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.
“Here. 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.
“Yes!” 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.
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
Mack 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.
Riding 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 . . .
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