But he’s not a monster.
If the kids are with Mack, he’ll protect them.
Longing to believe that, Allison buries her face in her hands, wiping the tears from her eyes. When she looks up again, Lieutenant Sparks is on the phone, listening and nodding and hurriedly scribbling something on the paper attached to the clipboard. He hangs up, says something to the old man, and then strides over to the car.
“Mrs. MacKenna,” he gets behind the wheel and slams the door, “did you say your husband took your cell phone with him?”
She nods numbly.
“Looks like they’ve picked up the GPS signal in your phone.”
“They? Who’s they?” she asks breathlessly.
“I think the information came from the NYPD.”
“The NYPD? But how would—”
“I don’t know, I thought that was what they—” Interrupting himself, he quickly jerks the car into reverse. “In any case, he’s not far from here, but he’s on the move, heading south. We’ve got a couple of cars on the way.”
“Can you . . . do you know if . . .”
“That’s all I know, ma’am.” Throwing an arm along the seatback, Lieutenant Sparks looks over his shoulder. The car skids backward in the sandy dirt, and then they’re on their way to the scene, sirens wailing.
Clutching her cell phone, Randi sits on the edge of the queen-sized bed in the guest room, thinking about Allison and Mack and the kids and waiting for the phone to ring. Detective Manzillo promised to call as soon as he hears anything at all.
Please let it be good news. Please let them be okay. Please . . .
Randi stands, paces across the room and back again. She smoothes the quilt on the bed where she was sitting, then looks at the portable crib next to it.
She should probably fold that up and put it away.
No. Not yet.
Maybe they’ll want to come back here when this is over. In fact, maybe she should change the bedding, here and in the other guest room, so that everything will be fresh and ready, just in case.
Ordinarily, it’s a job she’d leave for her housekeeper, but right now, she desperately needs something to do, something other than pace or brood.
She strips the crib and the bed and carries the bedding into the bathroom. After depositing it into a laundry basket there, she notices that the wicker wastebasket needs to be emptied. It’s full of crumpled tissues—probably Allison, wiping her tears. Her eyes were red and swollen this morning when she left.
On the verge of tears herself, Randi takes a plastic garbage bag from the sink cabinet and starts to dump in the contents of the wastebasket.
Something heavy falls into the bag. Randi reaches in and sees that it’s the E-ZPass tag from Allison’s SUV.
That means she’s most likely headed south or west—there are tolls on all the bridges. She doesn’t want anyone tracking her car, obviously, by checking to see where it was used, so she’ll pay cash.
Randi is about to toss the trash bag aside when she spots something else that isn’t crumpled tissue—something orange.
She fishes it out.
It’s a plastic bottle from the pharmacy. According to the label, it contains Dormipram, prescribed to James MacKenna.
The bottle is half full of pills.
Hearing the tremendous splash as the Jeep hits the water, Jamie turns and runs, heading straight for Mack, reveling in the startled dismay on the face of his foe.
He probably thinks I’m going to jump him.
Ah, but that won’t be necessary.
My work here is done, Jamie thinks gleefully.
He can see that the SUV’s motor is still running. How convenient.
All Jamie has to do is jump behind the wheel, drive away from here, and abandon the car somewhere. Maybe in the driveway of a deserted house, where no one will notice it for weeks, months.
By the time anyone finds it, Mack will have been arrested for drowning his children.
Who’s going to believe his crazy story about someone stealing them out from under his nose—in a car he rented himself?
Not the police.
Not the families of all those women whose bodies bore undeniable evidence of Mack’s DNA.
Not his lovely wife.
It’s over.
Allison has lost everything she had to lose, and as for Jamie . . .
I win.
I—
Too late, Jamie sees that Mack has a gun.
Torn, Rocky looks over his shoulder at the double doors leading back into the hospital, and then at the parking garage across from the entrance, where he left his car.
What the hell am I supposed to do now?
The case is exploding; he just got word from Murph that a frantic Allison MacKenna reported to the cops down in Jersey that her husband has abducted their children, and yet . . .
Ange.
How can I leave her?
His phone, still clutched in his hand, buzzes yet again. He answers immediately. “Manzillo here.”
“Jack Cleary. I heard about the theft at the clinic. Good work. We’ve got the lab on it, checking for chemicals that would indicate cryopreservation.”
“You’ll find them,” Rocky says flatly.
“Even so—the theft could have been a coincidence.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Detective, even if it wasn’t, we’ve got the guy’s own wife saying he took the kids and they’re in danger.”
“She said that? Are you sure?”
“I didn’t talk to her myself, if that’s what you mean, but she said they’re in danger, and believe me—”
“How does she know?”
“That they’re in danger? I don’t know how she knows. But I know how I know. I’m inside the house right now.”
“Which house?”
“The MacKennas’ house on Orchard Terrace. The warrant came through a little while ago.”
“Good. What’d you find?”
“For a start, we found a home computer registered to MacKenna that was last used a couple of days ago to do an Internet search on Susan Smith.”
“Who the hell is Susan Smith?”
“Case down in South Carolina. It made national headlines fifteen, maybe twenty years ago? Young mother with two small boys strapped in the back of her car, says she was carjacked, but—”
“But she did it herself.” Rocky remembers and his stomach gives a sickening twist. “She drowned them—drove the car into a lake.”
“That’s right.”
Jesus. Rocky tilts his head back, closing his eyes.
“Our friend also did his homework on fast-acting sedatives,” Cleary goes on, “and he set up a car rental down in Jersey . . .”
Cleary goes on, filling in with details that make Rocky’s head spin with the realization that he needs to give it up and admit that for the second time in his career, his gut instinct is wrong.
Dead wrong—that’s for damned sure.
Jerry Thompson is dead because he went to prison for crimes he didn’t commit, and now . . .
I know I’ve asked you for a lot lately, Rocky prays, remembering the two little blond girls, Allison’s daughters. But please watch over those children, the girls and the baby boy. Please keep them safe from harm, and if that isn’t your will, then I beg you to deliver them quickly. Please don’t let them suffer. Please . . .
Nothing is going to stop Mack from getting to his kids in the water.
Nothing—no one—is going to get in his way.
As the stranger races toward him, he raises the gun.
Seeing the weapon in the instant before Mack fires, his target suddenly spins around. He doesn’t run away; he’d have to know that would be futile. There’s no place for him to go.
Instead he goes still, like a child playing freeze tag, almost as if he’s waiting . . .
Bastard.
Mack pulls the trigger.
Taking the bullet in the back, his target falls to the ground
without a sound.
Mack streaks past him, not caring, not seeing anything but the Jeep, still visible but already starting to tilt and submerge.
He runs straight to the end of the jetty and dives in, arching as far out as he can to avoid the cruel rocks beneath, thinking only of his children trapped inside the sinking Jeep.
He surfaces beside it, gasping for air as bracing waves wash over him. The door is still open and he reaches inside. His hands immediately become entangled on a clump of seaweed—
No, not seaweed.
Hair.
Hudson’s long, blond hair.
He pulls, and the next thing he knows, his daughter is above the surface. Holding her up somehow with one hand, he reaches quickly into the Jeep again and his fingers brush more streaming wet hair: Madison. As he pulls her up, his fingers bump against something hard and round, a pole of some sort—
J.J.’s stroller, he realizes, wedged into the backseat.
He’s got both girls above the water . . .
Thank God.
Thank God.
“Hudson!” he screams. “Madison!”
They need to wake up right away; need to keep themselves afloat so that he can dive down for their brother.
“Hudson! Madison!”
Mack is struggling in the water now and they’re limp in his arms, both of them. Why didn’t the blast of icy sea snap them back to consciousness?
Are they alive?
“Hudson! Madison!” He has to get to J.J., but he can’t let go of his daughters or they’ll sink.
“No!” he screams as the top of the Jeep disappears below the surface with his son still trapped inside.
Allison can see the rotating red and blue lights all over the waterfront: police cars, rescue trucks, ambulances. The jetty is teeming with uniformed personnel: cops and paramedics, and . . .
Divers.
She watches in mute horror as they approach the scene, trying not to let her mind go to the darkest place. She glimpses a pair of EMTs loading someone onto the back of an ambulance, but she can’t see the person on the stretcher. The EMTs hurriedly climb in after it and the rescue truck pulls away, sirens wailing, racing north, toward the road to the mainland and the nearest hospital.
Lieutenant Sparks pulls to a stop near the foot of the jetty.
“Stay here,” he tells her, gets out of the car, and strides toward the action.
“I can’t.” She shoves the door open.
She forces her legs to work beneath her, willing them to hold her up and carry her toward the wretched scene when all she really wants to do is turn and run away, far away, back home . . .
Home.
A sob clogs her throat. She wants so badly to be back there, back with her little girls and her baby boy, and yes, with Mack, too . . .
We’re going to go home. We are. We’re going to get past this, whatever it is, and we’re going back to our Happy House. We’re going to—
Suddenly, she sees him: Mack.
He’s bundled in a blanket, talking to a pair of wary-looking cops as a paramedic takes his blood pressure.
Something flutters in Allison’s heart. He’s her husband. He’s shivering, maybe injured, and . . .
And he’s alone.
“Where are they?” she yells.
Mack turns toward her, and the rest of them, too.
Up ahead of her, Lieutenant Sparks waves her back. “Mrs. MacKenna, I told—”
Ignoring him, she screams again at Mack, “Where are they?”
His eyes settle on her, and even from here she can see that they’re full of love, and relief, and she forgets.
“Allison!” he shouts, and starts toward her
The cops are on him instantly, holding him back.
“It’s okay,” she hears Mack say. “She’s my wife, I need to tell her . . .”
“Stay right where you are,” a stout man in a trench coat tells him firmly.
He strides in Allison’s direction, pulling a badge from her pocket, and she braces herself.
“Mrs. MacKenna, I’m Detective Looney with the Salt Breeze Pointe PD.”
“Yes. Where are my children?”
He clears his throat. “There was an accident.”
Her knees buckle. She starts to go down, but is steadied by both Detective Looney and Lieutenant Sparks.
“Your children were in the back of the car your husband was driving . . .”
Were.
They were.
“Where are they now?” she asks shrilly, wrenching herself free.
“Your husband pushed the car into the water with the children in the backseat . . .”
“Noooooo!” she wails, and this time she does go down, sinking onto her knees. From where she is, she can see, for the first time, a pool of blood out on the jetty. Beside it is a prone figure covered in a tarp. Much too big to belong to a child, but . . .
“What happened? Oh my God, who is that?”
“Mrs. MacKenna, please try to calm down. We think it was a Good Samaritan who must have come along and tried to stop him. Your husband shot him in the back as he tried to—”
“Mack shot him?” she echoes, and shakes her head. “No. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He doesn’t have a gun.”
“He does. We recovered it. He—”
“No! I just told you, he doesn’t—”
“Mrs. MacKenna, we have his gun and he admitted to using it to shoot the man, okay? He confessed.”
She goes absolutely still.
Mack shot someone?
Killed someone?
Confessed?
“But that . . . that doesn’t make sense.”
“I’m sorry,” Detective Looney says quietly. “But we have word that DNA evidence has linked him to a series of murders in Westchester County, and—”
She gasps, clasping trembling hands over her face, covering her eyes, as if to protect herself somehow from seeing the shocking truth.
But it’s there anyway, right in front of her.
I’m married to a complete stranger.
A few months ago, she remembers, she’d asked Randi, “How could I be such a terrible judge of character?”
She was talking about Jerry Thompson at the time—about how sure she’d been that he was incapable of violence.
Ironic that she might have been right about him after all—and wrong about Mack.
“Mrs. MacKenna?”
“Where are my babies?” she asks dully, lowering her hands and staring at the cold water.
Hudson . . . Madison . . . J.J. . . .
“Your husband, we believe, had second thoughts and pulled the girls out.”
“What?” she turns back to the detective. “They’re out? He got them out?”
“Yes, the girls are—”
“J.J.?” she asks frantically. “What about J.J.?”
“He was still in the car when we got here—”
“Allison!” Mack calls.
“No, no, no, no . . .” Sobbing, she shakes her head. “My baby . . .”
“Mrs. MacKenna, listen to me. Our men went down immediately and managed to get to him. He was revived, and he was in that ambulance that just—”
“He’s alive? And the girls? The girls are—”
“They’re all alive, Mrs. MacKenna. All three of them.”
“Allison!” Mack again. “Allison!”
Dazed, she looks over.
Tears are streaming down his face. “They’re saying I did this. Please, Allie, you know me.”
I don’t. I don’t know you at all.
She turns her back on Mack.
“Allison, please! I promise you I would never hurt them.”
I promise you . . .
She remembers a string of broken promises.
Her mother’s far outweigh Mack’s. Maybe she’s overly sensitive because of the way she was raised; maybe that’s why she has a hard time forgiving, forgetting, trusting . . .
“You have to believe me
, Allison. This guy—this is no Good Samaritan. He’s a monster. He came into the house and he took the kids. I was trying to save them. I chased them here in our car—” He points at the SUV. “If that isn’t true, then why is it here? How could I have driven two cars here?”
Allison looks at Detective Looney, who tells her somberly, “We think that he parked the SUV here earlier and then walked or hitchhiked back to the house to load the kids into the other car—it was a rental, in his name. We think he planned to use the SUV as a means of escape after he . . . uh . . . after the other car was . . . in the water.”
With the children in it.
Oh, Mack.
Oh, God.
“Detective Looney, take a look at this.” A crime scene technician holds out something in his gloved hand. “It was wedged in the padding of the baby’s seat.”
The baby. They’re talking about J.J.
As Detective Looney takes the object, Allison realizes, with a start, what it is.
An iPhone.
“That’s mine,” she tells the detective abruptly. “It has to be. J.J.—he’s always . . .” Her voice breaks.
“Allison!” Mack calls. “Please, just listen to me. I swear to you, I’m not lying. I never lie. You know that.”
Mack . . .
Mack doesn’t lie.
Ever.
He’s a monster . . . he came into the house and he took the kids . . .
I was trying to save them. . .
Allison was so sure he’d taken her phone so that she wouldn’t be able to call for help, but if J.J. had it . . .
She whirls around and asks Detective Looney, “Were there any witnesses? Did anyone actually see my husband do this? Any of it?”
“Mrs. MacKenna, as I told you, your husband confessed—”
“To shooting the man who stole our children, not to trying to hurt them himself.”
“The DNA—”
“No.” She shakes her head rapidly. “I don’t care. I don’t care what the DNA says. If no one saw—”
“Someone did see, and he paid with his life.” Out of patience, his eyes blazing, the detective gestures at the bloody figure on the ground. “And we have some questions for you.”
“I have to get to my children, but—”
“And we’ll take you to your children, but—”
“Please, just listen to me! My husband didn’t do this. I can prove it.”
“How?”
She closes her eyes briefly.
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