Sleepwalker

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “This is some showplace,” Murph mutters, trailing a couple of steps behind. “Home, sweet home, huh, Rock?”

  Rocky shrugs, thinking of the well-worn Bronx row house where he and Ange raised their three boys.

  That’s home, sweet home . . .

  But not without Ange.

  The other day, restlessly sitting in the ICU waiting room while the nurse performed a suctioning procedure, Rocky picked up a pamphlet that was intended for long-married people dealing with a spouse with a debilitating illness, or facing widowhood. When he realized what it was about, his instinct was to toss it aside, but he found himself reading through it—at first relating to the advice, and then resenting it.

  Basically, it was all about learning to live alone again.

  Rocky, who’d gone directly from his parents’ house to the army to marriage with children, has never lived alone in his life.

  And I don’t want to learn how.

  His partner’s voice jars him from his melancholy thoughts.

  “I daresay that the bloodbath in the master suite takes away from the impeccable decor,” Murph declares in a fake-haughty accent.

  Ah, gallows humor. Whatever gets you through.

  Every homicide detective has his own way of coping with the violent horror witnessed on an almost daily basis.

  Murph, ever the jokester, tends to laugh it all off, or blow some steam playing practical jokes around the station house. Other guys throw themselves into sports in the off hours—running, hoops, even boxing—probably one of the healthiest ways of dealing with the stress. Many of their colleagues, conversely, have their share of vices—mainly cigarettes and alcohol—to help ease the tension.

  Rocky has never gone in for any of that.

  All he ever needed, at the end of a grueling day or night on the job, was to come home to Ange. And now . . .

  Now you just have to bide your time until Ange is home and things are back to normal again, that’s all.

  The first floor of the Lewis house, like the second, is humming with activity.

  Uniformed patrol officers, crime scene technicians, the team from the medical examiner’s office—some shooting the breeze, others going about their investigative procedures, a few simultaneously engaging in both banter and business.

  Early morning light falls through the windows on either side of the front door at the foot of the stairs. Rocky really needs to get back to the hospital. What if Ange is waking up right at this moment, while he’s forty minutes away? What if she opens her eyes and asks for him and he’s not there?

  Again, he thinks of Phyllis Lewis’s husband and he feels blessed because at least he, Rocky, has hope.

  For Bob Lewis, there is none.

  A gallery of framed family photos hangs on the wall alongside the stairway. The usual: a wedding picture, a couple of family group photos, baby portraits, grade school portraits, senior portraits, cap and gown shots. Mother, father, sister, brother. Just your average, all-American happy family . . .

  Shattered by a brutal crime, and the only saving grace is that Phyllis’s bloody corpse wasn’t found by her husband or children.

  No, it was found by Allison.

  Rocky has yet to voice his suspicions to anyone but Murph, but he’s about to.

  Captain Jack Cleary of the local police department greets them at the foot of the stairs. Tall, lean, and handsome —with just the right hint of five o’clock shadow on his chiseled jaw—he looks to Rocky more like an actor playing a detective than the real thing.

  “Looks like everything around here is picture-perfect” was Murph’s response, under his breath to Rocky, when they first met Cleary on the heels of their journey through the most charming town this side of a Hollywood-manufactured Americana set.

  Glenhaven Park is one of those northern Westchester suburbs you often read about in the papers—on the society pages, not the crime blotter. When the New York tabloids write about the celebrities and socialites who live there, they invariably use words like “leafy” and “tony” to describe the town.

  Rocky has been around and past it, but until tonight, has never had occasion to get off the highway here. Sure, he has friends in high places—who doesn’t?—but not quite this lofty.

  Main Street is going to be abuzz today, that’s for damned sure. Your classic case of “This kind of thing just doesn’t happen here.”

  Oh, but it does. It happens everywhere.

  And it’s going to happen again, Rocky knows. Another woman is going to be found hacked to death in her bed.

  Maybe not here, but somewhere. Most likely in the general area.

  Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow night, maybe next week, depending on the cooling-off period. Most likely sooner rather than later.

  Unless . . .

  He thinks about a case he worked years ago, one that remains unsolved. The Leprechaun Killer, he and Murph called it—but only privately, because the name stemmed from a clue that wasn’t released to the press or the public.

  A woman was murdered in her Manhattan apartment in the early morning hours after Saint Patrick’s Day, and a short-stemmed green carnation was found at the scene. Rocky speculated that it was a fledgling serial killer’s calling card and waited for the guy to strike again. The fingerprints that were lifted from the stem and petals yielded no match from the database.

  As always, when the Leprechaun Killer pops into his head, Rocky wonders about the security guard. That’s just one aspect of the case that troubled him for years afterward.

  Around the same time the woman was murdered, the lobby guard from the office building where she worked was found brutally stabbed in Central Park, the apparent victim of a random mugging. His wallet was missing and it took more than a week to identify his body. There was no record of a green carnation at that scene—but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been there and been overlooked in the park foliage, or displaced by an animal.

  As a detective, Rocky didn’t believe in coincidences. He thought the two cases were linked, and was convinced that the killer would soon strike again.

  He never did.

  But this, Rocky reminds himself, is different.

  This isn’t the first murder, and it won’t be—

  “Detectives, come with me. You’re going to want to hear this.” Jack Cleary’s brusque command interrupts Rocky’s thoughts, and he waves a hand for them to follow him into the adjoining living room.

  Rocky notices a big basket half filled with chocolate Halloween miniatures on a table by the front door. He tries to imagine the woman he just saw upstairs greeting trick-or-treaters just hours before her gruesome death, still alive and—and in one piece.

  He saw for himself that the middle finger on her right hand is, indeed, missing. Everything, right down to the positioning of her hacked, bloody body, curled on her side, leaves not a doubt in Rocky’s mind that the Nightwatcher is back in business.

  The Alicia Keys song is, indeed, involved this time, but in a slightly different way. Last time, it was audible to anyone within earshot, playing over stereo speakers. This time, the body was found wearing earbuds connected to an iPod looping “Fallin’ ” over and over in her ears, long after she had ceased to be able to hear it.

  Ten years ago, a CD player; today, an iPod—sign of the times. Doesn’t really change the signature.

  There are no other songs on the iPod. Just “Fallin’.”

  The local detectives are looking into the registration for the electronic device but Rocky would bet it’s not going to yield anything useful. This offender knows exactly what he—or she—is doing; so far, they haven’t even found a single fingerprint.

  Cleary closes a set of French doors, sealing them into a large, hushed room with plush off-white carpeting. He motions to a seating area, a cream-colored upholstered sofa and chairs grouped around a low glass table. On it is a perfectly aligned stack of hardcover coffee table books. The top one is on shabby-chic, cottage-style decorating—possibly just for show, judgi
ng by the elegant, traditional decor throughout the house.

  Rocky sits on the sofa, feeling as though he’s going to leave a smudge, and Murph, having heedlessly smudged many a surface in his day, more or less flops down on a chair opposite.

  Cleary, who has undoubtedly never smudged anything in his life, takes a seat between them. His blue eyes are troubled, and he wastes no time getting to the point.

  “I just talked to the CSU guys,” he says, “and something has come up that we didn’t expect at all.”

  “What’s that?” Rocky leans forward, resting his stubbly chin in his hand.

  “This is strictly between us. I don’t want it going beyond this room. No leaks in the press. Got it?” He looks from Rocky to Murph.

  “Got it,” they say in unison.

  “Good.” Cleary nods like a preschool teacher whose students have just correctly guessed the first letter of the alphabet.

  Rocky can’t help but feel a little resentful, and he isn’t sure why. Maybe he’s just jealous of the guy’s good looks. Or maybe he doesn’t appreciate his slightly superior attitude—one that probably suits him well in a hoity-toity town like this.

  Still, this is his jurisdiction, and there’s no mistaking who’s in charge here, regardless of the number of homicide cases this guy has likely seen over the course of his career here—in contrast to how many Rocky and Murph have worked.

  “Compared to the case you investigated ten years ago,” Cleary says, “we’ve got the same MO, and we thought we had the same signature, but we were wrong.”

  “About what?” Rocky asks.

  “There’s been a departure.”

  “You mean in signature?”

  Cleary nods.

  Rocky and Murph look at each other.

  When you’re comparing one crime scene to another to determine whether the same person committed both, the signature analysis is the key.

  As far as Rocky can tell, the Nightwatcher’s signature is all over this crime . . . right down to the missing finger. Although—

  “Do you mean the dead cat?” he asks, thinking of the family pet that was found on the floor in a pool of blood.

  Cleary shakes his head. “Not that. There happened to be a cat here, the cat got in the way, so he got rid of it.”

  “You’re talking about the iPod instead of the CD player?” Murph asks. “Because I wouldn’t say that’s—”

  “I’m not talking about that, either. It doesn’t change the signature drastically. What I’m talking about . . . it’s drastic.”

  “Drastic enough that you’re thinking this is a different killer altogether?” Rocky asks. “A copycat?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  Rocky’s thoughts fly back to Allison Taylor MacKenna. If this is a copycat crime, then she’s on top of a very short list of potential suspects familiar with the details of the Nightwatcher murders . . .

  Until Jack Cleary utters the one phrase that Rocky never saw coming.

  “Phyllis Lewis was raped.”

  PART III

  The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

  But I have promises to keep,

  And miles to go before I sleep,

  And miles to go before I sleep.

  Robert Frost

  Chapter Eleven

  Saturday, November 5, 2011

  “Was that brutal,” Randi asks Allison, “or was that brutal?” Resting a hand on her marble kitchen countertop, she pulls off her black, pointy-toed high-heeled designer pumps, balancing on first one foot and then the other.

  Brutal—she’s referring to the wake for Phyllis Lewis, which the four of them just attended: Randi and Ben, Allison and Mack.

  Brutal doesn’t even begin to describe the experience, Allison thinks as she sinks into a kitchen chair.

  Standing beside the open casket, Bob Lewis and his two children were alternately catatonic and hysterical, depending on who was stepping to the front of the long line of mourners to offer condolences to the family.

  When Allison’s turn came, Bob fell on her sobbing, thanking her over and over. For what, she doesn’t know, and she didn’t ask.

  “He’s just grateful that you went over there to check on Phyllis for him that night,” Mack murmured to her as they stepped away to kneel at the casket and say a quick prayer.

  That night . . .

  Phyllis . . .

  Try as she might, she can’t get the horrific images out of her head.

  Seeing her friend’s dead body a second time didn’t help. Allison hadn’t expected an open casket and was disturbed when she spotted the corpse from the doorway. She had to force herself to make her way over, clinging tightly to Mack’s arm, reminding herself that if Phyllis’s family could face this, so, certainly, could she.

  She overheard several people commenting on how beautiful Phyllis looked, as people have a peculiar way of doing at funerals. But it wasn’t the truth. It never is.

  A high-necked, long-sleeved black dress covered the horrific wounds to her torso, her mutilated hands were discreetly hidden, and her lovely face had been unscathed. But the mortician couldn’t erase the unmistakable death mask pallor Allison has seen before: on Kristina Haines, and on her own mother.

  “I need a drink,” Randi announces, opening a cabinet above the wet bar on the far end of her vast kitchen. “So do you.”

  Allison automatically opens her mouth to protest, but Randi has already taken out two martini glasses, cutting her off with a stern “No arguments.”

  “I’ll just have iced tea.” Randi thoughtfully stocked the fridge with Allison’s favorite beverage when they came to stay.

  “That’s not going to help you. You need something stronger.”

  “I don’t like to drink when the kids are around.” She’s not much of a drinker ever—and certainly not the strong stuff. Alcohol is a drug, and Randi knows how she feels about drugs, thanks to her mother.

  But Randi repeats, “No arguments,” and pulls a bottle of Grey Goose from beneath the bar. “The kids are sound asleep.”

  That’s true. The first thing Allison did when they got back from the wake a few minutes ago was head up the stairs to the spacious guest quarters where she, Mack, and the children have spent the last few nights.

  J.J. was peacefully snoozing in the portable crib set up beside the queen-sized bed in the larger of the two guest rooms. The girls were in twin beds in the other room, snuggled beneath their new quilts—a Madeline theme for Madison, multicolored polka dots for Hudson. Randi had taken them shopping to pick out the bedding on Wednesday while Allison and Mack were being interviewed—yet again—this time by Captain Cleary down at the Glenhaven Park police station.

  When Allison later saw the quilts, she was touched—and a little dismayed. “You shouldn’t have!” she told Randi. “It’s not like they’re going to move in forever.”

  “I know that, but the girls should be comfortable while they’re here,” Randi said. “And so should you. I had a crib delivered this morning, and you and Mack and J.J. are coming tonight—no arguments.”

  Allison didn’t argue.

  She had no desire to spend another sleepless, nerve-wracking night at home.

  At least Mack’s little sleepwalking episode in the wee hours of Wednesday morning doesn’t seem nearly as ominous, in retrospect, as it did at the time.

  She was just so rattled from the murder scene that when she saw him holding a knife, her mind immediately went to a dark, terrifying place.

  Phyllis had died on a Tuesday.

  Things happen on Tuesdays.

  Mack hates Tuesdays.

  But that doesn’t mean . . .

  No. Of course it doesn’t.

  When she told Mack about the knife that morning, he laughed and said he had skipped both lunch and dinner that day, and that he was probably planning to slice up an apple and eat it with cinnamon and sugar.

  “Why,” he asked with a grin, “what did you think I was going to do?”

/>   The grin faded quickly, though—either because he caught sight of the look in her eyes, or because, after a momentary lapse to normalcy, he’d suddenly remembered what had happened next door.

  She never did answer his question; she doesn’t ever want to reconsider, even for an instant, what she might have thought, as that bizarre moment was unfolding, he was going to do—or had already done.

  She’s given it very little thought since, and the past few nights in the Webers’ guestroom have been blessedly uneventful—or at least, if they haven’t, she’s been blessedly oblivious. It’s surprising how soundly she’s slept here . . . but as she told Randi, it’s not as if they’re staying forever.

  “You can stay as long as you want,” Randi offered graciously.

  Allison shook her head, remembering what Randi said, not long ago, about regretting having built the guest suite because her in-laws would come and stay indefinitely.

  No one needs—or wants—permanent houseguests.

  Sooner or later—sooner than later—Allison and Mack and the kids will either have to go back home or make other arrangements.

  “What other arrangements? We can’t just sell the house and move away,” Mack told her when she said, this morning, that she wasn’t ready to sleep at home yet—and might never be.

  “Well, we can’t just stay there waiting for him to come back and kill us all, either.”

  “That’s not going to happen. We have an alarm system now”—he’d had it installed on Thursday, along with shades for the sunroom windows, telling her after the fact— “and the police are keeping an eye on things.”

  Allison was shaking her head stubbornly before he’d finished speaking. “I can’t,” she told him. “I just can’t.”

  He dropped the subject, putting his arms around her and silently holding her close.

  She’s scared. Despite her strength, despite her resolve to never let fear get the best of her, she’s terrified.

  Mack is, too. He must be. He’s just trying not to feed her fear; trying to be the strong, stoic man of the house. Trying not to let his guard down and reveal how he really feels, not even to her, because that’s how he rolls, dammit.