PROLOGUE WHEN I WAS twenty-two years old, I left home for the first time and departed for New York City along with a meager cache of savings and the dream of being an actor. Traveling by train from Houston to Chicago to Buffalo and then down into Manhattan, I arrived on New Year’s Eve 1972…
Jay Desmarteaux raised a whole lot of hell in New Jersey after he was released from prison after 25 years for the murder of a rapist bully at his school. Now he’s on the run in his home state of Louisiana, where he traces his roots to an evil family tree that’s grown large and…
My angel, I’ve written you dozens of letters and, now more than ever, regret never having sent a single one of them. I ought to have done. Definitely. You’ve every right to find out what really happened back then. To find out from me, in my own words, words I always believed to be…
Curtain Raiser As the Turkish police began to dig up the remains, Holmes and I gratefully sniffed the morning desert air. It was chilly at this hour but the heat would soon become insupportable. “Remember Nietzsche’s dictum,” the detective remarked, lighting his pipe. “Nothing not written in blood is worth reading.” “Or writing, in this…
Chapter 1 Most of the media had already made up their minds. They were calling Wyatt Butler the worst serial killer in decades. Depraved. Evil. A twisted, calculated madman who had preyed on innocent children. News vans and angry members of the public packed Foley Square outside the New York County Courthouse on this,…
Now Friday, May 3 Leah The key is to go to a few different stores. I used to always go to Jerry’s Liquors on Bonifant Avenue. I was a regular. Too regular. Jerry’s mouth started to form a thin line when I’d come in. I could see the conflict on his face. He was glad…
Amelia FEBRUARY 2020 My husband doesn’t recognize my face. I feel him staring at me as I drive, and wonder what he sees. Nobody else looks familiar to him either, but it is still strange to think that the man I married wouldn’t be able to pick me out in a police lineup. I know…
CHAPTER 1 Warren Kitzmiller looked around the large, almost empty morgue, tugging at the sleeve of his starched white lab coat and painfully aware he should be presenting a more detached demeanor. He was standing alone beside a flayed, cold, gray corpse, spread out in a grotesque parody of a post-Thanksgiving feast. It was supine…
Saturday, 10:00 a.m., seventeen hours after drop-off Whitney had been up for hours, and still hadn’t heard from Amelia. Last night was restful. Quiet. Peaceful. All the things Whitney had wanted it to be. Much needed. But this morning she was suffering from a serious case of mom guilt. She missed her daughter. Was anxious…
Chapter 2 DENVER, COLORADO July 2 Special Agent James Mason emerged from the elevator onto the fortieth floor of a building that resembled a giant obsidian stake driven into the heart of downtown Denver. He’d thrown on a plain white T-shirt, jeans, and a baseball cap, covering his sandy blond hair and shielding his…
