Sleepwalker (8 page)

“So it
wasn’t
good having Mack home this week?” Randi prompts.

“Well, he got the sunroom painted, but he was so preoccupied he barely gave them the time of day. He promised he’d take them out for ice cream after dinner one night, and that never happened, which isn’t like him.”

“Uh-oh—were they upset?”

“They must have been.” She sighs, remembering what it was like when her mother broke promises—a frequent occurrence—and her own vow to never break a promise to
anyone
. “But you know how it goes with my girls. In their eyes, Daddy can do no wrong.”

“Wait till they turn thirteen,” Randi says darkly. “Then nobody—including Daddy, but especially
you
—will be able to do anything right.”

“Terrific. Can’t wait.”

“You know, it’s really too bad you guys couldn’t go to Disney this year. Or even Vermont. I’m sure not getting a vacation made all of this much harder on Mack.”

“That, and . . .” Allison trails off, not sure whether she should even bring it up.

“What?”

“It’s nothing, really.”

“When people say that, it’s always something, really.” Randi leans forward and props her chin in her hand. “I’m an expert bullshit detector, you know. It’s my favorite claim to fame.”

Allison smiles briefly. “So I’ve heard.”

“Tell me what’s on your mind.”

“Did you by any chance hear about Jerry Thompson?”

Randi, of course, knows who he is. She frowns. “What about him?”

“He killed himself in prison last weekend.”

“Really? Well, good riddance, right? You must be so relieved.”

“I am.” Allison absently uses a napkin to wipe a smudge of crumby paste, courtesy of J.J., from her hand.

“You don’t seem convinced.”

“It’s just . . . I don’t know, I guess I expected to find some kind of peace knowing he’s dead, but . . . it’s kind of the opposite.”

“What do you mean?”

She hesitates, not wanting to admit that the news seems to have dredged up a whole new wave of paranoia, leaving her jumpy and uneasy the last few days—and for no conceivable reason.

Now, more than ever, she should finally be able to put the whole nightmare behind her.

“I guess it just brought back a lot of bad memories,” she tells Randi. “And I keep remembering how wrong I was about him. Kristina herself said he gave her the creeps, and I told her he was harmless. The next thing I knew, she was dead. How could I have been such a terrible judge of character?”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Allie. You barely knew the guy. We can never really be sure what’s going on in someone else’s head, even someone we think we know well, let alone a virtual stranger.”

“I know, but . . . even after she died—after I saw him there that night—there was some little piece of my brain that wouldn’t accept that he was the one.”

“Until he attacked you in your apartment and almost killed you.” Randi shakes her head grimly.

“No—not even then. I never saw his face, and I was so sure it was someone else . . . Right up until the police arrested him and he confessed.”

“Serial killers are cunning. They fool people. Look at Ted Bundy. My cousin Mindy was at Florida State back in the seventies when he killed those sorority girls. She’d seen him hanging around campus, and he seemed totally normal.”

This isn’t the first time Randi has brought that up.

Allison shudders, remembering the horrific details of how Bundy crept into the Chi Omega house in the middle of the night to rape and murder sleeping young women. It was eerily similar to what Jerry did to Kristina Haines and that other woman, Marianne Apostolos.

“Mindy said no one ever would have guessed in a million years that the guy was a homicidal maniac,” Randi goes on.

“I know, but . . . Jerry wasn’t like that. He was kind of bumbling and dim-witted and . . . I don’t know. What’s the point of even talking about it? It’s over.”

“Exactly. You can’t beat yourself up over one lapse in character judgment. You’ve had a great track record ever since, right? I mean, you married Mack, and you have
me
for a best friend . . .” Randi offers her most charming smile.

Allison has to laugh, but she’s still feeling inexplicably uneasy inside, remembering what it was like to see a figure looming in her bedroom in the dead of night.

She just prays she’ll never experience sheer terror like that again.

But of course you won’t, because Jerry Thompson is dead and no one else in this world has any reason to harm you.

I
t’s strictly by choice that Chuck Nowak has worked the third shift for most of his seventeen-year career as a corrections officer at Sullivan Correctional. He’s always been a night owl; he’d much rather work until seven in the morning than get up at that ungodly hour to start the day.

Not only that, but if you’re going to be locked up with a few hundred dangerous felons, you’re better off doing it after lights out, when the vast majority of them are asleep.

The only drawback to the night shift: the love of his life—his wife, Cora, whom he married a few years ago—is a nine-to-five medical receptionist across the river in Beacon. Five days every week, they’re ships passing.

But the other two days make it all worthwhile. Chuck likes nothing better, weekend afternoons, than to strap on his helmet and ride off into the Catskills on his Harley with Cora’s arms—one of which is tattooed with a “CN2” inside a heart, to symbolize their identical initials—wrapped around his waist.

Unfortunately, this isn’t one of those days.

The Harley is sitting in the garage and the keys to his pickup are in his pocket as he enjoys a last smoke on the small back deck of the house he and Cora rent in Newburgh.

Dusk is falling and he notes the sharp chill in the air that wasn’t here yesterday. Off in the distance, the pleasant buzz of a speedboat cruising the Hudson gives way to police sirens, signifying another wave of gang violence.

The neighborhood is sandwiched between the Hudson River and a notorious stretch of dilapidated, drug-infested row houses. Kids kill each other and anyone else who gets in the way—happens every day, every night in this city.

Having grown up here, Chuck didn’t plan on ever leaving, but lately, he’s been thinking they might have to. Now that the escalating crime from the adjoining neighborhood is creeping into their own, he worries about Cora being home alone every night; worries, too, about her driving through seedy neighborhoods on her way to and from work.

Plus, their commutes are getting longer because there’s more traffic around, especially on weekends. On this final Friday night of the summer, throngs of city people will be making their way up to weekend retreats in the Catskills. It will probably take him over an hour to get to work, even on the back roads.

If they lived closer to the prison, he and Cora would have more time together—that’s what he told her.

“How so? Closer to the prison means further from my job.”

“You can always get a new job near Fallsburg.”

“Or we can move across the river and you can become a CO at the prison in Fishkill,” she returned.

She’s a strong-willed woman, Cora. That’s one of the things he loves about her. Most of the time.

He’s not going anywhere. He’s been at Sullivan for too long to just start fresh someplace else. He’s paid his dues—and then some.

Never a dull moment on the job, that’s for damned sure.

He thinks back to last weekend’s big excitement. One of the inmates on the block decided to kill himself on Chuck’s watch. Son of a bitch gulped down a cup of orange juice laced with cleaning fluid. It wasn’t a pretty way to go, that’s for damned sure.

The inmate, Jerry Thompson, didn’t leave a note or anything. But Doobie Jones, the prisoner who occupies the adjoining cell, claimed that he’d been talking about suicide for a while.

“Guess he just finally gave up,” Doobie commented in a tone that made Chuck look sharply at his face.

The guy is a vicious, manipulative psychopath responsible for the deaths of at least a dozen people on the outside. Chuck wouldn’t put it past him to commit another murder, just for kicks, while behind bars.

“Wonder where he got the orange juice?” Doobie mused on with an evil gleam in his eye.

Never mind that. Where the hell did Jerry get the cleaning fluid? He wasn’t on kitchen or bathroom duty.

But Doobie was.

Yeah, Chuck has his suspicions, but he’ll keep them to himself. So the world is rid of one more serial killer. No great loss, right?

He takes one last drag on his Marlboro, stubs it out with his steel-toed boot, and kicks it into the shrubbery beneath the deck.

Time to head to work.

He’d been hoping Cora would show up before he left—once in a while on a Friday, she manages to leave work early enough to see him—but he can’t afford to wait any longer.

He closes the slider leading out to the deck and locks it. Then he sets a yardstick into the metal groove to keep the door from opening, an added measure of security, should anyone try to break in.

Cora says it’s a joke—“If someone really wanted to get in, he could just break the window next to the door, climb on in, and help himself to our stuff.”

She’s right. All the more reason to consider moving.

Chuck opens the fridge and looks for the lunch he packed earlier in the insulated bag embossed with a white “CN.” Cora ordered it for him this summer, and one for herself, too.

Both are blue. “Mix and match,” she told him. “Isn’t it nice to have the same initials?”

Yeah, it’s nice. Everything about being married to Cora is nice.

He takes the bag from the fridge, turns on a living room lamp so that his wife won’t have to walk into a dark house alone, and steps out the front door.

The sirens are still wailing. God knows he’s used to the sound, but for some reason it’s really getting to him tonight.

Crossing the small, sparse patch of grass, he feels increasingly uneasy, as though something bad is about to happen.

Or maybe it’s more a feeling that he’s not alone.

His work at the prison has taught him well. You learn, when you’re locked behind steel doors with hundreds of depraved, lethal predators, never to ignore your instincts. Frowning, he looks at the windows of the neighboring houses, half expecting to spot someone looking out at him, but there’s no evidence of that. Not that he can see, anyway.

Still . . .

Something is off.

He pictures Cora in her little Toyota crossing the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge with all that weaving traffic, and he worries. He can’t help it. There are a lot of crazy drivers out there who might have stopped for happy hour to kick off the weekend.

He can’t bear the thought of anything happening to her. She’s all he has in this world—and all he needs.

His concern evaporates a few moments later when a pair of headlights swing into the driveway just as he’s putting the keys into the ignition.

Cora parks her car beside his pickup, jumps out, and scurries toward him with her own insulated lunch bag dangling from her hand. She’s wearing a conservative top and slacks and comfort shoes, but five minutes from now, he knows, she’ll have changed into slim-fitting jeans, black biker boots, and a short-sleeved shirt that reveals her tattoos. Her glorious dyed-black hair—the same shade as what’s left of his own—will be released from its clip to tumble down her shoulders.

God, he loves this woman.

He climbs quickly out of the truck and greets her with a fierce embrace and a passionate kiss.

“Mmmm,” she says, “I wish you weren’t leaving.”

“Me too. But I’ll be back, baby.”

She sighs and tilts her forehead against his. “I know. I just miss you when you’re gone.”

“I miss you more. You’re my everything.”

“You’re mine.”

It’s how they always say good-bye. They smile at each other and exchange one last kiss.

Then Chuck climbs behind the wheel and watches her until she’s disappeared inside, safe and sound for the night.

I
nteresting.

Concealed in the shadows of an overgrown rhododendron, Jamie ponders what just happened.

Ever since a chatty—for a price—prison deliveryman informed her that Charles Nowak was the main guard on Jerry’s cell block that fateful night, Jamie has been plotting the man’s death. Suddenly, though, the plan seems unnecessarily lackluster.

You’re my everything.

Those words had reached Jamie’s ears loud and clear.

Food for thought.

Guess life wouldn’t be much worth living without your everything, now would it, Charlie?

Sometimes, death isn’t the worst punishment a person can endure.

Don’t I know it.

A light flicks on inside the house, pooling from the window right above Jamie’s head. Standing on tiptoes, she glimpses the room—a bedroom—and Charlie’s wife walking right toward the window.

For one hair-raising moment, Jamie is certain she’s been spotted.

The woman reaches toward the glass.

But her hand goes to the window lock between the top and bottom panes. She turns it and lifts the sash from the bottom, opening the window a few inches.

Well, how about that? It’s like she’s inviting you in . . . but of course she can’t see you. The light puts a glare on the glass.

No, she has no idea someone is lurking out here in the night, watching her.

Just like the others.

Kristina . . . Marianne . . .

They had no idea that someone was watching them through the window. They both died because of what they did to Jerry.

This woman . . .

She’ll die because her husband helped to kill him.

Yes.
She’ll
die. Not him.

She’ll die tonight.

And then Charles Nowak will know what it’s like to lose someone you love.

“M
ack?”

He jumps, startled, and turns to see Allison standing in the doorway of the sunroom.

In her hand is a glass of diet iced tea. She buys it by the gallon and drinks it every night before bed—not the healthiest habit, she admits. But she’s been doing it for years, long before they moved to the land of health fanatics who would just as soon lace a drink with strychnine as they would ingest artificial sweeteners and caffeine.