NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER   It came in a plain brown wrapper, no return address—an audiocassette recording of a horrifying, soul-lacerating scream, followed by the sound of a childlike voice chanting: “Bad love. Bad love. Don’t give me the bad love.” For Alex Delaware the tape is the first intimation that he is about to enter a living nightmare. Others soon follow: disquieting laughter echoing over a phone line that suddenly goes dead, and a chilling act of trespass and vandalism. He has become the target of a carefully orchestrated campaign of vague threats and intimidation rapidly building to a crescendo as harassment turns to terror, mischief to madness.   “A wonderful, roller-coaster ride . . . a guaranteed page-turner.”— USA Today   With the help of his friend, LAPD detective Milo Sturgis, Alex uncovers a series of violent deaths that may follow a diabolical pattern. And if he fails to decipher the twisted logic of the stalker’s mind games, Alex will be the next to die. “ Bad Love will have you looking over your shoulder before you turn out the lights.”— Detroit Free Press   “By the end I was fairly racing through the pages.”— Los Angeles Times Jonathan Kellerman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than forty crime novels, including the Alex Delaware series, The Butcher’s Theater, Billy Straight, The Conspiracy Club, Twisted, True Detectives, and The Murderer’s Daughter . With his wife, bestselling novelist Faye Kellerman, he co-authored Double Homicide and Capital Crimes . With his son, bestselling novelist Jesse Kellerman, he co-authored A Measure of Darkness, Crime Scene, The Golem of Hollywood, and The Golem of Paris . He is also the author of two children’s books and numerous nonfiction works, including Savage Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children and With Strings Attached: The Art and Beauty of Vintage Guitars . He has won the Goldwyn, Edgar, and Anthony awards and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association, and has been nominated for a Shamus Award. Jonathan and Faye Kellerman live in California and New Mexico. Chapter 1 It came in a plain brown wrapper. Padded envelope, book rate, book-sized. I assumed it was an academic text I’d forgotten ordering. It went on to the mail table, along with Monday’s bills and announcements of scholarly seminars in Hawaii and St. Croix. I returned to the library and tried to figure out what I was going to do in ten minutes when Tiffani and Chondra Wallace showed up for their second session. A year ago their mother had been murdered by their father up on a ridge in the Angeles Crest Forest. He told it as a crime of passion and maybe he was right, in the very worst sense. I’d learned from court documents that absence of passion had never been a problem for Ruthanne and Donald Dell Wallace. She’d never been a strong-willed woman, and despite the ugliness of their divorce, she had held on to “love feelings” for Donald Dell. So no one had been surprised when he cajoled her into taking a night ride with sweet words, the promise of a lobster dinner, and good marijuana. Shortly after parking on a shaded crest overlooking the forest, the two of them got high, made love, talked, argued, fought, raged, and finally clawed at one another. Then Donald Dell took his buck knife to the woman who still bore his name, slashed and stabbed her thirty-three times, and kicked her corpse out of his pickup, leaving behind an Indian-silver clip stuffed with cash and his membership card in the Iron Priests motorcycle club. A docket-clearing plea bargain landed him in Folsom Prison on a five to ten for second-degree murder. There he was free to hang out in the yard with his meth-cooking Aryan Brotherhood bunkmates, take an auto mechanics course he could have taught, accrue good behavior brownie points in the chapel, and bench press until his pectorals threatened to explode. Four months into his sentence, he was ready to see his daughters. The law said his paternal rights had to be considered. An L.A. family court judge named Stephen Huff—one of the better ones—asked me to evaluate. We met in his chambers on a September morning and he told me the details while drinking ginger ale and stroking his bald head. The room had beautiful old oak paneling and cheap country furniture. Pictures of his own children were all over the place. “Just when does he plan on seeing them, Steve?” “Up at the prison, twice a month.” “That’s a plane ride.” “Friends will chip in for the fare.” “What kind of friends?” “Some idiocy called The Donald Dell Wallace Defense Fund.” “Biker buddies?” “Vroom vroom.” “Meaning it’s probably amphetamine money.” His smile was weary and grudging. “Not the issue before us, Alex.” “What’s next, Steve? Disability payments because he’s stressed out being a single parent?” “So it smells. So what else is new? Talk to the poor kids a few times, write up a report saying visitation’s in