Title Page

Copyright Page

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 www.simonandschuster.com

Copyright © 2000 by Jeffery Deaver

Originally published in hardcover in 2000 by
Simon & Schuster, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Simon & Schuster, Inc.,
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN-13: 978-0-671-02601-1
eISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1165-9
ISBN-10:0-671-02601-1

First Pocket Books printing April 2001

20 19 18 17 16 15

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of
Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Design: Richard Yoo

Manufactured in the United States of America

Dedication

For Deborah Schneider…
no better agent, no better friend

From the brain, and the brain alone, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrow, pain, grief, and tears…. The brain is also the seat of madness and delirium, of the fears and terrors which assail by night or by day….

—Hippocrates

I
North of the Paquo

… chapter one

She came here to lay flowers at the place where the boy died and the girl was kidnapped.

She came here because she was a heavy girl and had a pocked face and not many friends.

She came because she was expected to.

She came because she wanted to.

Ungainly and sweating, twenty-six-year-old Lydia Johansson walked along the dirt shoulder of Route 112, where she’d parked her Honda Accord, then stepped carefully down the hill to the muddy bank where Black-water Canal met the opaque Paquenoke River.

She came here because she thought it was the right thing to do.

She came even though she was afraid.

It wasn’t long after dawn but this August had been the hottest in years in North Carolina and Lydia was already sweating through her nurse’s whites by the time she started toward the clearing on the riverbank, surrounded by willows and tupelo gum and broad-leafed bay trees. She easily found the place she was looking for; the yellow police tape was very evident through the haze.

Early morning sounds. Loons, an animal foraging in the thick brush nearby, hot wind through sedge and swamp grass.

Lord, I’m scared, she thought. Flashing back vividly on the most gruesome scenes from the Stephen King and Dean Koontz novels she read late at night with her companion, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

More noises in the brush. She hesitated, looked around. Then continued on.

“Hey,” a man’s voice said. Very near.

Lydia gasped and spun around. Nearly dropped the flowers. “Jesse, you scared me.”