The Scarecrow

Michael Connelly

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Little, Brown and Company

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

www.twitter.com/littlebrown

First eBook Edition: May 2009

Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

ISBN: 978-0-316-07345-5

Contents

ONE: The Farm

TWO: The Velvet Coffin

THREE: The Farm

FOUR: The Big Three-oh

FIVE: The Farm

SIX: The Loneliest Road in America

SEVEN: The Farm

EIGHT: Home Sweet Home

NINE: The Dark of Dreams

TEN: Live at Five

ELEVEN: The Cold, Hard Earth

TWELVE: Coast to Coast

THIRTEEN: Together Again

FOURTEEN: One False Move

FIFTEEN: The Farm

SIXTEEN: Dark Fiber

SEVENTEEN: The Farm

EIGHTEEN: A Call to Action

NINETEEN: Bakersfield

TWENTY: The Scarecrow

Acknowledgments

About the Author

A Preview of Nine Dragons

Bonus Materials

Author Q & A

Photos

ALSO BY MICHAEL CONNELLY

Fiction

The Black Echo

The Black Ice

The Concrete Blonde

The Last Coyote

The Poet

Trunk Music

Blood Work

Angels Flight

Void Moon

A Darkness More Than Night

City of Bones

Chasing the Dime

Lost Light

The Narrows

The Closers

The Lincoln Lawyer

Echo Park

The Overlook

The Brass Verdict

Nonfiction

Crime Beat

To James Crumley, for The Last Good Kiss

ONE: The Farm

Carver paced in the control room, watching over the front forty. The towers were spread out before him in perfect neat rows. They hummed quietly and efficiently and even with all he knew, Carver had to marvel at what technology had wrought. So much in so little space. Not a stream but a swift and torrid river of data flowing by him every day. Growing in front of him in tall steel stalks. All he needed to do was to reach in, to look and to choose. It was like panning for gold.

But it was easier.

He checked the overhead temperature gauges. All was perfect in the server room. He lowered his eyes to the screens on the workstations in front of him. His three engineers worked in concert on the current project. An attempted breach thwarted by Carver’s skill and readiness. Now the reckoning.

The would-be intruder could not penetrate the walls of the farmhouse, but he had left his fingerprints all over it. Carver smiled as he watched his men retrieve the bread crumbs, tracing the IP address through the traffic nodes, a high-speed chase back to the source. Soon Carver would know who his opponent was, what firm he was with, what he had been looking for and the advantage he hoped to gain. And Carver would take a retaliatory action that would leave the hapless contender crumpled and destroyed.