The Inn Read online

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER EIGHTY

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

  CHAPTER NINETY

  CHAPTER NINETY-ONE

  CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

  CHAPTER NINETY-THREE

  CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR

  CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE

  CHAPTER NINETY-SIX

  CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ONE

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWO

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THREE

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOUR

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIVE

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIX

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVEN

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHT

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED NINE

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TEN

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ELEVEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  JAMES PATTERSON is one of the best-known and biggest-selling writers of all time. His books have sold in excess of 385 million copies worldwide. He is the author of some of the most popular series of the past two decades – the Alex Cross, Women’s Murder Club, Detective Michael Bennett and Private novels – and he has written many other number one bestsellers including romance novels and stand-alone thrillers.

  James is passionate about encouraging children to read. Inspired by his own son who was a reluctant reader, he also writes a range of books for young readers including the Middle School, I Funny, Treasure Hunters, Dog Diaries and Max Einstein series. James has donated millions in grants to independent bookshops and has been the most borrowed author of adult fiction in UK libraries for the past eleven years in a row. He lives in Florida with his wife and son.

  CANDICE FOX is the middle child of a large, eccentric family from Sydney’s western suburbs. The daughter of a parole officer and an enthusiastic foster-carer, Candice spent her childhood listening around corners to tales of violence, madness and evil as her father relayed his work stories to her mother and older brothers.

  Candice won back-to-back Ned Kelly awards for her first two novels – Hades and Eden. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed Fall, Crimson Lake, Redemption and Gone by Midnight. Candice’s first collaboration with James Patterson, Never Never, was a Sunday Times and New York Times no. 1 bestseller. They have co-authored three further novels featuring Harriet Blue – Fifty Fifty, Liar Liar and Hush Hush.

  Also by James Patterson

  ALEX CROSS NOVELS

  Along Came a Spider • Kiss the Girls • Jack and Jill • Cat and Mouse • Pop Goes the Weasel • Roses are Red • Violets are Blue • Four Blind Mice • The Big Bad Wolf • London Bridges • Mary, Mary • Cross • Double Cross • Cross Country • Alex Cross’s Trial (with Richard DiLallo) • I, Alex Cross • Cross Fire • Kill Alex Cross • Merry Christmas, Alex Cross • Alex Cross, Run • Cross My Heart • Hope to Die • Cross Justice • Cross the Line • The People vs. Alex Cross • Target: Alex Cross

  THE WOMEN’S MURDER CLUB SERIES

  1st to Die • 2nd Chance (with Andrew Gross) • 3rd Degree (with Andrew Gross) • 4th of July (with Maxine Paetro) • The 5th Horseman (with Maxine Paetro) • The 6th Target (with Maxine Paetro) • 7th Heaven (with Maxine Paetro) • 8th Confession (with Maxine Paetro) • 9th Judgement (with Maxine Paetro) • 10th Anniversary (with Maxine Paetro) • 11th Hour (with Maxine Paetro) • 12th of Never (with Maxine Paetro) • Unlucky 13 (with Maxine Paetro) • 14th Deadly Sin (with Maxine Paetro) • 15th Affair (with Maxine Paetro) • 16th Seduction (with Maxine Paetro) • 17th Suspect (with Maxine Paetro) • 18th Abduction (with Maxine Paetro)

  DETECTIVE MICHAEL BENNETT SERIES

  Step on a Crack (with Michael Ledwidge) • Run for Your Life (with Michael Ledwidge) • Worst Case (with Michael Ledwidge) • Tick Tock (with Michael Ledwidge) • I, Michael Bennett (with Michael Ledwidge) • Gone (with Michael Ledwidge) • Burn (with Michael Ledwidge) • Alert (with Michael Ledwidge) • Bullseye (with Michael Ledwidge) • Haunted (with James O. Born) • Ambush (with James O. Born)

  PRIVATE NOVELS

  Private (with Maxine Paetro) • Private London (with Mark Pearson) • Private Games (with Mark Sullivan) • Private: No. 1 Suspect (with Maxine Paetro) • Private Berlin (with Mark Sullivan) • Private Down Under (with Michael White) • Private L.A. (with Mark Sullivan) • Private India (with Ashwin Sanghi) • Private Vegas (with Maxine Paetro) • Private Sydney (with Kathryn Fox) • Private Paris (with Mark Sullivan) • The Games (with Mark Sullivan) • Private Delhi (with Ashwin Sanghi) • Private Princess (with Rees Jones)

  NYPD RED SERIES

  NYPD Red (with Marshall Karp) • NYPD Red 2 (with Marshall Karp) • NYPD Red 3 (with Marshall Karp) • NYPD Red 4 (with Marshall Karp) • NYPD Red 5 (with Marshall Karp)

  DETECTIVE HARRIET BLUE SERIES


  Never Never (with Candice Fox) • Fifty Fifty (with Candice Fox) • Liar Liar (with Candice Fox) • Hush Hush (with Candice Fox)

  STAND-ALONE THRILLERS

  The Thomas Berryman Number • Hide and Seek • Black Market • The Midnight Club • Sail (with Howard Roughan) • Swimsuit (with Maxine Paetro) • Don’t Blink (with Howard Roughan) • Postcard Killers (with Liza Marklund) • Toys (with Neil McMahon) • Now You See Her (with Michael Ledwidge) • Kill Me If You Can (with Marshall Karp) • Guilty Wives (with David Ellis) • Zoo (with Michael Ledwidge) • Second Honeymoon (with Howard Roughan) • Mistress (with David Ellis) • Invisible (with David Ellis) • Truth or Die (with Howard Roughan) • Murder House (with David Ellis) • Woman of God (with Maxine Paetro) • Humans, Bow Down (with Emily Raymond) • The Black Book (with David Ellis) • Instinct (with Howard Roughan, previously published as Murder Games) • The Store (with Richard DiLallo) • Texas Ranger (with Andrew Bourelle) • The President is Missing (with Bill Clinton) • Revenge (with Andrew Holmes) • Juror No. 3 (with Nancy Allen) • The First Lady (with Brendan DuBois) • The Chef (with Max DiLallo) • Out of Sight (with Brendan DuBois) • Unsolved (with David Ellis)

  NON-FICTION

  Torn Apart (with Hal and Cory Friedman) • The Murder of King Tut (with Martin Dugard) • All-American Murder (with Alex Abramovich and Mike Harvkey)

  MURDER IS FOREVER TRUE CRIME

  Murder, Interrupted (with Alex Abramovich and Christopher Charles) • Home Sweet Murder (with Andrew Bourelle and Scott Slaven) • Murder Beyond the Grave (with Andrew Bourelle and Christopher Charles)

  COLLECTIONS

  Triple Threat (with Max DiLallo and Andrew Bourelle) • Kill or Be Killed (with Maxine Paetro, Rees Jones, Shan Serafin and Emily Raymond) • The Moores are Missing (with Loren D. Estleman, Sam Hawken and Ed Chatterton) • The Family Lawyer (with Robert Rotstein, Christopher Charles and Rachel Howzell Hall) • Murder in Paradise (with Doug Allyn, Connor Hyde and Duane Swierczynski) • The House Next Door (with Susan DiLallo, Max DiLallo and Brendan DuBois) • 13-Minute Murder (with Shan Serafin, Christopher Farnsworth and Scott Slaven)

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

  CHAPTER ONE

  SOMETHING VERY BAD was about to go down.

  There are things you know as a cop in Boston. You know how the city feels, because its streets are your veins and the voices of its people come through your lips when you talk. You know the smell of the salt in the harbor like the scent of the back of your wife’s neck, and it’s just as precious, reassuring. The hammering of footsteps out of Back Bay Station for the morning rat race wakes you up, and the wail of sirens in the old Combat Zone at night puts you to sleep. Every Christmas, you gather up some young wide-eyed uniforms to take poor kids from East Boston and Hyde Park into the toy stores, try to show the new cops and the kids that they can get along. You know that in a few years, some of those cops and some of those kids will end up killing each other. But that’s how the city works. It’s like a living thing. It sheds, and it hurts, and it bleeds.

  I could feel what was about to happen in the air. It was an unexpected and dizzying heat, surreal against the snow on the ground outside the car.

  When my partner Malone and I got a call to go to the commissioner’s office downtown, I knew we were in for it. A Boston cop knows that being called to the commissioner’s office is a bad, bad thing.

  Malone always made fun of me for thinking I had Boston’s pulse, a sense about approaching trouble in the city. On the morning of the marathon bombing, we’d been a mile up Boylston Street doing crowd control and I told Malone I felt hot and weird, like I had a fever. We felt the thump of the first blast under our feet a second or two later.

  We were in the back of the cruiser, Malone looking out the window, joggling his knee and picking his teeth.

  “Wait. I know what this is,” he said suddenly. “This is about that baby. We’re getting a medal for the baby last week.”

  The week before, Malone and I had been walking out at the end of a shift when a woman outside a café two doors from the station started screaming like she was on fire. She was standing in the street pointing at a balcony five floors above, where a toddler was sitting on the concrete ledge, having the time of his life. A crowd gathered, and it was quickly established that the mother was inside but wasn’t answering the door or her phone. While some guys went in to try to break down her apartment door, Malone and I watched, pulling out our own hair, while the toddler crawled along the ledge and then, wobbling, stood up.

  There was no time to decide who would catch the kid. Malone and I both went in and snared him in a tangle of arms about two feet off the ground while the people around us hollered and screamed. Turned out the mother had been so damned tired from working two jobs that she fell asleep with the baby on the couch, the balcony doors open and a pot of peas cooking dry on the stove.

  It was a good get, the kind of thing that wins you cheers when you walk into the station the next day. Ribbing about how tubby you look in the YouTube footage. Calls from the Globe. A medal, maybe. The toddler catch had gotten my wife, Siobhan, on the phone for a week, bragging to all her friends, telling them to watch the news, patting my head and saying she was proud of me like I was some kind of heroic dog.

  But today wasn’t about the kid. I could feel it in my bones.

  “This is bad,” I told Malone. “They only send a car for you when they know you’ll be too fucked up to drive home afterward. We’re in big trouble here. You better start thinking what we’ve done to piss off the top brass.”

  Malone, still twitching and joggling his knee, settled back and watched our driver. I gripped the seat belt and let Boston roll by, trying to guess what they were about to tell us.

  The car dropped us at the building on Tremont Street. We went in, and as the elevator doors closed on us, I noticed that all Malone’s twitching had suddenly stopped.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. His eyes were fixed on the floor. “I’m real sorry for this, Bill.”

  “You’re sorry for what?”

  He didn’t answer. I had to hear it from the commissioner.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BOSTON PD LEGEND says that the visitor’s chair in the commissioner’s office is an old electric chair. I’d heard whispers around the department that some sadistic jerk occupying the top job had acquired the chair from a prison auction in Ohio and simply cut the straps and headgear off to make it acceptable for the office. Malone and I entered and took two identical chairs, either of which might indeed have been an Old Sparky sourced from the depths of the Midwest. The wood was eerily warm, and there were gouges in the arms that perfectly fit my fingernails.

  I wouldn’t have liked to be sitting in front of Commissioner Rachel McGinniskin even if the news were congratulatory. The red-haired, narrow-faced woman was a descendant of Barney McGinniskin, the first Irishman ever handed a police baton in Boston. From the moment Barney pulled on his blue coat, his appointment spurred hysterical newspaper reports, violent riots, and Irish bashings nationwide. The anti-immigration, anti-Catholic parties dumped him out of his job after only three years, and years later, Rachel McGinniskin had fought her way up the ladder in the force out of pure spite.

  The commissioner opened a laptop and swiveled it on the desk so that the screen was facing us. She pushed a button and a black-and-white video began to play.

  Only minutes into the video, I could feel sweat sliding down my ribs beneath my shirt. I looked at Malone, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  McGinniskin pointed to a guy in the video. “Detective Jeremiah Malone,” she said. “Is that you there on the screen?”

  Her tone was strangely heavy, like she was the one getting the bad news. Malone didn’t say anything. Just nodded, defeated. She let the video play a while longer.

  “Detective William Robinson.” She pointed at the screen again and looked at me, her eyes blazing. “Is that you?”


  “It is,” I said. Malone still wouldn’t meet my gaze. Look at me, you prick, I thought. But the bastard put his face in his hands. McGinniskin turned the laptop back around and slammed it shut.

  “You’re both out,” she said. The muscles in her jaw and temples were so tight, they bulged from beneath the skin. “And I’ve got to admit, gentlemen, after seeing that tape, it gives me great pleasure to say it. There’s no place in my police force for people like you. Your discharge will take effect immediately. If I hear that either of you have inquired about pensions, I’ll make sure you can’t get a job in this city as a fucking mall cop.” McGinniskin swept her hair back from her temples, chasing composure. “Give me your badges and your weapons,” she said.

  It was hard for me to get out of the chair. Gravity seemed to have tripled. I took my gun off, walked what seemed like a hundred miles to her desk, and put my weapon down at the same time Malone did. He finally looked at me as we took our badges off. Then we left. Neither of us spoke until we were outside her office.

  “Bill,” Malone said. “Buddy, listen. I—”

  “I can’t believe you did this.” I was shaking all over. “I can’t believe you did this to us. We’re out. That’s it. It’s over. You lying, backstabbing piece of shit.”

  My job. My city. The walls of the old stone building were pulsing around me, closing in. Malone had killed us. We were being expelled from the living thing. Shed like dead skin, like waste. I couldn’t breathe.

  “I’m so sorry, Bill.” Malone sounded panicky. “I was trying to—”

  I grabbed my partner by the shirt and slammed him into the wall beside McGinniskin’s door. It was all I could do not to knock his teeth out right there. I put a finger in his face and eased the words out from between my locked jaw.