Beach Road Read online

  Copyright © 2006 by James Patterson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com

  First eBook Edition: May 2006

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-1593-2

  Contents

  The novels of James Patterson

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Prologue: Somebody Else’s Summerhouse

  Chapter 1: Nikki Robinson

  Chapter 2:

  Part One: Murder on Beach Road

  Chapter 3: Tom Dunleavy

  Chapter 4: Tom

  Chapter 5: Tom

  Chapter 6: Tom

  Chapter 7: Tom

  Chapter 8: Dante Halleyville

  Chapter 9: Kate Costello

  Chapter 10: Tom

  Chapter 11: Tom

  Chapter 12: Tom

  Chapter 13: Kate

  Chapter 14: Tom

  Chapter 15: Tom

  Chapter 16: Kate

  Chapter 17: Kate

  Chapter 18: Kate

  Chapter 19: Tom

  Chapter 20: Tom

  Chapter 21: Tom

  Chapter 22: Loco

  Chapter 23: Loco

  Chapter 24: Loco

  Chapter 25: Tom

  Chapter 26: Tom

  Chapter 27: Tom

  Part Two: Kate Costello

  Chapter 28: Tom

  Chapter 29: Dante

  Chapter 30: Dante

  Chapter 31: Tom

  Chapter 32: Tom

  Chapter 33: Tom

  Chapter 34: Tom

  Chapter 35: Tom

  Chapter 36: Detective Connie P. Raiborne

  Chapter 37: Raiborne

  Chapter 38: Marie Scott

  Chapter 39: Tom

  Chapter 40: Tom

  Chapter 41: Tom

  Chapter 42: Tom

  Chapter 43: Tom

  Chapter 44: Tom

  Chapter 45: Kate

  Chapter 46: Kate

  Chapter 47: Tom

  Chapter 48: Tom

  Chapter 49: Loco

  Chapter 50: Loco

  Chapter 51: Kate

  Chapter 52: Kate

  Chapter 53: Tom

  Chapter 54: Tom

  Chapter 55: Kate

  Chapter 56: Tom

  Chapter 57: Tom

  Chapter 58: Kate

  Chapter 59: Tom

  Chapter 60: Tom

  Chapter 61: Kate

  Chapter 62: Tom

  Chapter 63: Tom

  Part Three: Down and Out in the Hamptons

  Chapter 64: Raiborne

  Chapter 65: Raiborne

  Chapter 66: Tom

  Chapter 67: Tom

  Chapter 68: Tom

  Chapter 69: Kate

  Chapter 70: Tom

  Chapter 71: Tom

  Chapter 72: Loco

  Chapter 73: Tom

  Chapter 74: Kate

  Chapter 75: Dante

  Chapter 76: Raiborne

  Chapter 77: Raiborne

  Chapter 78: Raiborne

  Chapter 79: Raiborne

  Chapter 80: Loco

  Chapter 81: Tom

  Chapter 82: Tom

  Chapter 83: Tom

  Chapter 84: Tom

  Chapter 85: Kate

  Chapter 86: Tom

  Chapter 87: Kate

  Part Four: Cold Play

  Chapter 88: Kate

  Chapter 89: Tom

  Chapter 90: Kate

  Chapter 91: Kate

  Chapter 92: Tom

  Chapter 93: Tom

  Chapter 94: Tom

  Chapter 95: Kate

  Chapter 96: Tom

  Chapter 97: Kate

  Chapter 98: Loco

  Chapter 99: Tom

  Chapter 100: Kate

  Chapter 101: Kate

  Chapter 102: Tom

  Chapter 103: Kate

  Chapter 104: Tom

  Chapter 105: Tom

  Chapter 106: Kate

  Chapter 107: Loco

  Chapter 108: Tom

  Chapter 109: Tom

  Chapter 110: Kate

  Chapter 111: Kate

  Chapter 112: Tom

  Chapter 113: Kate

  Chapter 114: Tom

  Chapter 115: Tom

  Epilogue: After the Fall

  Chapter 116: Tom

  Chapter 117: Kate

  About the Authors

  The novels of James Patterson

  FEATURING ALEX CROSS

  Mary, Mary

  Pop Goes the Weasel

  London Bridges

  Cat & Mouse

  The Big Bad Wolf

  Jack & Jill

  Four Blind Mice

  Kiss the Girls

  Violets Are Blue

  Along Came a Spider

  Roses Are Red

  THE WOMEN’S MURDER CLUB

  The 5th Horseman (and Maxine Paetro)

  4th of July (and Maxine Paetro)

  3rd Degree (and Andrew Gross)

  2nd Chance (and Andrew Gross)

  1st to Die

  OTHER BOOKS

  Lifeguard (and Andrew Gross)

  Maximum Ride

  Honeymoon (and Howard Roughan)

  santaKid

  Sam’s Letters to Jennifer

  The Lake House

  The Jester (and Andrew Gross)

  The Beach House (and Peter de Jonge)

  Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas

  Cradle and All

  Black Friday

  When the Wind Blows

  See How They Run

  Miracle on the 17th Green (and Peter de Jonge)

  Hide & Seek

  The Midnight Club

  Season of the Machete

  The Thomas Berryman Number

  For more information about James Patterson’s novels, visit www.jamespatterson.com

  For Daina, Matthew, Joseph, and Porter.

  Love, Peter

  And as always, for Jack and Suzie.

  Love, Jim

  In the summer of 2003 there were three brutal and tragic murders in East Hampton, a wealthy beach community on Long Island, and two related murders in New York City. These were the subject of countless news stories the following year, both in New York and nationally.

  But the horror of the murders paled in comparison to the tension and social upheaval in the Hamptons leading up to and during the murder trial.

  This is the story of what happened, and it is told from several points of view. Keep in mind that people often lie, especially in the current age, and that the full extent of their lies can be almost beyond our comprehension.

  The players, in order of appearance:

  Nikki Robinson, a seventeen-year-old part-time housemaid in East Hampton, Long Island

  Tom Dunleavy, a former professional athlete, now a defense attorney in the Hamptons

  Dante Halleyville, accused of four of the murders, one of the most talented schoolboy athletes in the country

  Katherine Costello, another important defense lawyer in the murder trial

  Loco, a drug dealer who supplied the Hamptons

  Detective Connie P. Raiborne, a streetwise Brooklyn detective

  M
arie Scott, Dante’s grandmother and his mentor in all ways

  This is their story.

  Prologue

  Somebody Else’s Summerhouse

  Chapter 1

  Nikki Robinson

  SEVENTEEN AND CRIMINALLY CUTE, Nikki Robinson sulks through the sultry afternoon trying to keep from staring at her useless shocking-pink cell phone. She hasn’t heard from Feifer in three days and is getting the awful feeling she’s already been dumped and just hasn’t been told yet.

  So when Nikki’s cell rings while she’s waiting in line to pay for her drink at Kwik Mart, her heart goes off with it. She grabs for the phone so fast her best friend, Rowena, behind the counter flashes her a disapproving look that says, “Chill, girl.”

  Rowena is all about maintaining dignity under romantic duress, and as usual, she’s right. It’s only Maidstone Interiors calling about a cleaning job for Nikki out in Montauk.

  Nikki has been working for Maidstone all summer and likes it okay, but the thing about Maidstone is that she never knows where they’re going to send her.

  It takes Nikki forty minutes to drive from Kings Highway in Bridgehampton to Montauk, and another five to find the hilly neighborhood perched just above Route 27 where all the streets are named for dead presidents—and not the recent ones, the ones who have been dead awhile.

  Forty-one Monroe is neither a mansion nor a dump, but somewhere in between, and as soon as she gets through the door, she sees it’s nothing catastrophic and was probably rented by a couple, maybe a small family.

  Besides the steady money, what Nikki likes best about this job is that she’s alone. She may be cleaning white folks’ houses, but at least they aren’t standing over her shoulder, watching and supervising her every move. Plus she can dress how she wants, and so she pulls off her jeans and T-shirt, revealing a skimpy two-piece bathing suit underneath. She puts on her headphones and some R. Kelly, and gets busy.

  Nikki starts with the ground-floor bedroom. She gathers the dirty towels and strips the sheets, balls them up in a giant damp pile, and wrestles it down the steep basement staircase. She quickly gets the first load of wash running, then races all the way up to the second floor, and by now her dark skin, which she sometimes loves and sometimes hates, is shimmering.

  When she reaches the landing, there’s a funky smell in the air, as if someone’s been burning incense or, now that she gets a better whiff, smoking reefer.

  That’s nothing too out of the ordinary. Renters can be stoners too.

  But when Nikki swings open the door to the master bedroom, her heart jumps into her mouth, and yet somehow she manages to scream and to think, The white devil.

  Chapter 2

  POISED ON THE BED with a long, curved fishing knife in his hand, and wearing nothing but boxers and a twisted grin, is a skinny white guy who looks as though he just got out of prison. His hair is bleached white, and his ghostly pale skin is covered with piercings and tattoos.

  But the scariest part, maybe even scarier than the knife, is his eyes. “I know you, Nikki Robinson,” he says. “I know where you live. I even know where you work.”

  For a couple seconds that feel much longer, those flat, horror-movie eyes freeze Nikki in the doorway and seem to nail her Reeboks to the floor.

  Her lungs are useless now too. She can’t even get enough air to scream again.

  Somehow she breaks the paralyzing spell enough to lift one foot, then the other, and now she’s moving, and screaming, running for her life toward the bathroom door at the far end of the hall.

  Nikki is fast, a hurdler on the Bridgehampton High School varsity team, faster than all but a handful of the boys, and faster than this snaky, beady-eyed intruder too.

  She reaches the bathroom door before him, and even though her hands shake, she manages to slam and lock it behind her.

  Her chest heaving so hard she can barely hear his footsteps, she leans her head against the door, her terrified reflection looking back at her in the full-length mirror.

  Then turning and pressing her back against the door, she desperately scans the room for a way out.

  The window leads to a roof. If she can get on the roof, she can find a way down or, if she has to, jump.

  And then she sees it. But she sees it too late.

  The brass doorknob twists in the light.

  Not the doorknob that’s pressing into her back, either. A second doorknob on the other side of the sink, attached to another door, a door she didn’t know was there because she’s never been to this house until now, a door that leads directly from the bedroom.

  As she stares in horror, the doorknob stops turning and the door slowly pushes open, and he’s in the tiny bathroom with her. The white devil.

  There is nowhere to go, nowhere to go, nowhere to go, she thinks, her terror bouncing back at her from every mirror.

  And now the devil is pressed up against her, breathing in her ear, the razor-sharp blade tracing a line into her neck. When she looks down he pulls her hair back until their eyes meet in the mirror.

  “Don’t cut me!” she begs in a weak whisper. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

  But nothing she says means a thing, and those pitiless eyes laugh at her as he pushes her shoulders and stomach down over the sink and roughly pulls her bikini bottom to her knees.

  “I know you’ll do whatever. Don’t stop looking.”

  Nikki looks at him in the glass just as she’s been told to and takes a shallow breath. But when he pushes himself inside her, he shoves so hard her head hits the mirror, and it falls into a million pieces. And even though the blade is pressed against her throat, and she knows it’s against the rules, she can’t keep herself from moaning and begging him to never stop. But it’s not till he’s finished that Nikki leans into the mirror and says, “Feif, I love it when you come up with this freaky romantic role-play shit. You are the devil.”

  It’s not until twenty minutes after that, when they’re both lounging around on one of the stripped-down beds, that he tells her the smell in the room isn’t reefer, it’s crack.

  And that’s how the story begins—with Feif and Nikki, and the crack they smoke that lazy afternoon at somebody else’s summerhouse in the Hamptons.

  Part One

  Murder on Beach Road

  Chapter 3

  Tom Dunleavy

  IT’S SATURDAY MORNING on Labor Day weekend, and I’m rolling down what some might call the prettiest country lane in America—Beach Road, East Hampton.

  I’m on my way to meet four of my oldest pals on the planet. The ’66 XKE I have been working on for a decade hasn’t backfired once, and everywhere I look there’s that dazzling Hampton light.

  Not only that, I’ve got my loyal pooch, Wingo, right beside me on the passenger seat, and with the top down, he hardly stinks at all.

  So why don’t I feel better about another day in paradise?

  Maybe it’s just this neighborhood. Beach Road is wide and elegant, with one ten-million-dollar house after another, but in a way, it’s as ugly as it is beautiful. Every five minutes or so a private rent-a-cop cruises by in a white Jeep. And instead of bearing the names of the residents, the signs in front of the houses belong to the high-tech electronic security companies that have been hired to keep the riffraff out.

  Well, here comes some prime riffraff, fellas, and guess what you can do if you don’t like it.

  As I roll west, the houses get even bigger and the lawns deeper and, if possible, greener. Then they disappear completely behind tall, thick hedges.

  When that happens, Wingo and I have put the sorry land of the multimillionaire behind us and have crossed, without invitation, into the even chillier kingdom of the billionaire. In the old days, this would be where the robber barons camped out, or the guys who had invented something huge and life-enhancing, like the refrigerator or air-conditioning. Now it’s reserved for the occasional A-list Hollywood mogul or the anonymous mathematicians who sit in front of their computer screens and run t
he hedge funds. A mile from here, Steven Spielberg slapped together three lots on Georgica Pond, then bought the parcel on the other side so he could own the view too.

  Before I get pulled over for rubbing the rich the wrong way, or being a grouch for no good reason, I spot a break in the hedges and rumble up a long, pebbled drive.

  Beyond a huge, sprawling manor built in—no, decorated to look like it was built in—the 1920s is a shimmering pack of cars parked on the grass, each one chromed and accessorized.

  Just beyond them is the reason they’re here, and the reason I’m here too—a brand-new, custom-built, state-of-the-art, official NBA-length-and-width basketball court.

  But if there’s a Hampton sight more welcome and less expected than a full-size basketball court with an ocean view, it’s the dozen or so people hanging out beside it, and they immediately come over to greet us—the guys lavishing attention on my vehicle, the ladies giving it up for my faithful dog, Wing Daddy.

  “This baby is pure class,” says a hustler named Artis LaFontaine as he appraises my antique Jag.

  “And this baby is pure cute!” says his girl, Mammy, as Wingo gets up on his hind legs to lay a big wet one on her pretty face. “Can I adopt him?”

  The warm way they all greet me feels as terrific as always—and not just because I’m the only white person here.

  Chapter 4

  Tom

  I DON’T HAVE the honor of being the sole Caucasian for long.

  In less than five minutes, Robby Walco arrives in his mud-splattered pickup, WALCO & SON, the name of his and his old man’s landscaping company, stenciled on the cab.

  And then my older brother, Jeff, the football coach at East Hampton High, shows up with Patrick Roche in his school-issued van.

  “Where the hell is Feif?” asks Artis. Artis has never actually volunteered what he does for a living, but the hours are highly flexible, and it pays well enough to keep his canary-yellow Ferrari in twenty-two-inch wheels.

  “Yeah, where’s the white Rodman?” asks a dude called Marwan with dreadlocks.

  Artis LaFontaine and crew can’t get enough of Feif, with his bleached-white hair, the piercings and tats—and when he finally rolls in barefoot on his bicycle, his high-tops dangling like oversized baby shoes from the handlebars, they practically give him a standing ovation.