Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(34)

William A. Kenyon, employed by Keefe, Bruyette, & Woods, last seen on 88th floor of South Tower. If you have any information at all please call wife Stephanie at 718–555–2171.

Wife Stephanie.

Nausea churns Allison’s stomach.

Why don’t you give me a call and we’ll go out sometime? he’d asked that night in the cab.

She’d been pretty sure he wasn’t her own Mr. Right—but it didn’t occur to her that he might already be someone else’s.

She looks again at the wedding photo, rereads the text below it. If you have any information at all . . .

For a brief, crazy moment, Allison considers calling Stephanie. She wouldn’t tell her the whole truth . . .

No, she’d just say that Stephanie’s husband had done a good deed and given her a ride downtown on what will most likely turn out to have been his last night on earth. She’d paint him as a Good Samaritan who took pity on a perfect stranger . . .

But maybe Stephanie wouldn’t see it that way. Maybe she’d see it for what it really was—a married man bending over backward for a blonde in a short skirt.

Call me . . . Maybe I’ll let you buy me a drink.

Rest in peace, Bill, she thinks, turning away from the poster and Stephanie’s phone number. Your wife has enough pain to deal with. I hope she never finds out what kind of man she really married.

She rounds the corner and is startled to see that the people who are out on the sidewalks are all standing still, facing south toward the World Trade Center wreckage. Turning to look in that direction, she sees the red flashing lights of a police motorcycle escort coming up the avenue. It’s moving slowly, in somber silence, leading a large truck—a refrigerated sixteen-wheeler.

“Bodies,” she hears a bystander murmur, as others sob audibly and someone speculates that the truck is heading to the morgue.

Shaken, Allison watches it pass.

Then she goes back to traveling the bleak streets of this war-torn foreign city, putting up posters on every available surface, fitting them in like puzzle pieces among the others.

MISSING . . . HUSBAND . . . WIFE . . . FATHER . . . MOTHER . . . SON . . . DAUGHTER . . . BROTHER . . . SISTER . . .

So many lives shattered, Allison thinks again, so many people gone forever.

Yesterday, she was so sure she didn’t know any of them personally.

Today, she found out that she did—to varying degrees.

William Kenyon.

Carrie Robinson MacKenna.

What about Kristina Haines? Where is she?

If she still isn’t answering the phone or the door by the time I get back home, Allison decides, I’m going to use her key and let myself in.





Chapter Six

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come?” Lynn asks, and Mack clenches the cell phone hard against his ear, frustrated.

Lynn doesn’t really want to be here, in the city. He knows it, and so does she. But her guilt—big sister guilt, Catholic guilt—forces her to keep telling him she’ll be glad to get into her Volvo wagon and drive into the city to be with him in his time of need.

“I’m positive,” he tells his sister yet again as he gets off the couch—Allison’s couch.

He’d taken his shoes off and put his feet up, as she’d suggested before she left, but he hadn’t planned on actually falling asleep here. The next thing he knew, his ringing cell phone woke him.

“You shouldn’t be alone, Mack.”

“I’m fine. Listen, you’ve got the kids to take care of. You don’t need—”

“Dan would come over and stay with them,” she cuts in. “He’s not working today. All of his patients canceled their appointments. ”

“All of them?”

“Do you know how many people are missing from there, Mack?”

There, of course, is Middletown, New Jersey, where Mack’s former brother-in-law is a dentist.

And no, he doesn’t know how many people are missing from that particular place, but before he can reply, his sister murmurs, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For even bringing that up. Right now, I know, the only missing person who counts is Carrie.”

Carrie. Jaw clenched, Mack paces across the living room in his socks. As Lynn talks on, doing her best to find hope where they both know there is none, he finds himself craving a cigarette.

Yes, he quit for Carrie’s—and their future child’s—sake, but when the pressure is on at work—or at home—he indulges in a pack of Marlboros.

The truth, though, is that there’s not much pleasure in it anymore. Psychologically, he might still crave the experience, but physically, he’s lost his taste for tar and nicotine. It’s kind of sad, really. On some level he always thought of smoking as an old girlfriend waiting in the wings—something he could go back to, if he got really desperate.

Well, you don’t get much more desperate than this, pal.

Mack busies his thoughts with random details—anything so that he doesn’t have to think about cigarettes, or about his wife, about what happened to her.

He notes the view of the street from Allison’s window, notes the significant amount of natural light in this apartment as opposed to his own apartment across the hall, notes the cozy, stylish decor straight out of a Pottery Barn catalog. He admires the richly textured fabrics in warm colors and the expertly distressed wooden furniture with contemporary Mission lines.