According to the conversation that just wrapped up between Allison and those cops, she’s going to be driven back over to the Weber home. She asked if she could pack some spare clothing, which makes it obvious to Jamie, at least, that she’s not planning on returning home again any time in the near future.
But the big question of the day is, where will her husband be sleeping from now on?
My money’s on anyplace other than with his wife.
Jamie’s smile gives way to a giggle at the thought—especially when she remembers the hint of misgiving in Allison’s tone as she answered the detectives’ questions about her dear husband.
She wanted so badly to defend him, but she couldn’t.
She wanted so badly to find a reason to trust him, to give him the benefit of the doubt—and perhaps she did.
For now.
But that won’t last for long.
She’s soon going to find out that she married a monster capable of pure evil; a monster capable of robbing her of the very thing that matters most to her in this world. And when that happens, there will be no going back. She’ll be shattered.
On screen, Allison surreptitiously wipes her eyes on the rolled-up sleeve of the men’s shirt she’s wearing and sneaks a peek at the policewoman to see if her tears are noticed.
“Are you almost finished?” the woman asks without the slightest bit of sympathy for poor little Allison, wife of the most notorious criminal this safe small town has ever known.
If you think that’s bad, lady—that he killed a couple of so-called innocent women—just you wait.
Allison nods and takes something else from her drawer—not the one where she keeps her lingerie. Such a pity Jamie has no reason now to rummage through another drawer filled with deliciously silky undergarments.
Everything is in place for the final phase of the plan, though Jamie did hit a slight speed bump when the MacKennas moved out of their house after the Lewis murder.
The Weber home, with its sophisticated security system, provided a whole new set of complications.
But then, Jamie always did welcome the opportunity to rise above the greatest challenge, and this was no exception.
The plan hinged on finding Mack’s BMW in the commuter parking lot, and there it was on Thursday afternoon, parked as always in the secluded far reaches, almost obscured by a clump of shrubbery.
It was so easy for Jamie to crouch beside it and affix a tiny camera just beneath the mirror on the driver’s side of the door. The camera was trained not on the car itself, but angled to focus on a spot directly opposite the door, about three feet above the ground.
The exact height and location of the keypad beside the Webers’ security gate. All Jamie has to do is watch carefully the next time Mack punches in the “secret” code.
Ha—there are no secret codes where you’re concerned, Jamie silently tells Mack, who was so pleased with himself after having that new burglar alarm installed at home.
You probably should have waited to share the password with Allison in person—or at least, have whispered it into the phone when you made that call.
But I must say, I’m so glad you didn’t.
Now there’s just one more step to take before James MacKenna is sent off to prison for the rest of his life, and his wife is left utterly alone for the rest of hers.
But what needs to happen next won’t be nearly as satisfying as what came before. There will be no wriggling, scantily-clad female begging for mercy—not a grown one, anyway, and somehow that takes the fun right out of it.
What will I do when I’ve won this final battle?
What reason will I even have to go on living after it’s over?
Maybe I won’t.
Maybe I’ll do what Jerry did, and leave this miserable world behind.
On the screen, Allison picks up a framed photograph from her dresser top. Jamie can’t see it clearly from here, but remembers which picture it is: the one of Allison with her baby on her lap and her daughters at her side, one cozily tucked under each arm.
A mother and her children.
Jamie watches Allison tuck the photo into her overnight bag, then zip it closed.
Ah, yes, Allison, that’s a great idea. Take the picture with you. Take all the pictures with you.
After all . . . you’re going to need something to remember them by.
Gazing down at what’s left of Zoe Jennings, Rocky feels sick to his stomach.
Not because of the badly mutilated corpse—he’s all but immune to gruesome murder scenes after all these years—but because the son of a bitch got to her before Rocky got to him.
There I was paranoid about myself, worrying about Ange, and this poor innocent woman—
“Detective Manzillo?”
He looks up to see Jack Cleary striding into the room.
“I just spoke to your partner downstairs,” he tells Rocky. “He said I’d find you up here.”
Yeah, Murph hadn’t felt the same need to hang around the dead body . . . not when one of the local uniforms had popped into the room to say that they’d just tapped a Box O’ Joe from Dunkin’ Donuts somewhere outside.
“I’m gonna take a coffee break,” Murph decided. “Who knows, maybe there’s doughnuts, too. Or fancy pastries, with these Westchester guys.”
After Murph left the room, Rocky had placed a quick call to the hospital to see if there’d been any change since he last spoke to them.
“I just came on duty, Mr. Manzillo,” the nurse told him, “and I heard that you’re worried about some security issues. I don’t know anything about that—all I can tell you is that it looks like she had a peaceful night.”
Peaceful—he supposed that was good, as opposed to . . .
He looked at the body on the bed, knowing Zoe Jennings’s last minutes on this earth had been anything but peaceful.
But Ange—Ange, he doesn’t want to see peaceful. Ange, he wants sitting up, talking, walking, laughing, scolding him about his lousy diet.
“I expected to see you at the press conference I called yesterday morning about the case.” Cleary jars him back to the moment.
“Yeah, I was planning to be there but . . . I couldn’t make it. My wife is . . . she’s been sick. I needed to be with her.”
Rocky doesn’t miss the flicker of disapproval in Cleary’s blue eyes. Even then he expects the guy to say something—ask how his wife is, or express his regret that she’s been sick—but he says nothing at all.
Rocky glances down at the captain’s left hand and is surprised to see a wedding band. For all he knows, Cleary could be the best husband in the world—but somehow, Rocky doubts it. And somehow, that matters to him more than it should.
Cleary gets down to business, indicating the body on the bed. “Same signature as the Lewis case.”
Right. Multiple stab wounds, missing middle finger, iPod earbuds hanging from her ears. There are votive candles, too. And she’s wearing an ill-fitting lace teddy that Rocky is willing to bet came from another woman’s bureau drawer—probably Phyllis Lewis’s.
“Exactly the same signature?” he asks.
“Other than the fact that he got in through a window . . .”
Right. Rocky knows that. They found broken glass downstairs beneath one of the windows overlooking the backyard.
Clearly this time, the Nightwatcher didn’t have a key. But that didn’t stop him.
There was broken glass in Rocky’s house, too, beneath a window.
Had he come in looking for Ange?
If she hadn’t been in the hospital, would she be . . . ?
“And this time, we got the weapon. Kitchen knife with a red handle. He dropped it. No prints. But if you’re asking whether she was raped, Detective Manzillo,” Cleary says, “the answer is yes.”
Rocky nods. He’d figured as much.
“Cora Nowak wasn’t raped,” he tells Cleary, then clarifies, “she’s the wife of the CO over at Sullivan Correctional.”
“I
heard about that. Look, I don’t know how it ties into this. All I know is we’ve got a semen sample here to match to the one we got at the Lewis place, and we’ve got a suspect who volunteered to provide us with his own DNA.”
“Volunteered? Who is it?”
“James MacKenna.”
Rocky’s eyes widen. “Why him?”
Cleary quickly explains about the phone call that had conveniently summoned Zoe Jennings’s husband from their bed in the middle of the night, Rocky hears the song he’d sung—well, tried to sing—just a few hours ago echoing in his head.
Mack the Knife.
Suddenly, it seems less a serenade to Ange and eerily like a harbinger of things to come.
But of course, that’s ridiculous. He’s no psychic. The song was just a coincidence. Besides . . .
“What about other prints? Not just on the knife, but . . .” The room has been dusted, of course.
“So far, it looks like he didn’t leave any.”
“So he wore gloves, but not a condom,” Rocky says, more to himself than to Cleary.
“Looks that way.”
“And Jennings is sure that it was MacKenna on the phone?”
“The call came from his number.”
“But the voice—he was sure?”
Cleary hesitates. “He says MacKenna was whispering, so it was hard to tell.”
Rocky digests that.
“Another thing—looks like the phone line at the MacKenna house was cut sometime after that call was made.”
“How does that fit in?”
“Who knows? Maybe he was trying to stage it to look like he and his family were victims, too.”
“You say MacKenna volunteered his DNA?” At Cleary’s nod, Rocky asks, “Why would he do that if he’s guilty?”
“Because maybe he doesn’t realize he’s guilty.” Cleary doesn’t add a “duh,” but he might as well have.
“Explain,” Rocky says tersely.
“The guy sleepwalks. His best friend mentioned it earlier, and when I asked the wife about it, you could see that she didn’t want to say anything, but she did. She said he’s been taking some kind of medication—Dormipram? It makes him get up in the middle of the night and do all kinds of crazy things.”
“Like . . . ?”
“Like eat . . .”
“And kill women? Chop off their fingers?”
Cleary shrugs and says with exaggerated patience, “The subconscious mind is a complicated thing, Detective Manzillo.”
Yeah. As if he didn’t know. And so is this case.
Rocky’s heard about Dormipram and its bizarre side effects. He’s not ruling out that medication could trigger an otherwise sane man to commit a series of heinous murders in the dead of night, but . . .
He isn’t sure he buys it.
Why not? Because you spoke to MacKenna yourself ten years ago?
Because you’re feeling guilty over the fact that Doobie Jones most likely force-fed poison to Jerry Thompson?
Because you’re thinking Thompson was innocent after all, and that there really was a Jamie?
Because Cleary didn’t ask about Ange?
Or because he looks like a freaking movie star?
Maybe all of the above.
In any case, Rocky isn’t jumping to any conclusions. That might be Cleary’s style, but it isn’t his.
MacKenna was smart—he remembers that. Too smart to stage such an obvious ruse.
“If MacKenna wanted her alone in the house so that he could kill her, why wouldn’t he just do it sometime when the husband was already going to be gone? Why go to all the trouble of getting rid of him with this elaborate scheme?”
“Who the hell knows how these sick bastards think? Looks like he wanted to do it then and there, so he got rid of the husband.”
“But why make the phone call from his own house so that it could be traced right back to him?”
“Anyone who’s capable of this—” Cleary sweeps a hand at the bloodbath on the bed—“isn’t in his right mind, Manzillo.”
“Yeah, no kidding.”
But what about Cora Nowak?
What about the mysterious Jamie?
“Sometimes you’ve got to go with your gut,” Cleary says, “and when I talked to MacKenna, my gut told me he was a little too antsy. The guy has something to hide.”
Fair enough.
And Rocky’s gut tells him the case isn’t as straightforward as it might appear.
“Anyway, we’ve got a rush on the DNA results,” Cleary informs him, “so we should have some preliminary results within the next seventy-two hours.”
Maybe not soon enough, Rocky thinks, to prevent another murder. He asks, “Where’s MacKenna now?”
“At his house.”
“And what about his wife?”
“We had her driven back over to where her kids are.”
“Which is . . . ?”
“They’re staying with friends. The Webers. Why?”
“I’m gonna go talk to her. That all right with you?”
“Knock yourself out,” Cleary tells him with a shrug. “Get the address from Joe Patterson. He’s downstairs. You look like you’ve had a long night. Grab some coffee, if you want, or a doughnut.”
“No, thanks,” Rocky tells him. “I’m on a diet. My wife and I are going on a Caribbean cruise, and I’m trying to get into shape.”
He dangles the phrase deliberately—“my wife”—to see if Cleary will be moved to ask about her health.
He doesn’t, just gives a nod and pulls a cell phone from his pocket, obviously having dismissed Rocky already.
Bastard.
Hudson is the first to look up from the Robert Munsch book she’s reading to her little sister, spotting Allison standing in the doorway of the girls’ guest room.
Madison is the first to leap off the twin bed and rush to embrace her. “Mommy!”
Kneeling to hug her daughter close, Allison can’t seem to push her voice past the enormous lump in her throat.
“Aunt Randi said you and Daddy got up early and went out to breakfast.” Hudson’s announcement, when she gets her turn to hug Allison, bears more than a hint of reproach. “How come you didn’t take us with you?”
“You were sleeping when we left,” Allison manages to say lightly, and it’s the truth, after all.
She pats her daughter’s hair, which someone—perhaps the ever-efficient Hudson herself?—has woven into a neat braid down her back. Greta probably did it. She wears her own long blond hair the same way.
Madison is sporting the same hairstyle, and the girls are both dressed and smell of minty toothpaste and strawberry shampoo.
J.J., too, was bathed and well cared-for in her absence. She peeked in on him first and found him sound asleep in his crib, settled in for a morning nap he hasn’t taken lately at home. But he obviously needs it today, what with all the wee-hour commotion.
She hunted quietly in the darkened room for her cell phone and found it on the floor beside the crib. Had she dropped it there herself in a drunken stupor when she went to bed last night? Or had J.J. gotten his hands on it again?
The tiny smudged prints on the phone seemed to be evidence of the latter, and her heart sank. She can’t leave him. She just can’t.
J.J., with his love of pressing buttons, had managed to turn the phone off. She checked her voice mail to see if she’d missed any calls from Mack—she hadn’t—and put it into her pocket, hoping he would call.
“Where did you go?”
That question comes from Hudson, and is followed up with another from Madison.
“Where’s Daddy?”
“Did you two eat breakfast yet?” Allison asks to distract them, not wanting to lie to them about anything unless she absolutely has to.
They nod vigorously.
“Aunt Randi sent Greta out to buy us Cap’n Crunch,” Hudson reports, “since we didn’t get any yesterday and it was a Saturday. She said you wouldn’t be mad.”
/> God bless Aunt Randi.
“I’m not mad. I wonder how she knew that you always get it on Saturdays and you missed it yesterday?”
“Huddy reminded her,” Madison says proudly.
Allison starts to laugh, pulls them both close again, and the laughter suddenly gives way to a flood of tears. She hastily wipes them away behind the girls’ backs before releasing them.
“Why don’t you two go back to whatever you were doing,” she suggests, “while I go find Aunt Randi to thank her for taking such good care of you?”
Obediently, the girls climb back onto the twin bed. Hudson picks up the book again and resumes reading to her sister, who becomes reabsorbed in the story in a matter of seconds.
Allison watches them for a few seconds before turning away, wiping her eyes once again.
Awash in tears and regret, she thinks about Mack who, according to Captain Cleary, was transported to the local precinct for DNA testing.
“Is he under arrest?” she asked in horror, and braced herself for the answer.
“No.”
“So he’s free to leave?”
“When we have what we need from him, if there’s no reason to hold him, he’ll be free to leave.”
She was torn between asking if she could be with Mack at the station and coming straight back here to her children.
Maternal obligation—and concern—won out. But now that she knows the kids are fine, she almost wishes she’d opted to see Mack.
Almost.
She’s not quite ready to face him just yet.
Now that the seed has been planted in Allison’s own mind—and, thanks to herself and Ben, in the detectives’ minds—that a sleepwalker might be capable of violence, she keeps wondering if Mack could possibly have committed two murders.
Not Mack, the kindhearted husband she’s loved all these years, but a man under the influence of a powerful medication with frightening side effects.
She’s seen firsthand the destruction drugs can wreak on the human mind. If drugs can cause a person—an otherwise loving mother—to take her own life, then surely they can also cause an otherwise sane and stable husband and father to take someone else’s life.
But . . . Mack?
Her Mack?
Her partner, her protector, the love of her life, the father of her children . . . ?
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