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The Death File: A gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist
J. A. Kerley
Detective Carson Ryder returns, on the trail of a brutal killer with mysterious motives.Two psychologists are murdered 2000 miles apart – one in Phoenix, Arizona, one in Miami, Florida.Amazingly, both have noted down the name of Carson Ryder – a detective with the Florida Center for Law Enforcement who specializes in catching psychopathic killers.Carson joins forces with troubled Phoenix Detective Tasha Novarro to trace a ruthless killer whose advantages include an uncanny talent for persuasion, an utter lack of remorse, and the horrifying ability to predict their every move. A killer even Carson might not be capable of stopping…
The Death File
J. A. KERLEY
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Copyright (#u22c4cf27-04bb-5477-9432-6626f0504d55)
KillerReads
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Copyright © J. A. Kerley 2017
Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com (https://www.shutterstock.com/)
J. A. Kerley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 9780008263751
Version: 2017-09-27
Dedication (#u22c4cf27-04bb-5477-9432-6626f0504d55)
To Virginia, who loved her beer and baseball…
Table of Contents
Cover (#uf939817c-7b72-5062-a7b7-98dec610e379)
Title Page (#uc39bf07a-dad6-5b6d-b4dc-ac3c15fc5bc4)
Copyright (#u5400f8a4-59b9-5f87-a08d-56abc9a95909)
Dedication (#uab97a0a9-c224-5adf-8b89-75c6b54e3ea7)
Chapter 1 (#ufa41f233-6f08-511a-b382-c829c3a80756)
Chapter 2 (#u7e7f9d8b-9ece-5514-8946-1a20481e47f4)
Chapter 3 (#ud1d735b8-1db5-553c-8cf9-1d37c4b85ee7)
Chapter 4 (#u9a50ca21-b86b-57f1-94a1-6f0a4b35384b)
Chapter 5 (#uce9f6923-0fb3-55d9-aeb0-f7bdae7477f1)
Chapter 6 (#u1f38b2ff-ba0b-5e76-8649-fad56866af98)
Chapter 7 (#u4965caa9-39c3-50e9-8460-04b4d61f1155)
Chapter 8 (#u40c4ad2b-db3f-5c31-bf86-7cf2018b89ce)
Chapter 9 (#u7a5c7d99-de25-5523-a1ba-23688b6551d8)
Chapter 10 (#u3726140e-c28e-592a-b380-14b155010557)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by J. A. Kerley (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#u22c4cf27-04bb-5477-9432-6626f0504d55)
Dr Leslie Meridien watched a vulture appear from the failing glow of a twilight sky to land atop a towering saguaro cactus fifty feet from her second-story window. The predator stared into her brightly lit home office, detecting the motion of Meridien’s hands lifting a glass of Chardonnay and assessing their potential as prey.
After a minute the bird renewed its journey unsated, the black of the vulture consumed by the black of the sky. Meridien sat at her oaken desk dressed in a fifteen-year-old gray college sweatshirt – Harvard, her Alma Mater – and a pair of navy shorts, a workout on the exercise bike just over, her shoulder-length brown hair damp from the shower.
A psychological therapist and counselor, Meridien was transcribing notes from the day’s sessions into her cloud account, currently recalling her last session with Adam Kubiac, ten days back. He’d not shown for today’s scheduled session. Or last week’s.
Meridien wasn’t surprised. Adam had likely dealt with much in the past two weeks, given his father’s sudden death. How had Adam taken the news? With sadness or glee? By weeping or partying? It could have gone either way. The father, Eli Kubiac, was a human mess, misdirected, often clueless in his relationship with his son. A self-made multimillionaire, Eli Kubiac loved being the macho, driven businessman; a man for whom traits such as compassion and sensitivity were suspect, somehow unmanly. And as was often the story in such individuals, Eli Kubiac had a dark side: he’d died on the floor in a motel in Scottsdale, nothing more in the news reports. There was probably a sad story there.
Meridien hoped Adam Kubiac found understanding. And, perhaps against all odds, maturity.
She leaned back and stared into the blank whiteness of her ceiling, a sharp contrast to the dark moods Kubiac often sank into during his private sessions, even carrying his private personal anger into group work, the reason she had removed him from group after several sessions. Adam could be charming and personable – though still emotionally closer to twelve years of age than nearing eighteen – but when his dark moods hit, or his bouts of insecurity-driven megalomania, he was hard to handle, even for Meridien.
Meridien jumped at the sound of a car door slamming. She ran to the front bedroom and looked out the window: a battered blue vehicle at the far side of her drive, the door slamming. But how? Hadn’t she closed the gate at the end of the drive?She watched a rail-thin body leap from the passenger seat.
“I s-see you in the window, Dr Meridien,” yelled a voice from below. “I w-want to talk!”
She blew out a breath and shook her head. Adam Kubiac. He had reverted to the stutter that plagued him when under stress. It had been worse when they started; perhaps the only true headway made.
Meridien walked down the wide stairs and crossed the open-concept great room, its walls of bright wood hung with Native American rugs and paintings, and opened the front door to see the Phoenix-centered desert valley, a 30-mile long plain holding nearly four and a half million people, tens of thousands of lights and looking like a galaxy blazing in the center of the desert.
In the foreground, centering the small porch, was Adam Kubiac. Skinny to the point of gaunt, Kubiac was attractive in a puppyish fashion: large dark eyes, high cheekbones, full lips now framed in a pout. He looked different; the usual battered jeans and black tee now a short brown blazer over a blue work shirt and rolled-cuff black jeans over tan suede kicks. Was that skinny piece of fabric a tie? Meridien couldn’t resolve the fashion with Kubiac: He looked like a kid trick-or-treating as a hipster.
Beside Kubiac stood a petite and gorgeous young woman dressed in a purple jumpsuit, her curling walnut-brown hair in a fluffy ponytail and her searching eyes huge behind outsize round glasses with red frames. She looked in her late teens or early twenties.
“Hello, there,” Meridien said, holding out her hand.
The woman just stared, studying Meridien like cataloging a new species.
“Come inside, then,” Meridien said, putting on false bonhomie. “Why don’t you two have a seat? Would you like—?”
