Read When She Was Bad: A Thriller for Free Online Page A

illustration. “Originally she was his elementary school teacher. Fourth, fifth grade, something like that. They say she was a gorgeous young strawberry blond—the kind of teacher every boy student gets a crush on and every girl student wants to grow up to be like. Then one day Maxwell shows up at school with both eyes swollen shut from a beating, and the whole story comes out. Turns out his parents were members of this twisted satanic cult whose leader was a flat-out pederast; they’d been abusing the kid since he was like, three, sexually, ritually, physically, you name it. Cowards to the end, the parents kill themselves—technically, it was a homicide/suicide—and the teacher gets custody of little Ulysses. But then for some equally twisted reasons of her own—probably because she’d been abused as a child—her idea of parenting included having sex with the kid on a regular basis.”
    “Oh, man.” The pilot—fit, tanned, with Ray-Ban sunglasses and close-cropped hair graying at the temples—winced.
    “It gets worse. The sex continued until Maxwell was around sixteen, then she told him it was all over, that part of the relationship, and that she was going to marry the high school shop teacher. He went ballistic, snuck into the bedroom while she and her fiancé were doing the nasty, stabbed him about fifty times with an icepick, and set the bedroom on fire. Burned the shit out of his hands, left her looking like something out of The House of Wax.
    “But she told the police that her fiancé was trying to rape her, and that the fire got started accidentally. Then when she got out of the hospital, she sprang him from the juvie farm and he moved in with her. Only from then on, around once a year or so she sent the lad out hunting, with orders to come back with a strawberry blond. That was about the only criteria—it had to be a woman and she had to have strawberry blond hair. To make wigs for the old horror.”
    “Jesus.”
    “I’d been searching for Maxwell for close to ten years before he finally slipped up and ran a stop sign down in Monterey with a dead strawberry blond in the passenger seat. I was about ninety percent sure he was the one who’d killed all those other women, but just to be sure, I talked the sheriff into putting me into a cell with him for an undercover interview. Bad mistake.” Pender raised his beret again to show the pilot the livid, trident-shaped scar across his scalp. “By the time I woke up in the hospital he’d already busted out, killed three deputy sheriffs, a highway patrolman, and at least two civilians….
    “When I finally caught up to Maxwell, there were a dozen strawberry blond wigs in a glass case in his basement, plus two half-starved survivors who looked like concentration camp victims.” Plus Dr. Cogan, of course, but as always, Pender chose to protect her anonymity.
    “He drew down on me, I put one round through his shoulder, a second through his knee, and between you, me, and the lamppost, I gave some serious goddamn consideration to putting a third round right through there”—touching a forefinger the size of a ballpark frank to where his third eye would have been, if he’d been a Hindu deity—“and saving everybody a shitload of trouble. As it was, he narrowly missed bleeding to death before we could get him to a hospital—they had to amputate what was left of his leg.”
    But as Pender started to explain how the old woman had died in a fall shortly after the shootout, he realized the pilot was no longer really listening—just nodding politely at intervals as he checked gauges and flipped switches, preparing the plane for descent.
    Oh shit, oh dear, thought Pender, his cheeks burning with embarrassment. How bored he used to get, pretending to listen politely in cop bars as some over-the-hill agent blathered on about his adventures back in the day. Pender had sworn more than once that he’d eat his 9mm SIG Sauer P226 before he’d let that happen to