No Mercy
No Mercy is a harrowing tale of suspense, brutal murder and the dark secrets that lie beneath the surface of a placid, tight-knit town.Perfect for fans of Harlan Coben and Linwood Barclay this is a page-turning thriller.The peaceful town of Wintersville is a place safe from the crime and congestion of city life, where neighbours feel like family. It’s the perfect place to live.But when a teenager is discovered brutally murdered in the woods, it becomes clear that a psychopath is roaming the streets. Dr Ben Stevenson, the town’s medical examiner, and father of two young boys, becomes entangled in the hunt for the murderer, determined to keep his family safe.But as Ben uncovers the dark secrets of his seemingly quiet community, he confronts a truth that will haunt him forever and puts those he loves in serious danger.
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JOHN BURLEY
No Mercy
AVON
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
First Published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © John Burley 2014
John Burley 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.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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: 9780007559480
Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007559497
Version: 2015-06-23
For LGandMNGB
There is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.
—Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
This is not the beginning.
Up ahead, a young man sporting jeans and a black T-shirt walks casually down the concrete sidewalk. He hums softly to himself as he ambles along, Nike-bound feet slapping rhythmically on the serpentine path he weaves through the late afternoon foot traffic. He is perhaps fifteen – not truly a young man yet, but certainly well on his way – and he walks with the energy and indifference of one who possesses the luxury of youth but not yet the experience to appreciate its value, or its evanescence.
The predator watches the young man turn a corner, disappearing temporarily from view behind the brick exterior of an adjacent building. Still, he maintains a respectable distance, for although he has an instinct for how to proceed, he now relinquishes control to something else entirely. For as long as he can remember he has sensed its presence, lurking behind the translucent curtain of the insignificant daily activities of his life. The thing waits for him to join it, to embrace it – observes him with its dark and faithful eyes. But there are times – times like this – when it waits no longer, when the curtain is drawn aside and it emerges, demanding to be dealt with.
The young man in the black T-shirt reaches the end of the street and proceeds across a small clearing. On the other side of the clearing is a modest thatch of woods through which a dirt trail, overgrown with the foliage of an early spring, meanders for about two hundred yards until it reaches the neighborhood just beyond.
The predator picks up his pace, closing the distance between them. He can feel the staccato of his heart kick into third gear, where power wrestles fleetingly with speed. The thing that lives behind the curtain is with him now – has become him. Its breath, wet and heavy and gritty with dirt, slides in and out of his lungs, mixing with his own quick respirations. The incessant march of its pulse thrums along eagerly behind his temples, blanching his vision slightly with each beat. Ahead of him is the boy, his slender frame swinging as he walks, almost dancing, as if his long muscles dangled delicately from a metal hanger. For a moment, watching from behind as he completes the remaining steps between them, the predator is struck by the sheer beauty of that movement, and an unconscious smile falls across his face.
The sound of his footsteps causes the boy to turn, to face him now, arms hanging limply at his sides. As he does, the predator’s left hand swings quickly upward from where it had remained hidden behind his leg a moment before. His hand is curled tightly around an object, its handle connected to a thin metal shaft, long and narrow and tapered at the end to a fine point. It reaches the pinnacle of its arcing swing and enters the boy’s neck, dead center, just below the jaw. A slight jolt reverberates through the predator’s arm as the tip of the rod strikes the underside of the boy’s skull. He can feel the warmth of the boy’s skin pressing up against the flesh of his own hand as the instrument comes to rest. The boy opens his mouth to scream, but the sound is choked off by the blood filling the back of his throat. The predator pulls his arm down and away, feeling the ease with which the instrument exits the neck.
