Desperate Read online

  Outstanding praise for the novels of Daniel Palmer!

  Desperate

  “Fans of well-crafted Hitchcock-like thrillers will enjoy Desperate.”

  —Associated Press

  “Palmer’s best book to date.”

  —BookReporter.com

  “Palmer has a way of telling the story and making it fresh.”

  —Winston-Salem Journal

  Stolen

  “Unrelentingly suspenseful.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “He already exhibits the skills of a master craftsman. Fans of Harlan Coben or Lisa Gardner will adore his look into the lives of an everyday couple.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “A twisting, suspenseful chiller of a book.”

  —William Landay, New York Times bestselling author of Defending Jacob

  Helpless

  “Warning: Once you start reading this novel, you will not stop! Palmer has concocted an adrenaline-fueled thriller.”

  —Lisa Gardner, New York Times bestselling author

  “Slam-dunk readable, scarily real, and emotionally satisfying. If you’re looking for a hero to root for, an innocent man charged with unspeakable crimes, an everyday town riddled with secrets, and a desperate father with everything on the line, look no farther than Helpless.”

  —Andrew Gross, New York Times bestselling author

  “A high-speed thriller . . . Helpless is edge-of-your-seat reading.”

  —Lisa Scottoline, New York Times bestselling author

  Delirious

  “Smart, sophisticated, and unsettling . . . not just a great thriller debut, but a great thriller, period.”

  —Lee Child, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “A solid, well-constructed thriller, nicely convoluted and definitely suspenseful.”

  —Booklist

  “A debut that is satisfying as a psychological thriller and as an ultramodern techno-thriller.”

  —The Sun-Sentinel

  Books by Daniel Palmer

  DELIRIOUS

  HELPLESS

  STOLEN

  DESPERATE

  CONSTANT FEAR

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  DESPERATE

  DANIEL PALMER

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Outstanding praise for the novels of Daniel Palmer!

  Also by

  Title Page

  Dedication

  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

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Teaser chapter

  Teaser chapter

  Copyright Page

  Dedicated to Marjorie and Stephen.

  Thank you for raising such a wonderful daughter.

  and

  In loving memory of my father, Michael Palmer.

  I sure do miss you, Pop.

  CHAPTER 1

  The only thing unusual about the bus stop was the crying woman sitting on the yellow-painted curb. Her hands were covering her mouth, and even with all the traffic whizzing down Massachusetts Avenue, I could still hear the muffled sobs. It was the beginning of August, and a warm breeze carried with it the sweet scent of marigolds mixed with pine. I was carrying a brown paper bag with a carton of General Tso’s chicken steaming inside. Stapled to the front of the bag was an order slip with just my name, Gage Dekker. No phone number or address supplied; the gang at Lilac Blossoms and I were that close. In fairness to my heart, the bag also contained a carton of steamed broccoli, brown rice (not white), egg drop soup, and some vegetable medley thing that came with the squishy tofu Anna loved.

  It was Anna, my wife, who stopped, stooped to the crying woman’s level, and asked, “Are you all right?” What Anna was really asking was, “Do you want our help?”

  The woman looked up at Anna, her eyes veined as though layered with bloody spiderwebs. She was breathtakingly beautiful, like a runway model: high cheekbones, a translucent complexion, and almond-shaped brown eyes perched below two perfectly arched eyebrows. Her face was a delicate oval, framed by dirty-blond hair, which hung limply over her shoulders in long, straight strands. As for her age, I’d have said late twenties—a decade my junior—but her denim jeans, ripped at the knees, along with the accompanying jean jacket, suggested a younger woman. A girl, really.

  “Are you okay?” Anna asked again.

  The young woman sucked in a heavy breath, pushed a thick band of hair away from her eyes. She sniffed twice, rubbing the underside of her nose with the back of her hand, flashing me her chipped (and chewed) fingernails.

  “Yeah, I’ll be all right,” she said. “Thanks.”

  Anna sat on the curb beside her. I kept standing, marveling at the depth of my wife’s strength and compassion. She connected while I just watched like a spectator in the stands. It didn’t surprise me; Anna had done the same for me.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Anna asked, reaching out to touch the woman’s shoulder with her well-manicured hand.

  “I’m fine, really,” she said.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “You’re not from Planned Parenthood, are you?”

  Anna looked up at me. The flicker in her eyes registered something important, or the possibility of something important.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” Anna replied.

  The woman exhaled a weighty breath and shook her head. “Sorry, bad joke. Look, since you asked, I just told my boyfriend that I’m pregnant and he went nuts, made this big scene, and just drove off. I guess he left me stranded.”

  Something passed between Anna and me, a look we’d shared on any number of occasions. It was the look she gave me every time we saw a pregnant woman or a mother with her baby, the look that said: Why can’t we have what they have?

  “How come your boyfriend was so upset?” Anna asked.

  The crying woman’s laugh was spiked with anguish. “I guess ’cause I don
’t know if it’s his,” she said.

  I studied Anna carefully, gauging her gestures and mannerisms to get a lock on her emotions. In the six months we’d been married, we already had been to couples therapy. In fact, everything about our union was accelerated, but that wasn’t uncommon in extreme situations like ours, the marriage counselor had explained. In those half-dozen sessions, I’d learned all about active listening. About checking in. Making sure Anna knew I was there for her. In truth, we had gone to therapy proactively, before we had any major issue to address. Figured it was a bad idea for two grieving parents to join their lives without having the tools to make the marriage work. Anna likened it to moving into a house without checking to see if there was a roof.

  “Do you have any place to go?” Anna asked.

  “I’m going home, unless that asshole won’t let me back in.”

  Anna stood, brushing bits of sand and gravel from the back of her skirt. She found her wallet from within her purse, took out a business card, and hesitated before offering it to the young woman. Anna was a management consultant. She worked out of the house and traveled a lot on business. She was accustomed to passing out her card with our home address on it to strangers, but with this young lady she had hesitated. This wasn’t about business. No, this was a personal matter, and Anna knew giving out her card was as much about Anna trying to remediate her own troubles as about offering to help this young woman.

  “Please take my card,” Anna said. “My name is Anna Miller and this is my husband, Gage. If you ever need to talk to someone, you can give me a call. Okay?”

  I knew what Anna really wanted to say. I could read between the lines, no different than learning a new language. Anna’s eyes spoke of hope; her hands, each trembling slightly, spoke of desire; her skin color, flush with a rush of blood to the head, spoke of divine intervention. Our hopes and dreams could be answered in the form of this girl.

  “Thanks,” she said, taking the card from Anna. “My name is Lily.”

  Lily.

  She’d always be the crying woman to me.

  CHAPTER 2

  We didn’t intend to grow our family through adoption. We weren’t even planning to get married or have kids, at least not right away. But I knew from past experience that plans and reality were not always one and the same. On our wedding day, Anna and I laughed, and said we’d had a five-year relationship in less than one year’s time.

  We went out on six dates before we made love. Six months later we were essentially living together. Three months after that, we got married in a private civil ceremony. No family, no friends were in attendance. It was a mutual decision. We wanted to celebrate each other but didn’t want to explain our reasons for rushing into matrimony. A few months before our wedding, a few days after Anna missed her period, she had gone to CVS in Arlington Center, bought an EPT, peed on the stick, and showed me the word PREGNANT. We were going to become parents again. It was both terrifying and elating, and we needed to experience those feelings in private.

  I held Anna in my arms, the two of us kneeling on the tiled bathroom floor. Even though I was happy, I felt a stab of guilt. I didn’t share this with Anna. This was a time for us to celebrate. But secretly, I felt I had betrayed the memory of my son, and wondered if Anna felt anything similar in regard to her son, Kevin.

  How quickly did our elation come and go? Two weeks and seven hours. That was when Anna, her voice strangled by tears, called me from a hospital in Seattle. Anna, a self-employed and highly sought-after management consultant, was traveling on business, finalizing a significant new contract, when the bleeding started. I didn’t get all the words, but enough to paint a vivid picture in my mind. Alone in a hotel bathroom, trying to breathe away the throbbing pain in her abdomen, reaching down between her legs and having her hands come away covered in blood. I found out later she took a cab to the hospital. I was crushed to think of her desperate, panicked, and so alone.

  When Anna came home, everything was different. I could see it in her eyes. We wouldn’t try again, even though her doctor in Seattle said we could give it a go as soon as Anna felt emotionally ready. But Anna wasn’t ever going to be emotionally ready. That was what her eyes told me. But the experience had awakened in her a strong desire to become a parent again, as it had with me. It also brought us closer together as a couple and made me realize this was the woman I wanted to marry.

  The day Anna decided she wanted to adopt was early springtime, a cool and crisp morning with a blanket of fog low enough to kiss the ground. She had emerged from the shower, towel-drying her shoulder-length dark brown hair. She flopped down on the bed in her plush and fuzzy bathrobe and looked up at the ceiling.

  “I’ve had enough loss, Gage. I can’t risk getting pregnant again,” she said. Tears lined the bottom of her eyes.

  I climbed onto the bed and lay down beside her. Our eyes met. My mind flashed on an image of my first wife, Karen. Anna looked nothing like Karen. My therapist told me this was all intentional on the part of my subconscious. I said it wasn’t subconscious at all. I couldn’t be with a woman if every day she reminded me of my first great love.

  In truth, I hadn’t noticed Anna right away. She was new to our grief group, which met on Tuesdays in the basement of a nearby Unitarian church. Her blank and unreadable face didn’t draw me to her, but she was clearly attractive—later I’d say gorgeous—tall and long-limbed, athletically built, with alluring brown eyes, a prominent nose, and a beautiful olive complexion. Unlike most of us at group therapy, Anna kept to herself. But one evening while filling our Styrofoam cups with coffee, Anna had smiled at something I said and I felt my heart quicken.

  Was it attraction? Could I be interested in another woman? It had been four years since the accident that had claimed the lives of my wife and son. Was it too soon to have this feeling? But I felt it—a powerful tug on my heart from just one simple smile.

  Hope.

  Attraction.

  Desire.

  Anna had experienced a similar loss with the death of her son, Kevin. After this new loss we agreed on two things: we wanted to parent a child, and we wanted to adopt. A few days after we made the major decision Anna said, “I don’t want to use an agency in the traditional sense.”

  Again, we were in bed and I propped myself up on elbows to look at her. “How else do you adopt a child?” I asked.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of research,” Anna said.

  I wasn’t surprised. Anna was on a mission to have a baby, and I was in lockstep on the journey with her. She was also very practical and methodical in her business dealings, and these attributes carried over into our new quest. She felt her age, thirty-eight, and wanted to have a baby as soon as possible. It was like a thirst that had to be quenched.

  “We can skip the agency and do a direct adoption with a birth mother. Technically direct adoptions aren’t legal in Massachusetts, so we’ll eventually have to hire an agency to facilitate, assuming we find a willing birth mother.”

  “Why go that route?” I asked.

  “Direct adoptions are much faster than agency adoptions. At least, that’s what I’ve read online. But it does require a lot of extra effort. We’ll have to use our enthusiasm and initiative to find a birth mother. It might take some luck, but from what I’ve read it’ll definitely take a lot of work.”

  “Do we take an ad out on birthmotherswanted.com?” I asked, smiling.

  Anna gave me a funny look. “Actually, you’re right about taking out an ad, sort of,” she said. “We have to make a profile on a website that birth mothers search to select potential parents.”

  “So we make a profile and then the birth mothers contact us?”

  “Like I said, it’s faster than going through an agency. I want this, Gage. I need it,” Anna’s eyes were wide with exuberance, her hands wringing mine like they were dishrags. “My heart hurts. It literally aches with this longing.”

  We both lay quiet on the bed. “Do you think I’m turning my back
on Max?” I asked. It surprised me to hear myself voice this fear aloud, but relieved me too.

  “You mean by adopting?” Anna asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Do you think I’m betraying his memory?”

  Anna nestled into my chest.

  “I think we’ll never heal,” she said. “But I don’t want to give up my dream to become a mother again. I want to raise a baby. I want to see my child grow up, play sports, have friends, learn an instrument, go to a dance or on vacation. These are all the things I can’t do with Kevin anymore, but it doesn’t mean I can’t ever do those things again.”

  “The obligation of the living is to live,” I said.

  Anna sat up, looking impressed. “Did you just make that up?”

  “No,” I said with a little laugh. “My therapist did.”

  For the next few weeks Anna and I were on a mission to make the greatest, most compelling, most desirable profile on ParentHorizon.com, the largest registry of parents seeking to adopt.

  This was, I soon discovered, a very competitive process. Yes, it’s all about giving a child your complete and total unconditional love. And yes, it’s also about expressing sincere gratitude for the gift, the true blessing of the birth mother who makes possible the completion of a family. But at the end of the day it’s also about being picked from tens of thousands of would-be adoptive parents, so you’ve got to put your best foot forward. Anna and I wrote draft after draft of the birth mother letter until every single word conveyed the spirit of our family and the reasons we’ve decided to adopt. I’d learned that this letter was extremely important in the adoption process, not unlike a cover letter from a job applicant. It set the tone for the rest of the profile.