Sleepwalker (34 page)

Thank you, God. Thank you.

Allison runs toward the house, panting hard, already shouting for help at the top of her lungs. By the time she reaches the house, a startled-looking elderly man in a cardigan and bifocals is peering out at her through the glass window in the door.

“Please!” she calls to him. “Please! Somebody took my children!”

Looking suspicious, he shakes his head, seems to check the lock on the door, and starts to turn away.

“Please, sir! You don’t have to let me in, just . . . just please call the police!” Tears roll down her face and her body sags beneath the weight of an awful reality she can no longer deny.

With a moan, she sinks onto the weathered steps, burying her head in her hands. For a long time, she sits there, gasping for breath, trying to find the strength to keep running, the strength to bear the impossible truth and the unimaginable loss.

Her babies, her beautiful babies, her girls, and her boy, and . . .

My husband
.

Mack. Dear God, what has he done?

What has
she
done, trusting him with those three precious little lives?

I knew better! I did! I knew, and that’s why I let Randi talk me into—

The thought is curtailed by the sound of wailing sirens in the distance.

R
ocky paces the sidewalk in front of the hospital, phone in hand, willing the damned thing to ring again so that he can get back to Ange’s bedside.

Maybe he should just go back up anyway.

But if he does, he’ll miss the call, and too many lives are hanging in the balance.

Thank God Ange’s isn’t one of them. Not in the immediate moment, anyway.

Right now, she’s safe and stable, and she would want him to do exactly what he’s doing.

Pacing . . .

Waiting . . .

Thinking about the one possible reason a calculating killer might so drastically change his signature, adding rape to the ritual . . .

Supposedly
.

At last, his phone vibrates in his hand.

“I’ve got it,” Mai tells him. “You were right. James MacKenna and his first wife did go through infertility treatments. They used the Riverview Clinic in Manhattan.”

Rocky holds his breath, waiting for the rest, hoping against hope . . .

“There was a break-in at the lab they use back in October,” Mai goes on, “and several sperm samples were stolen. Including James MacKenna’s.”

Before Rocky can react, his phone buzzes, indicating a call coming in. Frowning, he’s about to ignore it—then thinks better of it. What if it’s the nurse, calling from upstairs?

He checks the caller ID.

“I have to take this,” he tells Mai. “I’ll call you right back.”

Quickly, he disconnects that call and picks up the incoming one. “Manzillo here.”

“Detective Manzillo? It’s Randi Weber . . .”

Yeah. He knows.

“How can I help you, Mrs. Weber?”

“I know where Allison is, and . . . she’s on the move. Really fast. I feel like something might be wrong.”

J
amie clutches the wheel of the rented Jeep with gloved hands—warm knit winter gloves. They won’t leave prints.

As much as she loves to wear dresses, Jamie is bundled against the cold today, wearing jeans, a sweater, a parka, boots. She even left the wig behind in the last motel room, not wanting to risk shedding synthetic hairs this time and letting the cops think anyone but Mack is responsible for this.

I don’t look like myself
, she thought, surveying herself in the mirror earlier.
I look like Sam.

But that’s okay. When this is over . . .

What will I do when this is over?

Do I even want to go on?

It’s a question that has weighed heavily on Jamie’s mind. The answer, she figures, will come to her when the time is right. It always does.

Ah, there’s the jetty up ahead, jutting out into the churning gray-green waters of the Atlantic.

She’d scouted the location yesterday afternoon, driving up and down the bleak coastal island in search of the perfect spot to stage the grand finale, not sure exactly what she was looking for until she found it.

The jetty is well off the beaten path, located on a stretch of beach where there are just a few houses, all of them large summer rentals that have obviously been closed up for the winter.

“We’re almost there,” Jamie informs the three children in the backseat.

It would be much more interesting to talk to them if they could reply, but of course they can’t. All three children are unconscious, thanks to the needles Jamie stuck into their arms. The girls are on the floor, like limp rag dolls; the baby still strapped into his stroller, which Jamie simply turned on its side and shoved sideways across the backseat.

“Your mother thinks she’s so smart. But she told me exactly where to find you, did you know that? There I was on Sunday afternoon, minding my own business—”

At that, Jamie breaks off and giggles.

“All right, I was minding your parents’ business. They were plotting their big escape, thinking they were so clever, talking about a beach house somewhere . . .”

A beach house to which Jamie, of course, has the keys.

“Of course I copied all the keys I found in the desk drawer way back in the beginning,” she informs the sleeping children. “I figured they might come in handy at some point.”

Have they ever.

Although there
was
a fleeting moment of worry when it seemed Allison and Mack weren’t going to mention the exact location of the house. It would have been so bothersome to try and tail them to wherever they were going, and much too risky at this point to venture back into their house looking for clues.

But then, oh lucky day, Allison asked her husband, “How would you get to work from there?”

“I could commute if I had to—”

“From
Salt Breeze Pointe
?”

At that, Jamie broke into a delighted smile, assuming—correctly—that they were talking about the charming little town on the Jersey Shore.

There was no need to even follow them down here. Jamie meandered along later in the day, arriving just in time for darkness to settle in. Then it was just a matter of driving up and down the streets until Allison’s SUV materialized, parked in a carport alongside a rambling two-story house.

Well equipped for what lay ahead, Jamie broke into the house next door and kept an eye on things until the right opportunity presented itself.

“Your mother made things even easier for me when she took off this morning all by herself, you know?” Jamie tells the children. “I let myself in with the keys—walked right in through the front door, quiet as a mouse. I bet you didn’t hear a thing, did you? I know your father didn’t.”

Jamie spotted Mack in the kitchen with his son. He was making faces at him, and the baby was making a racket, laughing like crazy.

A nice little father and son moment
, she thought, enraged. Jerry never had a moment like that, and now he never would, thanks to Allison.

“This is all your mother’s fault,” Jamie tells the children, wishing they could talk, sob, protest, beg,
something
.

Jamie would feel a lot better if Allison’s kids were suffering the way Jerry had suffered.

“It isn’t
fair
! You just get to go to sleep, and you’re not going to feel a thing! Why did I take the easy way out?”

Jamie glances into the backseat. It might be worthwhile to wait until they wake up. . . .

Worthwhile, yes. But not feasible.

Things are already in motion. It’s now or never.

“I’ve got the kids. I’ve got the opportunity. I’ve even got this.” Jamie pulls Mack’s Blackberry from the console. It’s going to add such a nice touch.

Funny how things just fall into place. The device was conveniently lying on the dresser in one of the bedrooms when Jamie reached the second floor of the beach house.

In another bedroom, the girls were sound asleep. It was so easy to jab one slender white neck, and then the other, with the syringe that would knock them out almost instantly. Carrying them down the back stairs without making a sound was a little more challenging, though. They were heavier than they looked—dead weight, Jamie thinks now, with a grim little smile.

The painstaking process took much longer than anticipated, so long that it was a wonder the girls’ father hadn’t stirred from the kitchen, or their mother hadn’t come back from her walk.

At last, the still figures lay on the floor of the Jeep.

Then came the truly tricky part.

Jamie knew it would take some kind of diversion to separate Mack from the baby. Knocking over the table in the upstairs hall seemed like a good idea—and one of the few options available—but it wasn’t without risk. Had Mack decided to search the entire second floor before going to check on his daughters, whose room was at the end of the hall, he might easily have come across Jamie, hiding inside the linen closet right at the top of the stairs, a few feet from the toppled table.

But Mack didn’t do that. He must have sensed that Daddy’s girls needed him.

But it was too late for that, wasn’t it, Daddy dear?

As Mack’s footsteps pounded down the hall toward his daughters’ room, Jamie bolted from the closet and raced down the stairs as quietly as possible. She grabbed the baby, stroller and all, jabbed him with the needle, and ran out to the waiting Jeep.

Driving away from the house, Jamie spotted Mack in the upstairs window, looking out. It was so tempting to give a jaunty little wave.

How does it feel to be helpless when your child needs you? How do you like it?

Jamie coasted down the street, making sure Mack got a good look at the Jeep, on the off chance that there might be other cars on the road.

We wouldn’t want you to get confused, now, would we?

Mack was soon chasing the Jeep that, ironically, Jamie had rented using the desktop computer in the house on Orchard Terrace just a few days earlier. The username and password were even conveniently saved on the car rental agency’s Web site, along with the credit card information.

After making the rental reservation, Jamie used the search engine to type in some information that might come in useful . . .

Not for me, though.

The computer search was strictly for the benefit of the investigators who will confiscate Mack’s hard drive after this is all over—if they haven’t already.

The final step, as Jamie drives the Jeep out onto the jetty, is to toss Mack’s cell phone onto the floor in front of the passenger’s seat, where it will be easily found later by the divers.

Chapter Seventeen

“C
alm down, ma’am. Calm down.”

“I can’t calm down!” Allison screeches at Lieutenant Sparks, the young police officer who escorted her away from the front steps of the old man’s house. “My babies! He took my babies!”

“Who did?”

“My husband!” She clutches Lieutenant Sparks’s arm. “He’s . . . I don’t know, he’s gone crazy or something. Please. It’s not him, it’s the drug—”

“He’s on drugs?”

“No, not like—please. You have to stop him before he hurts them. Please . . .”

A
t the wheel of the SUV, Mack screeches to a stop on the narrow jetty, jams the gear shift into park, and jumps out. There’s barely room alongside the car for him to stand; the rocky drop-off into the water is mere inches from his shoes.

He edges past it and pushes forward.

Through the mist, he can see the car whose taillights he chased from Salt Breeze Pointe, after he realized, in a panic, that someone had taken all three of his children.

It’s a miracle that he even managed to catch up with the vehicle—which he can now make out is a Jeep—considering that the driver had a generous head start.

It didn’t take long for Mack to dump out Allison’s purse and grab her keys, yet those were seconds that carried his children farther and farther away from him. He lost precious seconds, too, in a frenzied, futile search for her cell phone so that he could call 911, but it didn’t seem to be there, and he quickly gave up.

By the time he got outside, he was shocked to see the taillights still visible down the block, almost creeping along, almost as if . . .

Several times, he almost managed to catch up to the car and then would lose it again as it raced south along the barrier island.

Now it’s almost within reach, parked just ahead, right at the end of the jetty, again, oddly, almost as if . . .

As if he’s waiting for me.

How the hell did he find them here at the shore anyway? They weren’t followed, they told no one, and the only time he and Allison even mentioned their destination was in the privacy of their own . . .

Home.

Mack’s heart sinks, remembering something Ben said to him not long ago, when they were talking about the nanny cam.

There’s no privacy anymore, anywhere—even in your own house. You never know who’s watching and listening.

That’s it
, Mack realizes.
That’s how this bastard knew where to find us, and it’s how he knew the alarm code. He heard me tell Allison, or he watched me punch it in. Electronic surveillance.

As Mack races toward the Jeep, he feels in his pocket for the gun he’s kept close at hand since they fled home. When they reached the Webers’ on Sunday, he was afraid Ben was going to corner him and ask for it back, or that he’d bring it up in front of Allison, but he didn’t.

Thank God he didn’t.

Thank God I have it. And I swear I won’t hesitate to use it.

As Mack hurtles himself along the jetty, the driver’s side door of the Jeep opens.

A figure steps out.

Mack’s hand closes around the gun and he draws it out as he runs, shouting, “Stop!”

The figure seems to ignore him, leaning into the car.

Mack raises the gun and slows his pace to take aim, not daring to take a wild shot while running and risk hitting the Jeep with his children inside.

The Jeep—it’s moving again, he realizes, stunned.

The vehicle is rolling forward . . .

Toward the end of the jetty . . .

Toward the water.

Mack hurtles himself forward with a scream as the Jeep goes over the edge.

H
uddled in the backseat of the police cruiser, Allison numbly watches the old man in the cardigan painstakingly adding his signature to a report attached to a clipboard. At last, he hands it back to Lieutenant Sparks, who nods and says something, then glances back at the car.

Allison quickly looks away, not wanting to meet the young cop’s eyes again. Every time he looks at her, she can see what he’s thinking, and she wants to scream at him that he’s wrong; that it isn’t like that.

Mack is a good man, an honorable man. He loves his children—and her—more than anything on this earth. He’s not some horrible violent deadbeat who would ever . . .

No, never.

Not if he were in his right mind.

It’s the medication—that’s what she tried to explain to the police officer, but he heard “drugs” and he got the wrong idea.

Or did he?

What’s the difference what kind of drug it is?

What’s the difference if a doctor prescribed it?

Allison’s mother took prescription medication and killed herself.

Mack is taking prescription medication, too—what’s to stop him from killing himself, or—

She moans; she can’t bear to think about it.

My babies.

No.
Our
babies
.

Mack loves them as much as I do; he was there when they took their first breaths, their first steps . . .

She thinks of him giving the girls piggyback rides, reading bedtime stories, watching princess movies on rainy days . . .

But not lately.

That was the old Mack, the loving daddy and husband who was home more often, and wasn’t always checking his BlackBerry, or looking as though he were a million miles away . . .

The new Mack is different.

But that doesn’t mean he’s capable of . . .

No. It just means he accepted a big promotion with a tremendous amount of responsibility, and that he’s worried, in this lousy economy, about job stability and rising taxes and cost of living and dropping stocks and retirement accounts . . .

And he’s stressed.

Who isn’t?

But he’s not a monster.

If the kids are with Mack, he’ll protect them.

Longing to believe that, Allison buries her face in her hands, wiping the tears from her eyes. When she looks up again, Lieutenant Sparks is on the phone, listening and nodding and hurriedly scribbling something on the paper attached to the clipboard. He hangs up, says something to the old man, and then strides over to the car.

“Mrs. MacKenna,” he gets behind the wheel and slams the door, “did you say your husband took your cell phone with him?”

She nods numbly.

“Looks like they’ve picked up the GPS signal in your phone.”

“They? Who’s they?” she asks breathlessly.

“I think the information came from the NYPD.”

“The
NYPD
? But how would—”

“I don’t know, I thought that was what they—” Interrupting himself, he quickly jerks the car into reverse. “In any case, he’s not far from here, but he’s on the move, heading south. We’ve got a couple of cars on the way.”

“Can you . . . do you know if . . .”

“That’s all I know, ma’am.” Throwing an arm along the seatback, Lieutenant Sparks looks over his shoulder. The car skids backward in the sandy dirt, and then they’re on their way to the scene, sirens wailing.

C
lutching her cell phone, Randi sits on the edge of the queen-sized bed in the guest room, thinking about Allison and Mack and the kids and waiting for the phone to ring. Detective Manzillo promised to call as soon as he hears anything at all.

Please let it be good news. Please let them be okay. Please . . .

Randi stands, paces across the room and back again. She smoothes the quilt on the bed where she was sitting, then looks at the portable crib next to it.

She should probably fold that up and put it away.

No. Not yet.

Maybe they’ll want to come back here when this is over. In fact, maybe she should change the bedding, here and in the other guest room, so that everything will be fresh and ready, just in case.

Ordinarily, it’s a job she’d leave for her housekeeper, but right now, she desperately needs something to do, something other than pace or brood.

She strips the crib and the bed and carries the bedding into the bathroom. After depositing it into a laundry basket there, she notices that the wicker wastebasket needs to be emptied. It’s full of crumpled tissues—probably Allison, wiping her tears. Her eyes were red and swollen this morning when she left.

On the verge of tears herself, Randi takes a plastic garbage bag from the sink cabinet and starts to dump in the contents of the wastebasket.

Something heavy falls into the bag. Randi reaches in and sees that it’s the E-ZPass tag from Allison’s SUV.

That means she’s most likely headed south or west—there are tolls on all the bridges. She doesn’t want anyone tracking her car, obviously, by checking to see where it was used, so she’ll pay cash.

Randi is about to toss the trash bag aside when she spots something else that isn’t crumpled tissue—something orange.

She fishes it out.

It’s a plastic bottle from the pharmacy. According to the label, it contains Dormipram, prescribed to James MacKenna.

The bottle is half full of pills.

H
earing the tremendous splash as the Jeep hits the water, Jamie turns and runs, heading straight for Mack, reveling in the startled dismay on the face of his foe.

He probably thinks I’m going to jump him.

Ah, but that won’t be necessary.

My work here is done
, Jamie thinks gleefully.

He can see that the SUV’s motor is still running. How convenient.

All Jamie has to do is jump behind the wheel, drive away from here, and abandon the car somewhere. Maybe in the driveway of a deserted house, where no one will notice it for weeks, months.

By the time anyone finds it, Mack will have been arrested for drowning his children.

Who’s going to believe his crazy story about someone stealing them out from under his nose—in a car he rented himself?

Not the police.

Not the families of all those women whose bodies bore undeniable evidence of Mack’s DNA.

Not his lovely wife.

It’s over.

Allison has lost everything she had to lose, and as for Jamie . . .

I win.

I—

Too late, Jamie sees that Mack has a gun.

T
orn, Rocky looks over his shoulder at the double doors leading back into the hospital, and then at the parking garage across from the entrance, where he left his car.

What the hell am I supposed to do now?

The case is exploding; he just got word from Murph that a frantic Allison MacKenna reported to the cops down in Jersey that her husband has abducted their children, and yet . . .

Ange.

How can I leave her?

His phone, still clutched in his hand, buzzes yet again. He answers immediately. “Manzillo here.”

“Jack Cleary. I heard about the theft at the clinic. Good work. We’ve got the lab on it, checking for chemicals that would indicate cryopreservation.”

“You’ll find them,” Rocky says flatly.

“Even so—the theft could have been a coincidence.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Detective, even if it wasn’t, we’ve got the guy’s own wife saying he took the kids and they’re in danger.”

“She said that? Are you sure?”

“I didn’t talk to her myself, if that’s what you mean, but she said they’re in danger, and believe me—”

“How does she know?”

“That they’re in danger? I don’t know how she knows. But I know how
I
know. I’m inside the house right now.”

“Which house?”

“The MacKennas’ house on Orchard Terrace. The warrant came through a little while ago.”

“Good. What’d you find?”

“For a start, we found a home computer registered to MacKenna that was last used a couple of days ago to do an Internet search on Susan Smith.”

“Who the hell is Susan Smith?”

“Case down in South Carolina. It made national headlines fifteen, maybe twenty years ago? Young mother with two small boys strapped in the back of her car, says she was carjacked, but—”

“But she did it herself.” Rocky remembers and his stomach gives a sickening twist. “She drowned them—drove the car into a lake.”

“That’s right.”

Jesus. Rocky tilts his head back, closing his eyes.

“Our friend also did his homework on fast-acting sedatives,” Cleary goes on, “and he set up a car rental down in Jersey . . .”

Cleary goes on, filling in with details that make Rocky’s head spin with the realization that he needs to give it up and admit that for the second time in his career, his gut instinct is wrong.

Dead
wrong—that’s for damned sure.

Jerry Thompson is dead because he went to prison for crimes he didn’t commit, and now . . .

I know I’ve asked you for a lot lately
, Rocky prays, remembering the two little blond girls, Allison’s daughters.
But please watch over those children, the girls and the baby boy. Please keep them safe from harm, and if that isn’t your will, then I beg you to deliver them quickly. Please don’t let them suffer. Please . . .

N
othing is going to stop Mack from getting to his kids in the water.

Nothing—no one—is going to get in his way.

As the stranger races toward him, he raises the gun.

Seeing the weapon in the instant before Mack fires, his target suddenly spins around. He doesn’t run away; he’d have to know that would be futile. There’s no place for him to go.

Instead he goes still, like a child playing freeze tag, almost as if he’s waiting . . .

Bastard
.

Mack pulls the trigger.

Taking the bullet in the back, his target falls to the ground without a sound.

Mack streaks past him, not caring, not seeing anything but the Jeep, still visible but already starting to tilt and submerge.

He runs straight to the end of the jetty and dives in, arching as far out as he can to avoid the cruel rocks beneath, thinking only of his children trapped inside the sinking Jeep.

He surfaces beside it, gasping for air as bracing waves wash over him. The door is still open and he reaches inside. His hands immediately become entangled on a clump of seaweed—