Every Crooked Path: The Bowers File (The Bowers Files, Band 9) - Softcover

James, Steven

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451467353 ISBN 13: 9780451467355

Verlag: Berkley, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Who is the Piper? . . .
 
Special Agent Patrick Bowers returns in an electrifying prequel to the Bowers Chess series from critically acclaimed, national bestselling novelist Steven James.
 
A mysterious suicide and a series of abductions draw Patrick into a web of intrigue involving an international conspiracy where no one is who they appear to be and the stakes have never been higher.
 
Soon, Patrick discovers that the secret to stopping the Piper’s current crime spree lies in unlocking answers from an eight-year-old cold case—and the only way to do that is by entering the terrifying world of the conspirators himself.
 
Dark, probing, and chilling, Every Crooked Path takes an unflinching look at the world of today’s cybercrimes and delves into a parent’s worst nightmare as it launches a new chapter of Patrick Bowers thrillers.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steven James is the national bestselling author of nine novels including the critically acclaimed thrillers Checkmate, The King, Opening Moves, and The Queen. He has won three Christy Awards for best suspense and was a finalist for an International Thriller Award. His thriller The Bishop was named Suspense Magazine’s book of the year. Publishers Weekly calls him ”[a] master storyteller at the peak of his game.” He has a master's degree in storytelling and has taught writing and creative communication around the world. When he's not writing or speaking, you'll find him trail running, rock climbing, or drinking a dark roast coffee near his home in eastern Tennessee.

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Praise

The Bowers Files

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

PART I

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

PART II

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

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

PART III

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

PART IV

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Chapter 96

Chapter 97

Chapter 98

Chapter 99

Chapter 100

Acknowledgments

Dear readers,

This is a work of fiction, and yet, in a very real sense, it also tells the truth about our world today. While the characters and situations in this story are made up, the nature of the crimes is not.

Online predators are real.

As a parent, I found this book particularly difficult to write, since it involved research into crimes against children. However, because of the impact of this issue on modern culture, I felt it was an important story for me to tell—perhaps my most important one so far.

Finding out what’s really out there lurking online was a wake-up call to me. Rather than describe any exploitative images in this book, I chose to show the reactions of the characters to seeing them. I’ll trust your imagination to fill in the rest.

During my research, I came across an organization called the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. It’s dedicated to rescuing children and catching those who target them. NCMEC is a nonprofit organization that depends on private donations, so please consider supporting their work. For more information, go to www.missingkids.com.

Together we can make a difference in protecting the next generation from those who would steal their innocence from them.

—Steven James

Autumn 2015

PART I

Masks

1

Wednesday, June 13

New York City

9:37 p.m.

I clicked on my Mini Maglite as I slit the police tape crisscrossing the apartment’s front door, swung it open, and stepped into the darkened living room.

Jodie and I would reseal the door after I was done in here.

I pocketed my automatic knife.

The NYPD’s Crime Scene Unit had finished up this morning so the scene had been processed, but I put on a pair of latex gloves just in case I did find anything.

At thirty-four years old, I’d been with the Bureau for eight years, after leaving the Milwaukee Police Department, and I’d worked with evidence recovery teams and analysts from all around the country. The CSU here in New York City was sharp, so I wasn’t necessarily looking for forensic evidence they might have missed; I doubted I would find any of that. I was here to look at context.

Though this would normally have been an NYPD case, because of my work with the joint task force, the Bureau was involved. Assistant Director-in-Charge DeYoung had asked me to take a look around.

I’d been consulting on another investigation earlier today, so this was my first time at the actual scene, which worked out well since it was the same time of day as when the crime occurred. Similarity brings perspective. I’d taught that at the FBI Academy. Now was my chance to put it into practice.

Almost exactly twenty-four hours ago, the man who rented this apartment was stabbed to death in the room just past the kitchen.

Orienting myself to the lighting, the sounds, in this location at the time of day of the crime was crucial. It’s always about the intersection of an offender being in a specific place at a specific time. Start there. Motives you can try to decipher later—if you venture in that direction at all. Most investigators go about things completely backward.

My partner, Special Agent Jodie Fleming, would be up in a few minutes. She was on the phone down by the car talking over a personal matter with Dell, the woman she was living with. Their relationship had hit a rough spot lately—actually, things had been going downhill for a while and I wasn’t sure they were going to weather this storm.

The lights had been off in the apartment when the responding officers arrived, so, to get a better understanding of how the room had looked at the time of the crime, I kept them off as I closed the door, swept the flashlight beam before me, and studied the room.

Well-worn, mismatched furniture. A couch. An easy chair. Two floor lamps. The glass end table was still overturned from the struggle. A wide-screen television looked out across the room from its mount on a swiveling arm on the wall. From studying the files, I knew that the windows on the south side of the room overlooked a park—even though it wasn’t visible from where I stood.

The television was angled so that the screen was visible from the reclining chair, rather than the couch that lay perpendicular to it.

Two remote controls sat on the arm of the recliner. I checked them—one matched the VCR player, one the DVD player. A wireless keyboard for surfing on the TV’s Internet browser rested nearby on the footstool. The television remote lay tossed haphazardly out of reach on the couch.

Clicking off my flashlight, I noted how the residual light from the city found its way into the room through the windows.

The struggle that started in here had ended in the master bedroom.

My specialty wasn’t blood spatter analysis, but I’d looked over the initial reports, and now, Maglite on again, I could picture the struggle playing out.

At a crime scene, blood can tell the story.

The progression of the attack, the location and responses of the individuals involved—did they duck? Try to run? Fight back? If there was a struggle, the blood spatter could show who struck first, where he was standing, where and how quickly he moved while he was trying to escape. It was a study in microcosm of geospatial interactions.

And that was my specialty.

I watched the tale unfold.

According to what we’d been able to piece together, the offender had accessed the apartment through the front door, apparently, based on the tool marks, picking the lock. The victim, a forty-two-year-old African-American man named Jamaal Stewart, had been seated in the recliner facing the television.

At some point the intruder must have startled him, because the blood spatter...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berkley
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0451467353
• ISBN 13: 9780451467355
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 608
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@phaidon.com; gpsr@phaidon.com; ; Zähringerstraße 24; Berlin; 10707; Deutschland