Also by Jeffery Deaver

Novels

The Colter Shaw Series

The Final Twist

The Goodbye Man

The Never Game

The Lincoln Rhyme Series

The Cutting Edge

The Burial Hour

The Steel Kiss

The Skin Collector

The Kill Room

The Burning Wire

The Broken Window

The Cold Moon

The Twelfth Card

The Vanished Man

The Stone Monkey

The Empty Chair

The Coffin Dancer

The Bone Collector

The Kathryn Dance Series

Solitude Creek

XO

Roadside Crosses

The Sleeping Doll

The Rune Series

Hard News

Death of a Blue Movie Star

Manhattan Is My Beat

The John Pellam Series

Hell’s Kitchen

Bloody River Blues

Shallow Graves

Stand-Alones

The October List

No Rest for the Dead (Contributor)

Carte Blanche (A James Bond Novel)

Watchlist (Contributor)

Edge

The Bodies Left Behind

Garden of Beasts

The Blue Nowhere

Speaking in Tongues

The Devil’s Teardrop

A Maiden’s Grave

Praying for Sleep

The Lesson of Her Death

Mistress of Justice

Short Fiction

Collections

Trouble in Mind

More Twisted

Twisted

Anthologies

Nothing Good Happens After Midnight (Editor and Contributor)

A Hot and Sultry Night for Crime (Editor and Contributor)

Ice Cold (Editor and Contributor)

Books to Die For (Contributor)

The Best American Mystery Stories 2009 (Editor)

Stories

Forgotten

Turning Point

Verona

The Debriefing

The Second Hostage

Ninth and Nowhere

Captivated

The Victims’ Club

Surprise Ending

Double Cross

The Deliveryman

A Textbook Case

Contents

Cover

Also by Jeffery Deaver

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Excerpt from The Final Twist

About the Author

1.

“He’s going to die in there. I mean, it’s only a matter of time. My boy . . .” The man’s voice choked. “There’s a gang inside. Friends of the man that got killed.”

Listening on his mobile, Colter Shaw noted the passive construction of the sentence. He didn’t say: Friends of the man that Jude was convicted of killing. Though that was what had happened.

“They’re out to get him. I know it! He’s afraid to walk outside in the prison yard. He’s afraid to eat meals.”

“Can’t they segregate him?”

“No. Or they won’t.”

“Has anyone else called about the reward?”

“A couple people,” Arnie Sterling told him. “They didn’t know anything about the case. They were just wanting the money and were making up something about Jude. Alibis, but they weren’t right.”

“You’ve tried private eyes?”

“One or two. They weren’t interested. And I can’t afford them anyway, not the good ones. It was all I could do to scrape up the reward. I mean, it’s nothing, I know. But it’s all we could think of to do.”

“Let’s get together. I can be there day after tomorrow.”

“Really?”

“Give me your address.”

“Oh, thank you, sir! Bless you.”

Shaw was spending this muggy June evening at his house in Florida. It was his fixed residence, though he spent little time in the place. It was a large, rustic craftsman home, on a lake: wormwood walls, leaded glass windows—several were stained glass. Gables. The siding was natural shake shingles. It featured four bedrooms, a study, a kitchen built for someone who was a far better and more eager cook than Colter Shaw. Eclectic assortment of furniture. Ancient maps were his main decorations—he collected them.

The favorite feature was a long lake-facing porch for sipping coffee in the a.m. and beer ten hours later (where he presently was, and what he was presently drinking). People envied him, having such a homey, stylish place. He thought he should appreciate it more. Shaw was known in his family as “the restless one,” and his abode tolerance was about thirty days, tops. It was then time for the road.

Shaw walked into the den, which was awash with brilliant light; the June sun was low in the west. He Googled “Jude Sterling” and was surprised that only three brief articles in the county newspaper, The Valley Register, came up. One was about his winning a long-distance foot race for his high school last year. The other two were about the shooting. To Shaw, it seemed odd there were no other articles.

Hanson Valley Resident Charged in Shooting Death of Drug Dealer

January 14. Jude Anthony Sterling, a 19-year-old resident of Hanson Valley, was arrested yesterday and charged with second-degree murder and related offenses in the shooting death of Daryl Williams, 29, on January 12.

Williams was shot to death at the Mason Gravel and Rock Quarry off Pemberton Road. According to a Steuben County Sheriff’s Office spokesman, the quarry is known as a place for drug sales among local youth. Authorities in Canton, where Williams lived, reported that he had a history of drug offenses in that city and in Akron.

The county sheriff’s office spokesman added that a certain amount of drugs and cash, traceable to Williams, was found in Sterling’s truck immediately after the killing. The alleged murder weapon was also found in Sterling’s truck.

He will be arraigned tomorrow.

Quarry Killer Found Guilty

May 17. Hanson Valley resident Jude A. Sterling was convicted today of second-degree murder in the death of Daryl Williams, 29, on January 12 of this year. He was also convicted of possession of controlled substances and larceny.

Williams, a known drug dealer, was shot in the back of the head by Sterling at the Mason Gravel and Rock Quarry. Sterling also robbed Williams of drugs and cash.

It took the jury three and a half hours to reach a verdict.

Judge Hanley Warwick Walker sentenced the defendant to twenty-five years to life.

2.

Colter Shaw arrived in Hanson Valley, Ohio, at ten in the morning, after fourteen hours on the road. He’d made the journey in his gray, thirty-foot-long Winnebago, whose odometer registered just over 139,000 miles upon his arrival.

Shaw had owned four other RVs, similar to this one, over the past ten years. Two he traded in, according to his own admittedly arbitrary rule of thumb: when the odometer reached a quarter-million miles—ten times around the circumference of the earth at the equator. One camper was totaled in a crash in Colorado, in which he was injured, though not badly. The fourth was destroyed in Oklahoma City when a man threw a Molotov cocktail at it. The improvised explosive device didn’t breach the windshield, but the flaming gasoline flowed into the body and burned the vehicle to the rims in twenty minutes.

Shaw, who was inside the RV at the time, escaped with most of his belongings. Six feet tall, and with a muscular build, he had been a champion wrestler at the University of Michigan and learned grappling—also known as street wrestling—from his father. When he located the bomb-flinger in his mobile home, it took only five minutes to convince the man to turn himself in, which he did, though only after a brief stop in the emergency room to treat the man’s dislocated shoulder.

In Hanson Valley, Shaw parked outside of the Sterlings’ bungalow, located in a tattered section of town. They obviously weren’t a family that could easily spare the twenty-six hundred dollars they were offering to anyone who could prove Jude was innocent of the murder. Arnie worked for the power authority doing line maintenance work; Jewel was a checker at Foster’s, a local grocery store that had been in business for sixty-two years, a mom-and-daughter operation.

Shaw always met offerors—his term for those posting a reward—in person. This gave each party a chance to size the other up. He’d need their cooperation and that meant they’d have to be comfortable with him. He, too, always made sure the offerors were people he wanted to do business with. Once, he’d declined a forty-thousand-dollar reward for a runaway teen. He’d walked into the father’s living room, noted the Nazi flag dominating one wall, and turned around and left, thinking to the teenager: Keep running, son, and good luck.

Arnie Sterling was a wiry man in his forties, with thinning flyaway reddish hair. His wife was heavy and her face was pinched, as if fraught with constant worry. They warmly welcomed Shaw into their cluttered kitchen and Jewel poured coffee. He declined baked goods.

“He got into a fight last night. This prisoner was baiting him. They finally broke it up but the guards don’t really care.”

Jewel added: “And there was a knifing yesterday, he told us.” She was tearing up.

Shaw said, “Let me tell you how this’ll work. You don’t pay a penny of expenses. That’s out of my pocket. If I find proof Jude is innocent, and he’s released, then you owe me the money. But not until then.”

The husband and wife regarded each other. He said, “Seems fair.”

“More than fair.”

Arnie said, “We might be able to add to it, the reward, I mean. A cousin of mine is—”

“No, the reward’s fine. Twenty-six hundred’s what you offered. That’s what’s on the table.”

The husband gave a perplexed look. “You got a funny way of running a business, mister.”

Shaw smiled. He produced a notebook and his favorite fountain pen, an Italian model, black with its trademark three orange rings.

For an hour the parents talked about their son and the case, and answered Shaw’s questions, during which time Jewel kept the coffee mugs filled and Arnie would step outside every so often for a smoke. Shaw took copious notes, writing in small elegant letters, with each line perfectly horizontal although the notebook was not ruled. This was not a skill he worked at; he’d inherited it from his father. Curiously, his sister, Dorion, and brother, Russell, did not get the calligraphy gene.

Slowly a picture of the young man emerged.

Jude didn’t do well in school. He suffered from attention deficit disorder. “He was hyper a lot of the time,” Jewel said. “Just going, going, going. All the time. It could be exhausting to be around him. Of course, this frustrated him too and made him angry. He’d tend to act out a lot.”

The school counsellor recommended therapists, but the Sterlings were unable to afford anyone other than a strip-mall psychopharmacologist, who saw Jude once every two months to prescribe and monitor his various medications. Success with the drugs was hit-or-miss.

Jude got into some fights in school. “Like we all did, like everybody did,” Arnie said defiantly. He was suspended a few times because of it. Only once, in the ninth grade, were the police called. It was bad fight and the other boy was bloodied. But the prosecutor declined to take the case to trial and Jude was let go. He faced several trespass and shoplifting charges but there was never the evidence—or maybe the energy—to pursue those cases either.

While his grades were not good, he showed talent in art and talked often about creating a superhero comic book series or graphic novels. (English and art were the only courses in which he ever received a grade as high as a B.) He didn’t do well at team sports but competed successfully in track and field; his sport was long-distance running, and for a year he held his school’s record for the ten-thousand-yard run. He still jogged regularly.

Shaw could only imagine what living in a ten-by-ten cell was like for a fleet-footed young man like Jude.

After graduation, Jude worked at a series of odd jobs—landscaping, fast-food, sorting packages at an international parcel delivery warehouse, stocking at an auto-parts shop.

When he was between jobs, which was often, he’d just sit home, watching horror and superhero films, sketching in notebooks, smoking pot.

His father told Shaw, “Never meth or coke, anything like that. It’s just that pot’d calm him down. He gets . . . Okay, I’ll be honest, Mr. Shaw. He gets angry. He’s got that side to him.”

“Angry about what?”

The mother shrugged. “Stuff. Can’t get a job, not a good one. And the ones he gets, he gets laid off. Not just him, but everybody around here.”

Hanson Valley, Arnie explained, had been a busy mill and dairy farming town in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but as had happened in countless locales of similar sizes and economies, the fortunes of the town plummeted with the loss of industrial work overseas and the edging out of local producers by mega-farms. “Unemployment in his age group? Was thirty percent last year.”

Jewel said, “And he gets mad about what happened to his brother.”

The Sterlings’ younger son, Frank, fifteen, was disabled. Eight years ago, the car in which he was riding was struck by a pickup that crossed the centerline, the driver hotdogging and passing on a curve. No one else was badly injured but Frank Sterling’s resulting brain trauma left him emotionally and cognitively disabled. The boy was in the public school’s special needs program. The driver was a county official’s son and got only a ticket. This continued to infuriate Jude.

“But whatever you hear people say, he’s not so mad he wants to hurt anybody.”

Finally, Shaw capped the pen and rose. “I think I have enough to get started with.”

Arnie walked Shaw to the door. “Bless you, sir. You’re the only one listening. We just couldn’t believe he was convicted of murder. We tried to talk to the lawyer, the police, the press, the parents of the kids who were at the quarry that day. They wouldn’t pay us any mind. Nobody cares about him. Just like that”—he snapped his fingers—“the whole world forgot about him.”

3.

Over the next few days Shaw approached nearly forty people in and around Hanson Valley, about one half percent of the population of Steuben County, looking for information from friends of Jude and his family, classmates, coworkers, teachers, other family members.

The majority of them declined to speak with him, but fourteen people were willing to talk, some over coffee or a beer or, in several instances, a meal Shaw paid for. The interviews were largely nonproductive; the folks he spoke with offered opinions like, “Oh, I couldn’t believe he’d do it.” Or: “He has a temper, I’ve seen it. He gets all scary.”

Colter Shaw’s father, a former professor turned survivalist in California, had compiled a lengthy list of rules, most of which began with Never.

Never assume October ice is thick enough to walk on.

Never assume a mother bear is more than ten seconds away from her cubs.

Ashton Shaw formulated some more general rules too, one of which was: Never make decisions based on opinion, only facts.

And it wasn’t opinions about Jude Sterling’s character that Shaw was presently after. He wanted facts: details, even if secondhand, about what might have happened on January 12 at the quarry, the days leading up to the events, and the days following.

He spoke—by phone—with the author of the Valley Register pieces but the man couldn’t offer any other details. Arnie and Jewel had spoken to him and asked if he could look into their son’s arrest, but he wasn’t, he explained, an investigative journalist.

He spent a half hour with Jude’s attorney. Harold Cummings was a fifty-year-old general practitioner in Hanson Valley who—Shaw had learned from his private eye—was the town’s main criminal lawyer, though he handled mostly DUI, domestic abuse and minor drug possession offenses.

Cummings, a big man wearing a rumpled seersucker suit, was clearly overworked and distracted. His desk was piled high with folders. When Shaw explained about the reward the lawyer was, curiously, not defensive that someone was revisiting the conviction. Shaw’s impression was that Cummings believed he’d done an adequate job for the fee he’d been paid—probably bargain basement. The case was done, and he had no more interest in the forgotten boy.

“What’re you, a private eye?”

“Like that.”

“And they offered a reward . . . Well, it’s a waste of your time and their money. He did it,” Cummings said. “Classic case. Kids, not working, hanging out, drugs, guns.”

“Did he admit it?”

“No, but who does?” The man swept off his glasses and cleaned them on the tail of his blue and white sport coat. “Tough about the sentence, have to say. But Judge Walker’s a hard-ass. I’d’ve thought you whack a drug dealer, you’re doing a community service. Ten to twelve would’ve been good. But the back-of-the-head thing was a problem for him, I guess.”

“You have a copy of the transcript?” Shaw asked.

This was public information, not subject to the attorney-client privilege.

“You can get one at the courthouse,” Cummings muttered, then looked coyly at Shaw. “Course, they’ll charge you fifty cents a page.” He cocked his head. “From me, it’ll only cost you a quarter.”

—

Shaw piloted the Winnebago to Watkins, the site of the medium-security prison where Jude Sterling was incarcerated.

The place was a nondescript, one-story facility, gray and sterile, outside of which flew two flags: one American and one Ohioan. Shaw had a familiarity with prisons—the inhabitants often being good sources for information on his reward jobs. He called older ones “brick-and-bars” and the newer ones “windows,” referring to the ubiquitous inch-thick impenetrable glass. Watkins was one of the latter.

Shaw sat in the pungent interview room, musty, for five minutes before Jude was brought in. The narrow-faced boy was six-one, and skinny. He had shaggy reddish hair, his father’s shade. His complexion was pale, and that pallor was accentuated by the orange jumpsuit, which was too big for him.

His dark eyes were cautious.

Shaw introduced himself with a smile. He needed the boy at ease and had to show he was on Jude’s side. They were not allowed to shake hands, and the boy nodded and sat with a jingle of cuffs.

“Your father and mother’ve offered a reward to see if anybody can maybe find some evidence or a witness that you’re innocent.”

Shaw was looking at the back of the boy’s hand. “What’s that?”

Jude held it up and shrugged. “Wasp Man.”

It was a drawing of a creature—a man from the waist up, below that, a wasp, a superhero, Shaw guessed. It was well done.

“Superhero?”

“Not from The Avengers, or anything. I made it up. It’s not a tat. I drew it.”

“It’s good.” Shaw remembered his aptitude for art and his love of comics.

The boy stared at the drawing. He made a fist and straightened it out.

“I know some things about what happened in January, Jude. I’d like you to tell me your side.”

In fits and starts, backing the narrative up and pushing it forward—and with stops for Shaw’s questions along the way—the young man told his story.

Twenty minutes later he sat back.

“What do you think, sir?”

“You’ve given me a lot to work with.” He rose.

There was motion outside the window in the door and Jude and Shaw looked up. A guard was walking with a compact, dark-complexioned prisoner, who stared at Jude with a cold grin and fierce pinpricks of black eyes.

Jude startled Shaw by shivering—not in fear but in rage. He shouted, “Asshole!” The guard wagged a take-it-easy finger toward Jude and he sat back, calming. Was this the prisoner he’d had the dustup with?

He calmed. “Can you get me out, mister?”

“It’s hard to overturn a conviction.” Colter Shaw knew this. He had considered law school at one point and had done some paralegal work. A good field for a restless mind, bad for a restless body. “But I’ll do everything I can.”

4.

Back in the camper, which was parked in a Walmart lot, Shaw brewed a cup of Kenyan coffee and, after adding some milk, sat down at the banquette and reviewed the trial transcript and his notes. He reconstructed what had happened on that freezing cold day in mid-January.

The story began about 2:30 p.m. on January 12. Jude was planning to pick Frank up at school, as he often did if their parents were working. But an accident on the Klamath River Bridge stopped traffic. His brother did not have a cell phone, so Jude called the school to say he’d be late, and a secretary said she would tell Frank that his brother was on his way.

When Jude arrived, though, he learned the message hadn’t been delivered and Frank had taken a ride with some students. They were a sophomore, Erik; two seniors, Travis and Carli—all attending Frank’s high school; and a freshman at a nearby community college, Michael.

In her statement to police, Carli said that the four students had told Frank they would take him home but had to run an errand first. That errand was driving to the Mason Gravel quarry to meet Daryl Williams to buy drugs.

“Michael, it was stupid, but he had this idea we could say we had this sick kid we were taking care of and Daryl’d maybe give us a better deal on the stuff.”

When Jude arrived at the school and learned who it was that Frank had left with, and where they were going, he “stone-cold freaked.” He thought about calling the sheriff’s office but if his brother was arrested it would have been a disaster for Frank to be held in detention even briefly.

Jude sped to the Mason Gravel quarry and he arrived there about 4 p.m.

The students told investigators that when they got to the quarry they knew Daryl Williams was there too; they’d been in touch with him on their mobiles. But they weren’t sure exactly where he was. The grounds were huge; the deep, shadowy pit was surrounded by thirty-five acres of forests and fields.

Carli said, “It was like, ‘We’re under these three big trees and there’s a hill on the right, and a rock.’ And he’s like, ‘It’s all fucking trees and hills and rocks.’”

The students split up into two groups to look for him. Carli, Michael and Frank went in one direction. Travis and Erik went in another.

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