J. Kerley - The Death File - A gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2017

Copyright © J. A. Kerley 2017

Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2017

Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com

J. A. Kerley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 9780008263751

Version: 2017-09-27

To Virginia, who loved her beer and baseball…

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

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

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by J. A. Kerley

About the Publisher

Dr Leslie Meridien watched a vulture appear from the failing glow of a twilight sky to land atop a towering saguaro cactus fifty feet from her second-story window. The predator stared into her brightly lit home office, detecting the motion of Meridien’s hands lifting a glass of Chardonnay and assessing their potential as prey.

After a minute the bird renewed its journey unsated, the black of the vulture consumed by the black of the sky. Meridien sat at her oaken desk dressed in a fifteen-year-old gray college sweatshirt – Harvard, her Alma Mater – and a pair of navy shorts, a workout on the exercise bike just over, her shoulder-length brown hair damp from the shower.

A psychological therapist and counselor, Meridien was transcribing notes from the day’s sessions into her cloud account, currently recalling her last session with Adam Kubiac, ten days back. He’d not shown for today’s scheduled session. Or last week’s.

Meridien wasn’t surprised. Adam had likely dealt with much in the past two weeks, given his father’s sudden death. How had Adam taken the news? With sadness or glee? By weeping or partying? It could have gone either way. The father, Eli Kubiac, was a human mess, misdirected, often clueless in his relationship with his son. A self-made multimillionaire, Eli Kubiac loved being the macho, driven businessman; a man for whom traits such as compassion and sensitivity were suspect, somehow unmanly. And as was often the story in such individuals, Eli Kubiac had a dark side: he’d died on the floor in a motel in Scottsdale, nothing more in the news reports. There was probably a sad story there.

Meridien hoped Adam Kubiac found understanding. And, perhaps against all odds, maturity.

She leaned back and stared into the blank whiteness of her ceiling, a sharp contrast to the dark moods Kubiac often sank into during his private sessions, even carrying his private personal anger into group work, the reason she had removed him from group after several sessions. Adam could be charming and personable – though still emotionally closer to twelve years of age than nearing eighteen – but when his dark moods hit, or his bouts of insecurity-driven megalomania, he was hard to handle, even for Meridien.

Meridien jumped at the sound of a car door slamming. She ran to the front bedroom and looked out the window: a battered blue vehicle at the far side of her drive, the door slamming. But how? Hadn’t she closed the gate at the end of the drive? She watched a rail-thin body leap from the passenger seat.

“I s-see you in the window, Dr Meridien,” yelled a voice from below. “I w-want to talk!”

She blew out a breath and shook her head. Adam Kubiac. He had reverted to the stutter that plagued him when under stress. It had been worse when they started; perhaps the only true headway made.

Meridien walked down the wide stairs and crossed the open-concept great room, its walls of bright wood hung with Native American rugs and paintings, and opened the front door to see the Phoenix-centered desert valley, a 30-mile long plain holding nearly four and a half million people, tens of thousands of lights and looking like a galaxy blazing in the center of the desert.

In the foreground, centering the small porch, was Adam Kubiac. Skinny to the point of gaunt, Kubiac was attractive in a puppyish fashion: large dark eyes, high cheekbones, full lips now framed in a pout. He looked different; the usual battered jeans and black tee now a short brown blazer over a blue work shirt and rolled-cuff black jeans over tan suede kicks. Was that skinny piece of fabric a tie ? Meridien couldn’t resolve the fashion with Kubiac: He looked like a kid trick-or-treating as a hipster.

Beside Kubiac stood a petite and gorgeous young woman dressed in a purple jumpsuit, her curling walnut-brown hair in a fluffy ponytail and her searching eyes huge behind outsize round glasses with red frames. She looked in her late teens or early twenties.

“Hello, there,” Meridien said, holding out her hand.

The woman just stared, studying Meridien like cataloging a new species.

“Come inside, then,” Meridien said, putting on false bonhomie. “Why don’t you two have a seat? Would you like—?”

“You knew, d-didn’t you?” Kubiac blurted, his voice thick with sarcasm.

“Knew what, Adam?”

“That my scumbucket male parent fuh-fucked me in his will.”

“Pardon me, Adam? What are you talkin—?”

“I just c-came from the luh-lawyer’s office. You were r-ratting me out all along. Telling the asswipe what I really thought about him. That’s why he did it.”

“Did what , Adam?”

“LEFT ME SHIT!”

Meridien felt her mouth drop open. “What?… How …?”

“HOW? Here’s how … fucking papa dear had $20,000,000. I get $1 when I t-t-turn eighteen. ONE DOLLAR, Meridien … That’s FUCKING IT! The rest goes to a bunch of foundations and charities and WORTHLESS SHIT. I put up with the bastard and his insults and his whores … IT’S M-MY MONEY!”