Jeffery Deaver

Narrated by William Dufris. Listen to an excerpt.

The Digger’s in town.

The Digger looks like you, the Digger looks like me. He walks down the wintry streets the way anybody would, shoulders drawn together against the damp December air.

He’s not tall and not short, he’s not heavy and not thin.

His fingers in dark gloves might be pudgy but they might not. His feet seem large but maybe that’s just the size of his shoes.

If you glanced at his eyes you wouldn’t notice the shape or the color but only that they don’t seem quite human, and if the Digger glanced at you while you were looking at him, his eyes might be the very last thing you ever saw.

He wears a long, black coat, or a dark blue one, and not a soul on the street notices him pass by though there are many witnesses here — the streets of Washington, D.C., are crowded because it’s morning rush hour.

The Digger’s in town and it’s New Year’s Eve.

Carrying a Fresh Fields shopping bag, the Digger dodges around couples and singles and families and keeps on walking. Ahead, he sees the Metro station. He was told to be there at exactly 9 A.M. and he will be. The Digger is never late.

The bag in his maybe-pudgy hand is heavy. It weighs eleven pounds though by the time the Digger returns to his motel room it will weigh considerably less.

A man bumps into him and smiles and says, “Sorry,” but the Digger doesn’t glance at him. The Digger never looks at anybody and doesn’t want anybody to look at him.

“Don’t let anybody…” Click. “let anybody see your face. Look away. Remember?”

I remember.

Click.

Look at the lights, he thinks, look at the…click…at the New Year’s Eve decorations. Fat babies in banners, Old Man Time.

Funny decorations.  Funny lights.  Funny how nice they are.

This is Dupont Circle, home of money, home of art, home of the young and chic.  The Digger knows this but he knows it only because the man who tells him things told him about DuPont Circle.

He arrives at the mouth of the subway tunnel. The morning is overcast and, being winter, there is a dimness over the city.

The Digger thinks of his wife on days like this.  Pamela didn’t like the dark and the cold so she …click… she… What did she do? That’s right.  She planted red flowers and yellow flowers.

He looks at the subway and he thinks of a picture he saw once.  He and Pamela were at a museum.  They saw an old drawing on the wall.

And Pamela said, “Scary. Let’s go.”

It was a picture of the entrance to hell.

The Metro tunnel disappears sixty feet underground, passengers rising, passengers descending.  It looks just like that drawing.

The entrance to hell.

Here are young women with hair cut short and briefcases.  Here are young men with their sports bags and cell phones.

And here is the Digger with his shopping bag.

Maybe he’s fat, maybe he’s thin. Looking like you, looking like me. Nobody ever notices the Digger and that’s one of the reasons he’s so very good at what he does.

“You’re the best,” said the man who tells him things last year.  You’re the…click, click…the best.

At 8:59 the Digger walks to the top of the down escalator, which is filled with people disappearing into the pit.

He reaches into the bag and curls his finger around the comfy grip of the gun, which may be an Uzi or a Mac-10 or an Intertech but definitely weighs eleven pounds and is load with a hundred-round clip of .22 long-rifle bullets.

The Digger’s hungry for soup but he ignores the sensation.

Because he’s the…click…the best.

He looks toward but not at the crowd, waiting their turn to step onto the down escalator, which will take them to hell. He doesn’t look at the couples or the men with telephones or women with hair from Supercuts, which is where Pamela went. He doesn’t look at the families. He clutches the shopping bag to his chest, the way anybody would if it were full of holiday treats. One hand on the grip of whatever kind of gun it is, his other hand curled — outside the bag — around what somebody might think is a loaf of Fresh Fields bread that would go very nicely with soup but is in fact a heavy sound suppressor, packed with mineral cotton and rubber baffles.

His watch beeps.

Nine A.M.

He pulls the trigger.

“Deaver is at his best here, slowly revealing layer after layer of a twisting and turning plot and building in suspicion and tension very carefully, so that eventually there seems to be something suspicious about each character. ”
– Booklist

“Thriller readers can always count on getting extra value from Jeffery Deaver –strong plots, fascinating research, believable characters, and plenty of surprise endings.”
– Amazon.com

“The Devil’s Teardrop has a tight plot, interesting characters, and an unexpected conclusion”
– Library Journal

Narrated by Richard Perry Turner. Listen to an excerpt.

She came here to lay flowers at the place where the boy died and the girl was kidnapped.

She came here because she was a heavy girl and had a pocked face and not many friends.

She came because she was expected to.

She came because she wanted to.

Ungainly and sweating, twenty-six-year-old Lydia Johansson walked along the dirt shoulder of Route 112, where she’d parked her Honda Accord, then stepped carefully down the hill to the muddy bank where Blackwater Canal met the opaque Paquenoke River.

She came because she thought it was the right thing to do.

She came even though she was afraid.

It wasn’t long after dawn but this August had been the hottest in years in North Carolina and Lydia was already sweating through her nurse’s whites by the time she started toward the clearing on the riverbank, surrounded by willows and tupelo gum and broad-leafed bay trees. She easily found the place she was looking for; the yellow police tape was very evident through the haze.

Early morning sounds. Loons, an animal foraging in the copious brush nearby, hot wind through sedge and swamp grass.

Lord, I’m scared, she thought. Flashing back vividly on the most gruesome scenes from the Stephen King and Dean Koontz novels she had read late at night with her companion, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. Those sorts of books made her boyfriend laugh but they spooked Lydia every time she read them, even when she’d read them before and knew the ending.

More noises in the brush. She hesitated, looked around. Then continued on.

“Hey,” a man’s voice said. Very near.

Lydia gasped and spun around. Nearly dropped the flowers. “Jesse, you scared me.”

“Sorry.” Jesse Corn stood on the other side of a weeping willow, near the clearing that was roped off. Lydia noticed that their eyes were fixed on the same thing: a glistening white outline on the ground where the boy’s body’d been found. She could see a dark stain that, as a nurse, she recognized immediately as old blood.

“So that’s where it happened,” she whispered.

“It is, yep.” Jesse wiped his forehead and rearranged the floppy comma of blond hair. His uniform — the beige outfit of the Paquenoke County Sheriff’s Department — was wrinkled and dusty. Dark stains of sweat blossomed under his arms.  He was thirty and boyishly cute and, though he wasn’t the lanky, unsmiling cowboy type that appealed to her, she thought now, as she often did, that you could do worse in the husband department.

“How long you been here?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Since five maybe.”

“I saw another car. Up the road.” Lydia asked, “Is that Jim?”

“Nope. Ed Schaeffer. He’s on the other side of the river.”

Jesse nodded at the flowers. “Those’re pretty.”

After a moment Lydia looked down at the daisies in her hand. “Two forty-nine. At Food Lion. Got ’em last night. I knew nothing’d be open this early. Well, Dell’s is but they don’t sell flowers.” She wondered why she was rambling. She looked around again.  “No where Mary Beth is?”

Jesse shook his head. “Not hide nor hair.”

“Him neither, I guess that means.”

“Him neither.” Jesse looked at his watch. Then out over the dark water, dense reeds and concealing grass, the rotting pier.

Lydia didn’t like it that a county deputy, sporting a large pistol, seemed as nervous as she was. Jesse started up the grassy hill to the highway. He paused. “Only two ninety-nine?”

“Forty-nine. Food Lion.”

“That’s a bargain,” the young cop said, squinting toward a thick sea of grass. He started up the hill again. “I’ll be up by the patrol car.”

Lydia Johansson walked closer to the crime scene. She prayed for a few minutes. She prayed for the soul of Billy Stail, which had been released from his bloody body on this very spot just yesterday morning.

For the soul of Mary Beth McConnell, wherever it might be.

For herself too.

More noise in the brush. Snapping, rustling.

The day was lighter now but the sun didn’t do much to brighten up Blackwater Landing. The river was deep here and fringed with messy black willows and thick trunks of cedar and cypress — some living, some not, and all choked with moss and viney kudzu. To the northeast, not far, was the Great Dismal Swamp, and Lydia Johansson, like every Girl Scout past and present in Paquenoke County, knew all the legends about that place: the Lady of the Lake, the Headless Trainman. . . . But it wasn’t those apparitions that bothered her; Blackwater Landing had its own ghost — the boy who’d kidnapped Mary Beth McConnell.

Lydia couldn’t stop thinking about all the stories she’d heard about him. How he’d roam silently through the marshes and woods here, pale and skinny as a reed. How he’d sneak up on lovers lying on blankets or parked along the river. How he’d slip into the side yard of some house along Canal Road and ease up to a girl’s window after she’d gone to sleep. Peer in at her, rubbing his hands like a white-faced Carolina mantis, stare until he couldn’t stand it anymore then reach through a hole he’d cut in the screen to snake a hand up inside her pajamas. Or just crouch on the shoulder of the road in front of a house in Blackwater Landing and look through the windows, hoping to catch of glimpse of a girl he’d been stalking after school.

Lydia opened her purse, found a package of Merits and lit a cigarette with shaking hands. Felt a bit calmer. She strolled along the shore. Stopped beside a stand of tall grass and cattails, which bent in the scorching breeze.

On top of the hill she heard a car engine. Jesse wasn’t leaving, was he? Lydia looked toward it, alarmed. But saw the car hadn’t moved. Just getting the air conditioning going, she supposed. When she looked back toward the water she noticed the sedge and cattails and wild rice plants were still bending, waving, rustling.

As if someone was there, moving closer to the yellow tape, staying low to the ground.

But no, no, of course that wasn’t the case. It’s just the wind, she told herself. And she reverently set the flowers in the crook of a gnarly black willow not far from the eerie outline of the sprawled body, spattered with blood dark as the river water.

* * *

“This new Lincoln Rhyme mystery is as intricate, well written, and enormously satisfying as its predecessors.”
– Booklist

“The Empty Chair is Jeffery Deaver at his best and most devious and is recommended, without reservation, to anyone in search of intelligent, high-adrenaline entertainment.”
– BarnesandNoble.com

“Deaver combines engaging narration, believable characters, and his trademark ability to repeatedly pull the rug out from under the reader’s feet.”
– Amazon.com

“Deaver is still aces”
–  Publishers Weekly