Extract: 23½ Lies by James Patterson

A must-read bonus story for fans of the thrilling Women's Murder Club series. Can Sergeant Lindsay Boxer solve one of her toughest cases yet - the murder of her estranged father?

Chapter Four

I think of Rich Conklin as the brother I never had.

I love him because he’s smart, honest, reliable, a great investigator, and literally, he has my back — and I have his.

In the years of riding together, we’d worked innumerable homicides. A few flashed through my mind. A firefight in a dark alley, with no cover, nowhere to hide. A shootout in a hotel corridor with a killer who’d already taken out an FBI agent standing beside me. A mass murderer who was aiming his semiauto at me when Rich came up from behind him and disarmed him like the pro he was.

We’d learned to pick up on each other’s cues during all-night interrogations and had taken turns giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to dying citizens. That we’re both alive speaks to our connection and that we can almost read each other’s minds.

But on this Monday morning, in the thick of a chaotic crime scene, I looked into Conklin’s eyes and couldn’t read him at all.

“Don’t make me beg, Rich.”

He put his arm around my shoulder and steered me away from the crowd. We kept walking until we found an empty patch of asphalt between the street and the chain- link fence.

“You’re scaring me, bud.”

He said, “Lindsay, you have to prepare yourself. This wallet was on the dead man. It belonged to a Marty Boxer.”

“What did you say?”

I reached for the billfold, but Rich snatched it away.

“Hold on,” he said.

“Jesus.”

I took a breath and Rich opened the wallet and pulled the driver’s license out from behind the yellowed glassine window inside the billfold. He held the license by the edges for me to see. I gripped Richie’s wrist and brought the picture closer. I focused on it.

My father’s eyes stared back at me from the DMV photo. My heart cartwheeled.

I said, “That’s my dad.”

A moment ago, morning rush traffic had been churning up exhaust fumes as it rumbled east and west on Bryant. There had been sirens and the crackle of static coming from squad car radios. But now, all the sound in the world faded. Snapshots of my father flickered through my mind and took me far away from Harriet Street.

But there was one problem: As far as I knew, Martin Boxer had passed away years ago. Heart attack, I’d been told.

So who was the man lying dead on Harriet Street?

Had someone been impersonating my father?

“Lindsay. Lindsay.”

I turned back to my partner. “Did you get his phone?”

“I did.” Conklin patted his jacket pocket. “And I took a picture of the DB with mine,” he said. “It’s cruddy. Shadows falling across his face. I know this is a strange thing to ask, but does this…? Does the DB look like your dad?”

“Hold it still,” I said, drilling in on the phone.

Was the face pictured on the screen really my father? The more I stared at the image on Richie’s phone, the more the dead man’s features, captured in profile, came together.

It was impossible, but . . . I looked up.

Conklin said, “See this? It was right behind the license.”

He showed me a torn scrap of paper. Numbers had been written between the fold lines. The paper shifted in the breeze but I could read the handwriting. It was a phone number, mine, from my landline in the Potrero Hill house before I married and moved to Lake Street with Joe. I looked back at the just- snapped image of the dead man’s face.

My knees buckled. Richie caught me before I dropped and called out to a uni standing beside his marked car a few yards away.

“Thompstett. Open your back door for me, now.”

Officer Thompstett opened the car’s rear door and Rich led me to the seat. Instead of sitting, I steadied myself against the door frame. I took a few deep breaths and looked into Richie’s eyes.

I said, “I want to see him.”

“You sure?”

I nodded and my partner stepped back and got a bead on the crowd. He guided me past the edge of the cordon, ordering people to make way until I was through the break in the fencing, standing next to Claire, both of us staring down at the lifeless body lying face-up on the street.