The old Mack would have.
The new Mack . . . who the hell knows?
He’s a virtual stranger after all these years. People change. Things change. And he’s going to remind Zoe of that first thing in the morning. She’d be better served by starting from scratch here in Glenhaven Park, rather than trying to reignite old friendships . . . or anything else.
Reaching the top of the stairs, Nate is sure he left the bedroom door open earlier, but now it’s closed.
Maybe Zoe got up with one of the kids while he was gone.
Who are you kidding?
She probably wouldn’t hear them if they screamed bloody murder.
Nathan Jennings opens the bedroom door—and crosses the threshold into . . .
Bloody murder.
Chapter Thirteen
Bobby Silva’s prison nickname, Rocky and Murph have been informed, is B.S.—and not just because of his initials.
According to the corrections officer who led them to the small room where they’re conducting inmate interviews, Silva is a pathological liar.
“Don’t believe a word he says,” the CO advises them.
“Terrific,” Murph mutters under his breath. “Why are we bothering?”
“A lot of times with guys like this, there’s a grain of truth in there somewhere,” Rocky reminds him.
With any luck, Silva will be more forthcoming than Doobie Jones was when they talked to him a short time ago. The guy couldn’t have been less cooperative, staring through them when they questioned him about Jerry Thompson. He simply refused to talk.
“You can’t get blood from a stone,” Murph muttered to Rocky after Jones was escorted away, “and that was the most stone-cold SOB I’ve ever met.”
Now it’s Silva’s turn to take a seat across from them as the armed CO takes up a watchful post on the other side of the glass-paneled wall. His presence was a definite comfort when Doobie Jones was in here.
But this guy isn’t anywhere near as menacing. Where Doobie Jones sat stealth-still, B.S. is full of nervous energy. He’s small in stature, with jet black hair, close-set black eyes, and sharp features. If he were a cartoon character, Rocky finds himself thinking, he’d be a rat.
“Do you know what time it is?” he demands, left alone with detectives.
Murph pushes up his sleeve and consults his watch. “Almost three-thirty.”
“I know that!”
Murph shrugs, calmly lowering the sleeve. “You asked.”
“Why’d you drag me out’a bed in the middle of the night?”
“We have some questions for you,” Rocky tells him, “and we hear you’re a smart guy. You know more than anyone else what goes on around the cell block.”
Ego sufficiently stroked, B.S. nods in agreement. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“You knew Jerry Thompson pretty well, didn’t you?”
“Jerry? Jerry was my best friend.” B.S. twitches in his seat. “I tried to save his life. Gave him CPR for, like, two hours, but he didn’t make it.”
Rocky figures that’s about as likely as Jerry rising from the dead, considering that B.S. was locked in his cell that fateful night, but he commends him for his heroic efforts.
Encouraged, B.S. launches into a detailed account of the action, painting himself as a bold would-be savior who tended to his fallen fellow inmate as the rest of the prison population, staff and medical personnel included, looked on helplessly.
Managing to look duly impressed, Murph says, “Wow, you’re one hell of a good friend, Mr. Silva. How did Jerry get his hands on the orange juice and the poison?”
In a flash, Silva goes from effusive to wary. “I don’t know.”
Yes, you do, Rocky thinks. You know that it came from Doobie Jones, and you’re afraid of what he’ll do to you if you rat him out.
Murph makes a few more futile attempts to get B.S. to reveal the truth. Watching him fidget and glance repeatedly at the door, Rocky decides it’s time to change the subject before the guy clams up altogether.
“So you and Jerry were best friends,” he says. “Did he ever talk to you about what his life was like on the outside?”
Still guarded, B.S. lifts his chin. “What do you think?”
“I think you were the one person he trusted in this place, and you were probably a good listener.”
“Yeah, I’m a great listener. All the guys tell me stuff all the time, because I’m the only one they trust. I used to be a secret agent before I got here, so I know how to keep my mouth shut.”
Masking his amusement, Rocky waits for B.S. to finish telling him about the government secrets he’s been privy to over the years, right up to the raid last spring on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.
“And what about Jerry?” Murph finally cuts him off. “What kinds of secrets did he confide in you?”
“A lot of stuff. You know.”
“Did he ever talk about what he did to get himself in here in the first place?”
“Sure.”
“What did he say?”
“He said his sister, Jamie, killed a bunch of people and he got blamed for it. He said no one believed Jamie was real. Everyone thought she was dead, even Jerry’s mother and father, but she wasn’t.”
Rocky nods, rubbing his chin.
Yes, Jamie was dead—no dispute there.
But what if Jerry mistook someone else for her? Or what if someone convinced Jerry that she was Jamie? What if that person, posing as Jamie—a person who fit into a size fourteen dress—had committed the murders and then slipped away as the police closed in, leaving a confused and hapless Jerry to take the fall?
It would explain how the murders could be replicated now with the deaths of Cora Nowak and Phyllis Lewis.
“Did you say Jerry’s father thought Jamie was dead?” Murph asks.
Startled, Rocky raises an eyebrow, belatedly picking up on what he’d missed.
“Jerry said it was his fault that she died,” B.S. tells them. “That’s what I said.”
No, it isn’t.
But this is even more intriguing, and Rocky raises a hand slightly, in case Murph is about to call him on the lie. Of course, he isn’t. He senses, as Rocky does, that they might be on to something.
Jerry Thompson reportedly never knew his father, Samuel Shields, who was just fourteen years old when he got his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Lenore Thompson pregnant with twins.
At the time, Samuel had even bigger problems than that. His own father, a paranoid schizophrenic, had tried to kill him and later been committed to the psych ward. And Samuel himself had already been in and out of juvenile detention—with an unpromising future ahead of him as a convicted felon.
Remembering the photograph in Jerry’s file—the one that showed him and his sister with a man who looked like he could have been their deadbeat father—Rocky asks B.S., “How was Jamie’s death the father’s fault?”
“He got mad and went after Jerry’s mother. When Jerry went to help her, his sister attacked him. Then she ran away. And she was killed out on the streets after that.”
The latter part of that story is undeniably true.
What about the first part?
“Do you know if Jerry was ever in touch with his father while he was here?” Murph asks.
“Nah, he didn’t know where he was, he said. He never got any visitors. Me, I get visitors all the time,” B.S. brags. “My family comes, and my friends, and the governor came a couple of times—he’s working to get me out of here—and . . .”
The governor. Right.
Rocky and Murph exchange a glance, reminding each other that they can’t believe anything this guy says.
Then again . . .
What if there’s some truth to what he said about Jerry?
They do their best to glean more meaningful information from B.S., but true to his name, he has nothing more to offer.
When at last he’s taken from the room, Rocky shares his latest theory with Murph: that ther
e really might have been a Jamie: either someone Jerry mistook for his dead sister, or someone who convinced Jerry that she was Jamie.
“And you think that’s the person who killed those women ten years ago?” Murph asks. “And now Nowak’s wife and the Lewis woman, too?”
“It could be.”
“But why start killing again now all of sudden, ten years later?”
“Jerry’s death. That might be what triggered it. Nowak was killed just days after he died; Lewis about six weeks later. And when you look at the victimology . . .”
Murph nods thoughtfully. Of course he knows as well as Rocky does how important it is to profile the victims along with their killer. You look at what they have in common, figure out why they might have been targeted by the unsub—unknown subject.
Rocky goes on, “Nowak was on duty on Jerry Thompson’s cell block the night he killed himself.”
“Or was murdered, depending on who you want to believe.”
“Right. And Phyllis Lewis’s connection to Thompson was less direct, but it’s there, Murph. She lived right next door to Allison, and Allison’s testimony put Jerry into prison in the first place.”
Murph whistles under his breath.
“So let’s say this person—someone Jerry believed was Jamie—really did—does—exist,” Rocky continues. “If Thompson’s death was the trigger, where do we look for the motive?”
“Revenge.”
“Exactly. You kill Nowak’s wife to get back at him. You kill Allison’s neighbor to get back at her.”
“But why not Nowak himself? Why not Allison herself?”
“For some people, losing a spouse is a fate worse than death,” Rocky says simply. “Believe me.”
“I do.” Murph gives him a sympathetic pat on the arm.
Determined to focus on the business at hand, Rocky says, “Whoever killed Cora Nowak knew what losing her would do to her husband. And he maximized the impact with that gruesome sandwich delivery.”
Rocky and Murph had studied the grainy surveillance videotape that showed the perp dropping off the so-called lunch that night. You couldn’t make out a damned thing; just a dark, hooded figure with his face completely obscured. It could have been anyone.
“But you’re talking about a wife,” Murph tells him, “not a next-door neighbor. What about the Lewis case? That doesn’t make as much sense.”
“No,” Rocky agrees. “It doesn’t. Unless there was more to the relationship between Allison MacKenna and Phyllis Lewis than we know.”
“They’re both married with kids.”
Rocky gives Murph a pointed look.
“Okay,” Murph says, “anything’s possible. But I don’t buy it.”
Frankly, Rocky doesn’t, either. But you have to look at all your options.
“We’ve got to talk to anyone we can find who knew Jerry Thompson ten years ago, anyone who can shed some light on this. Including his father.” Rocky is still intrigued by B.S.’s mention that Jerry’s father was there the night he was attacked by his sister, and by his own memory of the photograph sitting in the case file.
He quickly dials the precinct and asks Tommy, the station house desk sergeant, to put him through to Mai Zheng, one of the newer junior detectives on the squad. She’s incredibly proficient when it comes to computers and records.
She answers her phone on the first ring.
“Mai,” he says, “I need you to do something for me. Write down this name: Sam Shields.”
He quickly tells her to look into Shields’s background; find out if there was any way he had been a part of Jerry’s life after all, and whether he’s the man pictured in that old snapshot in Jerry’s file.
“I want to know where he was in December 1991, around the time that Jamie Thompson was murdered,” he tells Mai, “and I want to know where he was when the Nightwatcher murders took place—and where he is right now. Got it?”
“Got it,” Mai says. “I’ll get right on it.”
He hangs up to see a thoughtful-looking Murph scratching his chin.
“If we go with the revenge theory, Rock,” he muses, “then who’s next? Because you and I both know there’s gonna be another one.”
Rocky hadn’t gotten that far in his line of thinking, but Murph is right.
Promptly putting himself back into the predator’s shoes, Rocky returns, “Who else do you blame for Jerry Thompson kicking the bucket?”
“Doobie Jones, if you know what we know.”
“True,” he tells Murph, “but chances are, the unsub doesn’t, and anyway—how are you going to get to Jones in here?”
“You’re not. It has to be someone accessible. Someone who has more to lose.”
Jesus.
It dawns on Rocky, and he can feel the blood drain from his face.
He’s up and on his way to the door in a flash.
“Rock,” Murph calls, startled, “where are you going?”
Rocky manages to summon a one-word reply, and it comes out sounding strangled. “Ange.”
Unnerved by a second police car that races past with wailing sirens, Allison bites her lower lip and looks at Ben, behind the wheel.
His short, dark hair is tousled from the sweatshirt he’d hastily pulled over his head, and she’s sure her own hair must be completely disheveled. She didn’t bother to comb it, just splashed cold water on her face, grabbed her toothbrush and scrubbed the taste of vomit from her mouth. Then she threw on the closest thing at hand—a pair of jeans from the laundry bag, and the starched white dress shirt Mack had worn to the wake earlier, then apparently tossed on the floor beside the bed.
The police car disappears around a distant corner, heading in the general direction of her house.
She looks at Ben. “You don’t think . . .”
“I’m sure he’s fine. Anyway, you said he’s been sleepwalking lately, so maybe . . .”
Yes, she did say that, sharing just enough information with Ben about Mack’s nocturnal activities—but not too much. She didn’t tell him about the Dormipram, or about . . .
The knife.
Why can’t she stop thinking about it?
He was going to cut an apple that night, just as she’d watched him do hundreds, thousands of times before.
Pushing the unsettling memory from her mind, she tells Ben, “If he drove in his sleep, though”—and it looks as though he may have, given that his keys and the BMW were missing—“that would be so dangerous.”
“Maybe he didn’t do it in his sleep. Maybe he was wide awake when he left.”
“But why would he have gone? And why wouldn’t he have told me?”
“I don’t—” Ben breaks off at the sound of another screaming police car approaching in the distance.
They’re both silent, listening as the sirens grow closer before the whirling red lights overtake them. Ben pulls off to the curb to let the cruiser pass, and Allison rolls down her window to gulp fresh air.
“Hang in there.” Ben is back on the road and driving faster than the speed limit now. “It’s going to be okay.”
She says nothing, praying that all those police cars aren’t headed for Orchard Terrace.
But when they reach it, the block is dark and quiet, and Allison lets out the breath she’d been holding. Thank God.
“He’s here!” she tells Ben a moment later, spotting Mack’s car beyond the hedgerow, parked in their own driveway.
Ben, too, exhales in relief.
They pull into the driveway and she jumps out of the car, making a beeline for the house. But she stops short at the front door, realizing she doesn’t have her keys.
That wouldn’t matter anyway, she remembers, spotting the alarm company sticker affixed to the front door.
The new system is keyless—Mack thought it would be safer not to have them floating around, so easily stolen and duplicated—and she doesn’t remember the code she’s supposed to punch into the panel.
Mack had called her from the house to give it to
her after it had been installed, and though she dutifully scribbled it down, she didn’t bother to memorize it. As far as she was concerned, that was a moot point. They weren’t ever going to move back in.
Now, though, she’s not so sure about that. Now, she longs to open the door and step into the safe haven this house was supposed to be.
“I can’t get in,” she tells Ben, and presses the doorbell a couple of times. She knocks, too, then pounds, seized by a growing sense of urgency.
When at last the door opens, Mack is standing there.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, surprised, and she’s relieved that he sounds—and looks—like his normal self. Not the least bit zombielike; he’s clearly wide awake.
“What are you doing here?” Ben returns, as a grateful Allison grabs on to her husband and gives him a quick, fierce hug.
“I got a call on my cell from the alarm monitoring service. They said there had been a security breach and that I was supposed to meet the police here. I’ve been waiting, but they haven’t shown up yet.”
“That happens sometimes with these systems,” Ben tells him. “I guess the cops got busy with something else.”
Remembering the squad cars that rushed past a few minutes ago, Allison realizes that the sirens are still wailing eerily in the night. Something bad is going on out there—but thankfully, it has nothing to do with Mack.
“Did you check out the house?” Ben asks Mack.
“I did. Everything seems fine.”
Allison asks, in horror, “Are you crazy? You went into the house by yourself after . . . after what happened?”
Mack shrugs. “It wasn’t a big deal. Probably just an electronic malfunction. It’s always happening with the neighbors’ alarms, remember?”
“I remember.”
I remember a lot of things. I remember that there’s a homicidal maniac out there somewhere.
“But you didn’t know it was safe inside when you got here,” she points out. “Someone could have been waiting to jump you.”
“Things are different now, Allie,” he says patiently. “No one is going to get into this house ever again without the alarm code. And you and I are the only two people in the world who know what it is—so don’t worry.”
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