Day of the Dead
All she wanted was to get away. But now, she can’t escape… A pulse-pounding thriller that dives into the dark side of Mexico.A holiday in Mexico is just what Michelle Mason needs after her husband dies, leaving behind a scandal and a pile of debt.On the beach, she meets a handsome American ex-pat – the margaritas have kicked in and she decides: why not? But their date ends horribly when Daniel is attacked by intruders in her hotel room.When Daniel disappears, Michelle is drawn into Mexico's dangerous underworld of corrupt policemen and powerful drug lords. What was a holiday romance suddenly becomes a matter of life and death. Can she trust Daniel, or is he responsible for the danger she is in?Michelle has nowhere to run and no one to trust. Now, she needs to dig deep to escape her holiday nightmare alive…
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Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
Copyright © Isabel Allende 2014
Translation copyright © Isabel Allende
Originally published in Spain in 2014 by Random House Mondadori under the title El juego de Ripper
Isabel Allende asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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
Source ISBN: 9780007548941
Ebook Edition © January 2014 ISBN: 9780007548965
Version: 2015-02-02
To William C. Gordon, my partner in love and crime
Contents
Mom is still alive, but she’s going to be murdered at midnight on Good Friday,” Amanda Martín told the deputy chief, who didn’t even think to question the girl; she’d already proved she knew more than he and all his colleagues in Homicide put together. The woman in question was being held at an unknown location somewhere in the seven thousand square miles of the San Francisco Bay Area; if they were to find her alive, they had only a few hours, and the deputy chief had no idea where or how to begin.
They referred to the first murder as the Case of the Misplaced Baseball Bat, so as not to insult the victim by giving it a more explicit name. “They” were five teenagers and an elderly man who met up online for a role-playing game called Ripper.
On the morning of October 11, 2011, at 8:15 a.m., the fourth-grade students of Golden Hills Elementary School raced into the gym to whistle blasts from their coach in the doorway. The vast, modern, well-equipped gym—built using a generous donation from a former pupil who had made a fortune in the property market before the bubble burst—was also used for graduation ceremonies, school plays, and concerts. Normally the fourth-graders would run two laps around the basketball court to warm up, but this morning they came to a shuddering halt in the middle of the hall, shocked by the grisly sight of a man sprawled across a vaulting horse, his pants pooled around his ankles, his buttocks bared, and the handle of a baseball bat inserted into his rectum. The stunned children stood motionless around the corpse until one nine-year-old boy, more daring than his classmates, bent down, ran his finger through the dark stain on the floor, and realized that it was not chocolate but congealed blood; a second boy picked up a spent bullet cartridge and slipped it into his pocket, intending to swap it during recess for a porn magazine, while a girl filmed the scene on her cell phone. Just then the coach bounded over to the little group of students, whistle trilling with every breath, and, seeing this strange spectacle—which did not look like a prank—suffered a panic attack. The fourth-graders raised the alarm; other teachers quickly appeared and dragged the children kicking and screaming from the gym, followed reluctantly by the coach. The teachers removed the baseball bat, and as they laid the corpse out on the floor, they noticed a bullet hole in the center of the victim’s forehead. They covered the body with a pair of sweatpants, closed the door, and waited for the police, who arrived precisely nineteen minutes later, by which time the crime scene had been so completely contaminated it was impossible to tell what the hell had happened.
A little later, during the first press conference, Bob Martín announced that the victim had been identified as one Ed Staton, forty-nine, a school security guard. “Tell us about the baseball bat!” a prurient tabloid journalist yelled. Furious to discover that information about the case had been leaked, which was not only humiliating to Ed Staton but possibly damaging to the reputation of the school, the deputy chief snapped that such details would be addressed during the autopsy.
