Steal, page 1
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2022 by James Patterson
Excerpt from Run, Rose, Run copyright © 2022 by James Patterson and Dolly Parton
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ISBN 9781538703526 (trade paperback) / 9781538709177 (large-print paperback) / 9781538703533 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number 2021948178
E3-20220118-DA-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
PROLOGUE: Better than Betty, Deader than Dead ONE
TWO
BOOK ONE: The Art of Revenge CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
BOOK TWO: The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
BOOK THREE: You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
BOOK FOUR: The Masterpiece CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 74
CHAPTER 75
CHAPTER 76
CHAPTER 77
CHAPTER 78
CHAPTER 79
CHAPTER 80
CHAPTER 81
CHAPTER 82
CHAPTER 83
CHAPTER 84
CHAPTER 85
CHAPTER 86
CHAPTER 87
CHAPTER 88
CHAPTER 89
CHAPTER 90
CHAPTER 91
CHAPTER 92
CHAPTER 93
CHAPTER 94
CHAPTER 95
CHAPTER 96
CHAPTER 97
CHAPTER 98
CHAPTER 99
CHAPTER 100
CHAPTER 101
CHAPTER 102
CHAPTER 103
CHAPTER 104
CHAPTER 105
CHAPTER 106
CHAPTER 107
EPILOGUE: The Finishing Touches CHAPTER 108
Discover More
Run, Rose, Run Teaser Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
About the Authors
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PROLOGUE
Better than Betty,
Deader than Dead
ONE
Carter von Oehson mixed himself a tall gin and tonic from behind the polished mahogany bar of his father’s billiard room, topping it off with a squeeze of lime.
“Remember,” his father once told him, “never put the used wedge of lime in your drink. Toss it and reach for a new one. Anything less is sloppy.”
Carter never forgot that piece of fatherly advice, if for no other reason than he was only nine years old at the time.
A von Oehson man is never too young to learn the finer points of life.
Nor will he ever be deprived of the finest education. After boarding at Phillips Exeter, Carter was now a freshman at Yale. Never mind that he was whip smart and probably could’ve gotten in on his own. It didn’t matter if he had the grades or test scores. What Carter had was his name—von Oehson—and, more important, the man who gave it to him.
Mathias von Oehson, Yale class of ’86, ran the world’s most profitable hedge fund. Fortune magazine listed his net worth north of twenty-four billion dollars, a hundred million of which was earmarked for his beloved alma mater upon Carter’s graduation. Of course, Carter had only just submitted his application to Yale when his father made that hundred-million-dollar pledge to three of the university’s senior trustees over some butter-drenched porterhouses at Peter Luger. Timing is everything. And for Mathias von Oehson, so was his only son going to Yale.
In fact, Carter’s enrollment had never been discussed between the two of them. It had always just been assumed. Like it or not, Carter, that’s where you’re going.
But, oh, how Carter liked it.
The all-night parties at Durfee Hall. The infamous naked run through Bass Library. Taking in a dome show at Leitner Planetarium while completely stoned out of your gourd, and afterward eating an entire coal-fired large pepperoni from Pepe’s Pizzeria. An Ivy League education at its absolute finest.
Best of all—what Carter really liked—was that a mere thirty minutes away, a straight shot south on I-95 in his matte-black BMW M8 coupe, was his parents’ home. One of their houses, at least.
It was a sprawling Nantucket shingle in Darien, designed by Francis Fleetwood, that overlooked Long Island Sound and measured twenty-six thousand square feet with an estimated value of fifty-four million dollars. And most of the time it just sat there. Empty.
Except when Betty was coming over. Betty was one of Carter’s best-kept secrets. She was also late.
Carter glanced again at the Patek Philippe strapped to his wrist with a preppy blue-and-white nylon band. He and Betty had had many dates, and he couldn’t remember another when she had kept him waiting. Time was money, after all. Her time, his money.
The thought of calling her flashed through his mind as he took a sip of his gin and tonic, but that idea was quickly rendered moot by the melodic chime of the front doorbell.
In ripped jeans and a faded polo shirt, Carter strode barefoot across the white Italian marble of his parents’ foyer. In some ways Betty’s arrival was the best part. The anticipation. The initial slow climb of a giant roller coaster before the ride of his life. And always, always, always the same two words when he opened the door.
“Hello, handsome,” she would say.
Not today, though.
Carter blinked a few times, confused. But also a bit mesmerized.
She was auburn hair, lush and long. She was tanned skin, even now, in the month of December, accessorized with a full-length mink that left little doubt that not much was worn underneath it.
“You’re not Betty,” he said.
“No,” she replied, slinking up to his left ear and whispering in a Russian accent. “I’m better than Betty.”
TWO
She breezed by him, planting a three-inch stiletto heel in the middle of the foyer and turning around. Her jade-green eyes shifted to his hand. “What are you drinking?” she asked.
Carter glanced down as if reminding himself. “A gin and tonic.”
“Boring. You have any tequila?”
“That depends. You have a name?”
She shook her head, playfully disappo
“That was only one.”
“One too many,” she chided him. “Besides, Betty told me you like a little mystery.”
“So, you and her are—friends?”
“Something like that. She had to travel somewhere last minute but thought you would like me.” She dropped the mink just enough to expose the curve of her naked breasts, slightly larger than Betty’s. “You do like me, don’t you?”
Um.
“I think you’re very pretty,” said Carter, sounding way more like a schoolboy than he wanted to. He cleared his throat, dropping a half octave. “In fact, I’d say you’re gorgeous.”
“Good,” she said, pulling the mink back over her shoulders. “Now how about that tequila?”
Carter led her into the billiard room and straight to the bar. For sure, he’d impress her with his knowledge of the blue agave aging process. “Reposado or añejo?” he asked.
Or maybe not. “Shut up and pour,” she said.
Carter grabbed a lowball glass, pouring a generous shot of Partida Elegante. No sooner had he handed it to her than she threw it back like a pro, so to speak. Then, without the slightest hesitation, she reached into his gin and tonic for the unused lime, sucking it dry.
Plop. Back into his glass it went.
“Would you like to help me out of my coat, Carter?”
She turned around, the nape of her long neck and everything else about her inviting in Carter a hoard of extremely impure thoughts. Clink, clink, clink went the roller coaster, climbing upward. Were it not for the other sound in Carter’s head, his father’s voice, that mink of hers would’ve already been on the floor, along with the both of them.
“Cigars and women. The two things in life you always take your time with, son.”
That was on Carter’s eleventh birthday.
Slowly, Carter reached around with both hands, feeling his way inside the front of her coat. He hated the music of John Mayer—not to mention John Mayer himself—but for the first time he sort of knew what the guy was getting at with his song “Your Body Is a Wonderland.” This woman felt amazing. Her skin, soft as the mink.
Of course, a young man can only be so patient.
Carter’s hands slid past her navel, his fingers tracing the edge of her lace panties. He would do a drive-by first, a little tour of the perimeter before delving in.
Suddenly, he froze. What the…?
There was a bulge in those panties where there absolutely, positively should not have been a bulge. Unless, of course, Better Than Betty was actually a—Benny?
Carter’s hands snapped back. He nearly tripped over his own feet as he tried to pull away. When she spun around, the first thing he saw was her smile. Then came the second thing.
He’d felt something hard, all right, and for a split second he was relieved to know that it was something other than what he thought. The next split second, he wasn’t so sure.
He could live with The Crying Game. But the snub-nosed, single-action .38 now aimed at his chest?
“Who are you?” asked Carter. “What do you want?”
“Again with the questions,” she said.
Fine, no questions. Just a knee-jerk offer born of sheer panic and an extremely privileged upbringing. “If it’s money, you can have it. As much as you want. I promise. Anything. You can have it.”
She shook her head with mock disgust. “See, now you’re insulting me, Carter. Do I look like I need money?”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“Shut up already. You were better off asking questions.”
She cocked the hammer, the metallic sound—click!—echoing in Carter’s head and jogging loose the one and only question that really mattered now.
“Are you going to kill me?” he asked, his voice cracking.
Surprise, surprise. She shook her head no. But it was the way she did it, as if he’d just asked a tricky question with an even trickier answer.
“No, I’m not going to kill you,” she explained. “You’re going to do it for us.”
BOOK ONE
The Art of Revenge
CHAPTER 1
I once taught a class with a massive hangover. My head was throbbing and I wanted to throw up. It wasn’t my finest hour, but it wasn’t my worst, either.
During another semester, pre-Covid-19, I’d caught the flu. I had a temperature of 103 degrees and looked paler than a box of chalk. Still another time I was battling a kidney stone that had me keeling over in agony while discussing whether Freud really did have the hots for his mother.
The point being, the postal service has nothing on me. When Dylan Reinhart has an abnormal-psychology lecture to give, he delivers it no matter what.
But for the first time I simply didn’t have it in me.
Still, I couldn’t call in sick. Of all classes, this was one I knew I couldn’t miss.
If his fellow students can show up, I sure as hell can, too.
“Good morning, everyone, although I truly wish it were a good morning,” I began.
Then I just stopped. I knew everything I wanted to say, all the soothing reassurances that the grieving process is actually very healthy and that life—no matter how challenging at times or, more aptly put, how utterly effed-up beyond hope it can all too often feel like—is still always worth living. Nothing is sweeter in death. If it were, the pope wouldn’t have a pope mobile.
Again, though, I just stopped. All I could do was stare helplessly at my students as they stared right back at me. I could see it in their eyes. None of us had this in us.
Suicide isn’t supposed to make sense. I knew that. Hell, I’d even written about it extensively in AJP, the American Journal of Psychology. But this, what Carter had done, truly made no sense at all.
The kid wasn’t born on third base. No, he had it even better. Carter von Oehson was born crossing home plate after hitting the walk-off home run to win the World Series. Game seven, no less. He was the son of a multibillionaire and GQ–model handsome. Literally. Carter had appeared only months ago in the magazine’s September issue for a feature called “The Young Men of the Ivy League.” He was Mr. Yale.
So how does this young man, my student, charismatic as all get-out and with so much going for him, decide it simply isn’t enough? Why did Carter von Oehson take to Instagram a few weeks before Christmas and announce that “everything isn’t as peachy keen as it seems” and that he “no longer has the will”?
Even after that post, people still didn’t believe it. This was Carter being Carter. A cutup. A provocateur. He didn’t shy away from drama—he courted it. Any minute now he’d show up back on campus, all smiles and laughs. That’s what everyone thought.
But then those minutes became days. That’s when the New Haven police were called. That’s when it became news—local, tristate area, and then national. Carter’s roommate explained in a TV interview, while standing in front of the century-old Harkness Tower, that last Tuesday morning Carter had left their second-floor room in the Old Campus dorm, wearing his winter coat. He had his car keys but not his knapsack.
His roommate didn’t think anything of it because Carter didn’t have any Tuesday classes and apparently left campus a lot on those days. Sometimes he came back Tuesday night, sometimes the next morning. But he always came back.
Then Saturday happened.
No one could blame Carter’s parents for not mentioning to detectives that Carter kept a Sunfish at their waterfront Darien home. Who thinks of sailing in December? Besides, it had been months since the boat had been tied to their dock in plain sight, let alone configured. Before Carter left back in August for freshman orientation, he’d disassembled the Sunfish and stored it in the garage.
A maintenance worker at the Tokeneke Club less than a mile from the von Oehson home was the one who first spotted the boat at low tide early Saturday morning. The Sunfish was wedged along the side of a jetty that shielded the club’s beach. It had been washed ashore, fully intact, save for the heavy scratches on the bow. Carter had taken the boat out, but only the boat returned.
The Coast Guard concluded its search after twenty-four hours. Divers scoured the waters around the jetty, although if Carter had accidentally drowned he presumably would’ve either still been floating or washed ashore. By the end of the weekend there was only one logical conclusion, especially given Carter’s Instagram post. There was nothing accidental about his drowning.
