The Dead (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

the author of this letter who’d abducted and murdered her. But then why was he adding the killing on to Fagan’s tally rather than claiming the credit for himself?
    In the end, I did what I’d been avoiding doing ever since speaking to Nick Elliott at the café. I went to the safe in my office at the back of the apartment, dug out the satchel in which I kept my files on Ed Fagan and carried it over to the table for the first time in five years.
    Here was the unfinished manuscript of my book, together with my research notes: old newspaper clippings, tapes and transcripts of interviews with Fagan, his son, colleagues, neighbours, police, as well as friends and family of the five victims. There were crime scene reports too that Fitzgerald had let me see, evidence inventories, witness statements, all of which I’d copied and filed away together with photographs of the various scenes that I’d taken myself.
    There was even a shot of Fagan somewhere, another of him with his freaky son. I didn’t want to look at those just yet. I didn’t feel ready. I certainly didn’t feel ready for putting a tape on and hearing his voice. He was real enough to me right now.
    Too real.
    I hadn’t looked at the notes in years, not since I’d put the book, metaphorically speaking, out with the trash. They remained out of sight, if never quite out of mind. I don’t even know why I kept them. Fagan wasn’t a subject I relished thinking about, and I didn’t need notes to remember. It was forgetting that was the difficulty. Somehow there they still were, a presence always at my back as I wrote; but since it was increasingly rare these days for me to write anything, that wasn’t such a bind.
    I’d been delighted when I got the contract for the book about Fagan. I’d only been in Dublin three months, and Fagan was something of a cause célèbre. Others, hungry as Nick Elliott, would have leaped at the chance to write about him, and they might have been better at it too. I, though, had a measure of fame behind me by that point, and at such times you stumble into opportunities as easily as a drunk into lampposts.
    That fame came from my first book. I’d been lucky. I’d started out studying archaeology of all things at Boston University, though my boredom with prehistoric Aegean civilisation and the micromorphology of terrestrial sediments quickly started to outpace even my boredom with myself, which was some achievement on its part. Eventually I’d risen to the goading of an old boyfriend and, to both our surprises, found myself accepted on a training programme by the FBI in New York.
    In one fell swoop, I ditched boyfriend, Boston and boredom. It was what I’d always wanted, though I’d been reluctant to admit it even to myself. I was always fearful of failure. Three years’ training, four in the field as a special agent in New York state, and I was part of the team, a small part, that uncovered the serial killer Paul Nado, aka The White Monk.
    Archaeology hadn’t been so far removed, I quickly realised. What was I doing now but deciphering the hieroglyphics of psychopathology? But what I realised even quicker was that I didn’t have what the FBI took – and what the FBI took from its agents was everything. I was drained by the White Monk investigation; wasted; I couldn’t function.
    All I needed, maybe, was some leave; but with my usual talent for self-destructive gestures, I resigned from the Bureau and retreated back to New England to write a book about the hunt for Nado. Before I knew what was happening, I’d sold book, film rights and – according to my former colleagues – soul, and my life had changed for ever. For the better? I’d never know.
    Since then they’d been deciding which Hollywood actress should have the pleasure of playing me. I was a great part; from what I’d seen of an early screenplay, I was now responsible for catching Nado single-handed, if not for the entire security of the United States, which