Jeffery Deaver

“Numerous surprises are in store for Kathryn Dance (and the reader) in bestseller Deaver’s stellar fourth novel featuring the California Bureau of Investigation kinesics expert. …Deaver’s meaty thrillers are as good as they come.”
– Publishers Weekly * starred review

“Deaver once again satisfies with this exciting entry. His fans won’t be disappointed, and readers looking for a new thriller series will enjoy making Kathryn’s acquaintance.”
– Library Journal

“While Dance may not be able to compete with a flamboyant show-off like March, she’s excellent as the calm but constantly moving right hand that Deaver uses to distract us from what his busy left hand is doing. …[Dance] needs all her wits about her right now if she hopes to foil one of Deaver’s most diabolical villains.”
– New York Times

“Solitude Creek displays a key element in Deaver’s work: ironclad plotting.”
– The Independent (UK)

“What do we truly fear, and how would we react in a crisis? Would we fall apart and claw our way to safety? Or would we help someone else? Deaver forces the reader to tackle these questions, then adds his own brand of twists to play with expectations, delivering another outstanding and unpredictable thriller.”
– Associated Press

“The question at the heart of the novel is ‘Why?’ Who or what would hire someone to deliberately induce panic — in the hope that the resulting melee would end in the loss of innocent life? The answer is startling, and moves SOLITUDE CREEK beyond the usual exemplary entertainment that Deaver regularly provides to give his readership a chilling cautionary tale. … Deaver once again meets and exceeds his own high water mark for surprises with SOLITUDE CREEK. Antioch March is a chilling and unforgettable antagonist.”
– BookReporter.com

“Deaver is still going strong and his latest novel, Solitude Creek, exhibits his usual panache for fast action and diabolical twists.”
– Sydney Morning Herald

“The cat and mouse elements of this story are Deaver at his best. He seizes control of the readers’ attention and manipulates it to induce fear and trepidation as the story continues.”
– Huffington Post

I
Frenzy

Chapter One

The roadhouse was comfortable, friendly, inexpensive. All good.

Safe, too. Better.

You always thought about that when you took your teenage daughter out for a night of music.

Michelle Cooper did, in any event. Safe when it came to the band and their music, the customers, the waitstaff.

The club itself, too, the parking lot—well lit—and the fire doors and sprinklers.

Michelle always checked these. The teenage daughter part, again.

Solitude Creek attracted a varied clientele, young and old, male and female, white and Latino and Asian, a few African-Americans, a mirror of the Monterey Bay area. Now, just after seven thirty, she looked around, noting the hundreds of patrons who’d come from this and surrounding counties, all in buoyant moods, looking forward to seeing a band on the rise. If they brought with them any cares, those troubles were tucked tightly away at the prospect of beer, whimsical cocktails, chicken wings and music.

The group had flown in from L.A., a garage band turned backup turned roadhouse headliner, thanks to Twitter and YouTube and Vidster. Word of mouth, and talent, sold groups nowadays, and the six boys in Lizard Annie worked as hard on their phones as onstage. They weren’t O.A.R. or Linkin Park but were soon to be, with a bit of luck.

They certainly had Michelle and Trish’s support. In fact, the cute boy band had a pretty solid mom/daughter fan base, judging by a look around the room tonight. Other parents and their teenagers too; the lyrics were rated PG, at the raunchiest. For this evening’s show the ages of those in the audience ranged from sixteen to forty, give or take. Okay, Michelle admitted, maybe mid-forties.

She noted the Samsung in her daughter’s grip and said, “Text later. Not now.”

“Mom.”

“Who is it?”

“Cho.”

A nice girl from Trish’s music class.

“Two minutes.”

The club was filling up. Solitude Creek was a forty-year-old, single-story building featuring a small, rectangular dance floor of scuffed oak, ringed with high-top tables and stools. The stage, three feet high, was at the north end; the bar was opposite. A kitchen, east, served full menus, which eliminated the age barrier of attendance: only liquor-serving venues that offered food were permitted to seat children. Three fire exit doors were against the west wall.

On the dark wood walls were posters and during-the-show photos, complete with real and fake autographs, of many of the groups that had appeared at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967: Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Ravi Shankar, Al Kooper, Country Joe. Dozens of others. In a grimy Plexiglas case was a fragment of an electric guitar, reportedly one destroyed by Pete Townshend of The Who after the group’s performance at the event.

The tables at Solitude Creek were first come, first claimed, and all were filled—the show was only fifteen minutes away now—and presently servers circulated with last-minute orders, plates of hefty burgers and chicken wings and drinks on trays hovering atop their stable, splayed palms. From behind the stage a meow of tuning guitar strings and an arpeggio chord from a sax, a chunky A from a bass. Anticipation now. Those exciting moments before the music begins to seize and seduce.

The voices were loud, words indistinct, as the untabled patrons jockeyed for the best position in the standing-room area. Since the stage wasn’t high and the floor was flat, it was sometimes hard to get a good view of the acts. A bit of jostling but few hard words.

That was the Solitude Creek club. No hostility.

Safe…

However, there was one thing that Michelle Cooper didn’t care for. The claustrophobia. The ceilings in the club were low and that accentuated the closeness. The dim room was not particularly spacious, the ventilation not the best; a mix of body scent and aftershave/perfume clung, stronger even than grill and fry tank aromas, adding to the sense of confinement.

The sense that you were packed in tight as canned fish. No, that never sat well with Michelle Cooper. And she and her daughter were at a table dead center, inches from other patrons. She could smell sweat, drug-store perfume, garlic.

Michelle brushed absently at her frosted blond hair and looked again at the exit doors—not far away—and felt reassured.

Another sip of wine.

She noted Trish checking out a boy at a table nearby. Floppy hair, narrow face, hips skinny. Good looks to kill for. He was drinking a beer and so mother vetoed Trish’s inclination instantly, if silently. Not the alcohol, the age; the drink meant he was over twenty-one and therefore completely out of bounds for her seventeen-year-old.

Then she thought wryly: At least I can try.

A glance at her diamond Rolex. Five minutes.

Michelle asked, “Was it ‘Escape’? The one that was nominated for the Grammy?”

“Yeah.”

“Focus on me, child.”

The girl grimaced. “Mom.” She looked away from the Boy with the Beer.

Michelle hoped Lizard Annie would do the song tonight. “Escape” was not only catchy but it brought back good memories. She’d been listening to it after a recent first date with a lawyer from Salinas. In the six years since a vicious divorce, Michelle’d had plenty of awkward dinners and movies, but the evening with Ross had been fun. They’d laughed. They’d dueled about the best Veep and Homeland episodes. And there’d been no pressure—for anything. So very rare for a first date.

Mother and daughter ate a bit more artichoke dip and Michelle had a little more wine. Driving, she allowed herself two glasses before getting behind the wheel, no more.

The girl adjusted her pink floral headband and sipped a Diet Coke. She was in black jeans, not too tight—yay!—and a white sweater. Michelle was in blue jeans, tighter than her daughter’s, though that was a function of exercise failure, not a fashion statement, and red silk blouse.

“Mom. San Francisco this weekend? Please. I need that jacket.”

“We’ll go to Carmel.” Michelle spent plenty of her real estate commissions shopping in the classy stores of the picturesque and excessively cute village.

“Jeez, Mom. I’m not thirty.” Meaning ancient. Trish was simply stating the more or less accurate fact that shopping for cool teen clothes wasn’t easy on the Peninsula, which had been called, with only some exaggeration, a place for the newly wed and the nearly dead.

“Okay. We’ll work it out.”

Trish hugged her and Michelle’s world glowed.

She and her daughter had had their hard times. A seemingly good marriage had crashed, thanks to cheating. Everything torn apart. Frederick (never “Fred”) moving out when the girl was eleven—what a tough time for that. But Michelle’d worked hard to create a good life for her daughter, to give her what had been yanked away by betrayal and the subsequent divorce.

And now it was working, now the girl seemed happy. She looked at her daughter with moon eyes and the girl noticed.

“Mom.” A sigh. “What?”

“Nothing.”

Lights down.

P.A. announcements about shutting off phones, location of fire exits, upcoming shows, were made by the gravel-voiced owner of the club himself. The venerable Sam Cohen, an icon in the Monterey Bay area. Everybody knew Sam. Everybody loved Sam.

Cohen’s voice continued, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, Solitude Creek, the premiere roadhouse on the West Coast…”

Applause.

“Is pleased to welcome, direct from the City of Angels…Lizard Annie!”

Frantic clapping now. Hooting.

Out came the boys. Guitars were plugged in. The seat behind the trap set occupied. Ditto the keyboard.

The lead singer tossed his mass of hair aside and lifted an outstretched palm to the audience. The group’s trademarked gesture. “Are we ready to get down?”

Howling.

“Well, are we?”

The guitar riffs started. Yes! The song was “Escape.” Michelle and her daughter began to clap, along with the hundreds of others in the small space. The heat had increased, the humidity, the embracing scent of bodies. Claustrophobia notched up a bit. Still, Michelle smiled and laughed.

The pounding beat continued, bass, drum and the flesh of palms.

But then Michelle stopped clapping. Frowning, she looked around, cocking her head. What was that? The club, like everywhere in California, was supposed to be nonsmoking. But somebody, she was sure, had lit up. She definitely smelled smoke.

She looked around but saw no one with a cigarette in mouth.

“What?” Trish called, her eyes scanning her mother’s troubled expression.

“Nothing,” her mother replied and began clapping out the rhythm once again.

Ten minutes later, at the third word into the second song—it happened to be love—Michelle Cooper knew something was wrong.

She smelled the smoke more strongly.

“Mom?” Trish was frowning, looking around too. Her pert nose twitched. “Is that…”

“Yeah, it is,” Michelle whispered. She couldn’t see any fumes but the smell was unmistakable and growing. And it wasn’t cigarette smoke. Smoke from burning wood or paper.

Or the old, dry walls or flooring of a very congested roadhouse.

“We’re leaving. Now.”

She rose abruptly. An instant later: screams. And then the panic began.

#1 on the Sunday Times hardback Bestseller List in the UK!

“Deaver proves himself a grandmaster of the genre”
– Publishers Weekly starred review

Another suspenseful and twist-filled entry in this always-exciting series.”
– Booklist

“Deaver’s ability to tell the reader everything and still manipulate the story with diabolical twists is the sign of a master at work. Readers unfamiliar with Lincoln Rhyme will find a detective that rivals Sherlock Holmes, and fans will enjoy the familial and reflective aspects of previous cases.”
– Associated Press

“For those who have never read a Deaver book this is definitely the time to start. Once you are hooked you will find yourself searching for everything he has written in the past and that is plenty. He is one of the premiere writers of mysteries and each and every one of his books is a reading pleasure from beginning to end.”
– Huffington Post

““Deavotees” will expect and gratefully receive the many twists and sudden turns. …No one is better at narrative misdirection. Just at the point you think “That’s impossible!” Deaver demonstrates the exact opposite.”
– Evening Standard

From Jeff’s US Publisher:

From Jeff’s UK Publisher:

The creatures I had seen were not men, had never been men. They were animals—humanised animals—triumphs of vivisection.

—H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau

I

The Out-of-Print Book

Tuesday, November 5

Noon

Chapter 1

The basement.

She had to go to the basement.

Chloe hated it down there.

But they’d sold out of sizes ten and twelve Rue du Cannes—the tacky little floral number with scalloped hemlines and plunging fronts—and she needed to replenish the racks, fill ’em up for the grazers. Chloe was an actress, not a retail fashion expert, and new to the store. So she hadn’t fathomed why, in a November impersonating January, these particular dresses were selling out. Until her boss explained that, even though the store was in alternative SoHo in Manhattan, the ZIP codes of the purchasers situated them in Jersey, Westchester and Long Island.

“And?”

“Cruises, Chloe. Cruises.”

“Ah.”

Chloe Moore walked into the back of the store. Here the shop was the opposite of the sales floor and about as chic as a storage unit. She found the key among those dangling from her wrist and unlocked the basement door. She flicked on the lights and studied the unsteady stairs.

A sigh and she started down. The door, on a spring, swung shut behind her. Not a small woman, Chloe took the steps carefully. She was also on Vera Wang knockoffs. Pseudo-designer heels and hundred-year-old architecture can be a dangerous combination.

The basement.

Hated it.

Not that she worried about intruders. There was only one door in and out—the one she’d just come through. But the place was moldy, damp, cold…and booby-trapped with cobwebs.

Which meant sly, predatory spiders.

And Chloe knew she’d need a dog roller to remove the dust from the dark-green skirt and black blouse (Le Bordeaux and La Seine).

She stepped onto the uneven, cracked concrete floor, moving to the left to avoid a big web. But another one got her; a long clinging strand clutched her face, tickling. After a comic dance of trying to brush the damn thing off and not fall over, she continued her search. Five minutes later she found the shipments of Rue du Cannes, which may have looked French and sounded French but came in boxes printed largely with Chinese characters.

As she tugged the cartons off the shelf Chloe heard a scrape.

She froze. Tilted her head.

The sound didn’t repeat. But then she was aware of another noise.

Drip, drip, drip.

Was there a leak?

Chloe came down here often, if reluctantly, and she’d never heard water. She stacked the faux French garments near the stairs and turned to investigate. Most of the inventory was on shelves but some cartons rested on the floor. A leak could be disastrous. And while, yes, Chloe was eventually headed for Broadway she nonetheless needed to keep her job here at Chez Nord for the foreseeable future. Stopping a leak before it ruined ten thousand dollars’ worth of overpriced clothes might go a long way in keeping those paychecks dribbling into Chase.

She walked to the back of the cellar, determined to find the leak, though also on serious spider alert.

The dripping grew louder as she moved toward the rear of the room, even murkier than the front, near the stairs.

Chloe stepped behind a shelf, containing a huge supply of blouses so ugly even her mother wouldn’t wear them—a major order by a buyer who, Chloe believed, had made the purchase because he knew he was going to be fired.

Drip, drip…

Squinting.

Odd. What was that? In the far wall an access door was open. The sound of water was coming from there. The door, painted gray like the walls, was about three feet by four.

What did it lead to? Was there a sub-basement? She’d never seen the doorway but then she didn’t believe she’d ever glanced at the wall behind the last shelf. There was no reason to.

And why was it open? The city was always doing construction work, especially in the older parts, such as here, SoHo. But nobody had talked to the clerks—her, at least—about a repair beneath the building.

Maybe that weird Polish or Rumanian or Russian janitor was doing some repairs. But, no, couldn’t be. The manager didn’t trust him; he didn’t have keys to the basement door.

Okay, the creep factor was rising.

Don’t bother figuring it out. Tell Marge about the drip. Tell her about the open doorway. Get Vlad or Mikhail or whoever he is down here and let him earn his salary.

Then another scrape. This time it seemed to be a foot shifting on gritty concrete.

Fuck. That’s it. Get. Out.

But before she got out, before she even spun an eighth turn away, he was on her from behind, slamming her head into the wall. He pressed a cloth over her mouth to gag her. She nearly fainted from the shock. A burst of pain blossomed in her neck.

Chloe turned fast to face him.

God, God…

She nearly puked, seeing the yellowish latex full-head mask, with slots for eyes and mouth and ears, tight and distorting the flesh underneath, as if his face had melted. He was in worker’s coveralls, some logo on them she couldn’t read.

Crying, shaking her head, she was pleading through the gag, screaming through the gag, which he kept pressed firmly in place with a hand in a glove as tight and sickly yellow as the mask.

“Listen to me, please! Don’t do this! You don’t understand! Listen, listen…” But the words were just random sounds through the cloth.

Thinking: Why didn’t I chock the door open? I thought about it…Furious with herself.

His calm eyes looked her over—but not her breasts or lips or hips or legs. Just the skin of her bare arms, her throat, her neck, where he focused intently on a small blue tattoo of a tulip.

“Not bad, not good,” he whispered.

She was whimpering, shivering, moaning. “What, what, what do you want?”

But why did she even ask? She knew. Of course she knew.

And, with that thought, Chloe controlled the fear. She tightened her heart.

Okay, asshole, wanna play? You’ll pay.

She went limp. His eyes, surrounded by yellow latex like sickly skin, seemed confused. The attacker, apparently not expecting her collapse, adjusted his grip to keep her from falling.

As soon as she felt his hands slacken Chloe lunged forward and grabbed the collar of his coveralls. The zipper popped and cloth tore—both the outer garment and whatever was under it.

Her grip and the blows aimed at his chest and face were fierce. She pumped her knee upward toward his groin. Again and once more.

But she didn’t connect. Her aim was off. It seemed such an easy target but she was suddenly uncoordinated, dizzy. He was cutting off her air with the gag—that was it maybe. Or the aftermath of the shock.

Keep going, she raged. Don’t stop. He’s scared. You can see it. Fucking coward…

And tried to hit him again, claw at his flesh, but she now found her energy fading fast. Her hands tapped uselessly against him. Her head lolled and, looking down, she noticed that his sleeve had ridden up. Chloe caught sight of a weird tattoo, in red, some insect, dozens of little insect legs, insect fangs but human eyes. And then she focused on the floor of the cellar. A glint from the hypodermic syringe. That was the source of the pain in her neck—and of her fleeing strength. He’d injected her with something.

Whatever the drug was, it was taking effect in a big way. She was growing exhausted. Her mind tumbled, as if dipping into and out of a dream, and for some reason she found herself obsessing over the cheap perfume Chez Nord sold by the checkout counter.

Who’d buy that crap? Why didn’t—?

What am I doing? she thought as clarity returned. Fight! Fight the son of a bitch!

But her hands were at her sides now, completely still, and her head heavy as stone.

She was sitting on the floor and then the room tilted and began to move. He was dragging her toward the access door.

No, not there, please!

Listen to me! I can explain why you shouldn’t do this. Don’t take me there! Listen!

Here in the cellar proper, at least there was still some hope that Marge would look down the stairs and see them both and she’d scream and he’d scramble off on his insect legs. But once Chloe was deep underground in his bug nest, it would be too late. The room was growing dark but an odd kind of dark, as if the ceiling bulbs, which were still on, were not emitting light but drawing in rays and extinguishing them.

Fight!

But she couldn’t.

Closer to the black abyss.

Drip, drip, drip…

Scream!

She did.

But no sound came from her mouth beyond a hiss, a cricket click, a beetle hum.

Then he was easing her through the door into Wonderland, on the other side. Like that movie. Or cartoon. Or whatever.

She saw a small utility room below.

Chloe believed she was falling, over and over, and a moment later she was on the floor, the ground, the dirt, trying to breathe, the air kicked out of her lungs from the impact. But no pain, no pain at all. The sound of dripping water was more pronounced and she saw a trickle down the far wall, made of old stone and laced with pipes and wires, rusty and frayed and rotting.

Drip, drip…

A trickle of insect venom, of shiny clear insect blood.

Thinking, Alice, I’m Alice. Down the rabbit hole. The hookah-smoking caterpillar, the March Hare, the Red Queen, the red insect on his arm.

She never liked that goddamn story!

Chloe gave up on screaming. She wanted only to crawl away, to cry and huddle, to be left alone. But she couldn’t move. She lay on her back, staring up at the faint light from above, the basement of the store that she hated, the store that she wanted with all her soul to be back inside right now, standing on sore feet and nodding with fake enthusiasm.

No, no, it makes you look sooo thin. Really…

Then the light grew dimmer yet as her attacker, the yellow-faced insect, climbed into the hole, pulled the access door shut behind him, and came down the short ladder to where she lay. A moment later a piercing light filled the tunnel; he’d pulled a miner’s lamp onto his forehead, clicked it on. The white beam blinded and she screamed, or didn’t scream, at the piercing brilliance.

Which suddenly faded to complete darkness.

She awoke a few seconds or minutes or a year later.

Chloe was someplace else now, not the utility room, but in a larger room, no, a tunnel. Hard to see, since the only illumination was a weak light above her and the focused beam from the masked insect man’s forehead. It blinded her every time he looked at her face. She was on her back again, staring upward, and he was kneeling over her.

But what she’d been expecting, dreading, wasn’t happening. In a way, though, this was worse because that—ripping her clothes off and then what would follow—would at least have been understandable. It would have fallen into a known category of horror.

This was different.

Yes, her blouse was tugged up but only slightly, exposing her belly from navel to the bottom of her bra, which was still chastely in place. Her skirt was tucked tight around her thighs, almost as if he didn’t want there to be any suggestion of impropriety.

Leaning forward, hunched, intent, he was staring with those calm eyes of his, those insect eyes, at her smooth, white belly skin the way somebody would look over a canvas at MoMA: head tilted, getting the right angle to appreciate Jackson Pollock’s spatter, Magritte’s green apple.

He then slowly extended his index finger and stroked her flesh. His yellow finger. He splayed his palm and brushed back and forth. He pinched and raised peaks of skin between his thumb and forefinger. He let go and watched the mounds flatten back.

His insect mouth curved into a faint smile.

She thought he said, “Very nice.” Or maybe that was the smoke-ring caterpillar talking or the bug on his arm.

She heard a faint hum of vibration and he looked at his watch. Another hum, from elsewhere. Then he glanced at her face and saw her eyes. He seemed surprised, maybe, that she was awake. Turning, he tugged into view a backpack and removed from it a filled hypodermic syringe. He stabbed her again, this time in a vein in her arm.

The warmth flowed, the fear lessened. As darkness trickled around her, sounds vanishing, she saw his yellow fingers, his caterpillar fingers, his insect claws, reach into the backpack once more and carefully remove a small box. He set it beside her exposed skin with the same reverence she remembered her priest displaying as he’d placed the silver vessel holding the blood of Christ on the altar last Sunday during Holy Communion.