“I’m Captain Cleary.” He flashes a badge. “We met a few days ago.”
A police officer flashing a badge—Mack is catapulted back in time to his apartment on Hudson Street, the one he shared with Carrie. Two cops at the door hand him a packet that contains all that’s left of his wife: a gold band engraved with her initials and their wedding date . . .
“This”—Cleary gestures at the man accompanying him, and Mack forces his attention back to the matter at hand—“is Detective Patterson.”
Under any other circumstances, Patterson would be just an ordinary-looking middle-aged man—short and round, almost bald, with thick glasses and a bulbous nose. Next to Jack Cleary, however, he appears downright homely.
Almost feeling sorry for the guy, Mack starts to rise to greet him, but Cleary jerks a vertical palm at him, gesturing for him to stay seated.
Settling back onto the couch, Mack notes with incredulity that there’s a uniformed—and armed—officer stationed in the archway, eyes trained directly on Mack himself.
They actually think he’s a dangerous criminal.
He opens his mouth to start clearing up this gross misunderstanding before they waste any more time on him while the real killer is still out there. But before he can speak, Patterson motions abruptly for him to be quiet.
Mack’s pity for him flies out the window, but he obediently clamps his mouth shut. The cops are hell-bent on calling the shots here—as they should be, in all fairness—and the last thing he needs is to start off on the wrong foot.
He nods when Cleary asks if he’s willing to answer a few questions, wondering whether he actually has a choice. Not that it matters. He has nothing to hide. Of course he’s going to cooperate.
“Would you mind turning off your phone, Mr. MacKenna?” Detective Patterson asks. “We don’t want any distractions.”
He obliges, grudgingly, and puts the BlackBerry into his pocket.
His thoughts race as he answers the first few questions—basic ones about where he and Allison have been staying since the Lewis murder, and how he knows Nathan and Zoe Jennings.
He knows damned well where this is leading. Maybe he should have a lawyer present.
Is it too late to ask?
He nervously bounces his right leg, heel hitting the carpet in a rapid-fire staccato—then stops when he sees Cleary and Patterson glance from his bouncing foot to each other.
“So you were out of touch with them until recently?” Patterson asks.
“The Jenningses, you mean? Until a few weeks ago. I first saw them again—well, Zoe—at a party. Nathan was there, too, but I didn’t get a chance to talk to him.”
“And where was this party?”
“At Ben Weber’s house.” He wonders about Ben, whom he hasn’t seen since they arrived at the Jenningses’ house. Was he also questioned?
Mack hopes so. Ben is articulate and well-qualified to vouch for Mack’s character; he’ll be willing to help the cops straighten out this mess.
Mack just hopes he doesn’t mention the gun. He’s pretty sure Ben won’t—after all, he doesn’t have a permit for it.
It’s not as though Zoe was shot, but still . . .
It doesn’t look good for him to have a gun in the house—even though it’s still safely locked in his dresser drawer—and Allison will flip if she finds out.
“Tell us about your relationship with Zoe Jennings.”
Caught off guard by Cleary’s command, Mack echoes, “My relationship? I don’t have a relationship with her. I mean, I barely know her—barely knew her—anymore.”
“And you’d say the same thing about her husband?”
Mack nods vigorously. “The only time I’ve talked to him in fifteen years was the other night when I ran into him on the train—”
“Which night?” Patterson cuts in impatiently.
He’s holding a pen between his forefinger and middle finger as if it were a cigarette. He’s a smoker, Mack realizes, probably on edge and wanting a smoke.
His fingers . . .
Fingers . . .
Was Zoe, like the other victims, missing a finger?
He swallows hard, not wanting to imagine a disembodied finger, not just for its sheer ghastliness, but for the memory it triggers.
All that was left of Carrie was her wedding ring; how many times has he fought back the horror of imagining what might have happened to the finger it was on? To the rest of her?
“Mr. MacKenna! Which night did you run into Nathan Jennings on the train?”
“I’m sorry . . .” He takes a deep breath, trying to clear his head. “It was . . . it was the night I came home and found out about Phyllis Lewis. I guess that was . . . Tuesday.”
Tuesday. Yes.
It’s always a Tuesday, isn’t it?
“That was the only time in fifteen years that you spoke to him?”
“Yes. I mean, until they came over to the Webers’ tonight—Saturday night, last night,” he clarifies, noting the chalky daylight falling through the window.
“And this morning . . . ?”
“What?” Confused, he says, “I’m sorry, I just . . . I didn’t get any sleep and I guess I’m having a hard time following.”
“You talked to Nathan Jennings this morning . . . ?”
“No.” Maybe Detective Patterson is the one who’s confused, here. Nicotine withdrawal makes your brain fuzzy, right? “As I said, Nate and Zoe came over to the Webers’ last night. They left at around ten, I guess, maybe ten-thirty.”
“So you didn’t speak to them or call them at all after that?” Cleary asks, and clarifies, “I’m talking about earlier this morning—after midnight?”
“Do you mean did I call to ask Nate for a ride?” Seeing the man’s blue eyes narrow, Mack adds, “I know that’s what Nate said happened, because Ben and Allison told me. But I didn’t call him.”
“You’re sure about that.”
Mack wants to scream. “Positive.”
“And there’s no way you might have, say, made the call and then forgotten about it?”
“Who forgets making a phone call?”
Who, indeed?
He tries to ignore a flicker of misgiving as he admits—to himself only—that he doesn’t have a great recent track record for remembering other things he’s done in the wee hours. Walking, talking, eating . . .
Captain Cleary doesn’t know about that, though . . . does he?
What if he’s already talked to Allison, and she told him?
Why would she?
Then again . . . why wouldn’t she? She’s not trying to hide anything . . .
And neither are you.
Mack shifts his weight uncomfortably, wishing he could fidget with his phone, or pace, or . . .
Or light a cigarette, he thinks, watching Detective Patterson roll the pen back and forth between his twitchy fingers.
Once upon a time, Mack, too, was a smoker. It seemed everyone was, during that era in New York, when he was in his twenties and you could light up anywhere you pleased, in bars and restaurants, at the office . . .
He and Carrie quit together when they decided to start a family. But around the time that his marriage started to crumble, he went back to it. The old habit took the edge off the stress, and he kept it up for a while after Carrie died.
Then you had to quit all over again, and wasn’t that fun?
Whatever. All he knows is that right now, he’d kill for a cigarette.
Kill?
Not kill. He could never—would never—kill.
Never.
This is surreal.
“A call was placed to Nate Jennings, Mr. MacKenna, at”—Cleary consults his notes—“two-forty-eight A.M. It came from your home number.”
Startled, he shakes his head. “I didn’t make it. I wasn’t even here. Someone else must have been, and made the call. Actually—” He leans forward. “I had a call myself, right around that time, from my alarm monitoring company saying that the system had b
een breached.”
A call the alarm company denied making—something Cleary may already know.
And now he’ll either think I’m lying, or realize someone is screwing with me. With all of us.
Mack takes his BlackBerry out of his pocket, pressing the on button.
“Mr. MacKenna—”
“Wait, I just want to show you something.” The device powers up, and he presses the recall button, then holds the BlackBerry outstretched toward the captain. “See? I got that call at . . .” He turns the screen toward himself and checks the time. “Two forty-nine.”
Just one minute after Nathan Jennings received the call from this house.
It’s obvious to Mack that both calls were placed by the same person—the murderer—and that the motive for the first call was to lure Nate out of the house, leaving Zoe alone and vulnerable.
And the motive for the second?
“He was trying to get me out of the house and over here,” he tells Cleary and Patterson, careful to keep the note of desperation out of his voice, as they take turns glancing at the phone. “It’s obvious.”
Neither man responds to that.
Mack’s fingers twitch, itching to hold something . . . his BlackBerry, or . . . a cigarette.
Shaken, he again reminds himself that he doesn’t even smoke anymore. How could he crave a cigarette?
Come on, is it any wonder? When was the last time you were under this much stress?
Unless . . .
He’s been eating at night, and not remembering a thing.
What if he’s been doing other things, too? Smoking?
But where would he even get cigarettes?
Could he have bought or bummed them, and forgotten that, too?
Cleary passes the BlackBerry back to Mack.
“Look,” Mack says, trying to keep his voice from quaking, trying not to think unsettling thoughts, “I know what it looks like, but I’m innocent, and I’ll do whatever you need me to do to prove it. Go ahead, check my fingerprints, my DNA, whatever you need.”
“Are you willing to provide a DNA sample?” Cleary asks immediately.
“Absolutely, and anything else you need.”
A few minutes later, left alone again while they arrange for the DNA testing, Mack finally exhales.
It won’t be long now. He just has to hang in there until they clear him and move on.
He only prays, with a growing sense of dread, that his family will be safe in the meantime, and that . . .
No. That’s impossible.
There is no way—absolutely no way—he could have done anything but walk, and perhaps eat, in his sleep.
No way . . .
Staring at herself in the master bathroom mirror as she blow-dries her hair, Randi sees that the rough night is evident in the anxious expression in her eyes and in the purplish valleys beneath them. She ordinarily doesn’t wear foundation on a weekend day when she’s just planning to stay at home, but on this dismal Sunday, she’s going to need it—and some under-eye cover cream, too.
She doesn’t have much time, though, to pull herself together. Greta is watching all three of Allison’s kids in the third floor playroom, and while the girls are no problem at all, J.J. is a handful. Poor baby has been up since the wee hours, when Randi summoned Allison with the news that Nate Jennings was looking for Mack.
Little J.J. wanted his mommy so desperately, straining to reach for her when she came back into the guest bedroom to change quickly before leaving with Ben. Ordinarily, she’d probably have given her beloved mama’s boy a quick cuddle, but she was so utterly discombobulated that she barely seemed to notice, letting Randi hang on to him. She’d gotten sick, she said, and Randi couldn’t tell whether it was because she wasn’t used to drinking vodka martinis—or because she was upset that Mack was gone.
Why the hell was he gone at that hour?
Randi still has no idea what, exactly, went on here in the night. All she knows is that she and Allison stayed up pretty late, talking, drinking.
Randi, who with her own small stature has a low tolerance for alcohol, was taken aback by all the confidences that came pouring out of an inebriated Allison. Some of what she said wasn’t the least bit surprising—like that she resents how much time Mack spends at the office these days.
“It sucks, being alone with the kids all the time,” Allison slurred.
“Don’t I know it,” Randi told her.
Allison delivered some bombshells as well. Like when she said she sometimes fantasizes about moving back to Nebraska, away from the cutthroat pressure of New York.
“You can’t go,” Randi remembers telling her, on the verge of the tears that come so easily when you’ve had several drinks. “What would I do without you? You’re like a sister to me.”
She doesn’t remember Allison’s reply—she doesn’t remember a lot of what was said, come to think of it—but she does remember hugging her and crying, the way you do in college when you’re drunk and prone not just to tears, but to emotional declarations about how much you love your friends.
Going to bed is a blur in her mind.
Then all hell broke loose at around three-thirty in the morning, and on the other side of town, Zoe Jennings was murdered.
When a traumatized Ben called her with the news, Randi simply couldn’t get her head around the idea that a woman so young and vibrant, a woman who just hours ago was talking and laughing right here under the Webers’ own roof, had met such a horrific end.
She wishes Ben would get back and fill in the details, but she hasn’t talked to him since around five-thirty. That was when she took a break from pacing the floor with a miserable J.J. and called her husband’s cell to make sure he was all right. He sounded harried and said he couldn’t talk.
“And my cell’s almost dead, so—”
“But Ben, I just—”
“I’ll turn it off for now to save the battery and call you back as soon as I can,” he promised.
He didn’t call back.
That was about two hours ago; it must be well past seven now, probably almost eight.
She tried calling Allison’s cell, too, but it rang somewhere in the guest room—she’d left it behind. Mack didn’t pick up when she called his. And when she tried the MacKennas’ home number, it bounced right into voice mail.
Maybe she should finish getting dressed, try to get a groggy J.J. down for a morning nap, and go out to find Ben.
But where would she even look? At the Jenningses’ house? The MacKennas’? Where the heck is he?
She gives her hair one last brush-through with the dryer going, then switches it off and reaches for her cosmetics bag.
“Randi?”
She jumps, startled, and sees Ben standing in the doorway.
“Sorry—I didn’t mean to scare you. I said your name a few times, but you had the hair dryer on.”
“I didn’t hear you. It’s okay.” She takes a deep breath and lets it out, trying to calm her shattered nerves.
Ordinarily, she’s not so jumpy.
But when she thinks about Zoe; about what happened to her last night . . .
Now, looking at her husband, she sees reflected in his eyes the same expression she just glimpsed in the mirror.
She goes over to Ben and puts her arms around him. “What happened over there?”
He hugs her back, resting his chin on the top of her head. “She was killed in her bed. Stabbed, Nate said. He’s a mess.”
“I can imagine.”
Sadly, that’s the truth. She can imagine, all too well.
For the past couple of hours, ever since she got the call about Zoe, she’s been haunted by the thought that it could happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time. It’s frightfully easy to put herself into Zoe’s shoes, or Nathan’s.
Eyes closed, she holds tightly to Ben, breathing the unfamiliar scent that clings to his clothes: a hint of cigarette smoke, maybe, and outdoor air, and . . .
Death?
; “Did you go in there?” Zoe asks, abruptly releasing her grasp and stepping back. “Did you see her?”
“No!” He shudders. “They wouldn’t let anyone in, even Nate had to stay outside, and the kids were at the neighbor’s when I got there. I just talked to the police, and then—”
“You talked to the police?”
“Yeah.”
“But . . . why?”
“I was one of the last people to see Zoe alive, Randi. So were you. They’re going to want to talk to you, too.”
“And Mack, and Allison . . .”
Something shifts in his gaze, and he breaks eye contact, leaning toward the mirror and rubbing the peppery growth of beard on his chin. “They’re talking to Mack and Allison now.”
“At the Jenningses’ house?”
“I’m not sure where they are. They took them away.”
“Who?”
“Mack and Allison.”
“No, who took them away?”
“The police.”
Their gazes meet in the mirror and hold.
“Why did they do that?” Randi is afraid of the answer and not sure why.
“To question them, I guess.”
A strange and terrible thought flits at the edges of her consciousness like a falling leaf fluttering on a breeze, but before she can catch it, it dances out of her grasp.
“When will they be back here?” she asks Ben.
“I’m not sure.” He jerks open the mirrored medicine cabinet door, shattering their eye contact in its reflection.
“Ben?”
“Yeah?” He pulls out a can of shaving cream and his razor, closing the door but not looking up into the mirror again.
She hesitates, not sure what she dares to say, or even think . . .
But again, something teases at her brain, something that happened last night . . . something Zoe said? Or, no, something Allison said, when they were sipping their last drinks in the kitchen . . . ?
She settles on just “I’ll finish getting ready, and then I’ll go down and make some coffee.”
Ben nods.
She doesn’t move.
Ben looks at her. “What are you thinking?”
“Probably the same thing you’re thinking.”
“Probably.” He rubs his temples with his palms. “What the hell are we supposed to do about any of this? Call a lawyer?”
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