The Judas Child Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  epilogue

  Teaser chapter

  “The female Dirty Harry of detective fiction.”

  —The New York Times

  Praise for

  The Judas Child

  “Compelling.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “A kidnapped-child nightmare that’s every bit as intense as O’Connell’s acclaimed Kathy Mallory detective stories . . . O’Connell’s characters are so painfully real . . . that you’re hard-pressed to take anything for granted in this grisly, poetic tale.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “[A] chilling tale.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Praise for

  Bone by Bone

  “Ingenious . . . Ms. O’Connell gleefully invents a hothouse of . . . malice. She assigns dark secrets and strange habits to every last character in her serpentine story.”

  —The New York Times

  “[Bone by Bone] pulses with a Gothic noir . . . this is one of those books you can’t put down.”

  —The Boston Globe

  Praise for

  Carol O’Connell and the Mallory novels

  Find Me

  “A terrific find: a tightly wrapped, expert combination of suspense, mystery, and show-stopping character . . . For those who discover it at this breakthrough moment, Mallory’s story has just begun.”

  —The New York Times

  “A trip inside the dark heart of pop fiction’s most compelling mystery series.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “[O’Connell] has raised the standard

  for psychological thrillers.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “One of the most unique, interesting, and surprising heroines

  you’ve ever come across in any work of fiction.”

  —Nelson DeMille

  “America’s answer to Ruth Rendell.”

  —The Denver Post

  Winter House

  “Pure O’Connell . . . [Her] fans will be knocked out by this one.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Scores on all levels . . . O’Connell keeps the tension and suspense high right through to the surprising end.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “Breaks the usual rules.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  Dead Famous

  “Ingenious . . . O’Connell sets the standard in crime fiction.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Blazingly original. Once again, O’Connell transcends the genre.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  Crime School

  “One of the most original and striking crime fiction protagonists to appear in the last few years.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  Shell Game

  “Rich, complex, memorable . . . another superb effort from one of our most gifted writers.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “One of the most poetic yet tough-minded writers of the genre.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “An author who can raise goose bumps

  with both her plot and her prose.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  Stone Angel

  “Rich in people, places, and customs vividly realized, with mordant humor, terror, and sadness.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  Killing Critics

  “Hard to resist . . . blazingly original.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Darkly stylish . . . highly original . . . This is great fun.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “A tight, twisting mystery.”

  —Newsday

  “Another triumph for this truly gifted writer.”

  —Booklist

  The Man Who Cast Two Shadows

  “Even more satisfying than Mallory’s Oracle. And that’s high praise indeed.”

  —People

  “Beautifully written.”

  —Harper’s Bazaar

  “The suspense is excruciating.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  Mallory’s Oracle

  “Mallory is a marvelous creation.”

  —Jonathan Kellerman

  “A classic cop story . . . one of the most interesting new characters to come along in years.”

  —John Sandford

  “An author who really involves you, and makes you care.”

  —James B. Patterson

  “Wild, sly, and breathless—all the things that a good thriller ought to be.”

  —Carl Hiaasen

  Titles by Carol O’Connell

  BONE BY BONE

  FIND ME

  WINTER HOUSE

  DEAD FAMOUS

  CRIME SCHOOL

  SHELL GAME

  THE JUDAS CHILD

  STONE ANGEL

  KILLING CRITICS

  THE MAN WHO CAST TWO SHADOWS

  MALLORY’S ORACLE

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This 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. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  THE JUDAS CHILD

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with Hutchinson, a division of Random House U.K. Ltd.

  Copyright © 1998 by Carol O’Connell.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-45876-1

  BERKLEY®

  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” des
ign is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Michael Abney, a talented Arizona photographer and a good friend from my student days. Over many a beer, I gave him useful insights on women. However, Mike’s reciprocal information about men turned out to be pure gender bragging, for the true prince was not a common occurrence in nature, but a rare one—and I miss him.

  Prologue

  Up and down the lane ran two bright ribbons of grass, still green so deep in December. Long flanking rows of pine trees ended where the modern public road met this private one of ancient cobblestones. Though there was no proper name on any map, the townspeople called it the Christmas tree lane.

  Hidden beyond the west bank of evergreens lay all the brown dead leaves of a bare-branched forest. The dry carcass of an eyeless sparrow was crushed under the man’s shoe as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The day had turned chilly and mean. Wisps of fog hung low where the denuded woodland was protected by the windbreak of tall pines. The highest boughs of a nearby oak disappeared in the haze, and the trees behind it were only ghosts of birch and elm.

  The man glanced at his watch.

  Any moment now.

  His fingers splayed wide and then balled into fists. The surrounding air was dead still; the brittle leaves and low-lying clouds of the woods never stirred as a clean breeze whipped down the Christmas tree lane.

  He took great pride in this art of selecting the time and the place. Soon, a solitary child would come riding by on her bicycle, as she did every Saturday afternoon at this same time. The little girl would be fearless, for the cobblestoned roadway of trimmed grass and majestic pine trees was so different from the atmosphere of the forest, it might have been carved out of another world, a better one, where this man could not exist.

  one

  She slowed the purple bicycle and turned around to look directly at him with the full force of big brown eyes and a wicked grin.

  The boy’s front wheel wobbled at the exact moment he braked to a dead stop. And then the child resigned himself to the short flight over the handlebars, all but shrugging in midair. The hard landing on the road was all the pain and punishment he had expected it to be.

  Why did she do these things to him?

  Though Sadie Green had never laid a hand on him outside of dancing class, one day at school she had caused him to step off a second-floor landing, to fall down the stairs and cut his head—but only because the sudden sight of her had blinded him to science—more precisely, the law of gravity. For one fraction of a second, he had believed he could step out into thin air and not pay for that.

  Now David Shore sat cross-legged on the cold ground near his fallen bicycle. He pulled off a torn woolen glove to pick the gravel out of his hand. Sadie’s bike was describing lazy circles in the road, and by her wide smile, he could tell she was enjoying this enormously. As he plucked out one sharp bit of stone, the indent of his skin filled with a red droplet. He looked up at her.

  How much blood is enough, Sadie?

  Even from the distance of several yards, he could see all two hundred of her freckles jump as she laughed at him. He could still hear her laughing—like the maniac she was—as she sped around the clot of shrubs, turning off the road and into the Christmas tree lane. He was on his bike again and in motion, when her laughter stopped abruptly, not trailing away with distance, but ending, as though she had been turned off.

  For the first time, he stopped his bike at the foot of the lane. On every other Saturday, he had pedaled on by in the pretense that he had some business of his own farther along the public road. Now he stared down that long empty space between the two rows of evergreen trees.

  Where was she? The lane was a straightaway to Gwen Hubble’s house, and Sadie could not have covered all that ground so fast.

  David stood with one foot planted on the road, rocking his bike from side to side. He didn’t want to look into the woods beyond the pine trees, for fear of seeing her there, writhing on the ground and holding her bloody intestines in her hands.

  She had done that to him before.

  Sadie went to entirely too much trouble to frighten him. If she only knew how much fear she inspired whenever he thought about actually talking to her—as opposed to merely stalking her on Saturday afternoons.

  He rode on down the lane, but stopped halfway to Gwen’s house, a stately white Georgian mansion locked behind intimidating iron gates. The profile of a security guard and his newspaper was silhouetted in the window of the gatehouse. But the guard might as well be posted on the moon, for David rarely spoke to people—or girls. Anxiety and hysteria froze his vocal cords each time he tried.

  The boy cocked his head toward the left bank of pine trees. He heard a faint and garbled slew of sounds coming from the woods on the other side. Of course it was Sadie—baiting him. If she was carrying a spare set of pig’s intestines from the biology lab, she would not want to waste them.

  Well, he would play the fool for her if that made her happy.

  He got off his bike and wheeled it through the tight brace of evergreens. One bough of prickly needles scratched his face in yet another blood sacrifice, and then he was standing in the woods, looking at the stark trees bereft of leaves, shrouded in mist and feathering out to hazy and indistinct forms in the distance.

  Oh, this was Sadie country, prime for horror. She must be loving this, wherever she was hiding.

  He stood very still, tensing every muscle in his body. At any moment, she would come flying around the trunk of an oak tree, perhaps with some new weapon, another trick to cleave his poor startled brain into equal parts of terror and delight.

  Two small animals ran across his path. A gray cat crackled leaves and snapped dry twigs in pursuit of a squirrel. But this was not the noise he had heard from the lane. He listened for the sound of something female, ten years old and nearly human. He rolled his bike farther into the woods, and now he saw the small metallic swatch of purple.

  Everything Sadie owned was purple, even her running shoes exactly matched her purple parka.

  Her bike was partially covered by a gunnysack, dirt-encrusted and blending well with the dead leaves. She was probably in a hurry and making better time through the woods on foot. He could guess where she was heading, and that would explain why she had not gone all the way to Gwen’s. If they were meeting at the old boathouse, then Sadie must be in fresh trouble. The girls had not gone there since the last time Gwen’s father had forbidden them to play together.

  Confident that Sadie was not planning an ambush, he relaxed and took his time walking his bike around the tree trunks and fallen branches. At the edge of the woods, his vista opened to the wide lawn of St. Ursula’s Academy. Grass rolled downhill to the lake, a calm mirror of the gray winter sky. The near shoreline was obscured by rock formations and foliage. He laid down his bicycle and drew closer to the boathouse. Now he could see part of the long wharf spanning the other side of the building and reaching far out on the lake. Its boards were worn smooth by the barefoot steps of generations of children.

  St. Ursula’s Academy was very old, and over the past century, the students had marked every bit of it. The vast green lawn spreading upward from the lake was scarred with ancient rough trails where boys and girls had worn away the grass as they departed from the normal paths. And this departure was at the heart of the boarding school for not quite normal, and some said quite unnatural, children.

  He drew back when he heard the sound of a door being pulled shut. Now a single loud bark came from inside the boathouse.

  Had Gwen brought her dog along this time? She had never done that before.

  David didn’t take up his regular post beneath the window; that might set the dog to barking again. He walked back toward the woods and sat down on a patch of ground behind the cover of shrubs. Here he resolved to wait until Sadie came out, so he could follow her home.

  The dog barked aga
in and kept it up for a long time. Then it stopped suddenly, the same way that Sadie’s laughter had ended in the lane—the dog had been switched off. Over the next hour, this was repeated three more times.

  What were Gwen and Sadie doing to that animal?

  Now there was another noise behind him. He shrank back behind the massive trunk of a centurion oak. A small blond girl was running through the woods. Gwen?

  But how could that be?

  Gwen Hubble puffed white clouds of breath, and her legs churned faster. The child-pink locomotive with the flapping red scarf and blue jeans ran a weaving path, skirting the trees. Her running shoes, laces undone, smashed brittle leaves to powder. Dry twigs snapped with sharp cracks in sync with her heartbeat.