False Accusations by Jacobson, Alan (great novels of all time .txt) 📕

into his skin like acid on a pane of glass. “And I’m equally fortunate to have you for a friend, Jeffrey. Thanks again. You came through when I needed it most.”

“While you’re so appreciative, I should hand you my bill.”

They both laughed.

Leeza’s call from upstairs urging him to come to bed interrupted them. He reached over to the intercom on the wall behind his desk and told her he would join her in a few moments.

“Well, I’d better be going,” Hellman said as he rose from the chair.

“You okay to drive? You can stay the night if you want.”

“Nah,” he said with the wave of a hand. “I’m fine. I’ll call you in a couple of days.”

Madison started to get up; Hellman motioned him down. “I’ll let myself out.”

Madison leaned back in the leather chair, resting his feet on the desk. He felt numb as he attempted to sort through his thoughts, his plans for the future. Although it was quiet now in the house, the echoes of the noise from the party still buzzed in his ears.

He lay silently, watching the gentle rise and fall of his chest with each breath, the gleeful high of only an hour ago becoming a post-drunken depression. He thought of one of his favorite poems: “The Road Not Taken,” by Robert Frost. As he lay there, he pondered what his life would have been like had Brittany Harding not crossed his path, had she not accused him of rape, had she not tried to blackmail him, had she not attempted to destroy his marriage. Had she not made him kill those two innocent people.

He began to weep, appraising his hollow victory. Physically free, emotionally imprisoned for life. Held captive by his own horrible secret.

SPECIAL SERIES PREVIEW

Karen Vail is no ordinary FBI agent. She’s a profiler, brought to life by Alan Jacobson’s seven years of unprecedented access to, and research with, the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico. Karen Vail debuted in The 7th Victim to raves from reviewers, readers...even one of the founding fathers of the real Behavioral Analysis Unit.

The Karen Vail series is currently comprised of the bestselling novels The 7th Victim, Crush, Velocity, and Jacobson’s latest release, Inmate 1577, which Clive Cussler called “A powerful thriller, brilliantly conceived and written.”

So step into the world of Karen Vail and discover a character that James Patterson called “Compelling,” who Michael Connelly described as “My kind of hero,” and which Nelson DeMille found “Tough, smart, funny, and very believable.”

INMATE 1577

Inmate 1577

Copyright © 2011 by Alan Jacobson

Published by Premier Digital Publishing

All rights reserved.

1

January 29, 1955

8:39 PM

37 W. Rosedale Avenue

Northfield, New Jersey

Henry sat deathly still in the corner watching the life drain from his mother’s body, knees drawn tight against his chest, arms wrapped around his shins. He stared at the blood seeping from her pulpy head wounds, poking forth from between strands of matted hair.

The seven-year-old boy had told the policeman in so many words about the man in the black knit mask who came up from behind and struck his mother several times, then disappeared out the back door. Afterwards, Henry had sat frozen, unable to move, unable to comfort her in her last seconds before her body stilled, her eyes rapt in death.

A bottle of maple syrup, the lone weapon his mother had grabbed to fight off her attacker, lay shattered on the floor, oozing across the kitchen linoleum. In halting sentences, with shock-laden tear-filled eyes, Henry described how the masked man had knocked it from her hand before she could raise it.

It now sat impotent on the ground, like a cold revolver stuck in the deepest reaches of a holster, never given the opportunity to be of service.

Henry had finally eased forward, inching across the floor until the tips of his toes were a fraction of an inch from the pooled blood that encircled his mother’s head. He reached over and touched her ashen face, then poked it, despite the policeman’s admonishment to stay back from her body.

At his tender age, the finality of death was little more than an innate concept, like when an animal in the wild knows that one of its own kind is no longer among the living.

THE POLICEMAN, AFTER HAVING WAITED in the living room with Henry, walked outside into the winter evening. Moments later, he pushed open the door and then stepped aside so another man could enter.

Walton MacNally’s eyes instantly settled on the center of the kitchen floor, taking in the violence laid bare before him. A grocery bag dropped from his hand, glass bottles within shattering as it struck the hard floor.

“Doris?” He rushed to her side, caressed her face, felt for a pulse, couldn’t stop staring at her head wounds.

“Sir!” the cop said. “Mr. MacNally. Don’t touch the body—”

MacNally’s Adam’s apple rose sharply, then fell. Ignoring the cop’s directive, he lifted Doris’s hand and brought it to his lips, kissed it, and then started whimpering. He became aware of his son and pulled his gaze from his wife’s irreparably injured and abnormally still body.

“Henry—what...what happened?”

The boy’s eyes coursed down to his mother. His lips made an attempt to move, but no sound emerged.

But there was little doubt as to what had transpired. His wife had met with severe violence, the overt damage to her head and brain unquestionably fatal.

A parched “Why?” managed to scrape from MacNally’s throat. “Who?”

“A detective should be here any minute,” the policeman said.

MacNally scooted over to Henry and took the boy into his arms. His life had been turned upside down, destroyed...his mother, his maternal presence, ripped from him like a doe taken down by a lion while her fawn watches.

MacNally swallowed hard. A whimper threatened to escape his throat, but he fought it back. A pain unrecognizable to him, unlike anything he had ever felt, emerged from deep in his soul and manifested as a plaintive,