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Back Falling Save as PDF
Chapters (29)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Notice
  3. Epigraph
  4. ONE
  5. TWO
  6. THREE
  7. FOUR
  8. FIVE
  9. SIX
  10. SEVEN
  11. EIGHT
  12. NINE
  13. TEN
  14. ELEVEN
  15. TWELVE
  16. THIRTEEN
  17. FOURTEEN
  18. FIFTEEN
  19. SIXTEEN
  20. SEVENTEEN
  21. EIGHTEEN
  22. NINETEEN
  23. TWENTY
  24. TWENTY-ONE
  25. TWENTY-TWO
  26. TWENTY-THREE
  27. TWENTY-FOUR
  28. ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER PIKE
  29. Copyright Page

Yet it proved nothing. She could not take what she had discovered to her superiors and say she had solved the case. Her proof needed more layers—or so she told herself as she subconsciously rubbed her scarred abdomen. Falling was not the Acid Man. He was not a murderer. She could proceed alone with her investigation. She was not in danger.

Kelly drove toward Fresno. The next morning she checked the skydiving school for records of a Simon Schiller. Several people at the airport recognized the photograph. He had learned to skydive in the last six months. One instructor said Simon had been an excellent student.

“He could land on a dime,” the guy told her.

Back at the office, the same day, she contacted the lawyer who had handled Matt’s affairs at the time of his death. Matt had left his mother a meager five thousand dollars in cash and a rundown truck. But Cindy had said Matt had worked almost nonstop the last few months of his life, even though his bank statements showed he had made few deposits. Kelly suspected he had started to work for cash. That he had tried to save up enough money to survive a year or more without taking any jobs.

Was it proof?

“Oh yeah,” she said to herself as she lay in bed late at night, unable to sleep. She could not get the name Falling out of her mind, and all that it meant. Had she needed one last stroke of proof, he had given it to her on a platter. Matt must have fallen far the night he had leapt from his doomed plane. He must have fallen into an even deeper darkness when he had caught Amy with David. Sure, she would collect more data and analyze all the facts but in her heart she knew already that she had her man.

Matt was alive. He had Jimmy. He had the money.

But where would an obsessed young man who’d plotted such an elaborate revenge go? To locate him she would have to think like him. More, she would have to duplicate his mental processes from beginning to end. But was that really possible? She had been betrayed herself but she was neither obsessive nor a genius.

Yet she knew such a person.

One who could help.

One who could hurt.

NINE

NINE

Matt Connor sat in his car and watched as Amy Techer entered the park where they had met over two years ago. She sagged onto a bench and started to cry. Her grief wounded him, and yet it gave him confidence as well. Her pain only enhanced her beauty in his eyes. The rose that had fallen to the ground. He could bend and rescue her. Once, he had sworn, he would do anything for her. But that had been before she had destroyed him. And now she could destroy him again, with just a look.