James Patterson - Murder House

Is it Isaac Marks? He seems to be working with Aiden against me.

Is it Noah? He’s the one who must have tipped off Aiden that I’d be with Justin last night, when Aiden came through the window and tried to kill me.

Isaac and Noah. Each of them a grade younger than Aiden.

Three kids who grew up together, who went to school together. Did they learn more than reading, writing, and ’rithmetic while they were in school together?

I’m buzzed but exhausted at first light. Everyone else is just beginning to waken, to start a new day, and I’m about to collapse. My brain is fuzzy from sleep deprivation. I have a lot to do, but I can’t function without sleep...

Bam bam bam

Let me out

Buzz buzz buzz

Please let me out

Buzz buzz buzz

My eyes pop open, mid-dream, adrenaline swirling. My cell phone vibrating. I pat the bed until I find it, pick it up, stare at it through foggy eyes.

The caller ID says NOAH WALKER.

A flutter through my chest. I’m not ready to answer it. I wait until the buzzing ends. A NEW VOICE MAIL message pops up.

I look at the clock. It’s one in the afternoon. Wow. I slept for almost six hours. It felt like six minutes.

Then I play the voice mail.

Murphy, it’s Noah. Just want to make sure you’re okay. I have an idea I wanna run by you. Give me a call.

I punch out the phone and drop it on the bed. He has an idea he wants to run by me? Yeah, I have something to run by you, too, Noah — why don’t you explain to me who told Aiden Willis that I’d be at Justin’s house last night?

And by chance, were you adopted? Were you left abandoned at the police station as a child? Did you later discover that your biological father was part of a family line of deranged killers going back centuries?

Did you decide to pick up the mantle where they left off?

And was I, Detective Jenna Murphy, the dumb shit who sprang you from prison?

I move slowly, as if I’d been drugged last night, as if I’m recovering from a hangover. I eat some toast and drink some coffee and sit under a cascade of scalding shower water until the hot water runs out — which, in my apartment, doesn’t take very long.

My cell phone rings again. I find it in the bathroom through the steam. Noah, again. I ignore it, again.

Somehow, it’s four in the afternoon now.

I have to find Holden Dahlquist’s son. If that baby was abandoned at the police station, he would have been turned over to Child Protective Services, like the news clipping said. He would have entered the system — he would have been adopted, or placed in a foster home. Something that would have generated a paper trail.

Did the child trace that paper trail back to Holden? Or did Holden trace that paper trail back to the boy?

I don’t know. And I don’t care.

Because however it happened — a paternity suit, an adoption, whatever — Holden would have involved his attorney. And I have his lawyer’s name, thanks to Noah.

So how do I get this information from Holden’s lawyer, who will assert his attorney-client privilege?

No clue. All I know is that I’m getting closer, shaking some trees, and people are getting nervous.

Maybe all I can do is wait for their next move.

My phone rings again. It’s Lauren Ricketts.

“Hey there,” I say.

“Murphy!” Her voice excited, breathless.

“What’s going on?”

“You’re not going to believe this.”

I push my laptop computer aside. “Try me.”

“Annie Church and Dede Paris,” she says. “We just found their bodies.”

I close my eyes. Somebody — Aiden, Isaac, Noah — just made their next move.

My third time in two days driving in this neighborhood. But this time, it’s not directly to Aiden Willis’s house. And this time, traffic is at a standstill, logjammed as far as the eye can see, traffic down to a single, narrow lane on the turnpike.

I inch forward until I reach the barricades blocking access to the very road on which Aiden Willis lives. TV crews have lined up their vans and satellite feeds, well-coiffed reporters taking their turns before the cameras with their microphones. Once past the barricade, the turnpike opens up again, so I head north another quarter mile to Tasty’s, where I park in the lot and head back to the scene on foot.

Two bodies discovered in the woods, almost directly behind Aiden Willis’s property line in the backyard, buried ten feet belowground.

That was all I got from Lauren Ricketts, one of the officers on the scene. She didn’t have much time to talk to me; I was lucky to get as much as she gave me.

I walk down to the barricaded street. A reporter from one of the local stations, a guy with hair so brittle from hair spray that he could weaponize it, recognizes me. He probably doesn’t know I’ve lost my badge. Either way, he allows me inside the van and shows me the feed his station’s helicopter is getting, an overhead shot.

The overhead view: A lot of the work has already been completed. A bulldozer has already excavated the dirt, and a crane has somehow lifted the bodies out of the crater. The team is on the ground, officers and forensic investigators and medical examiners.

Two gurneys are loaded into a hearse and driven off the property. I step out of the news van. Five minutes later, I see the hearse approaching the turnpike barricade, officers removing the barriers to allow it to leave.

Annie and Dede. Why now? And how did it happen?

I send a text message to Ricketts: I’m here on the scene when you have a minute. It will be a while, I expect, before her work is done.

But thirty seconds later, I get a reply: Where?

I text back, then wait. Ricketts, looking the worse for wear — dusty and dirty, like a soldier emerging from battle — but excited, too, approaches the barricade.

“It’s Annie and Dede?” I ask.

She nods. “I think so. One of the fingers was missing.”

Right. He cut off one of Dede’s fingers and left it for the cops to find, a few years ago.

“The knife was there, too,” she says. “The murder weapon.”

Wow. He left the murder weapon with the girls? Our killer was probably too careful to leave fingerprints on the knife, but you never know.

“I found the bodies,” Ricketts says. “It was me.”

I put my hand on her shoulder. “How the heck did that happen?”

“Well, that’s the thing — someone put a note on my windshield this morning.”

I draw back. “What?”

Ricketts looks around at the bedlam, the reporters and onlookers, practically shutting down the turnpike. “A note said I could find their bodies back here. By the large elm tree with the X in red spray paint.” She shrugs. “Why would someone do that? Why would someone write me a note?”

I think about that. But she knows the answer, same as I do. The note was written to her because she was working on this case with me.

“Whoever did this — he wants you to know,” she says. “Since I’m the responding officer, it’s my case. I have access to all the data. He wants you to have the information, Murphy. He knows I’ll tell you.”

She’s right. It makes sense.

“Aiden didn’t work alone,” I say. “There are at least two people doing this. Aiden and someone else, maybe two somebody elses. Someone who knows we’re working on this case together.”

She thinks about it, nods. “So what do we do now?”

“Do your job,” I say. “Find out all you can. And then, when it’s safe, you and I should work through this.”

“Okay. Right. Okay.”

Ricketts takes a deep breath. This is a big moment for her. It’s not every day a rookie patrol officer breaks a major unsolved case.