All-American Murder Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by James Patterson

  Cover design by Anthony Morais

  Cover photograph by Getty Images

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

  littlebrown.com

  twitter.com/littlebrown

  facebook.com/littlebrownandcompany

  First Edition: January 2018

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

  ISBN 978-0-316-41268-1

  E3-20171212-NF-DA

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part Three Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part Four Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Map

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Part Five Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Part Six Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Part Seven Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Part Eight Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Part Nine Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Part Ten Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Part Eleven Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Coda

  Epilogue

  Photos

  About the Authors

  Books by James Patterson

  Newsletters

  To Bill Robinson, who got this thing cooking

  Prologue

  Matthew Kent ran track and played football at a high school in Attleboro, Massachusetts. After school, he worked out at a gym called Answer is Fitness. Then he would run, two miles north, to his house on Homeward Lane. The route went through an industrial park and into a clearing. The path turned to gravel, then dirt. On the far side of the clearing, at Landry Avenue, it turned into pavement again.

  On June 17, 2013, Matthew did not get as far as the pavement.

  It was a Monday. The day before the last day of school. Matthew had gotten to the gym at four. By the time he got out, an hour later, the weather—which had been beautiful all day—had started to turn. Clouds were gathering. The wind had started to gust. Matthew was running through the industrial park.

  Suddenly, at the far end of the clearing, he stopped.

  There was a man, lying on his back near a dirt pile.

  Matthew called out to him: “Are you all right?”

  The man did not answer. Matthew walked a bit closer, until he was about twenty feet away.

  “Are you all right?” he asked again.

  Once again, there was no answer.

  Detective Mike Elliott was nearing the end of his eight-hour shift at the station when the transmission came over the radio: A guy down. A “possible sudden” behind the Corliss Landing industrial park.

  Lieutenant Michael King, of the Massachusetts State Police, was coaching his son’s little league team when he got the call—he was already on his way down to the clearing. Assistant District Attorney Patrick Bomberg would arrive shortly after, along with uniformed police officers and members of the North Attleboro fire department. But North Attleboro PD Captain Joseph DiRenzo beat everyone else to the scene.

  The captain had left work at four. He was less than a mile away from Corliss Landing when the call came in, and he showed up, in shorts and a T-shirt, at 5:38.

  DiRenzo saw right away that they were dealing with a homicide.

  “There were rounds, and what appeared to be bullet wounds to the torso,” he says. “When I knelt down and touched the body, I could clearly tell that rigor mortis had set in.”

  The man on the ground was lying faceup. His left fist was clenched over his chest—one of several places he had been shot. He was young. He was black. His eyes were half-open.

  Flies were buzzing around the man’s nostrils.

  DiRenzo made note of the sneaker prints that had been left in the dirt. He saw a baseball cap, a white towel, and a partially smoked marijuana blunt lying on the ground. When he looked up, he saw something else: Dark, menacing clouds. A storm coming in from the west.

  Soon, it would rain—heavy rain, which would wash away crucial pieces of evidence.

  “It could not have come at a worse time,” DiRenzo recalls. “We have the body itself, tire marks, shoe prints, and rounds. All of a sudden you could see the trees bending over, clouds moving in in slow motion. It was a moment of, ‘Holy shit, we’ve gotta do something here!’”

  The fire department had brought tents and tarps that the police could use to cover the crime scene. The cops worked quickly, trying to stay ahead of the storm. They measured, logged, and photographed as
much as they could. But they also had to be careful not to contaminate the location.

  Everyone had to park one hundred yards away from the body, in order to preserve the tire tracks. Everyone, including the firemen, had to wear boots and gloves, or have the bottoms of their shoes photographed for comparison purposes in preparation for the eventual homicide investigation.

  The man had been standing when the first shot hit him. The detectives made note of the dirt the man’s heels had kicked up as he fell—it was the kind of detail that a rainstorm would wash away.

  The man had been shot several more times after falling.

  Boom, he goes down, the cops thought. Then, when he’s down: Boom, boom, boom. You could definitely tell, somebody wanted to make sure he was dead. And the shell casings are right there—one in the dirt and three more in a little indentation in the ground right next to the body. They’re all right there. Whoever did this was brazen. It’s crazy—not even bothering to pick up the brass?

  The police put tarps over the tire and sneaker prints, set a tent up over the body, and covered the body itself with a tarp, placing rocks around the tarp’s circumference to keep the wind from blowing it away.

  There was nothing more they could do before the storm passed.

  The rain lasted for twenty minutes—a half hour at the most—but it was heavy. Forty-mile-an-hour gusts shook the trees that stood around the clearing. The temperature dropped by twenty degrees. When the rain stopped, a state trooper named Michael Cherven removed the tarp and went through the dead man’s pockets:

  Sixty-four dollars and seventy-five cents in cash. Two sets of keys for an Enterprise Rent-A-Car. A cell phone.

  “His cell phone?” one of the officers said. “For Christ’s sake, you’re gonna kill someone, take his cell phone!”

  In the man’s wallet, they found an ID: Odin Lloyd. Twenty-seven years old. The face in the photograph matched the victim’s.

  Back at the North Attleboro police station, Detective Elliott and Elliott’s colleague, Detective Daniel Arrighi, waited outside of the room as a state trooper named Eric Benson called the car rental company and spoke with a manager named Edward Brennan.

  “I’m investigating an apparent homicide in North Attleboro,” Benson said. “We’ve recovered two sets of keys to a black Chevy Suburban, Rhode Island registration 442427. We have reason to believe that the person who rented it may be in danger.”

  Brennan looked up the number.

  “Oh, no,” he said.

  Outside of the room, the detectives strained to hear Trooper Benson’s side of the conversation. A few moments went by.

  Benson opened the door.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” he said when he saw Elliott and Arrighi. “The car was rented by Aaron Hernandez.”

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  It was November 23, 2006, and Aaron Hernandez’s high school football team—the Rams—was suiting up for the Battle for the Bell.

  Played annually on Thanksgiving mornings, the Battle was a grudge match between Aaron’s school, Bristol Central, and its crosstown rival, Bristol Eastern.

  Bristol, Connecticut, is a working-class town—football country in the middle of a state where soccer and crew are the suburban sports—and the Battle drew thousands of people to Muzzy Field, an ancient, minor-league baseball stadium that had hosted Babe Ruth at one time, and had been scouted as a film location for The Natural.

  Every year, going all the way back to 1959, bragging rights had been at stake: Would the Rams get to lord it over the Lancers for twelve more months?

  This year, the stakes were especially high. If the Rams won, they’d advance—for the first time in nineteen years—to the state championship. If they lost or tied, it would be the end of their season, and the end of Aaron Hernandez’s high school football career.

  The Rams were confident as they ran out onto the field in their red-and-white uniforms. They had good reason to be. With Aaron Hernandez as their team captain, the Rams had won all but one of their games. Everyone favored them over the Lancers, who had bigger players on their team but had lost four of their games that season. Everyone knew that, on this day, a win by the Rams would push them into the playoffs.

  Once again, all eyes were on Aaron Hernandez.

  Aaron was a quadruple-threat athlete. He ran track, and was the best player on the school’s basketball team. He had speed, dexterity, good reach, great hands. When he played baseball, he was the pitcher. On the basketball court, his dunks were legendary. And on the football field, he ducked, dodged, and stutter-stepped like a basketball star.

  At 6′1″ and 245 pounds, Aaron already had the body of an NFL player. Big and fast, he was the kind of tight end who’d always be the offense’s primary option.

  He was the best athlete that Bristol Central had ever produced.

  “Bristol Central had become the powerhouse of the state,” says Armando Candelaria, who was coaching high school football nearby in New Britain. “And Aaron Hernandez was the big name in Connecticut football. New Britain is a bigger city than Bristol. Our rivalry goes back to 2001, when Aaron’s brother, DJ, was on Bristol Central’s team. Our rivalry went from there to Aaron’s own rise in football. In 2005, I remember game planning for Aaron. Planning just for him.

  “He was like something you’d see on ESPN’s 30 for 30 series. A man among boys, even as a junior. When we played him the second game of his junior year, he caught four balls for a hundred and eighty yards—on a losing effort. In college, he could have played tight end or defensive end—it didn’t matter. You knew who the best player was when he walked onto the field. He was. Definitely.

  “I was the defensive coordinator, the secondary coach. It was my responsibility to stop Aaron. But he was very, very hard to block. He’d run away from the whole game. There was nothing you could do about it. From the coaching point of view, his numbers were unbelievable. As a senior, on both sides of the ball, he was dominating. His junior year as a tight end put him on the map. He would give you two hundred yards receiving as a tight end. I remember one game: DJ was a senior. Aaron was a freshman, but he didn’t look like a fourteen-year-old kid. He ran a shallow cross, coming across the middle, and turned it up against seniors. To do that at fourteen against varsity kids speaks volumes.

  “In his junior year, we started calling him ‘The Big Guy.’ We started to play a tough man underneath him—whoever got at his feet—and then we’d have a man eight yards on top of him, in case he got free of the first guy. Double coverage the whole time. That was easier said than done because my staff and I did not anticipate how physical he was. He was a lot faster in person than he was on film, and he would get free from the first defender and get open in front of the second defender. That made the game plan difficult during his junior year. We still got the win, but he made it known that you weren’t going to double him.

  “Everyone talked about his size. No one talked about his feet. He had really good basketball feet. His athleticism and speed took over. His footwork and balance. When you saw it live you understood, the kid was a born athlete.”

  “The thing that stood out to me,” says Ian Rapoport, who covered football for the Boston Herald, “was the first time I saw a guy fall down. He was the first football player who played like a basketball player, making defensive backs fall down. The kind of player who made the press box go, ‘Wow!’ An incredible, freakish athlete, with unbelievable versatility and talent. The first time I saw him, I thought, This guy’s got game. He could start and stop on a dime. It was amazing.”

  Chapter 2

  Aaron knew that the Lancers’ coach would double-team him at every turn, just as every other opposing coach had all season long.

  “From a coaching perspective, the philosophy had to be to figure a way to take Aaron out of the game plan,” says Sal Cintorino, who ran the football program at Newington High School and went on to coach Bristol Central. “That was what everyone tried to do. We’d try to
put two guys on him, try to influence Matt Coyne, who was their quarterback at the time, to go in a different direction. But Coyne had so much confidence in Aaron. He didn’t care who covered him. He’d throw right into the coverage. Somehow, Aaron would come away with the football.”

  Given how well Aaron had been playing, Bristol Central should have steamrolled the Lancers straight back to their side of town. But, just after kickoff, dark clouds full of rain, slush, and snow filled the sky.

  Although it was just a few degrees above freezing, the cold did not bother Hernandez. He had played beautifully in the cold in last year’s Battle, making seven catches for 112 yards, scoring a touchdown, leading the Rams to a thirteen-point victory. More troubling was the fact that the Rams were a passing team—and, Aaron knew, passing teams did not do well on rainy, windy football fields.

  The Lancers took a 7-0 early lead in the game, moving fifty-five yards on eleven plays. In the second quarter, the Rams’ coach, Doug Pina, adjusted for the rain and moved Aaron into the backfield. Hernandez did not disappoint. He ran straight up the middle, plowing straight through the other team’s players. He made a short but explosive touchdown run that opened up a 14-7 lead. But stripped of their passing game, playing in the mud, the Rams struggled to maintain their advantage.

  “It was a bad day,” Pina recalls. “The field was a mess. Our quarterback was having a lot of trouble throwing.”

  “It was the coldest I’d ever been,” one of Aaron’s teammates remembers. “I remember being out there, just stepping in puddles when I was on the field. Down in the line your hands would sink into the mud.”

  “The downpour was torrential,” says Cintorino. “The rain was sideways.”

  Aaron’s teammates on the sidelines wondered if Bristol’s Parks Department had let the game go forward because the department employee who had made that call was biased toward Bristol Eastern.