Fear Nothing

A
LSO BY
L
ISA
G
ARDNER

NOVELS

The Perfect Husband

The Other Daughter

The Third Victim

The Next Accident

The Survivors Club

The Killing Hour

Alone

Gone

Hide

Say Goodbye

The Neighbor

Live to Tell

Love You More

Catch Me

Touch & Go

SHORT WORKS

The 7th Month

DUTTON

—est. 1852—

Published by the Penguin Group

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Copyright © 2014 by Lisa Gardner, Inc.

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Gardner, Lisa.

Fear nothing : a detective D. D. Warren novel / Lisa Gardner.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-525-95308-1 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-698-14852-9 (eBook)

1. Warren, D. D. (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Police—Massachusetts—Boston—Fiction. 3. Serial murderer—Boston—Fictiion. 4. Boston (Mass.)—Fiction. 7. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

PS3557.A7132F43 2014

813’.54—dc23 2013037180

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

Version_1

Contents

Also By Lisa Gardner

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Prologue

R
ockabye, baby, on the treetop . . .

The body was gone, but not the smell. As Boston homicide detective D. D. Warren knew from experience, this kind of scene could hold the stench of blood for weeks, even months to come. The crime scene techs had removed the bedding, but still, blood had a life of its own. Seeping into drywall. Slipping behind wooden trim. Pooling between floorboards. Twenty-eight-year-old Christine Ryan used to have approximately 4.7 liters of blood pumping through her veins. Now most of it saturated the bare mattress occupying center stage of this grim, gray space.

When the wind blows, the cradle will rock . . .

The call had come in shortly after 9:00
A.M.
Good friend Midge Roberts had grown concerned when Christine hadn’t answered the knocks on her front door or the texts to her cell phone. Christine was the responsible kind. Didn’t oversleep, didn’t run off with a cute bartender, didn’t come down with the flu without providing a heads-up to her best bud, who picked her up promptly at seven thirty each weekday morning for their joint commute to a local accounting firm.

Midge had contacted a few more friends. All agreed no one had heard from Christine since dinner the night before. Midge gave in to instinct and summoned the landlord, who finally agreed to open the door.

Then vomited all over the upstairs hall upon making the find.

Midge hadn’t come up the stairs. Midge had stood in the foyer of the narrow duplex, and, as she’d reported to D.D.’s squad mate Phil, she’d known. Just known. Probably, even from that distance, she’d caught the first unmistakable whiff of drying blood.

Rockabye, baby . . .

Upon her arrival, the scene had immediately struck D.D. with its marked contrasts. The young female victim, sprawled spread-eagle on her own bed, staring up at the ceiling with sightless blue eyes. Pretty features appearing nearly peaceful as her shoulder-length brown hair pooled softly upon a stark white pillow.

Except then, from the neck down . . .

Skin, peeled off in thin, curling ribbons. D.D. had heard of such things. At eleven this morning, she got to see them firsthand. A young woman, flayed in her own bed. With a bottle of champagne on her nightstand and a single red rose placed across her bloody abdomen.

Next to the bottle of champagne, Phil had discovered a pair of handcuffs. The kind purchased in high-end sex shops and fur lined for comfort. Taking in the cuffs, the sparkling wine, the red rose . . .

Lovers’ tryst gone awry, Phil had theorized. Or, given the level of violence, a jilted boyfriend’s final act of vengeance. Christine had broken up with some sorry sucker, and last night, the sorry sucker had returned to prove once and for all who was in charge.

But D.D. wasn’t on board. Yes, there were handcuffs, but not on the victim’s wrists. Yes, there was uncorked champagne, but none poured into waiting flutes for drinking. Finally, sure, there was the rose, but not in a florist’s wrap for gifting.

The scene felt too . . . deliberate to her. Not a crime of passion or a falling-out between consenting adults. But a carefully staged production that involved months, years, perhaps even a lifetime of careful planning and consideration.

In D.D.’s opinion, they weren’t looking at just a crime scene. They were looking at a killer’s deepest, darkest fantasy.

And while this might be the first scene they were investigating, a homicide this heavily ritualized was probably not the last.

When the wind blows . . .

D.D.’s squad, the crime scene techs, the ME’s office, not to mention a plethora of other investigators, had spent six hours working the space. They’d documented, dusted, diagramed and discussed until the sun had set, the dinner commute was on and tempers were flaring. As lead detective, D.D. had finally sent everyone home with orders to refresh, then regroup. Tomorrow was another day, when they could search federal databases for other murders matching this description, while building the profiles of their victim and killer. Plenty to do, many angles to investigate. Now get some rest.

Everyone had listened. Except, of course, D.D.

It was nearly 10:00
P.M
. She should be returning home. Kissing her husband hello. Checking in on her three-year-old son, already tucked into bed at this late hour. Working on her own good night’s sleep, versus hanging out at a darkened crime scene with her toddler’s current favorite nursery rhyme running through her head.

But she couldn’t do it. Some instinct—insight?—had driven her back to this too-quiet town house. For most of the day, she and her fellow detectives had stood here and debated what they saw. Now she stood with the lights out, in the middle of a blood-scented room, and waited for what she could feel.

Rockabye, baby . . .

Christine Ryan had already been dead before the killer had made his first cut. That much they could tell from the lack of anguish stamped into her pale face. The victim had died relatively easily. Then, most likely as her heart emitted a final few pumps, the killer had delivered his first downward slash across her right flank.

Meaning the murder hadn’t been about the victim’s pain, but about . . .

Presentation? Staging? The ritual itself? A killer with a compulsion to skin. Maybe as a kid, he’d started with small animals or family pets, then, when the fantasy had refused to abate . . .

The ME would check for hesitation marks, if determining jagged edges was even possible given the mounds of thin, curling skin, as well as test for evidence of sexual assault.

But once again, D.D. suffered a nagging sense of discomfort. Those elements were the things a criminal investigator could see. And deep inside, D.D. already suspected that was the wrong track. Indulging, in fact, in exactly what the killer wanted them to focus on.

Why stage things just so, if not to manipulate your audience into seeing exactly what you wanted them to see?

Then it came to her. The thought she’d had in the back of her head. The first and foremost question worth pursuing and the reason she now stood in the dark, her vision deliberately obscured: Why set a scene?

A sound. In the distance. The town house’s front door, easing carefully open? A creak of the stair riser as a heavy foot found the first step? The groan of a floorboard just down the hall?

A sound. Once distant, now closer, and that quickly, Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren realized something she should’ve figured out fifteen minutes ago. Jack’s favorite lullaby, the children’s song she’d been humming under her breath . . . That tune wasn’t coming from solely inside her head.

Someone else was singing it, too. Softly. Outside the bedroom. From elsewhere in the dead woman’s apartment.

Rockabye, baby, on the treetop . . .

D.D.’s hand shot to her sidearm, unsnapping the shoulder holster, drawing her Sig Sauer. She whirled, dropping into a crouch as her gaze scanned the corners for signs of an intruder. No shifts in the blackness, no shadows settling into the shape of a human form.

But then she heard it. A creaking floorboard elsewhere in the apartment.

When the wind blows, the cradle will rock . . .

Quickly, she crept from the bedroom into the darkened hall, leading with her weapon. The narrow corridor didn’t offer any overhead lights. Just more shadows from the glow of neighbors’ apartments casting through the uncovered windows. A wash of lighter and darker shades of gray dancing across the hardwood floor.

But she knew this house, D.D. reminded herself. She’d already trod this hall, judiciously avoiding the pools of vomit, while noticing every pertinent detail.