Джеймс Паттерсон: The 13-Minute Murder

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.

Dead Man Running copyright © 2017 by JBP Business, LLC

113 Minutes copyright © 2016 by JBP Business, LLC

The 13-Minute Murder copyright © 2018 by James Patterson

Cover design by Anthony Morais; cover photograph by Jason Peterson

Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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First ebook edition: April 2019

Dead Man Running originally published in an ebook edition, September 2017

113 Minutes originally published in trade paperback and ebook editions, September 2016

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ISBN 978-1-5387-3303-5 (trade paperback) / 978-1-5387-3305-9 (ebook)

LCCN 2018965998

E3-20190307-DA-NF-ORI

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Coming next from James Patterson

Dead Man Running

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

SIX MONTHS LATER

Chapter 52

113 Minutes

3 minutes, 10 seconds

2 minutes, 45 seconds

4 minutes, 45 seconds

5 minutes, 35 seconds

4 minutes, 25 seconds

15 seconds

5 minutes, 5 seconds

45 seconds

1 minute

1 minute

1 minute

7 minutes, 15 seconds

3 minutes, 40 seconds

1 minute

4 minutes, 35 seconds

4 minutes, 10 seconds

5 minutes, 30 seconds

4 minutes, 45 seconds

5 minutes, 5 seconds

3 minutes, 15 seconds

6 minutes, 30 seconds

6 minutes, 15 seconds

4 minutes, 30 seconds

50 seconds

3 minutes, 40 seconds

8 minutes, 10 seconds

3 minutes, 20 seconds

5 minutes, 15 seconds

3 minutes, 45 seconds

45 seconds

1 minute

The 13-Minute Murder

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

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Dead Man Running

James Patterson

with Christopher Farnsworth

Chapter 1

Dr. Randall Beck sat in his office and looked across the coffee table at his patient.

Todd Graham was a big man who looked small. He hunched on the overstuffed couch, arms curled in tightly to himself. He looked cold. He looked scared.

You’d never know that a few months earlier, Graham had been one of the top men on the Metro PD’s Emergency Response Team—the Washington, DC, police SWAT team. He had broken down countless doors, been shot in the line of duty, and had seen some of the worst humanity had to offer in hostage situations, drug raids, and murder scenes.

But then he’d been called to a small apartment building in the Southeast, the quadrant of DC known as the worst area in the city. He and his squad thought they were going to take down a crack house.

Instead, they found bodies. Nine of them. Someone had killed all the members of an extended family for a grudge or some deal gone wrong. Graham was the first one into the room. He saw a child curled into the arms of her mother, the same gunshot wound through both of their chests.

Graham could handle danger to himself. What he couldn’t handle was the thought of being helpless to stop it from happening to someone else.

Since then, Graham had been on administrative leave. He’d lost weight. He didn’t sleep. He drank too much.

After medication and regular therapy failed, he’d been sent to see Beck.

Everything in Beck’s office was soft and beige, designed to soothe and calm, the visual equivalent of white noise. Beck’s patients were people who’d had enough chaos in their lives already.

Beck was considered the counselor of last resort for people suffering from severe post-traumatic stress and burnout. His patients included paramedics who’d pulled charred corpses out of plane crashes; doctors who’d volunteered in war zones, patching up children dismembered by bombs; hospice workers who faced a 100 percent mortality rate in their patients; and Special Forces soldiers who spent months in combat, ruthlessly killing to keep the rest of the world safe.

Beck noticed that the one thing all these people had in common was they were used to saving the world, but they had a much harder time saving themselves.

Graham had spent most of their sessions just sitting on Beck’s couch. Quiet. Staring. Today was no different.

“Do you want to talk?” Beck asked, after a long silence.

Graham shrugged. “What’s the point?” he asked Beck. “What’s the point of any of it?”

“You don’t think there’s any point to living?”

Graham shrugged again. He sat back, as he had in their other sessions, finished talking for the day. He seemed to think he could just wait Beck out.

Beck decided he was done waiting. He reached into a bag at the side of his chair and pulled out a Glock 9mm.

Graham was instantly alert.

Beck placed the pistol on the table between them.

“Okay,” he said. “You really want to die? Pick up the gun. Get it over with.”

Graham stared at him, wide-eyed. “You’re crazy.”