The Death File: A gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist
Detective Carson Ryder returns, on the trail of a brutal killer with mysterious motives.Two psychologists are murdered 2000 miles apart – one in Phoenix, Arizona, one in Miami, Florida.Amazingly, both have noted down the name of Carson Ryder – a detective with the Florida Center for Law Enforcement who specializes in catching psychopathic killers.Carson joins forces with troubled Phoenix Detective Tasha Novarro to trace a ruthless killer whose advantages include an uncanny talent for persuasion, an utter lack of remorse, and the horrifying ability to predict their every move. A killer even Carson might not be capable of stopping…
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Copyright © J. A. Kerley 2017
Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com
J. A. Kerley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of 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 authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 9780008263751
Version: 2017-09-27
To Virginia, who loved her beer and baseballâ¦
Table of Contents
Dr Leslie Meridien watched a vulture appear from the failing glow of a twilight sky to land atop a towering saguaro cactus fifty feet from her second-story window. The predator stared into her brightly lit home office, detecting the motion of Meridienâs hands lifting a glass of Chardonnay and assessing their potential as prey.
After a minute the bird renewed its journey unsated, the black of the vulture consumed by the black of the sky. Meridien sat at her oaken desk dressed in a fifteen-year-old gray college sweatshirt â Harvard, her Alma Mater â and a pair of navy shorts, a workout on the exercise bike just over, her shoulder-length brown hair damp from the shower.
A psychological therapist and counselor, Meridien was transcribing notes from the dayâs sessions into her cloud account, currently recalling her last session with Adam Kubiac, ten days back. Heâd not shown for todayâs scheduled session. Or last weekâs.
Meridien wasnât surprised. Adam had likely dealt with much in the past two weeks, given his fatherâs sudden death. How had Adam taken the news? With sadness or glee? By weeping or partying? It could have gone either way. The father, Eli Kubiac, was a human mess, misdirected, often clueless in his relationship with his son. A self-made multimillionaire, Eli Kubiac loved being the macho, driven businessman; a man for whom traits such as compassion and sensitivity were suspect, somehow unmanly. And as was often the story in such individuals, Eli Kubiac had a dark side: heâd died on the floor in a motel in Scottsdale, nothing more in the news reports. There was probably a sad story there.
Meridien hoped Adam Kubiac found understanding. And, perhaps against all odds, maturity.
She leaned back and stared into the blank whiteness of her ceiling, a sharp contrast to the dark moods Kubiac often sank into during his private sessions, even carrying his private personal anger into group work, the reason she had removed him from group after several sessions. Adam could be charming and personable â though still emotionally closer to twelve years of age than nearing eighteen â but when his dark moods hit, or his bouts of insecurity-driven megalomania, he was hard to handle, even for Meridien.
Meridien jumped at the sound of a car door slamming. She ran to the front bedroom and looked out the window: a battered blue vehicle at the far side of her drive, the door slamming. But how? Hadnât she closed the gate at the end of the drive?She watched a rail-thin body leap from the passenger seat.
âI s-see you in the window, Dr Meridien,â yelled a voice from below. âI w-want to talk!â
She blew out a breath and shook her head. Adam Kubiac. He had reverted to the stutter that plagued him when under stress. It had been worse when they started; perhaps the only true headway made.
Meridien walked down the wide stairs and crossed the open-concept great room, its walls of bright wood hung with Native American rugs and paintings, and opened the front door to see the Phoenix-centered desert valley, a 30-mile long plain holding nearly four and a half million people, tens of thousands of lights and looking like a galaxy blazing in the center of the desert.
