Sleepwalker (24 page)

Yes, that’s what it’s like to lose the person you love most at the hands of another, and you want to do the same thing to the one who stole that person away. You want them to suffer that same unbearable agony.

Zoe Jennings dies quickly.

But Jamie keeps sinking the knife into her body, over and over, eyes closed, seeing someone else bleeding, suffering, dying.

This isn’t about Zoe at all.

It isn’t about her husband, a total stranger whose loss couldn’t matter less to Jamie in the grand scheme of things.

No, the Jenningses—like Phyllis and Bob Lewis and Chuck and Cora Nowak—are insignificant casualties in a much more meaningful game. They merely had the misfortune to cross paths with
her
, the one who is to blame.

When it’s over, Jamie tosses the red-handled knife—the one that came from the MacKennas’ kitchen—onto the floor beside the bed.

“A
llison!”

Startled from a sound sleep by an urgent whisper, she opens her eyes, then clasps her hands over them, dazzled by a blinding overhead light.

“Sorry, sweetie . . .” She hears the wall switch click and then Randi’s voice saying, “It’s okay now, I turned it off. Where’s Mack?”

Mack?

Allison opens her eyes again, this time to shadowy darkness—and confusion.

It takes her a moment to remember where she is—the Webers’ guest room—and that Mack should be here in bed with her. Yet even in the dim light falling through the doorway to the guest sitting room, where Randi is standing, backlit, Allison can see that his spot is empty

“Where’s Mack?” Randi asks again, no longer whispering.

Allison’s heart pounds as she sits up—too quickly; her head pounds as well, and her stomach gives a queasy lurch.

“Nathan Jennings is on the phone. He said Mack called him for a ride, but when he got there, he couldn’t find him.”

“Got where?” Allison swallows back excess saliva with the tinny taste of fear and vodka, trying to understand.

“Wherever Mack said he was stranded. On the road someplace, I think. Ben is on the phone with him now.”

“Mack?”

“No, Nate. Here, Al, come talk to him.”

Allison stands hurriedly, fighting back full-blown nausea. She remembers—and regrets—having downed in a few gulps that second, welcome, stiff martini Randi handed her after the Jenningses left.

She doesn’t remember much that happened after that, not even coming up to bed . . .

And now the Jenningses . . . Nathan Jennings on the phone, looking for Mack . . . Mack not here . . .

What in the world is going on?

Hearing a rustling near the bed, she remembers belatedly—J.J. is there, sleeping in the portable crib.

Not sleeping anymore, though. He emits a sound that begins as a soft whimper and winds up an ear-splitting wail, and she instinctively bends over to pick him up. He’s soaked through his terry cloth pajamas, poor thing. Did she forget to change him one last time before putting him down for the night?

Wait—she wasn’t the one who put him down. She was at the wake, and J.J. was here with Greta, whom he barely knows, and now it’s the middle of the night and he’s wet and Mack isn’t here and Allison wants to cry, too.

“Here . . .” Randi is beside her, reaching out for the baby. “I’ll take him. Go talk to Nate. Ben is on the phone in our room.”

“He’s wet.”

“I’ll change him. Go ahead, Al.” Randi sounds worried.

Mack—where is Mack? What’s going on?

Feeling dizzy, she hurries from the guest sitting room and out into the hall. There, she makes a wrong turn and winds up at the foot of the stairs leading up to Greta’s third floor quarters.

Hastily backtracking, feeling more frantic—not to mention sick to her stomach—by the moment, she finds her way to the other wing of the house. The door to the master suite is open, and she can hear Ben on the phone.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing only boxer shorts and five o’clock shadow, he looks up when she enters. “Where’s Mack?”

“I don’t know.” Taken aback by the concern in Ben’s dark eyes, she forgets to be embarrassed by his state of undress. “He’s not in bed.”

Ben frowns and says into the phone, “No, he’s not. Yes. Allison. Okay, hang on.” He passes the receiver to her wordlessly.

“Hi, Allison.” She recognizes Nathan Jennings’s voice. “Do you know where Mack is?”

She has some idea, and shudders inwardly at the thought of him wandering around the Webers’ kitchen, rummaging through the cupboards.

But she doesn’t know if Mack ever confided in Ben about the sleep medication, or—if he did—about the bizarre side effects that accompany it. And even if he did, surely Nathan Jennings doesn’t know.

“He called me and said his car was broken down just off the Saw Mill and he needed a ride.”

“But that’s not . . .”

Yes. It is. If sleepwalking and sleep-eating are possible, then surely sleep-talking—over the phone, or otherwise—is also possible.

“The last thing I knew,” she tells Nathan, her stomach churning, “he was in bed.”

Even that isn’t the entire truth. She doesn’t even remember coming to bed last night; only that Mack turned in much earlier than she did, soon after the Jenningses left. He must have been here asleep when she came up. Surely, she’d have noticed if he wasn’t.

Or would she?

But Nathan doesn’t need to know any of that. Her only obligation is to protect Mack from  . . .

Well, she has no idea what, but her instincts are telling her to tread carefully.

“Where are you now?” she asks Nathan.

“I’m standing on the side of the road, off Exit 37, where he said he would be.”

“Why would he call
you
for a ride though?” she asks, not bothering to add the
no offense
that pops into her head. She really doesn’t care whether she offends this man who, with his wife, barged into her life at the worst possible time.

Remembering the way Zoe Jennings reminisced with Mack—and Ben, too, for that matter—and having picked up on her attitude of easy familiarity toward him, Allison feels the same irrational pinprick of jealousy she experienced earlier, when Mack smiled at Zoe.

Zoe, and her husband, too, had known a Mack Allison herself never had the opportunity to meet—a Mack who was young and single and unencumbered by a doomed marriage, a terrorist attack, a high-pressure job . . . the weight of the world.

I was cheated
, Allison found herself thinking earlier as she listened to the easy banter—a silly thought, she knew then, and knows now—but she’s only human.

“I’m wondering the same thing,” Nathan Jennings tells her, “and I have no idea why he called me.”

“Are you sure it was him?”

“I looked at the caller ID on the phone after he hung up, and it had his name on it, so . . .”

“Oh. Well, did you call him back?”

“I tried to. He didn’t answer. It just rang right into voice mail. I left a message. So you don’t know where he is?”

“No. I don’t. I’m sorry.” Too overcome by worry and nausea to keep going around and around with him, Allison gestures for Ben to take the phone.

After handing it over, she paces across the carpet as he says into the receiver, “Nate? Ben again. Listen, I’m not sure what to tell you. I have no idea why he called or where he is, but—”

He curtails what he’s saying as Allison stops abruptly in her tracks with a startled gasp.

If Mack were stranded on the side of the road, he’d have called for help from his cell phone—and that would have come up on caller ID as private, not with his name.

Their home phone, though, would be listed
James MacKenna
.

“I know where he is,” she whispers to Ben, who raises an eyebrow. She hurriedly touches her index finger to her lips, indicating that she doesn’t want him to let on to Nathan Jennings. She isn’t sure why.

Something strange and frightening is going on, and she needs to get to Mack as soon as possible.

Please, please let him be all right . . .

“Allison! Where are you going?” Ben calls as she bolts from the room.

She doesn’t answer, rushing into the adjoining bathroom and vomiting into the toilet.

P
ulling into the garage back at home, Nate Jennings is aggravated—with himself, mostly, for getting caught up in this elaborate wild-goose chase when he could have been sleeping.

But he’s aggravated with Mack, too, wondering what the hell is going on.

Oh well. At least tomorrow—today—is Sunday and I can sleep in
, he thinks.

Then again—probably not. The kids are always up pretty early, and Zoe likes to consider those early morning weekend hours “family time.”

Meaning, if she has to get up and suffer through the kids’ antics, so should he.

He climbs out of the car and hits the remote twice—one button to close the garage door behind him, the other to lock the car.

It drives Zoe crazy that he does that—“Why lock the car when it’s already locked into the garage?” she asked before bed, frustrated at having to come back into the house for the keys after running out to grab the purse she’d forgotten in the car.

But Nate can’t seem to break the habit. Before they moved here to the suburbs, he parked on the street in their Manhattan neighborhood, where even locking the car doors didn’t keep thieves from breaking into it four times.

“This is Glenhaven Park, Nate—it’s safe here,” Zoe told him after he—out of guilt—went back out to unlock the car and fetch her purse. “You’re the one who said we probably don’t even have to install an alarm system here.”

“I was talking about the house, not the car.”

“Right, and you could probably leave the car parked out front all night, unlocked and running, and no one would steal it.”

“Then nobody would have stolen your purse, either, right? You could have left it there until morning.”

“My phone is in it.”

“So? Do you have a desperate need to get in touch with someone now?”

“Maybe,” she said, annoyed, and he watched her retrieve the phone and start pressing buttons, probably checking for texts.

She often goes back and forth with her sister, and with the friends she left behind in the city, and with God only knows who else.

Now, stepping into the kitchen, lit by the bulb beneath the stove hood, Nate sees her open purse still on the counter, right where she left it earlier. He tosses the keys beside it, drapes his jacket over the back of a chair, and heads for the stairs.

Again, he thinks about the wild-goose chase and wonders what it was about.

In the old agency days, Mack—and Ben, too—was a practical joker. They all were. So was this some kind of prank? Was Ben in on it, too?

Nate would buy that if not for the somber circumstances. Would Mack—a grown man now, and on the heels of a tragic wake—really have gone out of his way to do something so ridiculous?

Say he
had
actually gone to the trouble of staging a ruse that dragged Nate out into the rain in the dead of night . . . wouldn’t he have jumped out of the bushes to have a good laugh at him?

The old Mack would have.

The new Mack . . . who the hell knows?

He’s a virtual stranger after all these years. People change. Things change. And he’s going to remind Zoe of that first thing in the morning. She’d be better served by starting from scratch here in Glenhaven Park, rather than trying to reignite old friendships . . . or anything else.

Reaching the top of the stairs, Nate is sure he left the bedroom door open earlier, but now it’s closed.

Maybe Zoe got up with one of the kids while he was gone.

Who are you kidding?

She probably wouldn’t hear them if they screamed bloody murder.

Nathan Jennings opens the bedroom door—and crosses the threshold into . . .

Bloody murder.

Chapter Thirteen

B
obby Silva’s prison nickname, Rocky and Murph have been informed, is B.S.—and not just because of his initials.

According to the corrections officer who led them to the small room where they’re conducting inmate interviews, Silva is a pathological liar.

“Don’t believe a word he says,” the CO advises them.

“Terrific,” Murph mutters under his breath. “Why are we bothering?”

“A lot of times with guys like this, there’s a grain of truth in there somewhere,” Rocky reminds him.

With any luck, Silva will be more forthcoming than Doobie Jones was when they talked to him a short time ago. The guy couldn’t have been less cooperative, staring through them when they questioned him about Jerry Thompson. He simply refused to talk.

“You can’t get blood from a stone,” Murph muttered to Rocky after Jones was escorted away, “and that was the most stone-cold SOB I’ve ever met.”

Now it’s Silva’s turn to take a seat across from them as the armed CO takes up a watchful post on the other side of the glass-paneled wall. His presence was a definite comfort when Doobie Jones was in here.

But this guy isn’t anywhere near as menacing. Where Doobie Jones sat stealth-still, B.S. is full of nervous energy. He’s small in stature, with jet black hair, close-set black eyes, and sharp features. If he were a cartoon character, Rocky finds himself thinking, he’d be a rat.

“Do you know what time it is?” he demands, left alone with detectives.

Murph pushes up his sleeve and consults his watch. “Almost three-thirty.”

“I know that!”

Murph shrugs, calmly lowering the sleeve. “You asked.”

“Why’d you drag me out’a bed in the middle of the night?”

“We have some questions for you,” Rocky tells him, “and we hear you’re a smart guy. You know more than anyone else what goes on around the cell block.”

Ego sufficiently stroked, B.S. nods in agreement. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“You knew Jerry Thompson pretty well, didn’t you?”

“Jerry? Jerry was my best friend.” B.S. twitches in his seat. “I tried to save his life. Gave him CPR for, like, two hours, but he didn’t make it.”

Rocky figures that’s about as likely as Jerry rising from the dead, considering that B.S. was locked in his cell that fateful night, but he commends him for his heroic efforts.

Encouraged, B.S. launches into a detailed account of the action, painting himself as a bold would-be savior who tended to his fallen fellow inmate as the rest of the prison population, staff and medical personnel included, looked on helplessly.

Managing to look duly impressed, Murph says, “Wow, you’re one hell of a good friend, Mr. Silva. How did Jerry get his hands on the orange juice and the poison?”

In a flash, Silva goes from effusive to wary. “I don’t know.”

Yes, you do
, Rocky thinks.
You know that it came from Doobie Jones, and you’re afraid of what he’ll do to you if you rat him out.

Murph makes a few more futile attempts to get B.S. to reveal the truth. Watching him fidget and glance repeatedly at the door, Rocky decides it’s time to change the subject before the guy clams up altogether.

“So you and Jerry were best friends,” he says. “Did he ever talk to you about what his life was like on the outside?”

Still guarded, B.S. lifts his chin. “What do
you
think?”

“I think you were the one person he trusted in this place, and you were probably a good listener.”

“Yeah, I’m a great listener. All the guys tell me stuff all the time, because I’m the only one they trust. I used to be a secret agent before I got here, so I know how to keep my mouth shut.”

Masking his amusement, Rocky waits for B.S. to finish telling him about the government secrets he’s been privy to over the years, right up to the raid last spring on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.

“And what about Jerry?” Murph finally cuts him off. “What kinds of secrets did he confide in you?”

“A lot of stuff. You know.”

“Did he ever talk about what he did to get himself in here in the first place?”

“Sure.”

“What did he say?”

“He said his sister, Jamie, killed a bunch of people and he got blamed for it. He said no one believed Jamie was real. Everyone thought she was dead, even Jerry’s mother and father, but she wasn’t.”

Rocky nods, rubbing his chin.

Yes, Jamie was dead—no dispute there.

But what if Jerry mistook someone else for her? Or what if someone convinced Jerry that she was Jamie? What if that person, posing as Jamie—a person who fit into a size fourteen dress—had committed the murders and then slipped away as the police closed in, leaving a confused and hapless Jerry to take the fall?

It would explain how the murders could be replicated now with the deaths of Cora Nowak and Phyllis Lewis.

“Did you say Jerry’s
father
thought Jamie was dead?” Murph asks.

Startled, Rocky raises an eyebrow, belatedly picking up on what he’d missed.

“Jerry said it was his fault that she died,” B.S. tells them. “That’s what I said.”

No, it isn’t.

But this is even more intriguing, and Rocky raises a hand slightly, in case Murph is about to call him on the lie. Of course, he isn’t. He senses, as Rocky does, that they might be on to something.

Jerry Thompson reportedly never knew his father, Samuel Shields, who was just fourteen years old when he got his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Lenore Thompson pregnant with twins.

At the time, Samuel had even bigger problems than that. His own father, a paranoid schizophrenic, had tried to kill him and later been committed to the psych ward. And Samuel himself had already been in and out of juvenile detention—with an unpromising future ahead of him as a convicted felon.

Remembering the photograph in Jerry’s file—the one that showed him and his sister with a man who looked like he could have been their deadbeat father—Rocky asks B.S., “How was Jamie’s death the father’s fault?”

“He got mad and went after Jerry’s mother. When Jerry went to help her, his sister attacked him. Then she ran away. And she was killed out on the streets after that.”

The latter part of that story is undeniably true.

What about the first part?

“Do you know if Jerry was ever in touch with his father while he was here?” Murph asks.

“Nah, he didn’t know where he was, he said. He never got any visitors. Me, I get visitors all the time,” B.S. brags. “My family comes, and my friends, and the governor came a couple of times—he’s working to get me out of here—and . . .”

The governor. Right.

Rocky and Murph exchange a glance, reminding each other that they can’t believe anything this guy says.

Then again . . .

What if there’s some truth to what he said about Jerry?

They do their best to glean more meaningful information from B.S., but true to his name, he has nothing more to offer.

When at last he’s taken from the room, Rocky shares his latest theory with Murph: that there really might have been a Jamie: either someone Jerry mistook for his dead sister, or someone who convinced Jerry that she was Jamie.

“And you think that’s the person who killed those women ten years ago?” Murph asks. “And now Nowak’s wife and the Lewis woman, too?”

“It could be.”

“But why start killing again now all of sudden, ten years later?”

“Jerry’s death. That might be what triggered it. Nowak was killed just days after he died; Lewis about six weeks later. And when you look at the victimology . . .”

Murph nods thoughtfully. Of course he knows as well as Rocky does how important it is to profile the victims along with their killer. You look at what they have in common, figure out why they might have been targeted by the unsub—unknown subject.

Rocky goes on, “Nowak was on duty on Jerry Thompson’s cell block the night he killed himself.”

“Or was murdered, depending on who you want to believe.”

“Right. And Phyllis Lewis’s connection to Thompson was less direct, but it’s there, Murph. She lived right next door to Allison, and Allison’s testimony put Jerry into prison in the first place.”

Murph whistles under his breath.

“So let’s say this person—someone Jerry believed was Jamie—really did—
does
—exist,” Rocky continues. “If Thompson’s death was the trigger, where do we look for the motive?”

“Revenge.”

“Exactly. You kill Nowak’s wife to get back at him. You kill Allison’s neighbor to get back at her.”

“But why not Nowak himself? Why not Allison herself?”

“For some people, losing a spouse is a fate worse than death,” Rocky says simply. “Believe me.”

“I do.” Murph gives him a sympathetic pat on the arm.

Determined to focus on the business at hand, Rocky says, “Whoever killed Cora Nowak knew what losing her would do to her husband. And he maximized the impact with that gruesome sandwich delivery.”

Rocky and Murph had studied the grainy surveillance videotape that showed the perp dropping off the so-called lunch that night. You couldn’t make out a damned thing; just a dark, hooded figure with his face completely obscured. It could have been anyone.

“But you’re talking about a wife,” Murph tells him, “not a next-door neighbor. What about the Lewis case? That doesn’t make as much sense.”

“No,” Rocky agrees. “It doesn’t. Unless there was more to the relationship between Allison MacKenna and Phyllis Lewis than we know.”

“They’re both married with kids.”

Rocky gives Murph a pointed look.

“Okay,” Murph says, “anything’s possible. But I don’t buy it.”

Frankly, Rocky doesn’t, either. But you have to look at all your options.

“We’ve got to talk to anyone we can find who knew Jerry Thompson ten years ago, anyone who can shed some light on this. Including his father.” Rocky is still intrigued by B.S.’s mention that Jerry’s father was there the night he was attacked by his sister, and by his own memory of the photograph sitting in the case file.

He quickly dials the precinct and asks Tommy, the station house desk sergeant, to put him through to Mai Zheng, one of the newer junior detectives on the squad. She’s incredibly proficient when it comes to computers and records.

She answers her phone on the first ring.

“Mai,” he says, “I need you to do something for me. Write down this name: Sam Shields.”

He quickly tells her to look into Shields’s background; find out if there was any way he had been a part of Jerry’s life after all, and whether he’s the man pictured in that old snapshot in Jerry’s file.

“I want to know where he was in December 1991, around the time that Jamie Thompson was murdered,” he tells Mai, “and I want to know where he was when the Nightwatcher murders took place—and where he is right now. Got it?”

“Got it,” Mai says. “I’ll get right on it.”

He hangs up to see a thoughtful-looking Murph scratching his chin.

“If we go with the revenge theory, Rock,” he muses, “then who’s next? Because you and I both know there’s gonna be another one.”

Rocky hadn’t gotten that far in his line of thinking, but Murph is right.

Promptly putting himself back into the predator’s shoes, Rocky returns, “Who else do you blame for Jerry Thompson kicking the bucket?”

“Doobie Jones, if you know what we know.”

“True,” he tells Murph, “but chances are, the unsub doesn’t, and anyway—how are you going to get to Jones in here?”

“You’re not. It has to be someone accessible. Someone who has more to lose.”

Jesus
.

It dawns on Rocky, and he can feel the blood drain from his face.

He’s up and on his way to the door in a flash.

“Rock,” Murph calls, startled, “where are you going?”

Rocky manages to summon a one-word reply, and it comes out sounding strangled. “Ange.”

U
nnerved by a second police car that races past with wailing sirens, Allison bites her lower lip and looks at Ben, behind the wheel.

His short, dark hair is tousled from the sweatshirt he’d hastily pulled over his head, and she’s sure her own hair must be completely disheveled. She didn’t bother to comb it, just splashed cold water on her face, grabbed her toothbrush and scrubbed the taste of vomit from her mouth. Then she threw on the closest thing at hand—a pair of jeans from the laundry bag, and the starched white dress shirt Mack had worn to the wake earlier, then apparently tossed on the floor beside the bed.

The police car disappears around a distant corner, heading in the general direction of her house.

She looks at Ben. “You don’t think . . .”

“I’m sure he’s fine. Anyway, you said he’s been sleepwalking lately, so maybe . . .”

Yes, she did say that, sharing just enough information with Ben about Mack’s nocturnal activities—but not too much. She didn’t tell him about the Dormipram, or about . . .

The knife.

Why can’t she stop thinking about it?

He was going to cut an apple that night, just as she’d watched him do hundreds, thousands of times before.

Pushing the unsettling memory from her mind, she tells Ben, “If he drove in his sleep, though”—and it looks as though he may have, given that his keys and the BMW were missing—“that would be so dangerous.”

“Maybe he didn’t do it in his sleep. Maybe he was wide awake when he left.”

“But why would he have gone? And why wouldn’t he have told me?”

“I don’t—” Ben breaks off at the sound of another screaming police car approaching in the distance.

They’re both silent, listening as the sirens grow closer before the whirling red lights overtake them. Ben pulls off to the curb to let the cruiser pass, and Allison rolls down her window to gulp fresh air.

“Hang in there.” Ben is back on the road and driving faster than the speed limit now. “It’s going to be okay.”

She says nothing, praying that all those police cars aren’t headed for Orchard Terrace.

But when they reach it, the block is dark and quiet, and Allison lets out the breath she’d been holding. Thank God.

“He’s here!” she tells Ben a moment later, spotting Mack’s car beyond the hedgerow, parked in their own driveway.