Sleepwalker

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Hearing the sickening crunch of metal behind him, he sees in the mirror that the truck has hit a lamppost. Speeding on, he listens for the sound of sirens behind him; keeps an eye on the rearview mirror for flashing red lights.

  What if they materialize?

  I’ll just keep going.

  If I stop, it’ll be all over. There’s too much to lose; I can’t risk it.

  He thinks about Allison. By now, she must be back at the house. She’ll be frantic when she realizes that he and the kids are missing. He’s sorry for that.

  Sorry for a lot of things.

  But I’m just doing what I have to do.

  Jaw set, he stares at the road beyond the windshield, focusing not on what lies behind him, but on what lies ahead.

  Allison races down the narrow, deserted street, turns a corner, and spots a house whose windows aren’t covered in plywood. There’s no car in the driveway, but maybe, just maybe . . .

  Please, God, let someone be home. Please.

  She races to the door and bangs on it. “Hello!” she shouts. “Is anyone here? Hello?”

  No one answers, just like at the last house she tried, a few doors up from Lynn’s beach house.

  With a cry of frustration, she turns and keeps going, up the street, around another corner. Every house on this short block is boarded up.

  The same is true on the next.

  And the next.

  There has to be someone here, somewhere, please, please . . .

  Rounding another corner, Allison spots a car in a driveway. Beyond it lies a house whose uncovered windows spill yellow lamplight into the morning gloom like a beacon. On the step: a pot of withered-looking brownish mums and a newspaper in a blue plastic bag.

  Thank you, God. Thank you.

  Allison runs toward the house, panting hard, already shouting for help at the top of her lungs. By the time she reaches the house, a startled-looking elderly man in a cardigan and bifocals is peering out at her through the glass window in the door.

  “Please!” she calls to him. “Please! Somebody took my children!”

  Looking suspicious, he shakes his head, seems to check the lock on the door, and starts to turn away.

  “Please, sir! You don’t have to let me in, just . . . just please call the police!” Tears roll down her face and her body sags beneath the weight of an awful reality she can no longer deny.

  With a moan, she sinks onto the weathered steps, burying her head in her hands. For a long time, she sits there, gasping for breath, trying to find the strength to keep running, the strength to bear the impossible truth and the unimaginable loss.

  Her babies, her beautiful babies, her girls, and her boy, and . . .

  My husband.

  Mack. Dear God, what has he done?

  What has she done, trusting him with those three precious little lives?

  I knew better! I did! I knew, and that’s why I let Randi talk me into—

  The thought is curtailed by the sound of wailing sirens in the distance.

  Rocky paces the sidewalk in front of the hospital, phone in hand, willing the damned thing to ring again so that he can get back to Ange’s bedside.

  Maybe he should just go back up anyway.

  But if he does, he’ll miss the call, and too many lives are hanging in the balance.

  Thank God Ange’s isn’t one of them. Not in the immediate moment, anyway.

  Right now, she’s safe and stable, and she would want him to do exactly what he’s doing.

  Pacing . . .

  Waiting . . .

  Thinking about the one possible reason a calculating killer might so drastically change his signature, adding rape to the ritual . . .

  Supposedly.

  At last, his phone vibrates in his hand.

  “I’ve got it,” Mai tells him. “You were right. James MacKenna and his first wife did go through infertility treatments. They used the Riverview Clinic in Manhattan.”

  Rocky holds his breath, waiting for the rest, hoping against hope . . .

  “There was a break-in at the lab they use back in October,” Mai goes on, “and several sperm samples were stolen. Including James MacKenna’s.”

  Before Rocky can react, his phone buzzes, indicating a call coming in. Frowning, he’s about to ignore it—then thinks better of it. What if it’s the nurse, calling from upstairs?

  He checks the caller ID.

  “I have to take this,” he tells Mai. “I’ll call you right back.”

  Quickly, he disconnects that call and picks up the incoming one. “Manzillo here.”

  “Detective Manzillo? It’s Randi Weber . . .”

  Yeah. He knows.

  “How can I help you, Mrs. Weber?”

  “I know where Allison is, and . . . she’s on the move. Really fast. I feel like something might be wrong.”

  Jamie clutches the wheel of the rented Jeep with gloved hands—warm knit winter gloves. They won’t leave prints.

  As much as she loves to wear dresses, Jamie is bundled against the cold today, wearing jeans, a sweater, a parka, boots. She even left the wig behind in the last motel room, not wanting to risk shedding synthetic hairs this time and letting the cops think anyone but Mack is responsible for this.

  I don’t look like myself, she thought, surveying herself in the mirror earlier. I look like Sam.

  But that’s okay. When this is over . . .

  What will I do when this is over?

  Do I even want to go on?

  It’s a question that has weighed heavily on Jamie’s mind. The answer, she figures, will come to her when the time is right. It always does.

  Ah, there’s the jetty up ahead, jutting out into the churning gray-green waters of the Atlantic.

  She’d scouted the location yesterday afternoon, driving up and down the bleak coastal island in search of the perfect spot to stage the grand finale, not sure exactly what she was looking for until she found it.

  The jetty is well off the beaten path, located on a stretch of beach where there are just a few houses, all of them large summer rentals that have obviously been closed up for the winter.

  “We’re almost there,” Jamie informs the three children in the backseat.

  It would be much more interesting to talk to them if they could reply, but of course they can’t. All three children are unconscious, thanks to the needles Jamie stuck into their arms. The girls are on the floor, like limp rag dolls; the baby still strapped into his stroller, which Jamie simply turned on its side and shoved sideways across the backseat.

  “Your mother thinks she’s so smart. But she told me exactly where to find you, did you know that? There I was on Sunday afternoon, minding my own business—”

  At that, Jamie breaks off and giggles.

  “All right, I was minding your parents’ business. They were plotting their big escape, thinking they were so clever, talking about a beach house somewhere . . .”

  A beach house to which Jamie, of course, has the keys.

  “Of course I copied all the keys I found in the desk drawer way back in the beginning,” she informs the sleeping children. “I figured they might come in handy at some point.”

  Have they ever.

  Although there was a fleeting moment of worry when it seemed Allison and Mack weren’t going to mention the exact location of the house. It would have been so bothersome to try and tail them to wherever they were going, and much too risky at this point to venture back into their house looking for clues.

  But then, oh lucky day, Allison asked her husband, “How would you get to work from there?”

  “I could commute if I had to—”

  “From Salt Breeze Pointe?”

  At that, Jamie broke into a delighted smile, assuming—correctly—that they were talking about the charming little town on the Jersey Shore.

  There was no need to even follow them down here. Jamie meandered along later in the day, arriving just in time for darkness to settle in. Then it was just a matte
r of driving up and down the streets until Allison’s SUV materialized, parked in a carport alongside a rambling two-story house.

  Well equipped for what lay ahead, Jamie broke into the house next door and kept an eye on things until the right opportunity presented itself.

  “Your mother made things even easier for me when she took off this morning all by herself, you know?” Jamie tells the children. “I let myself in with the keys—walked right in through the front door, quiet as a mouse. I bet you didn’t hear a thing, did you? I know your father didn’t.”

  Jamie spotted Mack in the kitchen with his son. He was making faces at him, and the baby was making a racket, laughing like crazy.

  A nice little father and son moment, she thought, enraged. Jerry never had a moment like that, and now he never would, thanks to Allison.

  “This is all your mother’s fault,” Jamie tells the children, wishing they could talk, sob, protest, beg, something.

  Jamie would feel a lot better if Allison’s kids were suffering the way Jerry had suffered.

  “It isn’t fair! You just get to go to sleep, and you’re not going to feel a thing! Why did I take the easy way out?”

  Jamie glances into the backseat. It might be worthwhile to wait until they wake up. . . .

  Worthwhile, yes. But not feasible.

  Things are already in motion. It’s now or never.

  “I’ve got the kids. I’ve got the opportunity. I’ve even got this.” Jamie pulls Mack’s Blackberry from the console. It’s going to add such a nice touch.

  Funny how things just fall into place. The device was conveniently lying on the dresser in one of the bedrooms when Jamie reached the second floor of the beach house.

  In another bedroom, the girls were sound asleep. It was so easy to jab one slender white neck, and then the other, with the syringe that would knock them out almost instantly. Carrying them down the back stairs without making a sound was a little more challenging, though. They were heavier than they looked—dead weight, Jamie thinks now, with a grim little smile.

  The painstaking process took much longer than anticipated, so long that it was a wonder the girls’ father hadn’t stirred from the kitchen, or their mother hadn’t come back from her walk.

  At last, the still figures lay on the floor of the Jeep.

  Then came the truly tricky part.

  Jamie knew it would take some kind of diversion to separate Mack from the baby. Knocking over the table in the upstairs hall seemed like a good idea—and one of the few options available—but it wasn’t without risk. Had Mack decided to search the entire second floor before going to check on his daughters, whose room was at the end of the hall, he might easily have come across Jamie, hiding inside the linen closet right at the top of the stairs, a few feet from the toppled table.

  But Mack didn’t do that. He must have sensed that Daddy’s girls needed him.

  But it was too late for that, wasn’t it, Daddy dear?

  As Mack’s footsteps pounded down the hall toward his daughters’ room, Jamie bolted from the closet and raced down the stairs as quietly as possible. She grabbed the baby, stroller and all, jabbed him with the needle, and ran out to the waiting Jeep.

  Driving away from the house, Jamie spotted Mack in the upstairs window, looking out. It was so tempting to give a jaunty little wave.

  How does it feel to be helpless when your child needs you? How do you like it?

  Jamie coasted down the street, making sure Mack got a good look at the Jeep, on the off chance that there might be other cars on the road.

  We wouldn’t want you to get confused, now, would we?

  Mack was soon chasing the Jeep that, ironically, Jamie had rented using the desktop computer in the house on Orchard Terrace just a few days earlier. The username and password were even conveniently saved on the car rental agency’s Web site, along with the credit card information.

  After making the rental reservation, Jamie used the search engine to type in some information that might come in useful . . .

  Not for me, though.

  The computer search was strictly for the benefit of the investigators who will confiscate Mack’s hard drive after this is all over—if they haven’t already.

  The final step, as Jamie drives the Jeep out onto the jetty, is to toss Mack’s cell phone onto the floor in front of the passenger’s seat, where it will be easily found later by the divers.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Calm down, ma’am. Calm down.”

  “I can’t calm down!” Allison screeches at Lieutenant Sparks, the young police officer who escorted her away from the front steps of the old man’s house. “My babies! He took my babies!”

  “Who did?”

  “My husband!” She clutches Lieutenant Sparks’s arm. “He’s . . . I don’t know, he’s gone crazy or something. Please. It’s not him, it’s the drug—”

  “He’s on drugs?”

  “No, not like—please. You have to stop him before he hurts them. Please . . .”

  At the wheel of the SUV, Mack screeches to a stop on the narrow jetty, jams the gear shift into park, and jumps out. There’s barely room alongside the car for him to stand; the rocky drop-off into the water is mere inches from his shoes.

  He edges past it and pushes forward.

  Through the mist, he can see the car whose taillights he chased from Salt Breeze Pointe, after he realized, in a panic, that someone had taken all three of his children.

  It’s a miracle that he even managed to catch up with the vehicle—which he can now make out is a Jeep—considering that the driver had a generous head start.

  It didn’t take long for Mack to dump out Allison’s purse and grab her keys, yet those were seconds that carried his children farther and farther away from him. He lost precious seconds, too, in a frenzied, futile search for her cell phone so that he could call 911, but it didn’t seem to be there, and he quickly gave up.

  By the time he got outside, he was shocked to see the taillights still visible down the block, almost creeping along, almost as if . . .

  Several times, he almost managed to catch up to the car and then would lose it again as it raced south along the barrier island.

  Now it’s almost within reach, parked just ahead, right at the end of the jetty, again, oddly, almost as if . . .

  As if he’s waiting for me.

  How the hell did he find them here at the shore anyway? They weren’t followed, they told no one, and the only time he and Allison even mentioned their destination was in the privacy of their own . . .

  Home.

  Mack’s heart sinks, remembering something Ben said to him not long ago, when they were talking about the nanny cam.

  There’s no privacy anymore, anywhere—even in your own house. You never know who’s watching and listening.

  That’s it, Mack realizes. That’s how this bastard knew where to find us, and it’s how he knew the alarm code. He heard me tell Allison, or he watched me punch it in. Electronic surveillance.

  As Mack races toward the Jeep, he feels in his pocket for the gun he’s kept close at hand since they fled home. When they reached the Webers’ on Sunday, he was afraid Ben was going to corner him and ask for it back, or that he’d bring it up in front of Allison, but he didn’t.

  Thank God he didn’t.

  Thank God I have it. And I swear I won’t hesitate to use it.

  As Mack hurtles himself along the jetty, the driver’s side door of the Jeep opens.

  A figure steps out.

  Mack’s hand closes around the gun and he draws it out as he runs, shouting, “Stop!”

  The figure seems to ignore him, leaning into the car.

  Mack raises the gun and slows his pace to take aim, not daring to take a wild shot while running and risk hitting the Jeep with his children inside.

  The Jeep—it’s moving again, he realizes, stunned.

  The vehicle is rolling forward . . .

  Toward the end of the jetty . . .

>   Toward the water.

  Mack hurtles himself forward with a scream as the Jeep goes over the edge.

  Huddled in the backseat of the police cruiser, Allison numbly watches the old man in the cardigan painstakingly adding his signature to a report attached to a clipboard. At last, he hands it back to Lieutenant Sparks, who nods and says something, then glances back at the car.

  Allison quickly looks away, not wanting to meet the young cop’s eyes again. Every time he looks at her, she can see what he’s thinking, and she wants to scream at him that he’s wrong; that it isn’t like that.

  Mack is a good man, an honorable man. He loves his children—and her—more than anything on this earth. He’s not some horrible violent deadbeat who would ever . . .

  No, never.

  Not if he were in his right mind.

  It’s the medication—that’s what she tried to explain to the police officer, but he heard “drugs” and he got the wrong idea.

  Or did he?

  What’s the difference what kind of drug it is?

  What’s the difference if a doctor prescribed it?

  Allison’s mother took prescription medication and killed herself.

  Mack is taking prescription medication, too—what’s to stop him from killing himself, or—

  She moans; she can’t bear to think about it.

  My babies.

  No. Our babies.

  Mack loves them as much as I do; he was there when they took their first breaths, their first steps . . .

  She thinks of him giving the girls piggyback rides, reading bedtime stories, watching princess movies on rainy days . . .

  But not lately.

  That was the old Mack, the loving daddy and husband who was home more often, and wasn’t always checking his BlackBerry, or looking as though he were a million miles away . . .

  The new Mack is different.

  But that doesn’t mean he’s capable of . . .

  No. It just means he accepted a big promotion with a tremendous amount of responsibility, and that he’s worried, in this lousy economy, about job stability and rising taxes and cost of living and dropping stocks and retirement accounts . . .

  And he’s stressed.

  Who isn’t?