Sleepwalker (18 page)

He’s on his feet before she finishes talking. As a homicide cop, he’s never been all that squeamish, but when it involves a medical procedure being performed on his wife . . .

“I’ll be back, sweetheart.” He presses a kiss to Ange’s pale, wrinkled forehead and leaves the room.

Walking down the hall, he passes rooms identical to hers, where families of other comatose patients keep the familiar, joyless vigil. Rocky knows that, according to statistics, the majority of their loved ones will never wake up. But in his heart, he truly believes that his wife is going to.

She has to, because I can’t live without her. It’s that simple.

He rides the elevator to the ground floor and stops in the chapel to light a candle—a daily ritual, both here and at his home parish, Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

After a quick prayer he continues on, passing the cafeteria. Ordinarily, his stomach turns at the cooking smells evocative of steam tables bearing overcooked meat, limp cabbage, mushy grains. But right now, he finds his mouth watering.

Checking his watch, he notes that it’s past midnight. When was the last time he ate something? Lunch? Breakfast? Last night?

You can’t go around skipping meals, Rocco
, Ange’s voice scolds him as she has so many times in the past.
You get low blood sugar, and it makes you cranky.

Okay. Maybe he’ll come back and grab a sandwich before he goes upstairs again. But right now, he needs to call his sons. It’s getting late, even on the West Coast.

He steps out the nearest exit.

The night air is cold, and there are still piles of snow. He wishes he’d thought to grab his coat. Ange would have reminded him to.

He’s spent a lot of time in hospitals over the years, courtesy of his job with the homicide squad—questioning witnesses, interviewing families of victims. Until recently, the area just beyond the exits would be crowded with hospital employees—including nurses and doctors in scrubs—gathered here under the awning on a smoke break.

Rocky always found it ironic that so many in the health care profession—people who regularly see the ravages wrought by the unhealthy habit—seem to puff away on cigarettes without a care in the world.

Then again, a certain degree of compartmentalization is necessary when you greet harsh reality on a daily basis. He should know.

Anyway, a recent law has banned smoking on hospital grounds. Now the smokers are huddled across the street in the doorway of an office building that’s deserted at this hour of the night. The only people hanging around the exit are the ones talking on their cell phones.

Rocky pulls his own out of his pocket, powers it up, and is surprised to see that he’s missed quite a few calls. Three, of course, are from his sons—but there’s one from his lifelong friend Vic Shattuck, a former FBI profiler.

It’s unusual for Vic to be calling again so soon—Rocky spoke to him earlier today, updating him on Ange’s condition.

There are a couple of calls from the precinct, too, that came in both before and after Vic’s.

Something must have happened.

Rather than waste time listening to voice mail messages, Rocky immediately dials the desk sergeant.

“Tommy, what’s going on?”

“Where are you, Manzillo? We been trying to track you down for a couple of hours now.”

“I’m at the hospital, where do you think? What’s going on?” he asks again.

“Hang on. I’m going to put you through to Murph.”

Rocky’s longtime partner, T.J. Murphy, picks up right away.

“Rock, remember that case you worked about ten years ago? The Nightwatcher murders?”

“
About
ten years ago? It was almost
exactly
ten years ago. The perp killed himself in prison on the ten-year anniversary a couple of weeks ago. What about it?”

“It looks like you might be wrong about that, Rock.”

Blame it on low blood sugar; he can’t help but snap, “I’m not wrong about it, Murph. Those murders were ten years ago—the first one was on September 12. That’s why you weren’t on the case with me. You were . . .”

He doesn’t need to say it. Murph knows exactly where he was on September 12, 2001. He was down on the pile, digging in vain for his kid brother, Luke, one of the hundreds of FDNY guys crushed beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center.

“No,” Murph says, “you’re not wrong about
that
. I mean about the perp being dead.”

“For the love of . . .” Rocky mutters under his breath, and rolls his eyes skyward, trying not to lose his temper. “Murph, I’m telling you, Jerry Thompson killed himself back in—”

“I know what Jerry Thompson did. But it looks like you might’a had the wrong guy.”

“What are you talking about? Thompson confessed. There was a shitload of evidence. We found him with the weapon, bloodstains everywhere—and with his mother’s dead body, too—right there in his apartment. We had a witness who placed him at the—”

“Yeah, about that witness—”

“Don’t tell me we had the wrong guy,” Rocky rants on, pacing to the end of the walkway and back to the door again.

“Okay, I won’t tell you. But everyone else will, Rock, because he’s at it again.”

Rocky stops short. “Who?”

“The Nightwatcher. Up in Westchester County. We got a new murder, same MO, same signature—stuff we never released to the public, Rock. Stuff no one else knew because the D.A. didn’t introduce it at the trial. And the finger—”

“Jesus.” Rocky knows exactly what he means.

The Nightwatcher had ritualistically hacked off his victims’ middle fingers, taking them as trophies. Sick bastard. The fingers were found in Jerry Thompson’s apartment, along with the other evidence.

That detail was deliberately kept from the press . . . along with another very important detail that never came out at the trial:

“And you know the song?”

The song. Rocky knows the song.

“Fallin’,” by Alicia Keys. The soulful ballad was on top of the charts around the time Kristina Haines and Marianne Apostolos were murdered, and clearly had some meaning for their killer.

“Was it playing at the scene?” Rocky asks Murph.

“Looped to play over and over, just like ten years ago. And you know that witness whose testimony put Jerry Thompson away?”

“Allison Taylor?”

“Allison . . . Taylor MacKenna. Yeah. Her. She’s the one who found the body.”

“Kristina Haines’s body, right. She was the first victim. They were neigh—”

“Nah, Rock, would you just listen? This murder happened on the heels of a natural disaster. Westchester’s been devastated by that snowstorm. Power is down, communications are down, businesses are closed, people are all shook up, isolated in their homes . . .”

“Just like Manhattan after September 11.”

“But wait, there’s more,” Murph says in his best infomercial host imitation. “You ready for this?”

“Just tell me, Murph.”

“She found this one, too. Allison MacKenna found the woman who was killed last night. They were neighbors, just like before.”

Rocky curses under his breath.

“That’s one hell of a coincidence, don’t you think?” Murph asks.

Yeah. One hell of a coincidence.

Anything is possible . . .

“The way I see it, Rock, either Thompson has come back from the dead . . .”

Okay
, almost
anything is possible. Not that
.

“ . . . or,” Murph goes on, “the wrong guy confessed.”

That . . .

That’s . . .

Possible
.

Ten years ago, Rocky honestly didn’t think so. Nor did the jury.

In hindsight—remembering the blank, terrified expression in Jerry Thompson’s eyes—he’s suddenly not so sure.

But you don’t get as far as Rocky has in the ranks of the NYPD by second-guessing yourself. There could be something else going on here, and that’s his job—to be thorough and consider every remotely possible explanation.

“I’m heading up there now,” Murph tells him.

“Pick me up at home on your way,” Rocky says grimly. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Make that twenty. I just need to go back up and tell Ange I have to leave for a while.”

“Tell Ange . . . ? How is she, Rock? Any change?”

“For the better, Murph. Only for the better.”

It isn’t until after he disconnects the call that Rocky uneasily remembers the broken window in his own basement. It’s not something that’s weighed heavily on his mind amid all that’s gone on with Ange.

But ordinarily, he probably wouldn’t have dismissed it so readily after a search showed nothing out of order.

Someone was in the house while he was away. Someone who took nothing away, and left nothing behind.

Or so Rocky assumed—perhaps too quickly.

“H
ere. Drink this.”

Allison looks up to see Mack standing beside the couch holding a steaming mug. “What is it?”

“Tea. Herbal. It’ll help you sleep.”

“I don’t want to sleep,” she says automatically, but she accepts the mug from him.

“Ever?” He sits beside her. “Al, you have to get some rest. J.J.’s going to be up in a few hours.”

She shakes her head. There’s no way she’s going to close her eyes for even a few seconds; knowing that the minute she closes them, she’s going to see again the horrific scene she stumbled upon next door.

Phyllis Lewis lay on her side, just like Kristina. She, too, was wearing lingerie, a champagne-colored silk, lace-trimmed nightgown Allison recognized immediately, though it was heavily smeared with brownish stains; blood.

In those few stunned moments before she fled, Allison noticed a couple of other things: the dead cat, eviscerated, on the floor beside the bed, and the dozens of white candles around the room. They were mostly votives that had long since burned out, but a few were pillars that flickered still.

The scene in Kristina’s apartment ten years ago had been exactly the same—not the cat, but the candles around the bed, almost as though her body lay on a sacrificial altar.

He’s back.

She abruptly sets the tea aside. It sloshes over the rim of the mug and puddles on the wooden coffee table. She ignores it.

Now that she’s had the time to process what happened—what she saw—there’s no denying that the Nightwatcher has resurfaced. And if Jerry Thompson is dead . . .

He’s dead. You know it.

Okay. He’s dead.

That means she was wrong about him being the Nightwatcher. And that means . . .

“We have to take the kids and get out of here, Mack.”

She doesn’t like the look on his face—the same expression he wore earlier, when she assumed he’d be staying home from the office tomorrow.

“Go . . . where?”

“I don’t care. Anyplace where he won’t find us.”

“We can’t just
go
, Allison.”

“Because you have to work? Is that why?”

“That’s one of the reasons, yes,” he says evenly. “And there are cops right outside the front door. We’re safe here. For now.”

“You really believe that?”

He doesn’t answer, just leans forward, plucks a couple of tissues from the box on the coffee table, and wipes up the spilled tea.

He brought her the box of tissues earlier, when she couldn’t stop crying about poor Phyllis.

She hadn’t allowed the floodgates to open until after the girls had left with Randi. Neither she nor Mack wanted to upset them further.

Nor did she cry in front of Ben, who showed up about a half hour later, having bolted from a business dinner to get to them.

He sat with Mack and J.J. in the kitchen while Allison told yet another detective every detail that might be relevant concerning Phyllis Lewis, and the silk nightgown, and of course, the case ten years ago.

“You told your husband that you knew all along Jerry Thompson wasn’t guilty?” the detective asked, apparently having been briefed by the officers who’d been standing with her when Mack arrived. “You testified under oath that you’d seen him at the scene. Are you contradicting yourself now?”

“No!” she said quickly. “He
was
at the scene. And he confessed to the murders. But before that, my gut instinct was that he couldn’t be guilty.”

And of course, in the end, logic overruled instinct.

She thinks back to the trial; to what she learned about Jerry Thompson’s life leading up to his arrest. Raised in poverty by a single mother, abandoned by his deadbeat father, he had a couple of strikes against him right from the start.

Just like I did.

Even as she testified against him, somewhere in the back of her mind Allison found herself feeling sorry for Jerry Thompson. She knew where he came from because she’d been there herself.

Allison buries her face in her hands. She feels Mack’s arms around her; hears him murmuring comforting words, but all she can think is
Good Lord, what have I done?

Her testimony helped to seal Jerry Thompson’s fate. She sent an innocent man to prison. Is it any wonder he killed himself?

And now . . .

Now the real killer has been lured from the shadows. He’s been inside this house, this haven where her sweet children play and sleep. He claimed his next victim right here, right under Allison’s nose, and the message is clear.

Watch your step . . . you might be next.

“Y
es!” Jamie hisses gleefully, focused on the screen, where Allison sits with her head in her hands, now fully aware that her days are numbered.

Ah, but not in the way she thinks.

What I’m going to do to her is going to be so much more satisfying than what I did to Phyllis Lewis and Cora Nowak.

Those women didn’t go easily, not by any means. They suffered good and long and hard. That came to an end, as all good things must.

Allison will be different.

Her suffering will have no end—not in this lifetime. She’s going to be tortured for as long as she lives—preferably, to a ripe old age. She’s going to wake up every morning for the rest of her life to find herself all alone in an empty house full of memories.