Джеймс Паттерсон - Liar Liar

I didn’t have nearly as much on Regan. But I had his childhood in my hands. It was clear to me that there had been something wrong with Regan from the moment he entered foster care.

At his first institution, a group home for children in Blacktown, a seven-year-old Regan Banks had set fire to a young girl’s dress. The girl’s injuries had been catalogued in the report – second and third degree burns to her legs and torso. The institution’s manager had put the incident down to a young boy’s curiosity, a mischievousness he didn’t think warranted isolating the boy from the other children. Three weeks later, Regan had dropped a full can of house paint on a toddler’s head, fracturing her cheekbone. He’d been shipped out immediately to a foster home.

When Regan was nine he’d been moved out of a foster home after a girl of similar age complained he’d choked her. When he was ten he’d been moved again after cutting all his foster mother’s clothes to shreds with a pair of scissors.

He was not only violent, it seemed, but manipulative. There were a host of mysterious nonviolent explanations for Regan being moved from one foster home to the next. One report read, ‘Foster mother reports Regan coming between her and husband, creating marital problems.’ Another read, ‘Regan’s night-time activities scaring foster parents.’ Yet another, ‘Foster father fears Regan’s influence on young sons.’

I flipped all the way through the reports to the back stack of pages, looking for the report that would explain why Regan had come into the care of the state in the first place. I’d seen my own Care Initiation Report, the accompanying photographs of my brother and me, our undernourished, bruised bodies, the filthy drug den where the police had found us. But in place of Regan’s CIR I found a scan of a yellow sheet of paper signed with a flourish by a Judge Edgar Boscke.

The report on Regan’s parents was missing.

Chapter

19

MY PHONE RANG. Some of the girls in the posse of prostitutes nearby gave a whoop of excitement out of habit, thinking one of their own had been summoned for a job. I answered the call, trying to swallow the white-hot rage that immediately rose.

‘Good evening, Harry,’ he said.

‘Good evening, Mr Sick Fuck,’ I sneered. ‘Set any little girls on fire today?’

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘How are you enjoying my files? Find anything surprising?’

‘No.’ I gathered the files against my chest, as though he could see them. ‘Nothing at all. I knew from what you did to those women that you weren’t right in the head. I just don’t see where my brother comes into all this.’

He didn’t answer. My stomach dropped. I hadn’t seen any mention of Sam in the paperwork, but his silence made me feel as though I was missing something obvious. Regan had spent plenty of time in the suburbs of Sydney, moving from house to house as foster parents gave up on him. Had he been in care with my brother? And if so – what did that mean? I realised I was bracing for Regan to reveal what I’d dreaded all along: that I had been wrong about Sam. That they had indeed killed together. That my brother was the monster everyone thought he was.

‘Were you in care together?’ I asked. ‘Did you meet him then?’

‘It’s hard for me to talk about Sam,’ he said.

I was lost for words. Some homeless men were watching me from a picnic table nearby, one with his beard in tiny braids.

‘I’d rather talk about you,’ Regan said. ‘Did you note that we were in the same Risk Category?’

I looked at the papers in my hands. Regan’s RC across his time in foster care had come down to 5 out of a possible 5. The assessment indicated how volatile he was – how much of a threat he was to other children, how many infractions he had in group homes, how many homes had outright rejected him as too difficult to deal with after only a short period. My score had been the same.

‘There’s a big difference between what you did in foster care and what I did, Regan,’ I said.

‘Is there?’ I heard him shift. ‘You’ve got a total of twelve assault reports. Fourteen failed short-term placements. Says here you stabbed one of your foster fathers in the leg with a corkscrew.’

‘Does it mention he was climbing into my bed at the time?’ I snapped.

‘You were defending yourself.’ Regan’s sarcasm was gentle. ‘All those times.’

I said nothing. I wasn’t going to let him feel like he knew me, even though he was right. Most of the time when I’d been violent as a kid, I’d been defending myself against predatory men or boys, or girls my age who wanted to steal my stuff or recruit me into a gang of bullies. But yes, some of the time I’d just plain had enough. I’d been angry. I’d picked on other kids. Caused trouble to get attention.

I’d been a bad kid. But didn’t I deserve to be?

‘What happened to your parents?’ I shoved the papers into my backpack. ‘Your file was sealed when you were seven years old by a court order. They must have done something really bad to you. Is that why you go after girls? You got mummy issues?’ I made a sooky baby voice as I stood and paced before the wall. ‘ Did Mummy spank her Reegsie-Weegsie too hard and give him a big nasty boo-boo? ’

He laughed. ‘I like it when you do that voice. Do it again.’

‘Go fuck yourself.’

‘I like the way your mouth pouts,’ he continued. ‘You’ve got good lips, Harry.’

I stopped in my tracks. The prostitutes were looking over their shoulders at me, their cigarettes leaking smoke.

‘Are you watching me?’ I asked.

He didn’t say a word.

Chapter

20

I WENT TO my bag, drew out my gun and stuffed it into the pocket of my hoodie. But I was sloppy, too busy scanning the street for a tall man with a shaved head and a phone to his ear. One of the girls saw my gun and stepped out of the circle.

‘Aww shit!’ She pointed at me. ‘We got a narco over here!’

She thought I was one of the undercover cops who regularly patrolled Kings Cross in hoodies and jeans, doing hand-to-hand buys and busting dealers, or simply hanging around, listening, trying to keep a finger on the pulse. The girls were all looking at me now.

‘Hey bitch!’ one of them shouted. ‘We know you’re five-o!’

‘Fuck the po-lice!’

Regan said something in my ear. I couldn’t hear it over the group of girls all now pointing, shouting, throwing threats. A fire engine siren started up at the nearby station.

‘Get out of here, bitch.’ One girl shoved my shoulder. ‘Go back to the fucking pig-pen, narco piece of shit.’

‘Hey!’ I returned the shove, squeezing the phone to my ear. ‘Back the fuck up.’

She pushed me again, encouraged by her friends, who now surrounded me. But they weren’t important. Regan was here . These people were in danger. A phone rang nearby. I thought I heard it on the other end of the call. Had I heard the siren through the phone, too? Was he that close?

‘Where are you?’ I said into the phone. ‘Come on. Come out, you bastard.’

‘Look at them,’ Regan said. ‘These are the people you spend your life protecting.’

A hand on my shoulder. I whirled around. The girl who’d noticed the gun, a round, pasty creature squeezed into a short skirt, knocked the phone from my hand and came at me again, her chest against mine.

‘I said get moving, bitch!’

I bent and picked up the phone, used the distance between the ground and her face to build momentum in the swing. I punched her hard in the jaw, heard crunching teeth. She staggered backwards, head wobbling. They all backed up.

‘Anyone else?’ I asked, setting my feet. ‘Anyone else wanna go?’