Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(50)

The tiny basement office—which houses the surveillance camera footage of the building’s public areas—can’t be searched without a warrant. Rocky requested one from the assistant district attorney, but he has a feeling it’s going to be a long wait with the office in chaos. The city in chaos.

Kristina’s neighbors—people who might have known something, seen something, heard something—weren’t evacuated. But like thousands of lower Manhattan residents, they fled anyway.

Only Allison Taylor and James MacKenna seem to have stayed in the building overnight. But when it comes to tracking down Jerry the maintenance man, neither of them even knows the guy’s last name.

“He kind of comes and goes,” MacKenna said. “As far as I know, he doesn’t have regular hours—but I’ve never paid much attention to him, and I’m hardly ever home on weekdays.”

MacKenna was cooperative when Rocky talked to him, but he seemed edgy and distracted—understandably so. The guy’s wife worked in an investment firm close to the top floor of one of the towers, just beneath Windows on the World. As far as anyone knows, no one made it out alive from that part of the building. The escape routes were cut off; that’s where most of the jumpers came from.

Rocky’s questioning was thorough, of course, but he found himself wanting to go easy on MacKenna, who didn’t have much to say anyway. He didn’t seem to know Kristina Haines well enough to shed any new light on the investigation.

Or so Rocky believed—until he saw the way Allison started squirming around when he asked her about men Kristina might have been seeing.

Allison Taylor had told him that Kristina didn’t have a boyfriend and, as of Sunday, wasn’t even seeing anyone. Not as far as she knew, anyway.

But there was something about the way she behaved when Rocky started down that line of questioning that made him wonder if she was telling him the whole truth. She was visibly squirming in her chair at one point.

Does she know more than she’s telling about Kristina’s love life?

Maybe he misread her, and she doesn’t.

Maybe there’s nothing more to know, and Jerry the maintenance man is Rocky’s guy.

But when Rocky thinks about the way Allison fidgeted and shifted her weight when he spoke to her . . .

It’ll be necessary to keep close tabs on both her and MacKenna right now. And with the decreased manpower and disrupted communications systems, that’s going to be yet another challenge.

“But don’t you worry,” Rocky tells the dead girl. “I’m going to find out who did this to you, and I’m going to make sure he gets what’s coming to him.”

Him . . . or her.

When Mack gets home after being questioned, the building is crawling with cops.

Two uniformed officers are posted outside on the street, another is stationed on the ground floor by the elevators, and judging by the squad cars and vans parked at the curb, there must still be a couple of guys upstairs, too, in Kristina’s apartment.

He slides the dead bolt, and leans against the door for a minute. His heart is pounding hard, as though he’s just run all the way home chased by the devil, rather than catching a ride back from the precinct with a police officer.

Get a grip, Mack. Get a grip.

With an icy hand, he flips a couple of light switches, making sure everything looks . . . right.

It does. How can it, when everything is wrong?

The way Detective Manzillo looked at him, and questioned him . . .

He was just doing his job. But Mack has watched enough television crime shows to know that the person who discovers the body is always a potential suspect.

Technically, Mack didn’t discover the body. But he’s the one who reported it.

A chill slips down his spine. He doesn’t need this right now. He really doesn’t.

His gaze falls on a few stray missing fliers lying on the table.

It’s crazy, like one of those movies where the action keeps escalating until it goes too far and you don’t buy into it anymore, because it could never really happen. Not like that.

Yeah, well, truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction. This is really happening.

Mack goes to the kitchen, fills the teakettle, sets it on the burner, and turns on the flame.

Then his eye catches the bottle of Jack Daniel’s still sitting on the counter from the other night. He turns off the flame and pours himself a stiff bourbon.

Standing there, he downs most of it in a few gulps. It burns his throat and weakens his knees, but it warms him from the inside out, banishing the chill better than tea ever could.

He tops off the glass and carries it into the living room, turns on a lamp, and sits on the couch.

Now what?

What do you do when life as you knew it has ceased to exist?

You search for something, someone familiar, that’s what you do. You reach out to someone who knows you well and will stick by you no matter what happens.

No matter what.

As a haze of bourbon settles over him like a heated blanket, Mack dials the phone.

Rounding the corner onto Sixth Avenue, Jamie sees that the bodega, run by an affable dark-skinned man named Mo, is open. Good. Most of the other shops and restaurants along the four-block walk over here were closed, and have been since Tuesday afternoon.

But at Mo’s, the lights are on and the door is propped open. He prides himself on being open round the clock; he reminds his customers of that whenever he hands back their change and their bagged purchases.