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  Highest Praise for

  John Lutz

  “John Lutz knows how to make you shiver.”

  —Harlan Coben

  “Lutz offers up a heart-pounding roller coaster of a tale.”

  —Jeffery Deaver

  “John Lutz is one of the masters of the police novel.”

  —Ridley Pearson

  “John Lutz is a major talent.”

  —John Lescroart

  “I’ve been a fan for years.”

  —T. Jefferson Parker

  “John Lutz just keeps getting better and better.”

  —Tony Hillerman

  “Lutz ranks with such vintage masters of big-city murder as Lawrence Block and Ed McBain.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Lutz is among the best.”

  —San Diego Union

  “Lutz knows how to seize and hold the reader’s imagination.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “It’s easy to see why he’s won an Edgar and two Shamuses.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Serial

  “Wow, oh wow, oh wow ... that’s as simple as I can put it. You gotta read this one.”

  —True Crime Book Reviews

  Mister X

  “Mister X has everything: a dangerous killer, a pulse-pounding mystery, a shocking solution, and an ending that will resonate with the reader long after the final sentence is read.”

  —

  “A page-turner to the nail-biting end ... twisty, creepy whodunit.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  Urge to Kill

  “A solid and compelling winner ... sharp characterization, compelling dialogue and graphic depictions of evil.... Lutz knows how to keep the pages turning.”

  —

  Night Kills

  “Lutz’s skill will keep you glued to this thick thriller.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Superb suspense ... the kind of book that makes you check to see if all the doors and windows are locked.”

  —Affaire de Coeur

  In for the Kill

  “Brilliant ... a very scary and suspenseful read.”

  —Booklist

  “Shamus and Edgar award–winner Lutz gives us further proof of his enormous talent ... an enthralling page-turner.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Chill of Night

  “The ingenuity of the plot shows that Lutz is in rare form.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Lutz keeps the suspense high and populates his story with a collection of unique characters that resonate with the reader, making this one an ideal beach read.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A dazzling tour de force ... compelling, absorbing.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “A great read! Lutz kept me in suspense right up to the end.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  Fear the Night

  “A twisted cat-and-mouse game ... a fast-moving crime thriller ... Lutz skillfully brings to life the sniper’s various victims.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A tense, fast-moving novel, a plot-driven page-turner of the first order ... a great read!”

  —Book Page

  Darker Than Night

  “Readers will believe that they just stepped off a Tilt-A-Whirl after reading this action-packed police procedural.”

  —The Midwest Book Review

  Night Victims

  “John Lutz knows how to ratchet up the terror... . He propels the story with effective twists and a fast pace.”

  —Sun-Sentinel

  The Night Watcher

  “Compelling ... a gritty psychological thriller... . Lutz draws the reader deep into the killer’s troubled psyche.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  ALSO BY JOHN LUTZ

  *Serial

  *Mister X

  *Urge to Kill

  *Night Kills

  *In for the Kill

  Chill of Night

  Fear the Night

  *Darker Than Night

  Night Victims

  The Night Watcher

  The Night Caller

  Final Seconds (with David August)

  The Ex

  Single White Female

  *featuring Frank Quinn

  Available from Kensington Publishing Corp. and

  Pinnacle Books

  JOHN LUTZ

  PULSE

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Also by

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  1 - Highway 72, Central Florida, 2002

  2 - New York State, June 2008

  3 - New York, the present

  4

  5

  6 - Central Florida, 2002

  7 - New York City, the present

  8 - Central Florida, 2002

  9 - New York, the present

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15 - Central Florida, 2002

  16 - New York, the present

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32 - Leighton, Wisconsin, 1986

  33 - New York, the present

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38 - Leighton, Wisconsin, 1986

  39 - New York, the present

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  PART TWO

  46

  47 - Leighton, Wisconsin, 1986

  48 - New York, the present

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54 - Leighton, Wisconsin, 1986

  55 - New York, the present

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60 - Leighton, Wisconsin, 1986

  61 - New York, the present

  62

  63

  PART THREE

  64 - Leighton, Wisconsin, 1986

  65 - New York City, the present

  66

  67 - Leighton, Wisconsin, 1986

  68 - New York, the present

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  82

  83

  84

  85

  EPILOGUE - Rio de Janeiro, the present

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Teaser chapter

  Copyright Page

  For Jane Ellen Jones

  Beautiful soul

  PART ONE

  There is a panther caged within my breast,

  But what his name, there is no breast shall know,

  Save mine, nor what it is that drives him so

  Backward and forward, in relentless quest.

  —JOHN HALL WHEELOCK, “The Black Panther”

  1

  Highway 72, Central Florida, 2002

  It gave Garvey the creeps, transferring somebody like Daniel Danielle. The sick bastard had been convicted of killing three women, but some
estimates had his total at more than a hundred.

  They were the women who lived alone and let their guards down because the sicko could be a charmer as a man or a woman. Single women who disappeared and were missed by no one. Those were the kinds of women Daniel Danielle sought and tortured and destroyed.

  Nicholson was seated next to Garvey. Like Garvey, he was a big man in a brown uniform. Their job was to transfer Daniel Danielle to a new, and so far secret, maximum-security state prison near Belle Glade, on the other side of the state from Sarasota. It was in Sarasota where Danielle Daniel (he had been dressed as a woman then) had been arrested while crouched over the body of one of his victims, and later convicted. The evidence was overwhelming. As a “calling card” and a taunt, he had put his previous victim’s panties on his present victim, panties he had apparently worn to the murder. He was damned by his DNA.

  Daniel was all the more dangerous because he was smart as hell. Degrees from Vassar and Harvard, and a fellowship at Oxford. Getting away with murder should have been a piece of cake, like the rest of his life. But it hadn’t been. When his appeals were exhausted, he would be executed.

  No one was visible on State Highway 72. This part of Florida was flat and undeveloped, mostly green vistas streaked with brown. Cattle country, though cattle were seldom glimpsed from the road except off in the distance. Wind and dust country for sure. Dust devils could be seen taking shape and dissipating on both sides of the road. Miles away, larger wannabe tornados threatened and whirled but didn’t quite take form.

  The latest weather report said the jet stream had shifted. Hurricane Sophia, closing in on Florida’s east coast, now had a predicted path to the south, though not as far south as the dusty white van rocketing along the highway. Taking time to replace a broken fan belt ten miles beyond Arcadia had slowed them down. They were still okay, if the hurricane stayed north. If it didn’t, they might be driving right into it.

  Now and then a car passed going the other way, with a Doppler change of pitch as the boxy van rocked in the vehicle’s wake. Off to the east there were more dust devils, more swirling cloud formations. The insistent internal voice Garvey often heard when some part of his mind knew something bad was about to happen wouldn’t shut up.

  Suddenly it began to rain. Hard. Garvey switched on the headlights. Hail the size of marbles started smacking and bouncing off the van’s windshield and stubby hood.

  “Maybe we oughta go back,” Nicholson said. “See if we can outrun whatever’s headed our way.”

  “Orders are to deliver the prisoners.” Garvey drove faster. The hail slammed harder against the windshield, as if hurled by a giant hand.

  The prisoner chained in the back of the van with Daniel Danielle was a young man with lots of muscles and tattoos under his orange prison jumpsuit. He was scarred with old acne and had a face like chipped stone, with a crooked nose and narrow, mean eyes. He was easy to take for a hardened ex-con, but he was actually an undercover cop named Chad Bingham, there for insurance if something weird happened and Daniel Danielle made trouble.

  Bingham would rather have been someplace else. He had a wife and two kids. And a job.

  The easy part of the job was just sitting there sulking and pretending he was someone else. But the way things were going, he was afraid the hard part was on its way.

  The hail kept coming. Nicholson was on the edge of being downright scared. Even if it didn’t make landfall nearby, Sophia might spawn tornados. Hurricanes also sometimes unexpectedly changed course. He reached out and turned on the radio, but got nothing but static this far out in the flatlands, away from most civilization.

  Garvey could see his partner was getting antsy so he tried to raise Sarasota on the police band. The result was more static. He tried Belle Glade and got the same response.

  “Storm’s interfering with reception,” he said, looking into Nicholson’s wide blue eyes. He had never seen the man this rattled.

  “Try your cell phone,” Nicholson said in a tight voice. “You kidding?”

  Nicholson tried his own cell phone but didn’t get a signal.

  Both men jumped as a violent thumping began under the van.

  “We ran over a branch or something that blew onto the road,” Garvey said.

  “Pull over and let’s drag it out.”

  “Not in this weather,” Garvey said. “That hail will beat us to death.”

  “What the hell was that?” Nicholson asked, as a huge, many-armed form crossed the road ahead of them, like an image in a dream.

  “Looked like a tree,” Garvey said.

  “There aren’t many trees around here.”

  “It’s not around here anymore,” Garvey said, as the wind rocked the van.

  The van suddenly became easy to steer. Garvey realized that was because he was no longer steering it. The wind had lifted it off the road.

  They were sideways now, plowing up dirt and grass. Then the van bounced and they were airborne again.

  “What the shit are you doing?” Nicholson screamed.

  “Sitting here just like you.”

  The van leaned left, leaned right, and Garvey knew they were going to turn over.

  “Hold tight,” he yelled, checking to make sure both of them had their seat belts fastened.

  The wind howled. Steel screamed. They were upside down. Garvey could hear Nicholson shouting beside him, but couldn’t make out what he was saying because of the din.

  The van skidded a long way on its roof and then began to spin. Garvey felt his head bouncing against the side window.

  Bulletproof glass came off in sharp-edged, milky strips, and he was staring at the ground. With a violent lurch, the van was upright again, then back on its roof. Garvey realized that as addled as his brain had become, his right foot was still jammed hard against the brake pedal.

  The van stopped. Hanging upside down, Garvey looked out the glassless window and saw that they were wedged against one of the rare trees Nicholson had mentioned. He looked over and saw that Nicholson was dazed and wild-eyed. And beyond Nicholson, out the window ...

  “Looks like a kind of low ridge over there,” he shouted at Nicholson. “We gotta get outta the van, see if we can burrow down outta the wind.”

  “Everywhere!” Nicholson yelled. “Wind’s everywhere!”

  Garvey unhitched both safety belts, causing the weight of his body to compress onto his internal injuries. Ignoring the pain, he leaned hard to his right, against Nicholson, and kicked at the bent and battered door. It opened a few inches. The next time it opened, the wind helped it by wrenching it off one of its hinges and flattening it against the side of the van.

  “Wind’s dying down a little,” he lied to Nicholson, and then was astounded to notice that it was true. The roaring had gone from sounding like a freight train to sounding like a thousand lonely and desperate wolves. A hurricane-spawned tornado, Garvey guessed. Moving away, he hoped.

  He wormed and wriggled out of the van. The hail had stopped, but rain was still driven sideways by the wind. Garvey was sore all over. Later he’d have to take inventory to see if he was badly injured. With great effort he could stand, leaning into the wind. Nicholson was near him, on hands and knees, his head bowed to Sophia’s ferocity.

  The overturned van’s rear doors were still closed, though the roof was crushed and the wire-reinforced glass was gone from the back windows. A pair of orange-clad legs and black prison shoes extended from one of the windows, and a voice was screaming.

  Inside the back of the van, Chad Bingham was cut and bleeding from the long shard of glass in Daniel Danielle’s hand. Daniel was bleeding himself, from cuts made by sharp glass or metal. Bingham’s scalp was laid open and his face was covered with blood. In the wild tumble of the van, Daniel Danielle had managed to wrench the .25-caliber handgun from where it was taped to Bingham’s ankle. Bingham, with his outside-the-walls complexion, hadn’t fooled Daniel for a second.

  Daniel held the small handgun against Bingham’s thro
at. Bingham’s legs were twisted backward, under him. The steel rail both men had been cuffed to had broken at the weld. They were free, though their wrists were still cuffed.

  It was Daniel’s legs protruding from the van’s window. Both men knew the gun had hollow-point bullets and would kill easily and messily at close range. Daniel dropped the shard of glass, then used the hand without the gun and rubbed some of Bingham’s blood over his own face and into his hair. Both men had prison haircuts. Bloodied up as they were, they could be mistaken for each other. Daniel needed only a moment of mistaken identity, and he would act.

  He dug the gun’s barrel into Bingham’s throat. “Yell that I’m dead, and you want outta here. Do it if you want to live,” he said to Bingham. “Don’t do as I say, and bullets start slamming around your insides.”

  Bingham’s eyes rolled with fear. He knew Daniel’s reputation, and knew the killer had earned it.

  “It’s me!” he yelled. “It’s Bingham. Daniel’s dead. Get me the hell outta here!”

  All the time he was yelling, Daniel was kicking with his free lower legs.

  It seemed a lot of time passed. He jabbed again into Bingham’s neck with the gun barrel. “Hey!” Bingham yelled, “Help!” While Daniel kicked.