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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  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

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  “Simply put, the finest crime suspense series I’ve come across in the last twenty years . . . your basic can’t-put-’em-down thrill rides.”

  —Stephen King

  China Lake

  “Do me a favor, okay? Lay your hands on . . . China Lake. [It] had me at page one. Miss Gardiner makes it all work. . . . Amazingly entertaining.”—Stephen King

  “[An] exciting mix. Great stuff.”—Independent on Sunday

  “With a colorful cast of richly delineated characters, a protagonist with whom the readers will easily identify—all big hearted, quick tongued, and hair-trigger tempered . . . a fast-paced ride through some of the more dubious nooks and crannies of the American dream.”—The Guardian (UK)

  “Fast and hard-edged. Buy it, read it.”—Hull Daily Mail

  “A cracker, with memorable characters, memorable lines, and a plot that races along to an explosive ending. A great summer read.”—Huddersfield Daily Examiner

  “Very well written, racy, and witty.”—Tangled Web

  “From beginning to end, China Lake is a book no reader of thrillers will be able to put down. Great characters, dynamic plot, nail-biting action—Meg Gardiner gives us everything.”

  —Elizabeth George

  Kill Chain

  “Evan Delaney is a paragon for our times: tough, funny, clever, brave, tireless, and compassionate. The pace and inventiveness never flag, and the climax . . . is both nail-biting and moving. But the brilliant writing is what puts this thriller way ahead of the competition. Intelligent escapism at its best.”

  —The Guardian (UK)

  “I loved every minute of it. A breathtaking thriller, gripping and relentless.”—Caroline Carver, CWA Dagger-winning author of Blood Junction

  “A rattling good read.”—News of the World

  “Brilliant.”—The Evening Telegraph (Peterborough, UK)

  “The action is high octane from the first page. Once you pick it up, it’s a very hard book to put down.”—My Weekly

  “Fast and furious.”—The Literary Review

  Crosscut

  “Full of classic Gardiner one-liners . . . but mostly there’s a serious freezerload of scare-you-silly chills.”—Stephen King

  “A tense and exciting thriller where almost anything seems possible. A conspiracy theorist’s must-have.”

  —Independent on Sunday

  “Easily one of the best thrillers I’ve read this year. I could barely wait to get to the next page. If you start this book, be prepared to be unable to put it down. Meg Gardiner has written a cracker.”—Caroline Carver

  “This book rips. It makes Silence of the Lambs look like Mary had a little one—it never lets up.”

  —Adrienne Dines, author of The Jigsaw Maker

  Jericho Point

  “Meg Gardiner dishes out the gripping plot in tense helpings. Short, punchy chapters keep the pace flowing, and you’ll find it impossible to find a resting point.”

  —Evening Times (Glasgow)

  “[Gardiner’s] depictions of the criminal elements of the Hollywood fringe and the local drugs culture is a tightly observed slice of realism. This is a relentless, claustrophobic examination of mistaken identity and the terror of being accused of a crime for which you are not responsible.”—Sherlock

  “Fast-paced, witty, and brutal.”

  —The Independent (London)

  “If you read Sue Grafton, Lee Child, Janet Evanovich, Michael Connelly, or Nelson DeMille, you’re going to think Meg Gardiner is a gift from heaven for thriller mystery readers.”

  —Stephen King

  “Meg Gardiner is a welcome addition to the ranks of American thriller writers.”—The Daily Telegraph (UK)

  “Meg Gardiner has rekindled my interest in thrillers.”

  —The Independent (London)

  “Meg Gardiner is a class act at the top of her game.”

  —My Weekly

  “Meg Gardiner has a powerful style—fast-paced, immediate, and imaginative.”—Sherlock

  “Meg Gardiner goes from strength to strength.”

  —OneWord Radio

  “Meg Gardiner is brilliant at making the over-the-top seem utterly convincing.”—The Guardian (UK)

  “Meg Gardiner hard-boils her American crime with the best of them. . . . If you like Sue Grafton and Janet Evanovich, you ought to have discovered Gardiner by now.”

  —The Evening Telegraph (Peterborough, UK)

  “Meg Gardiner takes us to places we hope we’ll never have to go in reality.”—Caroline Carver

  Also by Meg Gardiner

  China Lake Mission Canyon Jericho Point Kill Chain

  The Dirty Secrets Club

  OBSIDIAN

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. This is an authorized reprint of an edition published by Hodder & Stoughton. For information address: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH

  First Obsidian Printing, September 2008

  Copyright © Meg Gardiner, 2005

  All rights reserved

  OBSIDIAN and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this
book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN : 978-0-451-22522-1

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my parents To Sally, with love To Frank, in loving memory

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A number of people have helped with the creation of this novel. For their assistance, I thank my invaluable editor at Hodder & Stoughton, Sue Fletcher; Nancy Fraser, who knew that characters must go to the end of the line; and the writers’ group, who never let up: Mary Albanese, Suzanne Davidovac, Adrienne Dines, Kelly Gerrard, and Tammye Huf. My appreciation also goes to Sara Gardiner, MD, for her insight into post-traumatic stress disorder. And unbounded thanks, always, to Paul Shreve.

  1

  The breeze gusted through the wind chimes. They sang a jarring melody. Overhead a pair of fighter jets howled past, ripping silver across the sky above China Lake.

  Kelly Colfax lugged a grocery bag from the trunk of her car. She had twelve things to do in the next two hours and she should have written them down. The desert heat was bad for her memory. Did Scotty say he was coming home early? She unstuck her skirt from the backs of her thighs. She had to change and get to the nightclub in time to set up. Tonight she meant to put things right.

  She had forgotten her haircut, but that didn’t matter. Gaining twenty pounds in fifteen years mattered, but tonight she could smile and say, See? She had a good reason. It wasn’t the pressure. She wasn’t a screwup. People couldn’t blame her for all the things that had been going wrong. Couldn’t call her the B-Team anymore, or Slacker or Space Cadet. Tonight they would apologize. They would congratulate and envy her. With a little smile forming on her lips, she opened the door and walked into the kitchen.

  A stranger was standing by the sink.

  She saw short hair, olive skin, and eyes that seemed all pupil, deep and black. Dressed in utilities—working blues, like enlisted personnel wore. What was someone from the base doing in her kitchen? The stranger flexed both hands. Kelly saw them peripherally but couldn’t break from that black gaze. A gold aura flared at the corner of her vision.

  “So.” The stranger’s voice was sharp and high-pitched. “First question. Am I here?”

  Kelly stared. On the counter were scissors and a funnel and a roll of electrical tape. And her high school yearbook.

  “You think you’re dreaming a sailor girl in your kitchen. You think I’m a nightmare.”

  Kelly opened her mouth but couldn’t form words. A girl? This freaky being flexing those weird fingers? Something wrong with them, like doll’s fingers. And her face was expressionless.

  “Question two,” she said. “Can you run?”

  Kelly looked at her feet. Fear curled around her chest like a thorny vine. She couldn’t lift them. How could the stranger know that? Was this a nightmare?

  “So that’s a no.” The stranger’s lips drew back over her teeth. “No flight. No fight.”

  The fear pricked sharper. Kelly looked toward the front door. “Scotty . . .”

  The stranger reached for the answering machine on the kitchen counter and pressed play. Kelly heard her husband’s voice.

  “Kell, I’m not going to make the party. I have to pull a double shift. Don’t hate me.”

  She dropped the groceries. A bottle broke and milk gushed across the linoleum. Scotty kept talking and Kelly’s legs remained frozen. The stranger’s freaky hands opened the high school yearbook and flipped through it.

  “West. Skinner. Delaney. Colfax. Chang . . .” She stopped. “Tell me about your classmates. How much do you know?”

  Kelly felt saliva pooling in the back of her throat.

  “Well?”

  The stranger kept flipping through the yearbook, and Kelly felt tears forming. She knew why those hands were freaky. The stranger was wearing latex gloves.

  She looked at Kelly. A new voice roared from her throat, deep and booming. “Tell me.”

  That voice unglued Kelly’s foot. She moved it backward. Now the other. A sound was sliding from her mouth, a moan. This wasn’t a waking nightmare. She had to run. She slid her foot another inch, turned, and flung herself toward the door.

  The darts from the Taser caught her between the shoulder blades. The electric shock made her drop instantly. Her face smacked the floor. She lay splayed, her arms and legs shivering like jelly. Saliva ran out of her mouth onto the cool tile beneath her cheek.

  She saw the stranger walk to the knife rack. The sound of metal rang in the kitchen. The stranger pulled out the carving knife. Kelly felt her skirt turning wet and warm as she peed herself.

  The stranger’s boots appeared. She flipped Kelly onto her back as though she were a hunk of meat. The knife shone under the kitchen lights. Outside, the wind chimes rang.

  The stranger leaned over and dog tags swung out from beneath her utility shirt. On the chain with the tags was a gnarled piece of metal. That wasn’t navy. Kelly saw a scar near her collarbone. Tracks, like an animal had mauled her.

  “If you can’t talk about it, we’ll have to take a different tack. Let’s see if you can feel it.”

  She put down the knife, grabbed Kelly’s wrist, and pulled her toward the refrigerator. Her grip was like a wrench. She took the roll of electrical tape, whipped it around Kelly’s wrists, and wound it around the handle of the refrigerator door, binding her there.

  Kelly’s juddering subsided into pins and needles. She could feel her muscles coming back under control, but when she moved her leg, it flailed like a frog jabbed with an electrode in biology lab. She heard the stranger opening cabinets and pulling things out. She turned her head.

  The stranger now held a bottle of Drano crystals. She walked to the spot where Kelly had fallen and poured the drain cleaner on the wet splotch of urine. It hissed and bubbled and filled the air with the caustic stink of lye and ammonia.

  Reaching for the carving knife, she knelt and hitched Kelly’s skirt up to her panties, revealing chunky thighs. She held the Drano above Kelly’s leg and pressed the serrated edge of the knife to the inside of her thigh.

  “Let’s start over. Tell me when it hurts.”

  2

  The wind skipped over me. I stood in the parking lot, shielding my eyes from the setting sun. The heat was a wall against my face.

  “This was a bad idea. Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  Out on the highway an eighteen-wheeler rumbled past. Dust spun in the air behind it, blowing across the razor wire that marked the edge of the naval base.

  Jesse looked at me as if I’d blown a cylinder. “Are you nuts? You can’t back out now.”

  I peered over the roof of the Mustang at the strip mall. “Nuts isn’t backing out. Nuts is going in there.”

  He pulled off his sunglasses. “Let me get this straight. Evan Delaney is chickening out of her high school reunion?”

  The invitation read, China Lake’s brightest nightspot hosts our festive gathering. The nightclub sat between the adult bookstore and the auto wrecking yard. Beyond them stretched a million acres of absence: the Naval Air Warfare Center, where mirages hovered over the desert floor and the horizon flung itself up into mountains, purple and red against a huge sky.

  Above the door of the club a banner batted in the wind. BASSETT HIGH 15TH—WELCOME BACK, HOUNDS! Music banged through the windows. I could see the crowd packed inside.

  “It’s a setup,” I said.

  I handed Jesse the invitation, which specified, Dress: party casual. In the high Mojave that means shoes optional, but the reunion committee had lied.

  “They’re dressed to the nines. I see sequins.”
r />   “Damn, I should have gone with the ball gown and stilettos.”

  I made a face at him. He looked perfectly presentable in jeans and a white button-down shirt. For that matter, I looked perfectly presentable in jeans and a white button-down shirt. How had I let that happen? God, we’d be voted cutest couple. They’d stick little cardboard crowns on our heads and ask whether we were engaged and why Jesse looked like he’d been smashed over a cliff. I’d say on and off, and because he had been. Then I’d stupidly mention that we were both lawyers, and spend the evening explaining that no, I didn’t practice anymore and yes, their ex really could sue them for pouring sugar in the gas tank of the car. Why the hell had I come?

  I pointed at the window. “That’s Ceci Lezak handing out name tags. She ran the student council like it was the Reichstag.”

  He looked. “Explaining that funny little mustache. Come on; I want to meet her. Plus that guy who set his hair on fire at the talent show, and the girl who turned those four chickens loose, with numbers painted on their backs.”

  “One, two, three and five. That was me.”

  “And your mortal enemy could turn up.”

  I groaned. “Seeing Valerie is the last thing I need.”

  I glanced north at mountains arrayed like saw blades. The Sierras and Panamints, and the Cosos, where Renegade Canyon cut deep through the rocks. One afternoon there, one debacle, had led to four years of rancor.

  “We’ll set up a steel cage and you can settle old scores,” he said. “Grease up with Swedish meatball gravy and go at it.”

  I stepped back. “You need to cut down on the painkillers. And the satellite TV.”

  He drummed his fingers on the trunk of the car. “Last winter you fired a clip of ammunition at a homicidal maniac in your own house. You can’t let a few snobs in shiny dresses send you packing.”

  I sighed. He took my hand.

  “Besides, don’t you want to see your old boyfriend? What’s his name, Tommy Chong?”

  “Chang.”

  He grinned. “Thought so.”

  He headed up the curb cut and toward the door of the club, nodding at the auto wrecking yard. “Stay here and admire that giant heap of old tires. I’m going in.”