21st Birthday

by James Patterson

  “You have a letter for me?” Cindy asked.

  Nancy opened a drawer, hunted around, said, “Oh, dear.”

  There was a newspaper on the side chair near the desk. It was the Chronicle. Cindy picked it up, turned it over, and read the headline on the front page.

  Her headline.

  CONVICTED KILLER LUCAS BURKE COMMITS SUICIDE

  Cindy said, “Did Mr. Burke see this paper?”

  “Oh, yes. He saw the story on the news and sent down for it.”

  “How did he react?”

  “He seemed mad, then he laughed and said something like, “What a jerk.” Then he complained that the handcuffs were rubbing his skin off. I told him he wouldn’t be here much longer. Moving him out of the ICU and into a room later today.”

  Nancy handed the envelope to Cindy.

  “Here you are, dear. Go with God.”

  Cindy thanked her and left the hospital. She had a lot to do and not much time.

  Chapter 118

  Rich and I were in the waiting room twenty yards away from the core of the ICU and out of sight.

  When Cindy turned the corner, she looked pale. Stricken.

  “How did it go? What did he say?”

  “How did it go? It was Clarissa meets Hannibal Lecter. He was cold, friendly, abrupt, welcoming, all in about five minutes. I would say he’s as far away from human as you can be and still have a pulse. I know he has one because his heartbeat was on the monitor. And he knows about Luke. Listen, I might get sick.”

  I pointed to the ladies’ room, but Cindy stayed with us.

  Conklin said, “What did he want?”

  “I’ll tell you in the car.”

  We piled into our rented Outback and Conklin took the wheel. Cindy sat in front with him and I stretched out in the back seat. I called Chief Belinky and gave him the bare facts, that we had a permission letter and a line drawing of the location of Burke’s house out near Red Rock Canyon.

  “He’s still chained to his bed, chief, but due to be moved out of the ICU and into a room today. I guess he’s getting better. Talk to you soon.”

  Judging from the distance on the hand-drawn map, Burke’s home was thirty miles from the Strip. Following Cindy’s directions, we stayed on Route 95, the highway that cut through housing developments, across smaller roads and plain flat desert dotted with scrub.

  I wouldn’t have imagined Burke living this far from the coast. This far from anything.

  Although I’d never been to a more desolate area, there was beauty here. Sunset. Mount Charleston in the distance backlit as the sky turned from blue to a vivid red and yellow and orange.

  Rich pointed to an exit coming up at a left angle to the highway.

  “That’s it,” Cindy said. “Good catch, Richie.”

  He took a hard left and we traveled, I’d say a half a mile, following real estate company arrows, crossing other narrow turnoffs, until a grim little shack was dead ahead in our headlight beams.

  Rich pulled up to a small home that looked like Burke’s place at Mount Tam. The structure was a hybrid of sorts; an old camper attached to a handmade wood-frame house. There was a red-and-white sign on a post at the end of the drive reading “Sold by Patricia McNamee Real Estate.” There were no lights on in the dwelling, no cars in the driveway, no traffic, only insect sounds as the sun melted in the distance.

  I said, “Looks cozy.”

  Cindy laughed nervously.

  Rich said, “Cindy. Stay here until we come to get you. Lock the doors.”

  My partner and I approached the house with flashlights and guns. We listened at the doorways and windows, pressed our ears to aluminum and wood siding.

  It seemed that no one was home.

  Chapter 119

  It was great working with Richie again.

  We didn’t have to speak as we circled the house, me to the left, Conklin to the right. We heard nothing, saw nothing through the windows, or in the yard and after checking the toolshed we executed the knock and announce protocol.

  I knocked, called out, “Police! Open the door.”

  No answer. The front door was locked and there was a real estate lock box just outside the doorjamb.

  Conklin called out “Police!” once more and louder. When there was no answer, he kicked in the door, right off the hinges.

  I stepped in and flipped on the lights, which illuminated the entire four-hundred-square-foot interior, all visible from the doorway.

  The main room doubled as a bedroom/sitting room with a built-in bed and a bookcase with a foldout writing surface for a desk, cubbyholes above it for filing. The camper section contained both the kitchen and bathroom.

  Conklin and I cleared the dwelling, including the two closets and the shower stall. When we were sure it was safe, Rich stood up the kicked-in front door and called out to Cindy.

  We stood aside as she stepped over the threshold and began her exceedingly well-earned treasure hunt.

  She said, “What I’m looking for is supposed to be under this bed.”

  The twin-sized bed was made of a built-in rectangular frame tied into the floorboards. The mattress was centered on top, no room underneath for dust bunnies or anything else. Rich hefted the mattress out of the frame and leaned it against the wall. Inside the frame were two-by-four slats resting across the width of the bed, used to support the mattress. It took only a minute to lift them from the frame—and there it was.

  A plain wooden chest, about the size of a child’s toy box.

  “Go ahead,” I said to Cindy.

  She stepped into the opening where the slats had been and tried opening the lid of the box. It was locked.

  She said, “Oh. Right.”

  Pulling out a red string lanyard from inside her shirt, I saw the key that had been taped under Burke’s signature. Cindy tried the key, and after a few wiggles, the lock clicked open.

  Cindy lifted the lid and stared at the treasure inside. I saw three stacked leather-bound books with dates etched into the covers. I opened one and saw dated pages, covered in very small, very tight cursive writing.

  Cindy pulled a large, bulging scrapbook from the bottom of the chest. When she flapped it open, we saw that it was filled with glued-down photos. All of the photos were of women, all smiling at the camera, all looking to be in their teens or early twenties, Burke’s cramped handwriting under each; for instance, Becky Weise, Catalina, 1998, tattoo around her ankle of birds and flowers. Roses are red. Summer is yellow. Neither of them last.

  Each photo was annotated with dates, names, or “unknown,” plus maps to the places where Burke had presumably killed his victims and where he’d buried, dumped, or hidden their remains.

  I looked to Cindy and saw tears streaming down her cheeks. I hugged her hard and tried not to cry myself. It was too painful. The scrapbook had transformed Burke’s bragging and lying and sly intimations into real people; real people Burke had killed.

  “What do I do?” Cindy said. “What’s my first step?”

  Conklin said, “Let me see that note from Burke, the one the nurse gave you.”

  He sat on the floor next to us and read the handwritten note, the map to Burke’s house, and also something of a legal document.

  “I, Evan William Burke, do hereby leave my possessions from my house in Lonelyville to Cynthia Thomas.”

  It was dated, signed, and witnessed “Nancy Shepherd, RN.”

  Richie said, “These books belong to you, Cin. But the information in here? It can’t just go out online.”

  “No, of course not,” Cindy said. “But which police?”

  “I know what we should do,” Rich said.

  We rifled through the books on the shelves, the desk, too, and found more letters and an accordion file of photos, all of which we put into the wooden box. We tossed the drawers and closets and found other items of interest:

  A key to a Sea Ray motorboat, the same model Wendy Franks had owned.

  A luggage tag, monogrammed “S
W,” presumably for Susan Wenthauser, the young traveler killed before she could find her way home.

  A picture of Misty Fogarty in her blue and white school uniform, taped to the inside of a kitchen cabinet. It was disgusting to think that he’d taken this picture and then killed her out of spite.

  With the chest of evidence in the trunk, Rich drove us to a Lowe’s about fifteen minutes away where we picked up a strong wifi signal in the parking lot.

  And we made calls.

  First to Brady, to let him know we were safe. Then I called Joe. He said, “Hang on,” and connected us in a conference call. The next voice I heard was Berney’s.

  “We have Evan Burke’s murder records,” I said. “He gave them to reporter Cindy Thomas with a signed, witnessed document.

  “May I talk to her?”

  “Sure. Berney, this is my dear friend, Cindy,” I said.

  As Rich and I stepped outside to give Cindy some privacy, I could hear her saying, “I want you to have the material Burke has written. But when it’s cleared, I will need it for publication.” She was smiling when she handed the phone back to me.

  I said good-bye to Joe and Berney, and then Cindy called her lawyer and friend, Bob Barnett.

  Bob had represented Cindy when she’d written her true-crime thriller, Fish’s Girl.

  I put my ear next to the phone so I could hear, too.

  “Bob, I’m in Las Vegas. I’ve got a blockbuster in the works, a true-crime story that reads like fiction.”

  Bob sounded delighted to hear her voice.

  “Cindy, this is the Burke story? I’ve been following it. Avidly. As soon as you can, come to Washington so we can talk it over and make a plan.”

  “See you soon,” she said.

  We shared a group hug, then Rich started up the car and we headed back to the airport and home.

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  Acknowledgments

  With thanks for the advice of these exceptional people:

  Captain Richard Conklin, BCI, Stamford, Ct. PD, Lisa Raquel Pallack, forensic pathologist, Ulster County Dept of Health, NY, and our gifted researchers, Vivian Kahn, Heather Parsons, and Ingrid Taylar, who has been our West Coast sleuth for fifteen years. To Team Patterson: You are the best. And we are most grateful to Mary Jordan, who keeps the runway clear for takeoffs and landings and disappears random UFOs.

  And we will always have fond memories of attorney, Philip Hoffman, partner, Pryor Cashman, LLP, NYC, who advised us on the trials in this and previous works. RIP, Phil.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  James Patterson is the world’s bestselling author and most trusted storyteller. He has created many enduring fictional characters and series, including Alex Cross, the Women’s Murder Club, Michael Bennett, Maximum Ride, Middle School, and I Funny. Among his notable literary collaborations are The President Is Missing, with President Bill Clinton, and the Max Einstein series, produced in partnership with the Albert Einstein Estate. Patterson’s writing career is characterized by a single mission: to prove that there is no such thing as a person who “doesn’t like to read,” only people who haven’t found the right book. He’s given over three million books to schoolkids and the military, donated more than seventy million dollars to support education, and endowed over five thousand college scholarships for teachers. For his prodigious imagination and championship of literacy in America, Patterson was awarded the 2019 National Humanities Medal. The National Book Foundation presented him with the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, and he is also the recipient of an Edgar Award and nine Emmy Awards. He lives in Florida with his family.

  Maxine Paetro is a novelist who has collaborated with James Patterson on the bestselling Women’s Murder Club, Private, and Confessions series; Woman of God; and other stand-alone novels. She lives with her husband, John Duffy, in New York.

  Books by James Patterson featuring

  the Women’s Murder Club

  The 20th Victim (with Maxine Paetro)

  The 19th Christmas (with Maxine Paetro)

  The 18th Abduction (with Maxine Paetro)

  The 17th Suspect (with Maxine Paetro)

  The 16th Seduction (with Maxine Paetro)

  The 15th Affair (with Maxine Paetro)

  The 14th Deadly Sin (with Maxine Paetro)

  Unlucky 13 (with Maxine Paetro)

  12th of Never (with Maxine Paetro)

  The 9th Judgement (with Maxine Paetro)

  The 8th Confession (with Maxine Paetro)

  7th Heaven (with Maxine Paetro)

  The 6th Target (with Maxine Paetro)

  The 5th Horseman (with Maxine Paetro)

  4th of July (with Maxine Paetro)

  3rd Degree (with Andrew Gross)

  2nd Chance (with Andrew Gross)

  1st to Die

  For a preview of upcoming books and information about the author, visit JamesPatterson.com or find him on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.