Instinct (previously published as Murder Games)

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By James Patterson

By Howard Roughan

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This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around February 20, 2018. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

A criminal behavior expert teams up with an NYPD detective to track down a criminal in the novel that inspired the hit CBS TV series starring Alan Cumming.

Dr. Dylan Reinhart wrote the book on criminal behavior. Literally: he’s a renowned, bestselling Ivy League expert on the subject. When a copy of his book turns up at a gruesome murder scene-along with a threatening message from the killer-it looks like someone has been taking notes.

Elizabeth Needham is the headstrong and brilliant NYPD Detective in charge of the case who recruits Dylan to help investigate another souvenir left at the scene: a playing card. Another murder, another card. . . and now Dylan suspects that the cards aren’t a signature; they’re a deadly hint pointing directly toward the next victim.

As tabloid headlines about the killer known as “The Dealer” scream from newsstands, New York City descends into panic. With the cops at a loss, it’s up to Dylan to hunt down a serial killer unlike any the city has ever seen. Only someone with Dylan’s expertise can hope to go inside the mind of a criminal and convince The Dealer to lay down his cards. But after thinking like a criminal, could Dylan become one?

A heart-pounding novel of suspense more shocking than any tabloid true crime story, Instinct introduces the next unforgettable character from the imagination of James Patterson, the world’s #1 bestselling author.

Excerpt

Prologue

The Dealer Manifesto

Entry #1




 

SO YOU want to be a serial killer…

Sure, you can go around just shooting people, bang-bang, but I’ve found that guns, while sometimes the right tool for the job, often leave me unsatisfied. There’s a lack of intimacy involved when all you have to do is pull a trigger. You hear the blast and see the carnage, the way your victim’s flesh ruptures and bursts open in an instant, but you don’t really feel the same adrenaline as with other, let’s say more personal, methods of murdering someone.

Me? I like to mix things up. There are so many wonderful and creative ways to kill people, and I really feel as if I owe it to myself and my cause to make sure that I branch out and keep it interesting. And even when circumstances do call for a gun, I try to add a twist to it, a little something extra. Sundaes always look better with a cherry on top.

Still, you’d be amazed at how much satisfaction can be derived from some of the most rudimentary approaches. Stabbing someone to death, for instance. I can’t think of a more personal and intimate experience. The sound that a knife makes when piercing human skin is nothing short of intoxicating. You can’t help yourself sometimes. You want to hear it over and over and over.

Of course, repeatedly stabbing someone to death isn’t without a downside or two. For instance, it tends to be messy. That’s why I like to wear clothes that I can simply throw away afterward. No muss, no fuss. If you want to be a real stickler for hiding evidence, though, burning the clothes would be even better.

But if you’re on a budget or partial to a particular outfit—you know, a certain shirt or comfortable pair of pants that you enjoy killing in more than others—remember that you want to treat the bloodstains as soon as possible with a strong prewash stain remover and let it soak in for a good hour or so before throwing the clothes in the Maytag. Also, I highly recommend an extra rinse cycle.

Another downside, or at least a potential one, is that stabbing a person to death requires a tad more preparation. It takes a little longer than simply aiming a gun, and it also puts a premium on the element of surprise. Even then, the first couple of stabs don’t always do the trick. Be prepared for some resistance, depending on the size and stubbornness of your victim.

Not all folks, however, will put up a fight. We assume that people have a tremendous will to live, but it’s amazing how quickly some of them will resign themselves to their fate, especially when it comes to dying in a massive pool of their own blood.

That about covers it for my first entry. If you have any questions, I’m afraid you’re on your own. It’s not like I have an 800 number or an e-mail address I can give out. For obvious reasons, too, I can’t tell you my real name. But lately people have taken to calling me the Dealer, which I happen to like, so I’ve taken to it as well. There’s a nice ring to it. The Dealer. Clean. Authoritative. Quite proprietary, too, given my methods. I’d trademark it if I could.

I mean, the best serial killers, the ones whom people tend to remember, always manage to have a good moniker, the kind of nickname that seems to suit them perfectly. Otherwise, what’s the point? The shrinks will tell you that guys like me are first and foremost narcissists, but if that means taking pride in your craft and planning each and every murder with meticulous care, then I suppose there are worse things to be called.

Honestly, I’m just giving you all what you want. A little razzle-dazzle, an escape from your dreary lives. What else are you going to talk about while sipping your four-dollar coffees and acting superior to the rest of the world?

You want me. You need me. And in time, you’ll all discover that I’m doing you nothing less than a huge favor. Trust me.

Now, if you don’t mind, there’s someone else I really need to kill.




Book One

Shuffle Up and Deal




Chapter 1

THE LECTURE hall hushed to a pin-drop silence the moment I walked in, every conversation stopping on a dime, every pair of eyes homing in on me, watching my every move.

For the record, any professor who tells you that he doesn’t get off on this bit of catnip for the ego, if only a little, is completely full of crap. We all love it.

Milking the silence a few seconds longer, I took my time unloading my shoulder bag on the table next to the lectern before slowly turning to the class with the same opening speech I’ve been delivering now for years. The only thing that ever changes is that the faces staring back at me always seem to look just a little bit younger every time I give the speech.

There’s nothing like a college campus to make a thirty-four-year-old guy feel over the hill.

And we’re off…

“Good morning, my assembled prodigies, all you former class presidents and valedictorians, type A go-getters and relentless overachievers, and hopefully only a tiny smattering of you whose mommies and daddies knew the right people on the Yale admissions committee. Welcome to Abnormal Behavioral Analysis, commonly referred to as Intro to Psychopaths or, better yet, Your Ex-Boyfriend or Girlfriend 101. My name is Professor Dylan Reinhart; that’s Dylan with a y, and, yes, my mother was a huge Bob Dylan fan. Are there any questions so far?”

Every year, someone takes the bait.

A blonde in the third row raised her hand with an easy confidence that bordered on flirtation. Clearly she hadn’t done her homework on me.

“Yes? What’s your name?” I asked.

“Heather,” she answered. Heather with the come-hither smile.

“Thank you, Heather, but asking if there were any questions was a rhetorical question on my part. I haven’t begun teaching you anything yet, so there shouldn’t be anything you need to ask about,” I said. “And with that we come to the first rule of this class. Ask only what you don’t understand.”

I can be such a hard-ass sometimes.

Although I assure you it’s not without a larger purpose in mind for these students. The vast majority of them have been treated like geniuses since the third grade, and the sooner they figure out they’re not, the better. As a former patent-office clerk with crazy hair once said, “A true genius admits that he knows nothing.” That guy’s name was Einstein.

Meanwhile, poor Heather in the third row looked as if she’d just eaten a bad oyster. Don’t worry, I’ll make it up to her at some point.

I continued. “The textbook for this class is entitled Permission Theory: Redefining Abnormal Behavior, and for those of you not familiar with the author, handsome devil that he is, let it be known that he’s a bit of a narcissist who enjoys listening to the sound of his own voice almost as much as he does forcing others to listen to it.”

Most of the room laughed. Those who didn’t had their heads buried in their syllabi to see that, yes, I, Dylan Reinhart, was indeed the author of said textbook.

“This of course brings us to rule number two,” I said. “You will attend every class. Your only excuse for missing a class will be your own death or someone else’s, provided this someone else either breast-fed you, coached your Little League team, or routinely put a five-dollar bill in your childhood birthday card and signed it Love, Grandma and Grandpa.”

A student in the first row, obviously a freshman, was typing feverishly on his laptop. I remained silent until he finally looked up at me.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He swallowed hard and glanced at his keyboard, confused. “I was…um…taking notes,” he said meekly.

“Rule number three,” I announced with a little added volume. “You will not take notes in this class. I repeat, you will not take notes. What you will do is listen. The premise of this course is to challenge the long-standing conventional thinking about abnormal behavior, and as far as I’m concerned there’s nothing more abnormal than my lecturing to a roomful of stenographers.” I paused, smiling. “Are there any questions?”

This time, no one raised a hand. Geniuses or not, they were all still students at Yale. They didn’t get there by learning slowly.

“Good,” I said. “Now let’s get started.”

But before I could, a noise in the back of the room had every head turning. It was only the door opening, nothing more.

Still, there was something different about it.

Sometimes you just know the sound of trouble even before she walks into the room.




Chapter 2

“SHIT!” SHE announced from the top of the aisle as she realized everyone was staring at her. Immediately she slapped her forehead. “Shit, I just said that out loud, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did,” I said. “Lucky for you, I don’t give two shits about someone cursing in my class.” I stepped out in front of the lectern. “Welcome.”

Writers can spot their own books a mile away, and she had mine tucked under her arm. “You’re Professor Reinhart, right?” she asked.

“Yes,” I answered. “And you are?”

“Clearly interrupting,” she said.

She was either a student or someone who happened to look young for her age. I couldn’t tell.

For sure, though, she was attractive. The proof wasn’t so much the way the male students were staring at her but rather the female students. If you don’t understand that, then you probably have no clue why women buy expensive shoes. Hint: it has nothing to do with men.

“I’m sorry, I still didn’t get your name,” I said.

“It’s Elizabeth,” she answered. “Elizabeth Needham.”

“Are you a student here, Ms. Needham?” I asked.

“At Yale?” She laughed deeply from her gut. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“Apparently I am,” I said.

She looked around the room. “I mean, no offense, of course.”

“I’m sure I speak for everyone here when I say none taken. But if you’re not a student…”

“Then who am I? Yes, that’s a good question,” she said.

“Will there be a good answer?”

“How about I just sit in on the class and we’ll talk afterward?”

She half tiptoed over to an empty chair in the back row. For good measure, she gave me a nod as if to say, “Carry on.”

Whoever she was, she had balls.

As if the entire class were sitting midcourt at Wimbledon, they all turned their heads back to me—whoosh!—to see what would happen next. The ball was clearly in my court.

“Sixty-eight thousand, two hundred and thirty dollars,” I called out.

Whoosh! went everyone’s head back to her.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“That’s the cost of a year at Yale, Ms. Needham, of which approximately forty-nine thousand dollars is for tuition,” I said.

“Are you asking me to leave?”

“No, I’m asking if you have your checkbook.”

Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!

With that, she stood with a huff and began walking toward the door. I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of guilt. My damn conscience. It’s my Achilles’ heel.

“I hope I didn’t offend you, Ms. Needham,” I said.

She stopped, raising a palm. “That’s quite all right. For the record, though, it’s Detective Needham. The reason I’m here is because I’m pretty sure someone wants to kill you.”

Then whoosh!

She was gone.




Chapter 3

“GO AFTER her!” a few students shouted.

I was tempted, but I figured if someone really did want me dead there was no better place to be than in a roomful of potential witnesses.

I stayed put and delivered my lecture as planned. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t the best lecture I’d ever given, and maybe I rushed through it just a wee bit. A guy can compartmentalize only so much.

I obviously needed to talk to this woman, and I knew it would take only one call after class to know whether she was still on campus.

“No,” said the guy who answered the phone at the New Haven police department. “We don’t have a Detective Elizabeth Needham.”

I didn’t think so. There was something “big city” about her. Or at least a bigger city than New Haven. That meant she traveled a distance to see me. No way she would leave without our talking.

Sure enough, within seconds I felt the vibration of a text message. She’s a detective, she flashes her badge, and the dean or some other keeper of all things confidential coughs up my cell number.

Meet me @ Jojo’s.

No address and none needed. A coffee shop that everyone on campus knows. It was close by, too.

A few minutes later, I was walking toward her at a table in the back. She had my book and some colored folders laid out meticulously, everything perfectly aligned. She was peering at me with her dark brown eyes over an oversize mug.

“Fancy meeting you here,” I said, taking a seat.

Of course, the charm of Jojo’s, on Chapel Street, is that there’s nothing fancy about it. Wooden tables and chairs on a scuffed-up wood floor were scattered about, and some grandma-style curtains were hanging in the windows. Very college.

“How was the rest of class?” she asked. Her flashing of a wry smile would’ve been redundant.

“A third of the students wanted me to chase after you while another third actually thought you were a plant—you know, someone I hired. The course is about abnormal behavior, after all.”

“And the remaining third?” she asked.

“Too busy wondering what grade they’ll get if someone does indeed kill me before the term is over,” I said.

I waited for her to tell me that she’d been a tad melodramatic; that no one really wanted to kill me. Instead she opened the folder directly in front her. It was green.

“Let’s back up a bit,” she said.

She reintroduced herself. Elizabeth Needham, NYPD detective second grade. I could call her Elizabeth, though.

Then she basically introduced me to myself.

I sat there listening as she quickly reduced my life to a series of bullet points, reading in a near monotone off a hand-scribbled piece of paper in the folder. At least it wasn’t a cocktail napkin.

“Dr. Dylan Reinhart…Yale undergrad…PhD in psychology, also Yale…three-year research fellowship, University of Cambridge…then another PhD, this time from MIT, in statistics with a focus on Bayesian inference.” She paused and looked up. “Am I supposed to know what that is? Bayesian inference?”

Maybe if you’re dating Nate Silver…

“Bayesian inference is why most women shouldn’t have routine mammograms until they’re fifty,” I said.

“And why’s that?”

I nodded at the folder. “You’re the one who apparently likes to do her research, Elizabeth.”

“This bothers you, doesn’t it?” she asked. “My looking into your background?”

“No. What bothers me is that you still haven’t explained who wants to kill me. Anytime you’re ready.”

She closed the folder, resting her hands on top of it. No wedding ring. No jewelry of any kind. “Do you know who Allen Grimes is?”

“Grimes on Crimes?” The guy wrote a daily column for the New York Gazette. I’d heard about it—catchy name and all—but never read it.

Elizabeth nodded. “That’s him,” she said. “Two days ago, Grimes received an anonymous package in the mail. Inside it was your book.”

“Is that a crime?” I asked.

I was half joking. Not Elizabeth, though.

“As it turns out, it was a crime,” she said.




Chapter 4

ELIZABETH REACHED to her left, pulling another folder in front of her. This one was red. Red’s never good.

“Your book came with a bookmark,” she said.

She opened the folder and removed a small evidence bag. It was sealed, labeled, and just big enough for a ham sandwich. That made it the ideal size for what it was actually holding.

I leaned in, staring at it. “A playing card?”

It wasn’t a question; that was clearly what it was. A playing card. The king of clubs.

“Does this mean anything to you?” she asked.

“That’s silly. Why would it?”

“Yeah, you’re right,” said Elizabeth, rolling her eyes. “Clearly the reason I drove all the way out here from Manhattan is so I could ask you silly and irrelevant questions.”

“You get the word feisty a lot, don’t you?” I asked.

“I prefer spirited,” she said. “What do you prefer instead of smug?

“Actually, I’m okay with smug.”

To her credit, she kept the straight face a good five seconds before she smiled. Peace begins with a smile, said Mother Teresa.

“No, the card doesn’t register anything with me,” I said. “Of course, it is pretty common for people to use playing cards as bookmarks.”

“Agreed,” she said. “Here’s something not so common, though. In fact, it’s pretty damn rare.”

Elizabeth turned the bag around so I could see the back of the card. There was a dark red blotch on what was a harlequin-patterned blue-and-white background. It was blood.

“I assume you’ve already had it tested,” I said.

“It’s type AB negative,” she said. “Only around 1 percent of the population has it.”

“Yeah, I’d say that’s rare, all right. I’d also say it was on purpose.”

“You and me both,” she said with a nod. “Blood type as bread crumbs.”

“So where did it lead you?” I asked.




Chapter 5

ELIZABETH REACHED for her red folder again and took out an eight-by-ten photo, black and white. As crime scenes go, this one was particularly grisly. Even the most devout Wes Craven fan would’ve flinched.

“The victim’s name is Jared Louden, ran a large hedge fund,” she said. “He was stabbed to death—to put it mildly—six days ago in the entryway of his Upper East Side town house. No witnesses, no leads. Nothing.”

I stared at the image of Louden in a pool of his own blood, his dapper-looking suit shredded from seemingly endless entry wounds. Absolutely brutal. “How many days ago did you say?”

“Six,” she answered, “and since then there hasn’t been another murder victim with AB negative blood in a two-hundred-mile radius.”

“What about before this guy?” I asked. “Any other unsolved cases?”

“There’s one from more than eight months ago. A prostitute shot to death in Queens.” Elizabeth nodded at the back of the playing card. “This blood’s not eight months old. The lab put it at no more than a week.”

“You said the card, along with my book, was mailed, right? It wasn’t delivered by messenger?”

“Yes, definitely mailed. Routed through Farley.”

She assumed I knew that was the main post office in Manhattan, the James A. Farley building, a.k.a. the one with the famous inscription. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

“The address wasn’t handwritten, was it?” I asked, speaking of inscriptions. I figured there was no chance.

“Actually, it was,” she said. “But it was Toys‘R’Us.”

That reference I didn’t know. “Toys‘R’Us? As in the toy store?”

“As in writing with your nondominant hand so it’s childlike,” she explained. “That’s what we call it, at least. Nearly impossible to trace.”

“And the card itself: what was it again?”

Elizabeth spun the evidence bag around again to show me.

“The king of clubs,” she said. “My first thought was a God complex. The killer thinks of himself as a king.”

“Does that make me his subject?”

“He obviously identifies with you or your book in some way. But whether he loathes you or reveres you, the chances are pretty good that he wants to kill you.”

“I’m sure it’s a possibility, but that’s a pretty big leap,” I said.

“A big leap, huh?”

“Sure. Fixation disorders play out in many ways.”

“You’re right,” she said. “Then again…” Her voice trailed off.

“What do you mean?” I asked. What haven’t you shown me?

Elizabeth picked up the book, turning it around so I could see my author photo.

Damn.

“How’s that leap looking now?” she said.




Chapter 6

WITH SEVENTY-FIVE miles between New Haven and the Upper West Side of Manhattan I could either suffer through the round-trip journey every week or make the best of it. I chose the latter, with more than a little help from a restored 1961 Triumph TR6 Trophy motorcycle, the same model that Steve McQueen rode like a boss in The Great Escape. A few hard twists of the wrist, a rev of the engine, and the world and its worries are always left behind.

Not today, though.

Genre:

  • Praise for Murder Games:

    An instant New York Times bestseller!
    A USA Today bestseller!
  • "Patterson has mastered the art of writing page-turning bestsellers."—Chicago Sun-Times
  • "The page-turningest author in the game right now."—San Francisco Chronicle

On Sale
Feb 20, 2018
Page Count
368 pages
ISBN-13
9781478945185

James Patterson

About the Author

James Patterson is the world’s bestselling author, best known for his many enduring fictional characters and series, including Alex Cross, the Women’s Murder Club, Michael Bennett, Maximum Ride, Middle School, I Funny, and Jacky Ha-Ha. Patterson’s writing career is characterized by a single mission: to prove to everyone, from children to adults, that there is no such thing as a person who “doesn’t like to read,” only people who haven’t found the right book. He’s given over a million books to schoolkids and over forty million dollars to support education, and endowed over five thousand college scholarships for teachers. He writes full-time and lives in Florida with his family.

Learn more at jamespatterson.com

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Howard Roughan

About the Author

Howard Roughan has cowritten several books with James Patterson and is the author of The Promise of a Lie and The Up and Comer. He lives in Florida with his wife and son.

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