What Have You Done Read online

  PRAISE FOR MATTHEW FARRELL

  “A young crime writer with real talent is a joy to discover, and Matthew Farrell proves he’s the real deal in his terrific debut, What Have You Done. He explores the dark side of family bonds in this raw, gripping page-turner, with suspense from start to finish. You won’t be able to put it down.”

  —Lisa Scottoline, New York Times bestselling author

  “A must-read thriller! Intense, suspenseful, and fast-paced—I was on the edge of my seat.”

  —Robert Dugoni, New York Times bestselling author

  “One hell of a debut thriller. With breakneck pacing and a twisting plot, What Have You Done will keep you guessing until its stunning end.”

  —Eric Rickstad, New York Times bestselling author

  “A must-read thriller! What Have You Done is a rollercoaster of a novel that grabs hold and refuses to let go. Fans of Meg Gardiner and Mark Edwards will find lots to love in this debut. I can’t wait to read what Matt cooks up next.”

  —Tony Healey, author of the Harper and Lane series

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Matthew Farrell

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503902404 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503902404 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503900646 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503900649 (paperback)

  Cover design by PEPE nymi

  First edition

  For Cathy—

  we did it, babe.

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  The first things Liam noticed were the mattresses lined up on the living room floor. The furniture had been pushed to the walls on the outer perimeter of the room, leaving the mattresses placed strangely in the center, where the couch and coffee table should have been. There were three of them, side by side, no covers or sheets, just a single bouquet of paper flowers their mother had learned to make at a craft party her friend Patty had hosted when she was pregnant with her second bundle of joy. One bouquet for each mattress. Their bright colors painted a dreadful picture against the otherwise dark surroundings. The shades had been drawn. The house was silent. Liam’s stomach turned once. This wasn’t right.

  Before he could inquire as to what might be going on, a thump interrupted the quiet, and from his periphery, Liam saw his older brother, Sean, fall to the floor. Hands suddenly grabbed Liam from behind, and he was lifted off the ground, carried by someone he couldn’t see. Liam struggled to free himself, tried to call for Sean or his mother, but the grip was tight enough that he could hardly breathe, let alone cry out for help.

  The bear-claw tub was old and rusted. Liam caught a glimpse of the calm water that had been filled to the rim before he was thrust to the hard tiled floor. His hands were pulled behind his back and tied together so tight he lost feeling in his fingers.

  “We’re going to visit your father,” the voice said behind him. It was his mother’s voice, so suddenly full of life and determination. She was strong and vibrant, the adrenaline coursing through her. This new energy scared him the most. “We’re all going to be one happy family again. All of us together. Like it should be.”

  She picked him up and threw him into the tub. Liam thrashed about, kicking and jerking upward, trying to get enough leverage to sit above the waterline, but with his hands tied behind him and the slippery porcelain, he couldn’t do much more than keep his face above the surface. He couldn’t hear anything under the cold water other than his breathing, which echoed in his ears.

  His mother appeared over him. She’d cut large swaths of her hair off so close to the scalp he could see bloody patches of skin. Clumps of hair fell from the collar of her dirty nightgown and onto the water’s surface when she moved. Her skin was pale, her eyes sunken and hollow. “I love you, Liam,” she said. Her chapped lips cracked as she spoke. “You and your brother. We’re going to be with your father now. I’ll see you there.”

  She placed her hand over his face and pushed him all the way under. He held his breath as best he could, but panic set in as he lay on the bottom of the tub, submerged, trapped. He tried to move, turn, kneel up, anything, but his hands were fists stuck under the weight of his body. His mother kept pressing down, her fingers digging into his eye sockets and cheeks, making it impossible for him to move. His lungs burned as he tried to hold on. He squeezed his eyes shut and could see bursts of color exploding in the darkness.

  Seconds seemed like hours, and it wasn’t long before his tiny body gave in and he involuntarily opened his mouth to take a breath. The water tore down his throat. He tried to cough, but still the water came, rushing into his lungs, choking him. His body regurgitated what he inhaled, but the water had nowhere to go. It kept coming. He was drowning. He was going to die. His mother’s maddening promise repeated in his mind.

  We’re all going to be one happy family again. All of us together. Like it should be.

  Liam opened his eyes as he took a breath and began to choke. He jumped up from his sleep, gagging and slapping at the standing water in the tub. He crawled over the side and flopped naked onto the bathroom floor, panting and coughing.

  “Jesus!” he screamed between another coughing fit and the wheezing of a damp breath he fought to keep steady.

  Footsteps from the hall. His wife, Vanessa, ran to the doorway, where she stopped, frozen by the scene unfolding before her. “Liam! What’s wrong?”

  The room was blurry for a moment as shapes and colors blended into one floating and twisting image. He sat up and pushed himself against the wall by the toilet, his chest rising and falling as he took deep breaths. “I . . . I . . . how did I get in the tub?”

  Vanessa hurried into the bathroom, her blonde hair pulled back in
a ponytail, her hazel eyes filled with fear. “What happened?” she asked as she knelt beside him, helping him sit up straighter against the edge of the slippery porcelain. “Why are you screaming? What are you doing in the tub?”

  He calmed himself, stared at his wife, then the tub, then back at his wife again. His body began to shake as he was suddenly aware of how cold he was. “Why am I . . . how did I . . . why was I in the tub?”

  “That’s what I just asked you.”

  “I woke up, and I was in here. How did I get here?”

  “I have no idea.” Vanessa stood back up, grabbed a towel from the rack, and tossed it to her husband. “I was sleeping. You scared me screaming like that. I thought something was really wrong. I don’t know how you got in there. Last I saw, you were crashed out on the couch.”

  Liam draped the towel over himself and tried to stop shaking. He stood carefully and shuffled over to the toilet to sit. Ever since the day his mother had tried to drown him, he’d been petrified of water. He never would’ve voluntarily taken a bath. He hadn’t had a bath in twenty-seven years.

  Vanessa folded her arms across her chest. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “You really can’t remember how you got in there?”

  “I’m serious. I can’t remember anything.”

  “Must’ve been a rough night last night.”

  Liam began to examine himself. He was wet and still shivering. A large scratch ran down from his shoulder to his chest. It looked raw. “Wait. You said I slept on the couch?”

  “All night, apparently. I woke up around four and realized you weren’t in bed. When I went down to look for you, you were on the couch, snoring like a drunken fool. I could smell the liquor on you. Would’ve been nice if you called to tell me you were staying out that late. You know how I get nervous.”

  “Sorry. I was planning to call. I guess the night just got away from me.” Liam began to towel off. He could sense that familiar tone in Vanessa’s voice. She was upset, and he didn’t want to fight again.

  “What time did you get in?”

  And then he stopped what he was doing. Stopped dead in his tracks as his eyes glassed over for a moment. “To be honest, I have no idea,” he whispered more to himself than to his wife. “I can’t remember that either.”

  “Oh, that’s comforting. Missing the old college days, are we?” Vanessa took a second towel from the rack and started cleaning the standing water on the floor. “You’re a grown man, Liam. You’re getting too old for blackouts.” She looked up at him and pointed. “What happened to your chest?”

  Liam didn’t say anything.

  “Yeah, I know. You don’t remember.”

  She finished drying the floor, then bent over the side of the tub and took the stopper out. He watched as she picked up his boxers from next to the sink, balled them up, and stuffed them in the pocket of her robe. She always cleaned when she was angry. Whether it was a small argument that made her start dusting or a blowout that required a closet reorganization, the cleaning and the anger worked hand in hand. It had been like that since they first met.

  “Where are your clothes?” Vanessa asked.

  The whistling of the water rushing down the drain made Liam’s lungs contract as if he were drowning all over again. He felt as if he might be sick. “The living room?”

  “No, they’re not.”

  He surveyed the bathroom, but there were no clothes anywhere.

  “Never mind. I don’t want to know.” Vanessa tossed the wet towel in the hamper and adjusted the tie that had slipped open on her robe. “So who went? No doubt your brother was there.”

  “Yeah, Sean was there,” Liam lied. He couldn’t remember anything about the night before. What had happened? How had he ended up in that tub?

  “Who else?”

  “A few guys from the station. You don’t know them.”

  Vanessa walked to the doorway. “You’re a forensic scientist for the Philadelphia Police Department. Don’t you think you should be acting more responsibly?”

  “It was one night.”

  “You blacked out, Liam. That’s what high school kids do when they steal liquor from their parents’ cabinet and can’t control themselves.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Vanessa’s face tightened just slightly. She paused for a moment and then spun away from him. “Get dressed, and I’ll put the coffee on. You’re going to be late.”

  Liam watched her leave. His breathing was starting to steady, and in the solace of the bathroom, he tried to think back and replay his night out. He couldn’t recall anything. Not one detail of one moment. How long had it been since he’d gotten that drunk? The tub groaned and wheezed as the water continued draining.

  “And clean up your boots,” Vanessa called from the hall. “You left them at the bottom of the stairs. Almost killed me when I came down this morning.”

  “Okay.”

  Liam got up from the toilet and made his way to the bedroom. His cell phone was sitting on his nightstand, and he grabbed it, touching his thumb to the reader as the phone came to life. Perhaps he could retrace his steps through calls or texts.

  “Coffee’s on!”

  “I’ll be down in a minute!”

  There were no new texts past four o’clock the day before, the last one being from his brother asking if he wanted in on hockey tickets. Now that he read the text, he could recall being asked about the tickets, but everything since that point was fuzzy. He flipped to his phone records and saw a voice mail that had come in at eight o’clock. It was grayed out, meaning he’d already listened to it, but he couldn’t remember the call or the message. He played it again.

  “Hey, it’s me. I got your text, but I don’t see you. Where are you? Call me.”

  Liam recognized the voice immediately. It was Kerri. She’d called about a text he’d sent her. Again he checked his sent texts and couldn’t find anything. He also looked in his trash folder, but there was nothing there either. He walked back through the bedroom, peeked out into the hall, then shut the door. When he was alone, he dialed her number and waited.

  “Hey, you’ve reached me, and if you know who ‘me’ is, leave a message, and I’ll—”

  He hung up and tossed the phone back on the nightstand. In the serenity of the bedroom, Liam could hear the birds singing outside the window. A sign of a new day. A fresh start. That was what kept him and Vanessa going. One day, then another, and still another after that. Their marriage was a work in progress.

  Liam had been six years old when his mother tried to kill him. It had happened eleven months after he and Sean had lost their father to a set of bad brakes and a fatal car wreck. Their mother hadn’t been able to handle the loss and had spent the majority of that time after her husband’s death on a self-destructive spiral that was one of the scariest things Liam had ever seen in his young life. The woman he’d grown to depend on had become dark and intense in her depression, shutting both of her sons out of her life and communicating through a series of muted grunts and head tilts instead of forming actual words. He and Sean had spent most of their time trying to understand what these movements and sounds meant and how they should go about responding to them. Sometimes they guessed right. Often they were wrong. During those eleven months, their mother had stopped eating and cooking and, on that last day, couldn’t even rise from her bed in the morning to see them off to school. Their father had been her everything, and he was gone. Over the course of that first year, she’d left with him. There was no way he and Sean could’ve expected what had been waiting for them that afternoon. That memory, those events, had burned into his psyche like a hot brand.

  The birds continued their morning song as Liam got dressed. His head ached, and he fought to recall anything from the night before, but there was nothing. He wondered if his memory would ever return. It had to, right? Probably by the time he got in to work. There was no sense freaking out about it. Besides, Sean would be th
ere. He’d ask his brother for the details and hope he hadn’t done anything stupid. If that didn’t work, he’d keep trying Kerri. Someone had to know something. Waking up in the tub had scared him. How had he ended up in there? How out of it had he really been?

  2

  A white sheet covered the body of Alexander Scully. It was the best the responding officers could do until the initial investigation was complete and the EMTs could put him in a body bag for transport to the coroner’s office. Sean Dwyer stood over the victim, staring as if the sheet weren’t there, as if the corpse would suddenly sit up and tell him who had done it. But there was no need for such a confession, supernatural or otherwise. He knew who was responsible.

  The Philadelphia Police Department handled about sixteen thousand violent crimes a year. Of that total number, approximately three hundred were homicides. As a homicide detective, Sean found most of the cases were common enough and forgettable: gang violence, domestic violence turned manslaughter, hit-and-runs. You worked the case when you were up, then moved on in the rotation when you were through. With only twenty-one districts for 350 murders, you didn’t have time to be Perry Mason on every assignment. Usually, the person who appeared to be the guilty party was in fact guilty, and the case was solved without much fanfare. Those homicides had no Hollywood flare. They were the real thing, and as with anything authentic, there was a certain percentage of the job that was mundane. This was not one of those times.

  Sean rubbed the stubble on his square chin and absently pulled at the shield that hung around his neck. He was twelve years in. Seven with Homicide. He’d thought he’d seen it all by now, but this particular crime scene had stopped him in his tracks. The brutality with which death could be administered was an amazing thing.

  The EMTs waited outside in their truck. It was still early, but the morning rush was about to begin. The few pedestrians who bothered to try to sneak a peek were quickly chased away by a police unit parked in front of the shop, but they had been few and far between. For the most part, the city was still rising. They’d have time before the crime scene would be fully exposed.

  Don Carpenter, Sean’s partner, came in through the front door. He was tall, African American, about fifteen years older than Sean, and good-looking. When he walked, he seemed to float. There were no hard movements about him. The ladies loved him, but he was a faithful husband, which made him all the more alluring. He was the only partner Sean had ever known and had been his mentor since Sean’s rookie year. Over time they had formed a bond that grew far beyond the department.