Worst Case

Book 3: A Michael Bennett Thriller

by James Patterson, Michael Ledwidge

Genres: Suspense; Thrillers

Synopsis

One by one, children of New York’s wealthiest are taken hostage. But the criminal doesn’t crave money or power—he only wants to ask the elite if they know the price others pay for their luxurious lifestyles. And, if they don’t, he corrects their ignorance—by killing them.

To Detective Michael Bennett, it becomes clear that these murders are linked and must be part of a greater, more public demonstration. With the city thrown into chaos, he is forced to team up with FBI agent Emily Parker, and the two set out to capture the killer before he begins his most public lesson yet—a deadly message for the entire city to witness.

From the best-selling author who brought you the Alex Cross novels comes James Patterson’s most action-packed series yet. With the heart-pounding suspense that only Patterson delivers, Worst Case will leave you gasping for breath until the very end.

A Blackstone Audio production.

Release date: April 9, 2010

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 352

Sample

BRIAN AND I were done for the day. There was nothing left to say. He wasn’t going to tell me what I needed to know. It could’ve been stupid stubborn teenage pride. Acting like a tough guy, or, more likely, fear of what would happen if he talked. That was relatively new in the culture cops operated in. The whole “snitches get stitches” attitude had popped up in inner-city neighborhoods and spread through music and TV shows. Now it seemed to be the mantra of anyone under thirty.

When the door opened, I had to snatch one more hug from my son. He wrapped his arms around me as well. Then I watched silently as a corrections officer led him away. He moved like a robot. His feet shuffling and the flip-flops making a sad slapping sound on the concrete floor.

I headed toward the exit, where my friend Vinny was waiting to lead me out. I said, “Is there anything you can do to protect him?”

He smiled and patted me on the shoulder. “We have Brian in what we call the nerd ward. Hackers and financial guys who decided they weren’t going to follow the rules. Those sorts of perps. He only comes into contact with the general population if he goes out to exercise once a week or if we have to move people around because of trouble. But I promise, Mike, we’re keeping a close eye on him.”

This was special treatment because I was a cop. I wasn’t going to refuse it.

When he told me Brian was safe for now, I thought I’d break down and cry right in front of him.

What did people without friends working in the jail do? What about people with no access to a decent lawyer? It made me think about cases I had worked and how I would persuade people to cooperate. Now I saw that they often had no other choice.

Then Vinny took my arm, and as we started to walk, he leaned in closer and said, “The rumor is that the DA’s office wants to make an example of Brian. Wants to show that they’ll go after a white kid as hard as a black kid. And they want to look fair by not showing preference to a cop’s son.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the truth like that all at once. It felt like a punch in the gut. I slapped the cinder-block wall in frustration. The jolt of pain through my body reminded me that I had stitches in that hand. Blood stained the white bandage.

Vinny draped his arm over my shoulder and subtly headed us toward the exit.

I found myself shuffling, just like Brian. I wondered if it had something to do with this place.

This place I would never look at the same way again.

 

Learn more about Haunted.

Excerpt from Haunted copyright © 2017 by James Patterson

THE STOCKY MAN with the salt-and-pepper hair felt light-headed as he crossed beneath the marble arch into Washington Square
Park. He dropped his backpack, took off his circular glasses, and blotted the sudden tears in his eyes with the sleeve of
his ancient jeans jacket.


He hadn’t planned on breaking down, but My God, he thought, wiping at his rugged, lined face. Now he knew how Vietnam veterans
felt when they visited their Wall down in Washington, DC. If veterans of the antiwar movement had a monument—a Wall of Tears—it
was here, where it all began, Washington Square Park.


Staring out over the windy park, he remembered all the incredible things that had occurred here. The antiwar demonstrations.
Bob Dylan in the 4th Street basement clubs, singing about which way the wind was blowing. The candlelit faces of his old friends
as they passed bottles and smoke. The whispered promises they had made to one another to change things, to make things better.


He looked out over the Friday-afternoon crowd by the center fountain, the people hovering over the chess tables, as if he
might find a familiar face. But that was impossible, wasn’t it? he thought with a shrug. They’d all moved on, like he had.
Grown up. Sold out. Or were underground. Figuratively. Literally.


That time, his time, was almost completely faded now, just about dead and gone.


Just about, he thought as he knelt and removed the box of flyers from his knapsack.

But not quite.

On each of the five hundred sheets was a three-paragraph message entitled LOVE CAN CHANGE THE WORLD.


Who says you can’t go home? he thought. A quote from Keith Richards popped into his head as he stacked the sheets.

“I got news for you. We’re still a bunch of tough bastards. String us up and we still won’t die.”

You said it, Keith, he thought, giggling to himself. Right on, brother. You and me both.

More and more over the last year, his thoughts kept coming back to his youth. It was the only time in his entire life when
he’d felt like he meant something, when he’d felt he was making a positive difference.


Was coming back now after all this time a midlife crisis? Maybe. He didn’t care. He’d decided he wanted that feeling again.
Especially in light of recent events. The world now was in even more dire straits than the one he and his friends had fought
to affect. It was time to do it again. Wake people up before it was too late.


That’s why he was here. It had worked once. They had, after all, stopped a war. Maybe it could happen again. Even if he was
a lot older, he wasn’t dead yet. Not by any means.


He licked his thumb and took the first sheet from the stack. He smiled, remembering the countless flyers he’d handed out in
Berkeley and Seattle, and in Chicago in ’68. After all this time, here he was. Unbelievable. What a crazy life. Back in the
saddle again.


“HI THERE,” he said, offering the flyer to a young black woman pushing a toddler in a stroller.

He smiled at her, making eye contact. He was good with people, always had been. “I have a message here that I think you should
take a look at, if it’s not too much trouble. It concerns, well, everything.”


“Leave me the hell alone with that nonsense,” she said with surprising vehemence, almost smacking it out of his hand.

Had to expect a little of that, he thought with a nod. Some people were a hard sell. Came with the territory. Unfazed, he
immediately walked over toward a group of teenagers skateboarding by the statue of Garibaldi.


“Afternoon, guys. I have a message here that I’d like you to read. Only take a second out of your day. If you’re concerned
about the state of affairs and about our future, I think it’s something you should really consider.”


They stared at him, dumbfounded. Up close, he was surprised to see the crow’s-feet around their eyes. They weren’t teenagers.
They were in their late twenties and early thirties. Hard-looking. Kind of mean, actually.


“Holy shit! It’s John Lennon!” one of them said. “I thought somebody shot you. Where’s Yoko? When you getting back with Paul?”

The rest of them burst into sharp laughter.


Jerks, he thought, heading immediately over toward the center fountain, where a street comedian was giving a performance. Yeah,
the fate of the world was a real rip, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t let those assholes get to him. He just needed to hit on the right
person and things would start rolling. Persistence was the name of the game.


People averted their eyes as he approached them. Not one person would take a flyer. What the hell was this? he wondered.

It was fifteen fruitless minutes later when a petite woman walking past took the flyer from his hand. Finally, the man thought.
His smile collapsed as the woman crumpled it and dropped it to the paved path. He ran forward and scooped it up before he
caught up to her.


“The least you could do was wait until you were out of sight before you threw it out in a garbage can,” he said as he whirled
in front of her. “You have to litter, too?”


“I’m… sorry?” the woman said, pulling the white iPod buds from her ears. She hadn’t heard a word he’d said. Were all young
people today retarded or something? Didn’t they see where everything was heading? Didn’t they care?


“You certainly are,” he mumbled as she walked off. “You are sorry. A sorry excuse for a human being.”


He stopped dead when he got back to the park’s entrance. Someone had kicked over the stack, and most of the flyers were wafting
away under the arch, over the sidewalk, whipping north up Fifth Avenue.


He ran out of the park and chased them for a while. He finally stopped. He felt completely drained and idiotic as he sat on
the curb between a couple of parked cars.


He held his head in his hands as he wept. For twenty minutes he cried, listening to the wind, watching the relentless roll
of traffic in the street.


Flyers? he thought, sniffling. He thought he could change things with a sheet of paper and a concerned expression? He looked
down at the antique jeans jacket he’d taken from the back of his closet. So proud that it still fit. He really was a complete
fool.


There was only one thing that could get people to sit up straight, only one thing that would open their eyes.

Only one thing then.

And only one thing now.

He nodded, finally resolving himself. He wasn’t going to be getting any help. He had to do it himself. Fine. Enough of this
nonsense. The clock was ticking. He didn’t have any more time to fool the fuck around.


He discovered he was still holding on to a crumpled flyer. He smoothed it out on the cold pavement beside him, took out a
pen, and made a vital correction. It snapped like an unfurled flag as he let the wind take it from his fingers.


The broad man with the graying hair wiped his eyes as the sheet he’d written on caught high on the corner lamppost behind
him.


The word LOVE in the title had been X’ed out. Against an ash-gray sky above him it now said,



Blood
CAN CHANGE THE WORLD!


BOUND IN THE dark, Jacob Dunning thought about all the things he would give for a shower.

All his possessions? Done. One of his toes? In a heartbeat. One of his fingers? Hmmm, he thought. Did he really need his left
pinkie?


Unidentified mudlike filth stuck to his cheek, his hair. Wearing only his NYU T-shirt and boxers, the handsome brown-haired
college freshman lay on a soiled concrete floor in a very tight space.


An angry industrial hum raged in the vague distance. He was blindfolded, and his hands were cuffed to a pipe behind him. A
gag around his mouth was knotted tight against the hollow indentation at the base of his skull.


The indentation was called the foramen magnum, he knew. It was where your spinal cord passed into your skull. Jacob had learned about it in anatomy class a month or so
ago. NYU was step one in his lifelong dream to become a doctor. His father had an 1862 edition of Gray’s Anatomy in his study, and ever since he was a little kid, Jacob had loved going through it. Kneeling in his father’s great padded
office chair with his chin in his hands, he’d spend hours poring over the elegant, fascinating sketches, the topography of
the human body shaded and named like distant lands, like treasure maps.


Jacob sobbed at the safe, happy memory. A drop of lukewarm water landed on the back of his neck and dripped down his spine.
The itch of it was unbearable. He would get sores soon if he wasn’t able to stand. Bedsores, staph infection, disease.


The last thing he remembered was leaving Conrad’s, an Alphabet City bar that didn’t care about fake IDs. After a monstrously
long chem lab, he’d been trying to chat up Heli, a stunning Finnish girl from his class. But after his fifth mojito, his tongue
was losing speed. He’d called it a night when he noticed she was talking more to the male model of a bartender than to him.


His memory seemed to stop at the point when he stepped outside. How he got from there to here he couldn’t recall.

For the billionth time, he tried to come up with a scenario in which everything turned out all right. His favorite was that
it was a fraternity thing. A bunch of jocks had mistaken him for some other freshman, and this was a really messed-up hazing
incident.


He started weeping. Where were his clothes? Why would somebody take his jeans, his socks and shoes? The scenarios in his head
were too black to allow light to enter. He couldn’t fool himself. He was in the deepest shit of his young life.


He banged his head on the pipe he was chained to as he heard a sound. It was the distant boom of a door. He felt his heart
boom with it. His breath didn’t seem to know if it wanted to come in or go out.


He was pretty much convulsing when he made out a jangle interspersed with the steady approach of footsteps. He suddenly thought
of the handyman at his parents’ building, the merry jingle of keys that bounced off his thigh. Skinny Mr. Durkin, who always
had a tool in his hand. Hope gave him courage. It was a friend, he decided. Somebody who would save him.


“Hppp!” Jacob screamed from behind the gag.

The footsteps stopped. A lock clacked open, and cool air passed over the skin of his face. The gag was pulled off.

“Thank you! Oh, thank you! I don’t know what happened. I—”

Jacob’s breath blasted out of him as he was hit in the stomach with something tremendously hard. It was a steel-toed boot,
and it seemed to knock his stomach clear through his spine.



Oh, God, Jacob thought, his head scraping the stone floor as he dry-heaved in filth. Dear God, please help me.


JACOB WAS UNCUFFED and pulled roughly for twenty or so steps and slammed into a hard-backed seat. Light spiked his eyes as
his blindfold was sliced away, and his hands were cuffed again behind his back.


He was in a child’s school desk in a vast, windowless space. In front of him was an old-fashioned wooden rolling blackboard
with nothing written on it. Behind him was a cold presence that lifted the hairs from his neck.


Jacob sobbed silently as a lighter hissed. The faintly spicy scent of tobacco smoke filled the air.

“Good morning, Master Dunning,” said a voice behind him.

It was a man’s voice. The man sounded perfectly sane, highly educated, in fact. He reminded him of a popular English teacher
he’d had at Horace Mann, Mr. Manducci.


Hey, wait. Maybe it was Mr. Manducci. He always did seem a little too, er, friendly with some of the male students. Could this be a kidnapping or
something? Jacob’s CEO father was extremely wealthy.


Jacob could actually feel the relief emit from his pores. He decided he’d take a kidnapping at this point. Ransom, being released.
He was down with that. Please be a kidnapping, he found himself thinking.


“My family has money, sir,” Jacob said, carefully trying to keep the terror out of his voice and failing.

“Yes, they do,” the man said pleasantly. He could have been the DJ for a classical music station. “That’s precisely the problem.
They have too much money and too little sense. They own a Mercedes McLaren, a Bentley—oh, and a Prius. How green of them.
You can thank their hypocrisy for bringing you here. Unfortunately for you, your father seems to have forgotten his Exodus
twenty, verse five: ‘For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons.’”


Jacob twitched violently in the hard chair as a stainless-steel pistol barrel softly caressed his right cheek.

“Now I’m going to ask you some questions,” his captor said. “Your answers are very, very important. You’ve heard of pass-fail,
haven’t you?”


The pistol jabbed hard into Jacob’s face, its hammer cocking with a sharp click.

“This test you’re about to take is pass-die. Now, question one: What was your nanny’s name?”

Who? My nanny? Jacob thought. What the hell was this?

“R-R-Rosa?” Jacob said.

“That’s right. Rosa. So far, so good, Master Dunning. Now, what was her last name?”


Oh, shit, Jacob thought. Abando? Abrado? Something. He didn’t know. The sweet, silly woman that he had played hide-and-seek with. Who’d
fed him after school. Rosa, pressing her warm cheek against his as she helped him blow out the candles on his birthday cake.
How could he not know her last name?


“Time’s up,” the man sang.

“Abrado?” Jacob said.

“Not even close,” the man said in disgust. “Her name was Rosalita Chavarria. She was a person, you see. She actually had a
first and a last name. Just like you. She was flesh and blood. Just like you. She died last year, you know. A year after your parents
fired her because she was becoming forgetful, she went back to her home country. Which leads us to our third question: What
was Rosa’s home country?”


How the hell had this guy known about Rosa’s termination? Who was this? A friend of hers? He didn’t sound Hispanic. Again,
what was this?


“Nicaragua?” Jacob tried.

“Incorrect again. She was from Honduras. A month after she returned to a one-room shack owned by her sister, she had to go
for a hysterectomy. In a substandard hospital outside of Tegucigalpa, she was given a tainted transfusion of blood and contracted
HIV. Honduras has the highest concentration of AIDS in the Western Hemisphere. Did you know that? Sure you did.


“Now, question four: What is the average life span in Honduras for an HIV-positive person? I’ll give you a hint. It’s a hell
of a lot less than the fifteen years it is in this country.”


Jacob Dunning began to cry.

“I don’t know. How would I know? Please.”

“That won’t do, Jacob,” the man said, jamming and twisting the barrel of the gun painfully against his teeth. “Perhaps I’m
not making myself clear enough. There’ll be no Ivy League A in this class. No tutors. No helpful strategies to maximize your
score. You can’t cheat, and the results are ultimate. This is a test that you’ve had your whole life to study for, but I have
the feeling you were slacking off. So I’d try to think a little bit harder. HIV-positive life span in Honduras! Answer now!”


IT WAS THE Catholic grammar school version of March Madness in Holy Name’s gym that Sunday around noon. A deafening chaos
of ringing basketballs, screaming cheerleaders, and howling sugar-crazed kids rolling over the laminated hardwood on Heelys
rose to the angel-carved rafters.


In addition to the noise, it was overly hot, dusty, and crowded, and I couldn’t have been happier.

I found myself where I always do when chaos is present, smack-dab in the middle of it. With a whis. . .