Sleepwalker (19 page)

Ah, but she’ll never truly be alone. I’ll always be there, watching her. Someday, maybe, I’ll take it upon myself to end her suffering, but until then. . .

Allison, who has so deftly made fresh starts twice in this lifetime—the first when she moved to New York, the second when she married Mack—has run out of chances to start over. Even the most resilient human being wouldn’t recover from what’s going to happen to Allison—what Jamie is going to do to her, what Jamie is going to take from her.

On the computer screen, Mack has his arms around his wife, comforting her.

Aw . . . aren’t they just so sweet together, the two lovebirds
. He’s saying something into her hair, but his voice is too muffled to make out. He’s probably telling her that he’s there to protect her.

You just go ahead and keep saying that, Mack. I can’t wait to see the look on her face when she finds out what kind of man she really married.

Chapter Ten

M
ack closes the bedroom door and then, after a minute, locks it.

Just in case.

It’s three in the morning, but Allison is still downstairs, despite his repeated attempts to get her to go to bed. He didn’t really want to leave her there, but he needs a few minutes alone, and he’d better not count on waiting until she’s asleep. That’s probably not going to happen tonight.

He goes back to the bed, picks up his briefcase, and opens it. For a long time, he stares at the object he’d stashed inside earlier, between layers of papers he’d brought home from the office.

What the hell am I doing with a gun?

He knows how to shoot, but it’s been a while. Years. As a kid, he went hunting with his uncle; as an adult, he did some target shooting with Ben, who wanted to learn how to use a gun after someone broke into his and Randi’s apartment. Randi never knew about it, though. Still doesn’t.

“She’d freak if she thought I had a gun in the house with the kids around,” Ben told Mack, who admitted that he didn’t think it was such a good idea himself.

“I keep it locked up,” Ben assured him. “But it’s good to know it’s there, just in case.”

That seemed to make more sense back when the Webers lived in the city than it does here in the suburbs—at least, until tonight.

“Whatever you do,” Ben whispered, slipping the gun to Mack in the kitchen, “don’t tell Allison where it came from. She’ll tell Randi, and I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Are you kidding? I’m not even going to tell her I have it. I’m not even sure I should take it.”

“You should,” Ben told him. “Like I said, it’s here just in case you need it.”

He thanked Ben and tucked the gun into his briefcase before Allison rejoined them in the kitchen.

Now, he gingerly takes the weapon from his briefcase and checks to make sure it’s loaded. Yep. Ready to go, just as Ben promised.

Lending the gun was entirely Ben’s idea, and he’d reminded a reluctant Mack, “You always were a better shot than I am.”

True. His uncle taught him well, as did the shooting range instructors. But clay pigeons—and even live ducks—are different from human beings. Mack isn’t sure he’s even capable of aiming at another person and pulling the trigger, and he said as much to Ben.

“What if your wife or your kids were in danger? Could you shoot someone to save their lives?”

Mack nodded grimly.

If it comes down to that—
please, God, don’t ever let it come down to that
—he’ll do whatever is necessary to protect his family.

He wraps the gun in a T-shirt and opens the middle drawer of his dresser—the only drawer that locks. When they bought the furniture, Allison had teased him that it would be the perfect place to stash his porn.

“What am I, thirteen years old?” He remembers laughing and shaking his head at the suggestion.

Now, he fishes the tiny, never-used key from the bottom of the drawer, tucks the bundle way in the back, closes it, locks it, and stuffs the key into his wallet.

That’ll do for now. Chances are, Allison won’t be putting away any laundry any time soon, and he’ll find a better hiding place before she does.

Shaken, Mack unlocks the bedroom door, then looks longingly at the bed. All he wants right now is to escape this nightmare for a little while. He goes into the bathroom, takes a pill from the orange bottle, and swallows it quickly.

As soon as he does, he regrets it.

Is it really a good idea to knock himself out right now, leaving Allison to fend for herself should anything happen?

What’s going to happen?

There are cops right outside, and it’s almost dawn, and anyway, whoever killed Phyllis Lewis has to be long gone by now.

Still, Mack is unsettled as he climbs beneath the covers. He’ll just rest, he decides. Just for a few minutes. Then he’ll get up and go back downstairs to sit with Allison until the sun comes up, and then he’ll figure out how the hell he’s going to convince her that he really does have to go to work.

R
iding up the Saw Mill River Parkway to visit the murder scene, Rocky has all but forgotten, for the time being, that he left his wife in an ICU trauma unit about an hour ago.

Right now, with Murph at the wheel and a cup of gas station coffee in his hand, he’s living in the moment—something he hasn’t truly done since Ange’s fall.

He and Murph have been riding around together forever, it seems, expertly investigating horrific crimes, just as expertly breaking each other’s chops. This is familiar territory for him.

The only thing that’s changed over the decades—besides the potbellies that have sprouted on both of them—is that Murph’s flame-colored hair has a smoky touch of gray in it these days, courtesy, he says, of having been married and divorced a second time, while Rocky wears a pair of reading glasses perched on the end of his nose whenever he takes notes.

Now, juggling the coffee with a pencil, he scribbles down everything Murph can tell him about the case so far, referring back to the old case files he pulled before he left, to refresh his memory.

His cell phone rings, and he sees a familiar number on the screen.

“It’s Vic,” he tells Murph, who nods. He, of course, knows Vic Shattuck; knows, too, that Vic had tried to reach Rocky earlier.

Murph and Rocky speculated that Vic was calling because the FBI had also been alerted about the apparent reemergence of the Nightwatcher. Though he took his mandatory retirement a few years back, Vic still has a way of getting wind of these things.

“Vic,” Rocky says into the phone.

“Hi, Rock. I got your message.”

Rocky had tried calling Vic back earlier, on his way home from the hospital, but it went right into voice mail.

“I just got off a plane,” Vic tells him now.

“On the road again, huh?”

“Story of my life. Not complaining, though.”

Vic’s been doing some consulting and also travels the lecture circuit, promoting the book he wrote about the biggest case of his life: the Night Watchman. After disappearing for many years, the Night Watchman resurfaced a while back using the same signature.

Night Watchman, Nightwatcher . . .

The press reserves catchy nicknames for the most lethal serial killers.

Vic’s book was open-ended; presumably, the Night Watchman is still out there somewhere.

The Nightwatcher, on the other hand, was presumed to be in custody—and then dead.

But now—who knows?

“I heard what happened,” Vic tells him. “Looks like we might have picked up the wrong guy back in ’01.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not jumping to conclusions.”

“I’m not, either, but . . . Listen, I know how you are. Don’t beat yourself up over it if it was a mistake, Rock. It happens to the best of us.”

“Tell me what you know that I don’t. About the case, I mean. Not about me.” Rocky never particularly appreciates it when Vic aims those well-honed psychoanalyst skills in his direction.

“Come on, Manzillo, yours is the most fascinating mind I’ve ever had the pleasure of analyzing.”

Hearing the grin in his voice, Rocky replies, “I’ll take that as a compliment. Listen, Vic, Murph’s right here with me and we’re in the car heading up to Glenhaven Park. Can I put you on speakerphone?”

“Go ahead.”

Rocky presses the speaker button. “You’re on.”

“Hey, Vic,” Murph says. “What’cha got for us?”

“Hey, Murph. This is unofficial and off the record, right?”

“Right,” Murph says.

“So they tell me the signature looks exactly the same as the Nightwatcher’s. I’m assuming you guys know that, right?”

Both Murph and Rocky confirm the assumption, and neither asks who “they” are.

“And you know that in a case like this, the MO is going to evolve—practice makes perfect—but the signature isn’t likely to change.”

“So I’ve heard,” Rocky says dryly.

As Vic has told Rocky many times over the years—and memorably wrote in his best-selling book—the offender is always going to be playing out some kind of twisted fantasy, and there are certain key elements he needs in order to complete the crime.

“There’s only one way to rule out a copycat and establish whether the same person committed this murder and the ones ten years ago.”

“By studying the behavioral patterns.” Rocky nods.

“Looks like we’ve established that they’re the same. We’ve got the disaster—the freak snowstorm—that could have set him off. We’ve got the stolen lingerie,” Murph points out, “and the Alicia Keys song, the candles, the severed middle finger . . .”

Yes. Phyllis Lewis’s death certainly appears to have the same signature as the Nightwatcher murders, but . . .

“I don’t know.” Rocky shakes his head. “I’m just not convinced.”

“Because . . . ?” Murph looks over at him.

“Because it’s too soon. We don’t have all the information. We haven’t gotten a look at the scene. And . . .”

And maybe I just can’t stand to even consider that I might have arrested the wrong damned guy ten years ago.

Before Jerry Thompson confessed—oh hell, even
after
he confessed—he blamed the murders on someone named Jamie. Rocky later learned that was the name of his dead sister.

“People don’t come back from the dead, Rock. You know that, right?” Vic is talking about Jerry, not his sister, Jamie.

Either way—yeah. Rocky knows that.

“If Jerry didn’t kill those women,” he says, frustrated, “then who did?”

“Good question,” Vic says. “Wish I could be there to work this case with you guys.”

“So do I,” Murph tells Vic, as Rocky stares at a distant set of red taillights on the winding road ahead, thinking back.

Forget about the murder weapon and the severed fingers of his victims, all found in his apartment. What logical explanation could there be for the wig, the makeup, and the bloody dress that were also there? Forensics determined that strands of long hair found clenched in Marianne Apostolos’s fingers had come from that wig. The dress was a size fourteen—larger than the average woman; maybe barely large enough to fit stocky Jerry . . . but nowhere near large enough to fit his obese mother.

So it wasn’t hers . . .

If it wasn’t
Jerry’s
 . . .

Whose was it?

“Rock? You still there?” Vic asks.

“Yeah. I’m just trying to figure out what I possibly could have missed ten years ago. It’s not like I haven’t been doing this job forever, and I sure as hell don’t go jumping to conclusions, or rely on circumstantial evidence . . .”

“You’re as seasoned as they come, Rock. But look at the timing—you got this case a few hours after a terror attack that killed dozens of guys you knew; thousands of citizens you were sworn to protect.”

“That doesn’t mean I—”

“No, it doesn’t,” Vic cuts him off, “but you’re only human. If there was ever any time in your career that you might not have been on top of your game; any time when you’d have been prone to slip up . . . that was it. For all of us.”

Rocky mulls that over, remembering those shell-shocked days after September 11. The city was in ruins; the force was short-staffed; every available officer was down there on the pile, digging for survivors, digging for corpses with familiar faces, brothers, sons, sisters, colleagues, friends . . .

Did he ever truly consider, on that long ago night in Jerry Thompson’s apartment, that someone else might have been involved?

Or did he take one look into Jerry’s vacant face, recognize that Jerry wasn’t all there, and perhaps subconsciously dismiss his trying to cast the blame elsewhere as desperate babble?

I’m a good detective. That’s not how I operate.

Anyway, even Jerry’s own attorney never introduced the possibility of another actual suspect, and besides . . .

“Look, the person Jerry blamed had been dead for years, Rock.”

Yeah. The sister, Jamie.

How many times had he gone back and looked into the old case file just to be sure?

Too damned many. Seeing autopsy photographs of a child’s bloody corpse is never easy.

Tragic end to a tragic story. She was just a kid.

A kid who beat her brother’s brains out
, Rocky reminds himself yet again.

But a kid who never had a chance.

At sixteen, Jerry and Jamie’s mother, Lenore, had gotten herself knocked up by a fourteen-year-old juvenile delinquent named Samuel Shields. Aside from the birth certificate, there’s no evidence that the father ever had anything to do with the twins—although a lone photograph discovered among Lenore Thompson’s belongings might suggest otherwise.

It’s a shot of Jerry and Jamie posing with a man who bears a strong resemblance to Jerry. It might have been taken not long before Jamie died, judging by her apparent age in the photo.

When shown the photograph just after he was taken into custody, Jerry shook his head and said that he had no idea who the man was. Maybe he was lying, or maybe he’d forgotten, thanks to the head injury he’d later suffered.

“Jamie Thompson is dead,” Vic is reminding him, over the speakerphone.

“Yeah. I know that.”

How many times had Rocky read through the reports to confirm there was no doubt about the identity of that corpse? There was none. After being stabbed in an apparent random mugging, Jamie had been a Jane Doe until forensics matched dental records and DNA samples supplied by her mother, Lenore.

DNA doesn’t lie.

“Jerry Thompson is dead, too,” he points out. “So where does that leave things now?”

“Someone else killed Phyllis Lewis,” Murph says. “That’s where it leaves things.”

“Right. Someone who knew exactly how Kristina Haines died and wanted Allison Taylor MacKenna to find this body, just like she found Kristina’s, or . . .”

“Or what?” Vic prompts as Rocky trails off, and Murph glances over at him, wearing an expectant expression.

Ever since he heard about that particular detail—Allison finding the body—an idea has been teasing at the edge of Rocky’s mind.

“Let’s say Jerry Thompson really did kill those women ten years ago,” he says. “Who else would have known the exact details about the MO, the signature, the trophies . . . the stuff that the public didn’t know?”