trouble than it might have been because the truck was on a slant to the left, and her real problem was to catch herself when her feet contacted the ground and keep her balance so she wouldn’t go rolling down the grade. Despite her problems, thinking of what that might look like made her almost smile.
Abbey stood with her hand against the sun-heated metal of the front fender for a moment, gaining her balance, then waddled around to the front of the truck.
Steam was still rolling out from underneath, but the hissing had stopped. She knew then that she’d screwed up. She wanted to see what the problem might be, but she’d forgotten to release the hood latch in the truck’s cab. Keeping both hands on the truck to help keep her balance, she made her way back to the open door on the driver’s side.
She was halfway there when she heard the sound of a motor.
So there was another vehicle on the county road!
Abbey felt like singing with relief.
Then she realized she might have a problem. There was no guarantee the driver of whatever was coming would notice the truck pulled well off the shoulder like it was.
She tried to make her way back to the road side of the truck, all the while listening to the approaching car or truck motor getting louder.
Damn! It went past her. A dusty white van with tinted windows, rocking along faster than was lawful. Its radio or cassette player had been on. Abbey had heard a snatch of music as it passed.
Wait! She heard music now. A rock band. Sounded like the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”
Abbey thought, Ain’t that the truth?
Then she heard the motor, growing louder.
She had been seen! The van was backing up.
She glimpsed it between the trees, then it rolled backward around the shallow bend and slowed.
It parked only a few feet from the truck. Mick Jagger shouted, “I cain’t get no—I cain’t get no—” as the van’s door opened and a heavyset, smiling woman awkwardly got down from behind the steering wheel and slammed the door shut behind her.
She was tall as well as bulky, and stood with her thick arms crossed, looking at Abbey, then the truck and the puddle beneath its front bumper, then back at Abbey. Her smile widened, showing bad teeth with wide spaces between them. Though badly in need of dental work, it was a kind smile and Abbey was glad to return it.
“Hell,” the woman said, “you got yourself a problem, sweetheart. But it ain’t hopeless.” Her voice was highly pitched but authoritative, each word abrupt.
“The engine just stopped on me,” Abbey said. “Overheated.”
“I’ll say. I’m familiar with these things.” She strode over to the truck, the soles of her faded gray tennis shoes crunching on the gravel. “You know where the hood latch is?”
Abbey shrugged.
The woman went around to the driver’s-side door and opened it, reached inside and did something. The hood jumped upward a few inches. She slammed the truck door shut then walked around and raised the hood all the way, exposing the engine and the steaming radiator.
“Don’t s’pose you carry any water,” she said.
Abbey shook her head no. “Maybe we oughta take the cap off the radiator. It might make it cool down faster.”
“Burn your hand, sweetheart. Maybe your whole damn arm. Gotta let these things run their course.” She propped her fists on her hips and glanced up and down the road. “Ain’t what you’d call heavily traveled.”
“Never is.”
“And you, in your delicate condition, oughta be someplace outta the sun.”
“Couldn’t argue that.”
“My name’s Mildred,” the woman said.
“Abigail Taylor. Or just Abbey.”
“You was headed for Medford?”
“Was.”
“I’m goin’ that direction, Just Abbey. How about I drive you there, you do whatever it is you gotta do, then we can come back this way with a jug or two of water. That might be all you need to get back home. You got a husband?”
Abbey was taken slightly aback by the question. “Sure do. He’s home sleepin’ now. Had hisself a rough night.”
“Men!” Mildred said. “Still tryin’ to get at you, I bet.”
“Uh, no,” Abbey said. “It’s close enough now, that’s stopped till after the baby.”
“Baby good an’ healthy?”
Abbey had to smile. “Doctor says so.”
Mildred held her arm to balance her as they walked over to the van; then she helped Abbey up onto the passenger seat, next to the driver’s.
Abbey settled into the seat while Mildred climbed up behind the steering wheel and got the van started. It rode kind of bumpy, but Abbey was glad to be moving.
“Gotta stop by my place and pick up somethin’ on the way into town,” Mildred said. “You mind?”
“Not at all,” Abbey said.
Mildred turned the air conditioner on high and aimed one of the dashboard vents directly at Abbey.
“Too much?”
“Just right,” Abbey said.
The day wasn’t turning out to be such a disaster, after all. And she’d made a new friend.
She couldn’t have been more wrong.
2
New York City, the present
Some people thought it would never rain again in New York. It had been almost a month since a drop of moisture had made it to the ground. The sky remained almost cloudless. The brick and stone buildings, the concrete streets and sidewalks, were heating up like the walls and floor of a kiln that didn’t cool all the way down at night.
Quinn was fully dressed except for his shoes. He was asleep on the sofa in the brownstone on West Seventy-fifth Street, lying on his back with an arm flung across his eyes to keep out the sunbeam that seemed to be tracking him no matter which way he turned.
The sun had sent a beam in beneath a crookedly closed drape, and an elongated rectangle of sunlight lay with geometric
precision in the middle of the carpet. The brownstone didn’t have central air, and the powerful window units were running almost constantly, barely holding the summer heat at bay.
Quinn was a big man, and solid. He took up most of the sofa. Ordinarily he’d be working this afternoon, but business was slow at Quinn and Associates Investigative Agency.
Quinn knew Pearl was holding down the office. Fedderman was talking to a man in Queens whose car kept being stolen again and again. Sal Vitali and Harold Mishkin were down in New Jersey, keeping close watch on a wayward wife, whose husband had hired Q&A to see if she was cheating on him, and was himself cheating on her. Quinn knew the parties were, most likely, more in need of a marriage counselor than a detective agency.
He’d seen this before. Harold Mishkin would probably wind up consoling and counseling. He was a friend and mediator to all humankind, and probably should never have been a cop. The NYPD, the violent streets of New York, hadn’t seemed to coarsen him or wise him up over the years. It was a good thing his partner, Sal Vitali, looked out for him.
Maybe because of the heat and drought, crime seemed to be taking a break in New York City. Legal chicanery was no doubt still going strong, but only a small percentage of the illegal was finding its way to Q&A. The cheating married couple, the guy with the stolen and stolen car. That was about it for now.
