1st Case Read online

  James Patterson & Chris Tebbetts

  * * *

  1ST Case

  Contents

  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

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  CHAPTER 72

  CHAPTER 73

  CHAPTER 74

  CHAPTER 75

  CHAPTER 76

  CHAPTER 77

  CHAPTER 78

  CHAPTER 79

  CHAPTER 80

  CHAPTER 81

  CHAPTER 82

  CHAPTER 83

  CHAPTER 84

  CHAPTER 85

  CHAPTER 86

  CHAPTER 87

  CHAPTER 88

  CHAPTER 89

  CHAPTER 90

  CHAPTER 91

  CHAPTER 92

  CHAPTER 93

  CHAPTER 94

  CHAPTER 95

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Authors

  JAMES PATTERSON is one of the best-known and biggest-selling writers of all time. His books have sold in excess of 385 million copies worldwide. He is the author of some of the most popular series of the past two decades – the Alex Cross, Women’s Murder Club, Detective Michael Bennett and Private novels – and he has written many other number one bestsellers including romance novels and stand-alone thrillers.

  James is passionate about encouraging children to read. Inspired by his own son who was a reluctant reader, he also writes a range of books for young readers including the Middle School, I Funny, Treasure Hunters, Dog Diaries and Max Einstein series. James has donated millions in grants to independent bookshops and has been the most borrowed author of adult fiction in UK libraries for the past twelve years in a row. He lives in Florida with his wife and son.

  CHRIS TEBBETTS has collaborated with James Patterson on nine of his previous titles, including the Middle School series and Kenny Wright: Superhero. He lives in Vermont.

  A list of titles by James Patterson appears at the back of this book

  For Angela Hoot, of course

  —JP

  For Jonathan

  —CT

  CHAPTER 1

  Forensic Media Analysis Report

  Case agent: William Keats, ASAC, FBI Field Office, Boston, MA

  Evidence marker #43BX992

  Media: iPhone 11, serial 0D45-34RR-8901-TS26, registered to victim, Gwen Petty

  Recovered file: Unknown source mixed-media electronic message transcript. Source investigation pending.

  I want to touch you. Your face, your skin, your thighs, your eyes. I want to feel you shiver as my hands explore every part of you.

  I want to hear you. Your voice, whispering my name. Your breath in my ear. Your soft moan as I give you everything you want, and so much more.

  I want to taste you. Your lips. Your kisses. Your beautiful flower, opening to my touch, my mouth, my tongue.

  I want to take in the scent of you. I want to smell the perfume of your hair. The musk of your desire, bringing us closer, always closer.

  More than anything, Gwen, I want to see you. Face to face. Body to body. I could pour my heart out with words forever, but words will never be enough.

  It’s time we finally met, don’t you think?

  Please say yes.

  CHAPTER 2

  THEY TOLD ME ahead of time to prepare myself for the dead bodies. But nobody told me how.

  When I pulled up outside of 95 Geary Lane in Lincoln, all I knew was that a family of five had been killed and that I was supposed to report to Agent Keats for further instruction. Talk about jumping into the deep end, but hey, this was exactly the kind of assignment I’d been jonesing for. On paper, anyway. Real life, as it turns out, is a little more complicated than that.

  “Can I help you?” a cop at the tape line on the sidewalk asked.

  “I’m Angela Hoot,” I said.

  “Good for you,” he said.

  “Oh.” I’d forgotten to show him my new temporary credential. I held it up. “I’m with the FBI,” I said.

  I could hardly believe the words coming out of my mouth. Me? With the FBI? Not something I ever saw coming, that was for sure. I certainly didn’t look the part, and I didn’t feel like I belonged there for a second.

  Neither could the cop, apparently. He eyeballed me twice, once before he even looked at the ID, and once after. But that seemed to take care of it. He handed back my card, gave me an if-you-say-so kind of shrug, and lifted up the yellow tape to let me into the crime scene.

  “Watch out for the smell,” he said. “It’s pretty bad in there.”

  “Smell?” I said.

  “You’ll see.”

  It hit me on the porch steps, before I was even through the front door. I’d never been anywhere near a dead body, much less smelled one, but what else could that acrid nastiness be? A gag reflex pulsed in my throat. I switched to mouth breathing and fought the urge to run back to my safe little cubicle in Boston.

  What was I doing here? I was a computer jockey, not some CSI wannabe.

  Up until two hours ago, I’d been a lowly honors intern at the Bureau field office, focusing on cyberforensics. Clearly, I was here to look at some kind of digital evidence, but knowing that didn’t make it any less bizarre to walk into my first real crime scene.

  The house was almost painfully ordinary, considering what I knew had gone down here just a few hours earlier. The living room was mostly empty. I saw all the expected furniture, the art on the walls, the fan of cooking magazines on a glass coffee table. Nothing at all looked out of place.

  Most of the action was centered around the kitchen straight ahead. I’d noticed police officers stationed outside the house, but inside, it was all FBI. I saw blue ERT polo shirts for the Evidence Response Team, techs in white coveralls, and a handful of agents in business attire. Voices mingled in the air while I tried to get my bearings.

  “No signs of a struggle,” someone said. “We’ve got some scuff marks here on the sill, and over by the table …”


  “Looks like the back door was the point of entry. Must have shot this poor guy right through the window.”

  “Yup.”

  They all sounded like they were discussing the score of last night’s game, not a multiple homicide. It just added another dreamlike layer to the whole thing.

  The lights were off in the kitchen, and one of the techs was using some kind of black light to illuminate spatters on the linoleum floor. It was blood, I realized, fluorescing in the dark. I could just make out a half empty glass of milk on the table, and a sheet-covered body on the floor, next to a tipped-over chair.

  I was still standing in the doorway, silent until one of the bunny-suited techs brushed against me on his way out. I started to speak and had to clear my throat and try again, just to get the words out.

  “Excuse me. I’m looking for Agent Keats?” I said to him. Even then, my voice sounded so small, so unlike me. I wasn’t used to feeling this way, and I didn’t like it one bit.

  “Sorry, don’t know who that is,” the guy said, and kept moving. Somehow, I’d expected for everything to make sense here, and that I would know what to do as I went along. Instead, I was left standing there with a growing sense that I’d been dropped off in the wrong nightmare.

  “Hoot, up here!” I heard, and turned to see one of my supervisors, Billy Keats, at the top of the stairs. Thank God.

  He hurried down to meet me. “You ready for this?” he said, handing me a pair of latex gloves matching the ones he was already wearing. I put them on. His demeanor was all business, and his face was grim.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “You don’t look it.”

  “I’m okay,” I repeated, as much for myself as for him. If I said it enough, maybe it would come true. And maybe my stomach would stop folding in on itself, over and over, the way it had been doing since I’d arrived. “Where do you need me?”

  “This way.” He led me up the carpeted stairs, briefing as we went. “We’ve got one of the victims’ cell phones in a Faraday bag. They’re just clearing the body now.”

  The body. Some person who had been alive yesterday, now just “the body.”

  But that other phrase—Faraday bag—was like a piece of driftwood, something I could latch on to in the middle of all this unfamiliarity. At least I knew what I was supposed to do with that. A Faraday bag blocks out any digital signals and preserves the device in question exactly as it was found until it can be forensically examined.

  “Eventually, I’m going to want you to cover every machine in the house, but this phone is going to be your primary concern.”

  We passed two open bedroom doors along the upstairs hall. I told myself to keep my eyes straight ahead, but they didn’t obey the impulse. Instead, I stole a glance into each room as we passed.

  Through the first door, I saw something truly horrendous. A woman lay on her back on the king-size bed, eyes wide-open, with a small but unmistakable dark hole in her forehead. A halo of blood stained the pale-blue pillowcase under her hair. Outside of the few family wakes I’d been to, this was the first corpse I’d ever laid eyes on. The sight of it seemed to jump right into my long-term memory. No way I’d ever forget that moment, I knew right away.

  As awful as that tiny moment had already been, it was the bunk beds in the next room that really split my heart down the middle. Each bunk held a covered body, draped with a white sheet. On the lower bunk, I could see one small hand sticking out, spiderwebbed with dark lines of dried blood, which had also pooled on the rug.

  Jesus. This just got worse as it went along. The tightness from my stomach crawled up into my chest. I didn’t want to throw up anymore: now I wanted to cry. These poor, poor people.

  “Hoot? We’re in here.” I looked over to see Keats already standing outside the last door on the hall. He stepped back to make way for two EMTs rolling out a gurney with a black zippered body bag on top. Beyond them, I could see what looked like a teenage girl’s room, with a floral comforter and an LSHS Warriors banner.

  As I came closer and got a full look, one thing jumped out at me right away. I didn’t see any blood. Not like with the others.

  “What’s her name?” I asked Keats, looking back at the gurney as they moved it down the hall. Somehow, I needed to know who she was.

  “Gwen Petty,” Keats said. “Mother Elaine, father Royce, and twin brothers Jake and Michael. But if anyone in this family had information we can use, it’s going to be this girl.”

  I only nodded. There were no words. Or maybe there were too many, racing around inside my head. It was hard to know anything right now.

  “Come on, then,” Keats said. “Let’s get you to work.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “WHY ISN’T THERE any blood in here?” I asked as soon as we stepped into Gwen Petty’s bedroom.

  I always ask a lot of questions, especially if I’m nervous. Facts are always reassuring. And if I didn’t know what I was doing, well, at least I could ask questions. Always that.

  Keats ran a hand over his jaw like he was trying to decide how much to say.

  “It looks like he shot the others, but our best guess in here is asphyxiation,” he said.

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. Whoever did this had strong feelings about Gwen, one way or another.”

  I could feel some kind of empathetic tightness in my chest. Did that mean Gwen Petty had been strangled? Something else? What were her last moments like?

  I couldn’t help the morbid thoughts cascading like lines of code through my mind. It was force of habit, in the worst possible way. So I tried to focus on the room instead—on what I could actually do.

  I walked over to a built-in desk in the corner. A whole collage of photos was tucked into a crisscross of yellow ribbon on a gray fabric pin board. Another photo, framed on the desk, showed a family of five, smiling on the edge of what I guessed was the Grand Canyon. They all looked so happy.

  “Is this them?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Keats said.

  “How recent?”

  “Not important,” he told me, and pointed at the Faraday bag on the floor by the bed. That meant Gwen’s phone had already been physically fingerprinted and sequestered. Now it was time for the geek squad, a.k.a. me. All things considered, I was grateful for the distraction and listened carefully as Agent Keats went over my instructions.

  “I want to know who she’s been in contact with, what she’s deleted, what someone else might have deleted—everything,” Keats told me. “Specifically, I’m looking for texts or images that are romantic or sexual.”

  I stuck my hands through the mesh sleeves that would give me access to the phone inside.

  “What is it, do you know?” I asked. “iPhone? Android?”

  “iPhone 11,” he said. “It was powered up when we got here.”

  That told me where the port would be and what kind of cable I’d need to run a copy of the whole thing without altering any files. I dropped a connector cable into the bag, ran it through the exit port, and plugged it into the field kit I’d brought from the office.

  One thing I’ll say for the FBI: they’ve got the best toys.

  “Soon as you finish that, I want you in the mobile unit outside. Any other devices we find, we’ll bring to you. But this phone is your priority.”

  “What’s the hurry on the phone?” I asked. I assumed it had something to do with the fact that Gwen Petty had died so differently than the rest of her family.

  Instead of an answer, though, Keats only gave me a tight smile. “Listen, Angela. I know this is new for you, and I’m going to do my best to help you through,” he said. “Part of that is knowing your role and sticking to it. These questions are only wasting time, and from an investigative standpoint, the clock is always ticking. Got it?”

  I got it, all right. I really did. This wasn’t about me, and I didn’t need Keats treating me with kid gloves, either. If anything, I appreciated that he didn’t.

  I’d deal with the inhu
manly sad thing that had happened here on my own time. Right now, the best thing I could do for Gwen Petty—and for that whole family—was to tighten my focus and IT the shit out of this assignment.

  CHAPTER 4

  IF ANYONE HAD told me five months earlier that I’d be collecting evidence at this hideous scene, I never would have believed them. But five months earlier, almost to the day, was when it all got set in motion.

  The day I was kicked out of MIT.

  There we were—me, my mom, and my two little sisters, packing me out of the graduate apartments in Ashdown House on Albany Street, where I was no longer a registered student, and therefore no longer welcome.

  “Is this yours?” Mom asked, holding up a ratty old MIT crew T-shirt.

  “No,” I said. “Leave it.”

  I jammed shoes into a box alongside an algorithm design textbook, the world’s ugliest teddy bear, and a huge tangle of miscellaneous cables. I’m not the most organized person under the best of circumstances, much less as I was hurrying to get out from under the dark cloud that MIT—not to mention my mother—had hung over my head. I wanted to get away from there ASAP. I’d get myself organized when I unpacked later, at home.

  “I don’t understand, Angela,” Mom said. “We’ve gone over it five times and I still don’t know what happened here. How is that even possible?”

  “Because Angela’s being evasive,” my youngest sister, Hannah, chimed in while I kept my head down and kept on stuffing things randomly into boxes.

  “Good word,” Mom said to Hannah, but with her eyes still on me. “And a good observation, too.”

  My other sister, Sylvie, was too busy trying on my roommate’s perfume to get involved. Hannah was more like me, sticking her nose in whenever things got tense.

  Mom pressed on. “What exactly did the disciplinary board charge you with? Can you at least tell me that much? I mean, seriously, sweetheart. What’s with the cloak-and-dagger act?”

  “Please don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s going to be fine.”

  “How can you be so calm? You got kicked out of MIT halfway through your first year, for God’s sake.”