The Final Deception Read online

  How do you confront a threat that is hiding in plain sight? FBI agent Craig Frasier and psychologist Kieran Finnegan hunt an escaped serial killer in the latest explosive thriller in the New York Confidential series.

  It was one of Kieran’s most chilling cases: her assessment of a murderer known as the Fireman. There was no doubt that the man needed to be locked away. Now Craig is called to a gruesome crime scene that matches the killer’s methods, and news breaks that the Fireman has escaped prison.

  Amid a citywide manhunt, Kieran and Craig need to untangle a web of deceit, privilege and greed. They suspect that those closest to the killer have been drawn into his evil, or else someone is using another man’s madness and cruelty to disguise their crimes.

  When their investigation brings the danger right to the doorstep of Finnegan’s Pub, Kieran and Craig will have to be smarter and bolder than ever before, because this time it’s personal, and they have everything to lose.

  Also by New York Times bestselling author Heather Graham

  THE STALKING

  THE SEEKERS

  THE SUMMONING

  A LETHAL LEGACY

  ECHOES OF EVIL

  PALE AS DEATH

  FADE TO BLACK

  A DANGEROUS GAME

  WICKED DEEDS

  DARK RITES

  DYING BREATH

  A PERFECT OBSESSION

  DARKEST JOURNEY

  DEADLY FATE

  HAUNTED DESTINY

  FLAWLESS

  THE HIDDEN

  THE FORGOTTEN

  THE SILENCED

  THE DEAD PLAY ON

  THE BETRAYED

  THE HEXED

  THE CURSED

  WAKING THE DEAD

  THE NIGHT IS FOREVER

  THE NIGHT IS ALIVE

  THE NIGHT IS WATCHING

  LET THE DEAD SLEEP

  THE UNINVITED

  THE UNSPOKEN

  THE UNHOLY

  THE UNSEEN

  AN ANGEL FOR CHRISTMAS

  THE EVIL INSIDE

  SACRED EVIL

  HEART OF EVIL

  PHANTOM EVIL

  NIGHT OF THE VAMPIRES

  THE KEEPERS

  GHOST MOON

  GHOST NIGHT

  GHOST SHADOW

  THE KILLING EDGE

  NIGHT OF THE WOLVES

  HOME IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS

  UNHALLOWED GROUND

  DUST TO DUST

  NIGHTWALKER

  DEADLY GIFT

  DEADLY HARVEST

  DEADLY NIGHT

  THE DEATH DEALER

  THE LAST NOEL

  THE SÉANCE

  BLOOD RED

  THE DEAD ROOM

  KISS OF DARKNESS

  THE VISION

  THE ISLAND

  GHOST WALK

  KILLING KELLY

  THE PRESENCE

  DEAD ON THE DANCE FLOOR

  PICTURE ME DEAD

  HAUNTED

  HURRICANE BAY

  A SEASON OF MIRACLES

  NIGHT OF THE BLACKBIRD

  NEVER SLEEP WITH STRANGERS

  EYES OF FIRE

  SLOW BURN

  NIGHT HEAT

  * * * * *

  Look for Heather Graham’s next novel

  SEEING DARKNESS

  available soon from MIRA.

  Heather Graham

  The Final Deception

  For Josie Blanco, one of the most giving and generous women I know.Thanks for being there for so many people so often!

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  EXCERPT FROM SEEING DARKNESS BY HEATHER GRAHAM

  PROLOGUE

  CRAIG FRASIER BREATHED it in before he could stop himself; the bloodcurdling scent of burning flesh.

  Human flesh.

  Flames still skittered over the body—an accelerant had been used. As he stood there in the small dark alley, he heard others rushing in: Mike Dalton, his partner, and patrol officers. He heard the sirens; the fire department was coming.

  But there was no saving this victim.

  Craig was already tamping the fire out; an extinguisher would make the work of the medical examiner more difficult.

  But he knew what the medical examiner would find.

  The victim had been strangled, then the tongue had been cut out. And then the eyes had been gouged out. Death had occurred, mercifully, before the fire had been set.

  The corpses haunted his dreams. Burned shells, some flesh and soft tissue remaining, charred and clinging to the bones, mummy-like. The mouth in the blackened skull was agape, and those empty, soulless eye sockets seemed to be staring up, as if they could still see, as if they stared at him in reproach...

  Why hadn’t they caught the killer sooner?

  He heard a rustling sound. Looking across the alley, Craig saw a shadow moving. Leaving the corpse to others, he took off like a bullet. He pursued the moving shadow at a run...running and running for blocks. The city was a blur around him.

  He reached apartments on Madison, with a coffee shop and a dress store on the first floor, just as the gate at the street entry to the residential units above was closing. He caught the gate, and he reached the elevator in time to see what floor it stopped on. He followed.

  And again, as he arrived, a door was just closing; he didn’t let it close.

  And there he was: the Fireman, still smelling faintly of gasoline, ready to sit down to a lovely dinner with his family. About to say a prayer before the meal...just a husband and a father, and a man who looked at Craig and calmly said, “So, my work is over. But I have obeyed the commandments given me, and I will go with you.”

  Why did you take so long? The corpse again! In Craig’s dreams, the corpse was back, animated, flying at him like a ghostly banshee, issuing a silent scream.

  Craig opened his eyes.

  He didn’t awake screaming or startled—he didn’t jerk up. It was almost as if he always knew it was a dream, reliving the day the Fireman had gone down.

  He’d had the dream several times before. But, now, it seemed as though it had been a long time. Weeks. He’d thought he’d ceased experiencing it altogether. He’d been doing all the right things: quietly seeing a Bureau shrink a few times, following their advice. He hadn’t told Kieran Finnegan, his fiancée, about his recurring nightmare, and while she was a criminal psychologist working with two of the city’s finest criminal psychiatrists, he’d made a point of not telling her or her bosses.

  He’d thought he’d settled it on his own. It was a little strange and sometimes intimidating being in love with someone who studied the human psyche, and he hadn’t wanted Kieran worried about him or trying to analyze him.

  Why the hell had the dream come back?

  He felt Kieran shift against him. He pulled her into his arms and she rolled, crystal eyes opening w
ide when she realized that he was awake.

  And aroused. Kieran’s tangle of auburn hair was a wild mass around her face, emphasizing her eyes and the quick smile that came to her lips.

  “Ah!” she murmured, feeling his arousal against her.

  “Your fault,” he accused.

  “Well, thankfully. What time is it?” she asked with a soft whisper.

  He laughed. “Quickie time, or time for a quickie,” he said.

  Her smile deepened, and there was something so sensual about it that it never failed to increase whatever he had begun to feel.

  In her arms, in the liquid burn of kisses here and there strategically placed, in the swift—and intense—blaze of arching and writhing and thrusting, all else faded.

  After, Craig headed for the shower. He was an FBI agent in the Criminal Division of New York City’s branch of the FBI. He could be satisfied in having brought down several killers. But there would be more; a sad fact of the world and humanity. He was blessed to have his job, his vocation, and it was time to go to work.

  He shoved the dream into the back of his mind.

  Whatever his day held, he’d already seen the worst that this world could offer.

  Little did he know.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Two months later

  “‘THOU SHALL NOT suffer a witch to live’!” Raoul Nicholson said. His voice was low, but passionate. He stared at Kieran Finnegan with eyes that pleaded for understanding.

  Kieran sat in a chair across from Nicholson, her hands folded on the simple metal desk between them.

  Nicholson was handcuffed, and chained to pegs in the concrete floor at the foot of his side of the table. Nicholson was forty-eight years old, a thin man, but lean-muscled, wearing a full beard and mustache and long, unkempt brown hair.

  The man’s attorney, Cliff Watkins, stood behind Nicholson, hands folded behind his back, having declined to sit. He’d assured Kieran he would be there just to protect his client, though protecting him seemed a futile effort at times.

  Kieran liked Watkins. He was clean-shaven and bald, somewhere in his early to mid-forties, wiry in build and calm in demeanor. Despite his client, he wasn’t a grandstander; his firm had taken on the case pro bono, but he was doing his best to see that the man was treated fairly.

  Trying for an innocent plea of any kind didn’t seem to be his game.

  Nicholson could never be deemed innocent.

  Watkins didn’t seem to be concerned with safety issues. He’d shrugged when they’d chained Nicholson down. He’d known a protest would be foolhardy, and for the record alone.

  Kieran wasn’t sure the security measures were necessary. She didn’t believe Nicholson was a threat to her because he didn’t believe that she was a witch.

  Or was it all a ruse for an insanity plea?

  She started to speak, but, before she could, he was imploring her again. “Don’t you understand? The world is a disaster, because no one adheres to the commandments. Those I executed, they weren’t men and women. You must believe me. I killed witches. I helped rid the world of monsters. You must obey the commandments. ‘Thou shall not suffer a witch to live’!”

  “What about, ‘Thou shall not murder’?” Kieran asked quietly.

  “It refers to people!” Nicholson told her, distressed and shaking his head. “You don’t understand what I’m trying to tell you. They were witches. Satan’s minions.”

  Nicholson had brutally murdered five people: two sex workers, a senior at NYU, a fashion designer, and an accountant. Before they had been murdered,the investigations into their deaths had proved he had delivered each one of them a simple message: I know what you are; you are going to die.

  The bodies had been found across the city—one downtown, one in the West Village, one in Hell’s Kitchen, and two Midtown.

  They had been burned, leaving very little to be discovered by the medical examiner. But even with the use of an accelerant, there had been enough left behind for the ME to report that, in each case, the eyes and tongue had been removed. That information, however, had been kept from the public.

  The press had given him the moniker the Fireman. Once in captivity, Nicholson had never denied his guilt. He had been on a mission—and in the eyes of his Maker, he had done what needed to be done. He was happy to be a martyr; his reward would come to him, and he would be judged by “He Who Mattered,” or his “higher power.” What happened in earthly courts didn’t matter to him. They had wondered, naturally, if anyone else had been involved—his family, friends, members of his church. But Nicholson had told them time and again that no one else had been involved. They didn’t understand. The mission—and it had been a mission—was his, and no one else was part of it, nor did they know about it. Word had come to him alone, and he had acted on his own.

  Nicholson owned a furniture repair shop in the village and had a rent-controlled apartment. He had a wife, Amy, and two children, Thomas and John; the elder had graduated from NYU, and John was now studying at Princeton.

  His wife was devastated... She couldn’t stop crying 24/7. They had been a religious family, but she’d had no idea of her husband’s homicidal desire to cure the world of witchcraft. Or so she claimed.

  His pastor, Reverend Axel Cunningham, had been similarly stunned, or so he claimed, as well. As had Nicholson’s employees at the furniture shop. And according to everyone at Annie’s Sunrise, the café where he stopped every morning for a doughnut and a latte, he was always kind and courteous and polite. Annie Sullivan, who owned the place, claimed that he was one of the nicest customers who came in, courteous to everyone around him, making people smile as they started out their day.

  To everyone he regularly interacted with, he was just a wonderful person. If he hadn’t admitted his guilt, they would have all said he wasn’t capable of such violence. Even his attorney had said he’d never met such a sincere man.

  “I’m sorry to press, Mr. Nicholson, but I’m trying to understand why you thought those young men and women were witches, and why that allowed you to kill. I’m not making fun of you or doubting you, I’m trying to see it from your perspective.”

  And determine if you’re lying, she thought.

  He leaned forward, as if he felt he had found a friend, one who really might not just understand him, but also agree that witches needed to die.

  “You must listen to me.” He paused to sniff suddenly. “They’re not even silly people who practice sanctioned ‘Wicca’ religions. Witches don’t dance beneath the moon in the forest, naked, bowing to their horned god there. Real witches are devious. They wear beautiful shells, and that’s how they manipulate men—and women—and cause them to do hurtful things. I heard the voice that told me who they were—and what must be done.”

  “A voice? God’s voice?”

  “Perhaps it was God’s voice. Perhaps He sent Gabriel or another angel. We all see God differently, but, yes, if you like, it was God’s voice. But the point is, I knew what must be done, and as hard as it was, I did it. I was told to be merciful—one does not retrieve a soul by cruelty. I offered them a chance to repent, and I strangled them, as quickly as I could. Then I cut out their eyes and tongues so they would no longer see the devil as they made their way to purgatory, no longer be able to answer his call. And if I am to die for the good I’ve attempted to bestow upon the world, so be it. I have done as I was commanded.”

  Watkins spoke up. “You’re not going to die, Raoul.”

  “If there are federal charges, I could be sentenced to death,” Nicholson said.

  “No, Mr. Nicholson, what we’re trying to determine here is just what charges they wish to pursue,” Kieran told him quietly. She looked over at the man’s attorney. Watkins met her gaze with steady brown eyes.

  “The laws of man must be used as man chooses,” Nicholson said. “I will answer in the flesh, as such laws c
ommand. I only killed witches. I killed nothing but evil.”

  “You killed people with families and friends and long lives ahead of them,” Kieran said.

  “The voice was very clear on who must be killed and when. You can’t imagine what havoc they might have done to the world. There are more out there, of course. They are the devil’s disciples—and you must be afraid, Miss Finnegan, you must be very afraid.”

  “Mr. Nicholson, I beg you, watch your words!” Watkins warned.

  Kieran was startled. She hadn’t expected to be on Nicholson’s list—in fact, she hadn’t even expected to be here.

  In a case this serious, her employers, Drs. Fuller and Miro, usually did the interviews, and several of them, for the police or the FBI. They were psychiatrists. Kieran was on their staff as a psychologist, and most often worked when therapy was ordered by the court or the effect of that therapy was to be determined.

  But because of the circumstances of this case, they had both already spoken with the accused. And they wanted Kieran’s opinion of his mental state, as well. “I’m in danger?” she asked, keeping her voice even and low. Was he a threat to her?

  She thought maybe, if he were ever free again. “Witches—slaves of Satan! I fear for you greatly. You don’t know the danger they present. You can’t imagine what they might do to you! You are in no danger from me—you’re a good person. Anyone can see that. But you also must believe that evil is out there. I barely began to rid the world of a tiny portion of the evil.”

  “Mr. Nicholson, I really want to see all this, see what you’re seeing. But your victims—I just can’t see what harm they caused anyone.”

  Nicholson sighed softly. “You don’t see, but you will. The young woman I last freed...if they haven’t discovered it yet, she was spreading a deadly disease. Satan commanded her to spread it as far as she could. The man...second, third... I don’t remember. He killed his father. Satan told him to do so. They were all obeying their higher power, Satan. I was charged to stop them!”

  Kieran sat back. She didn’t know if it was true or not. Could the medical examiner test a burned body for infectious diseases? If that had been the case, she didn’t know about it.

  “How did you know these things?” she asked.