The Bishop Read online

  “James writes smart, taut, high-octane thrillers. But be warned—his books are not for the timid. The endings blow me away every time.”

  Mitch Galin, producer, Stephen King’s The Stand and Frank Herbert’s Dune

  “Move over Alex Cross, there’s a new FBI special agent in DC, Patrick Bowers. Steven James joins the ranks of James Patterson in his spine-tingling thriller The Bishop. Horrifying villains, diabolical murders, and rapid-fire twists make this gripping novel impossible to put down. You’ll think about these characters long after you read the last page. Patterson fans are going to love Steven James.”

  Kathleen Antrim, bestselling author, Capital Offense

  “Steven James’s The Bishop should come with a warning: Don’t start reading unless you’re prepared to finish this book in a single sitting. An intense, intelligent thriller with characters as real as your next-door neighbors, The Bishop goes beyond the exploration of good and evil to what it means to be human. Riveting!”

  Karen Dionne, International Thriller Writers website chair; managing editor, The Big Thrill

  “The Bishop—full of plot twists, nightmarish villains, and family conflicts—kept me turning pages on a red-eye all the way from New York City to Amsterdam. Steven James tells stories that grab you by the collar and don’t let go.”

  Norb Vonnegut, author, Top Producer; editor, Acrimoney.com

  “Steven James locks you in a thrill ride, with no brakes. He sets the new standard in suspense writing.”

  John Raab, editor, www.suspensemagazine.com

  “Every time I read a novel by Steven James, I want to climb a ladder into his mind and dig around in the uncommonly rich soil from which springs Patrick Bowers. Incredible.”

  Ann Tatlock, award-winning author

  “Forget what you know. Steven James turns everything upside-down in The Bishop. This is thriller writing at its absolute best.”

  C.E. Moore, TheChristianManifesto.com

  THE BISHOP

  THE BOWERS FILES # 4

  STEVEN JAMES

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  Grand Rapids, Michigan

  © 2010 by Steven James

  Published by Revell

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  www.revellbooks.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  James, Steven, 1969–

  The bishop : a Patrick Bowers thriller / Steven James.

  p. cm. — (The Bowers files ; bk. 4)

  ISBN 978-0-8007-1919-7 (cloth) — ISBN 978-0-8007-3302-5 (pbk.)

  1. Bowers, Patrick (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Criminologists—Fiction. 3. Children—Crimes against—Fiction. 4. Legislators—United States—Fiction. 5. Washington (D.C.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3610.A4545B57 2010

  813.6—dc22 2010010374

  All characters are fictional, and any resemblance to real people, either factual or historical, is purely coincidental.

  10 11 12 13 14 15 16 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

  —The Declaration of Independence

  Dedicated to all those in the military

  and their families.

  Thank you for sacrificing

  to protect the Constitution

  and all that it represents.

  “You aspire to the free heights, your soul thirsts for the stars. But your wicked instincts too, thirst for freedom.”

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  “Whatever is or is not true, one thing is certain, man is not what he is meant to be.”

  —G. K. Chesterton

  Contents

  Prologue

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  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Saturday, May 17

  Patuxent River State Park

  Southwest Maryland

  53 miles north of Washington DC

  Spring, but still cold.

  9:42 p.m.

  Officers Craig Walker and Trevor Meyers rolled to a stop in front of the squat, paint-peeled home of Philip and Jeanne Styles, the only house on the vacant county road winding around the state park.

  They exited the cruiser.

  A few dogs barked in the distance, but the forest behind the house swallowed most of the night noise, so apart from the muffled shouting coming from inside the home, the evening was silent and dewy and still.

  Craig ascended the porch’s crumbling steps, Trevor at his heels. He tried to distinguish the words of the people hollering inside. Tried to catch the gist of the argument.

  After a moment Trevor cleared his throat. “Aren’t you gonna knock?” He’d told Craig earlier in the day that he liked to be called Trev, of all things. How nice.

  “Easy, Tonto.” Even though Craig had only been on the force five years, he’d already dealt with more than his share of drunk husbands and battered wives. “Domestic disturbance calls are the worst.”

  The voices inside were loud but indistinct.

  “You been called out here before?”

  “N
o.”

  Craig almost told him that he’d heard this guy, Styles, had a history of spousal abuse but then remembered that Trevor—wait, Trev—had been in the car with him when the dispatch call came through.

  More shouting from inside the home. Two voices: one male, one female.

  Craig opened the screen door and rapped on the wooden one. “Mr. Styles.” He made sure he called loud enough so that anyone in the house would be able to hear. “Sir, open the door. It’s the police.”

  “Is that him?” the man inside the house shouted. “That the guy you’ve been—”

  “Stop it!” Her voice was shrill, frantic, filled with fear. “Get away from me!”

  Craig shouted, louder this time. “Mr. Styles, open the door!”

  The man: “Put that down, you—”

  Craig Walker unsnapped the leather holster holding his weapon and gave one final warning. “Open the door or we’re coming in!”

  The man: “Gimme that thing.”

  “Stop!”

  And then.

  A shotgun blast.

  Splitting open the night.

  Craig yelled for Trevor to cover the back of the house, cover it now! But then the words were mist and memory and he was only aware of the doorknob in one hand and the familiar feel of his Glock in the other as he threw open the door and swung his gun in front of him.

  Stepped inside.

  No overhead light, one lamp in the corner. A smoldering fireplace. A plaid couch, a green recliner.

  And a woman on the other side of the room, trembling, shaking. A Stoeger 12-gauge over-under shotgun in her hands.

  Craig leveled his weapon at her. “Put down the gun!”

  A man was lying on the floor six feet from her, his chest soaked with blood, his feet twitching sporadically. He coughed and then tried to speak, but the words were garbled and moist and Craig knew what that meant.

  “Ma’am! Put down the shotgun!” Craig had never drawn on a woman before and felt his hands shake slightly.

  She wore a pink housecoat. Her face was smeared with tears. She did not lower the gun.

  “He was gonna kill me.” They were frantic, breathless words. “I know he was this time—he said he was gonna kill me.”

  The man on the floor sputtered something unintelligible and then stopped making sounds altogether.

  Where’s Trevor!

  “Put it on the floor, Mrs. Styles. Slowly. Do it now.”

  At last, staring at the man she’d shot, she began to lower the shotgun. “He hit me. He was gonna kill me.”

  “Okay,” Craig said, “now set down the gun.”

  She bent over, a shiver running through her. “This wasn’t the first time.” She let the gun slip from her hands. It dropped with an uneven thud onto the brown, threadbare carpet. “He liked to hit me. He said he was gonna kill me this time. I know . . .” Her words seemed to come from someplace far away. Shock. Already washing through her.

  “Ma’am, you need to step away from the gun.”

  “The gun went off.” She stood slowly. “I didn’t want to hurt him, but it just went off.” She took two unsteady steps backward.

  “Is there anyone else in the house?”

  She shook her head.

  As she backed up, Craig, weapon still drawn, carefully approached the gunshot victim to see if the man still had a pulse.

  But as he bent down, the woman shrieked and he glanced at her for a fraction of a second, only that much—a tiny instant—but that was all it took.

  By the time he’d looked back at the body, the man had rolled toward the shotgun, snatched it from the floor, and aimed it at his chest.

  And fired.

  The impact of the bird shot sent Craig reeling, tumbling against the couch. He tried to raise his hand to fire his own weapon, but his arm wouldn’t obey. The room dimmed, and for one thin moment he was aware of all of his dreams and memories, running together, merging, collecting, descending into one final regret for all the things that he would leave forever undone.

  And then, all of his thoughts folded in on themselves, dropping into a deep and final oblivion, and Officer Craig Walker crumpled motionless and dead onto the tattered carpet beside the plaid sofa in Philip and Jeanne Styles’s living room.

  She saw the man she’d fallen in love with, the man she’d stuck with through everything, the man whose baby she was carrying, pull the trigger.

  Shoot the officer.

  Rise to his feet.

  Swing the gun to his hip.

  Then she heard the smack of the back door banging open and saw him pivot and fire at a second cop.

  This cop managed to pull the trigger and shoot a hole in the floor beside his foot as he dropped in an awkward heap against the wall, dead by the time he landed. The pellets had hit him in the face, but you couldn’t tell it had ever been a face. All that remained was a blur of blood and tooth and splintered bone.

  She looked away.

  And into the eyes of the man who had just murdered the two police officers. She hadn’t told him about the baby yet; for some reason that was what she thought of at that moment. The tiny life growing inside her.

  Her heart hammered. The colors of everything in the room seemed to cut through the air with a distinctiveness she could barely understand.

  He hadn’t bothered to lower the barrel, and it was pointed at her stomach. At the baby.

  “So,” he said softly.

  She took a ragged breath. “So.”

  And then.

  He set down the gun.

  She stared at it for a long moment, then spoke unsteadily, with words brushed bright with adrenaline, “That was close. The second one almost had time to aim.”

  “Yes,” he said. “He did.”

  Then the man, who was most certainly not Philip Styles, and had not been shot in the chest at all, began to wipe his prints from the gun’s stock, forestock, and trigger.

  And Astrid, the name she’d chosen for herself when she’d started this hobby, shed the housecoat and stuffed it into the duffel bag she’d hidden earlier in the front closet.

  “You did well,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  She was wearing only a bra and panties now. And as she bent over, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed her man, who called himself Brad, watching her. Even though she was about thirteen weeks along, she hadn’t really begun to show, and she’d kept herself in shape, so at twenty-nine it felt good to still be able to distract him while she was changing. She took her time rummaging through the bag, then slowly stood and pulled on her jeans, a sweatshirt, and a pair of latex gloves.

  At last he looked away, toward the window. “How long do you think we have?”

  “Less than five minutes. I’d say.” She gestured toward the kitchen. “Let’s make the call.”

  The body of the real Jeanne Styles lay sprawled haphazardly in a pool of dark blood on the well-worn linoleum floor near the fridge. As Astrid walked toward the counter where Jeanne’s purse lay, a tawny cat, shy but curious, entered the room, and Astrid gently stroked its back. The cat arched its body and purred in a gentle and familiar way.

  “Good kitty.” A soft moment, warm and alive. Maternal in its tenderness.

  She scratched the cat’s forehead, then picked up the dead woman’s purse. Rummaged through it. Found the cell, turned on the speaker so that Brad could hear. Tapped in 911.

  A male voice answered, speaking in autopilot. “Emergency services. How may I—”

  She interrupted, her voice high, hysterical, “They’re dead! They’re both dead! Oh my God, the cops. He shot ’em, he—”

  “Who? Who’s dead?”

  “He’s gonna kill me. My husband is! Oh he’s—”

  The sharp echo of the gunshot blast cut her off, and she let the phone clatter to the floor as Brad put another round of shot into Jeanne Styles’s corpse.

  “Ma’am?” His voice sharper now. Concerned. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

 
Actually, no. I’m dead, Astrid thought. Hurt is a whole different thing.

  She slid backward, away from the dead woman, toward the living room, but she could still hear the dispatcher.

  “Ma’am?” The man’s voice caught, a growing sense of dread in each word. “Are you there?”

  As she left to meet Brad in the next room, she realized that the dispatcher would probably still be talking to the woman’s corpse when the cops arrived, still asking if she was all right.

  Astrid was struck by the tragic and delicious irony of it all.

  Talking to the dead. Hoping for a reply.

  Hurt is a whole different thing.

  The cat, now less hesitant, followed her.

  Brad was changing into his own clothes. He’d placed Philip Styles’s gunshot residue–covered clothes on the edge of the fireplace so they would smolder but not be consumed by the embers. At least not before the next wave of authorities arrived.

  This time she and Brad were not using explosives or a fire to destroy evidence. This time they were leaving carefully arranged clues behind. Clues they wanted found.

  Astrid glanced out the window and saw a pair of headlights appear at the end of the long, winding driveway.

  Brad followed her gaze. “Philip,” he said nervously. “I didn’t expect him so—”

  “We need to leave.” She gestured toward the couch. “Don’t forget the duffel bag.”

  Brad collected their things, and she walked to the hallway where the second cop lay slumped against the blood-spattered wall.

  The cat strolled beside her, rubbed against her leg.

  As Brad stepped past her to leave, Astrid bent beside the body. She held out her hand to show the cat that she meant no harm. “Come here.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, the cat padded toward her, trusting her, and she set it gently on the dead cop’s chest. “There you go.” She stood back, and the cat began to lick the red smear that used to be the police officer’s face.

  “Good kitty.”

  It purred.

  She petted it once more and then joined Brad outside.

  The air felt clean, brisk, invigorating.

  Astrid closed her eyes and listened to the delicate, invisible chatter of crickets, the soft hum of distant traffic, the emerging wail of sirens.