Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(54)

“You made it to New York, then?” Ange asks. “How did you get here?”

“I flew,” he says simply.

“But I thought the FAA—oh. Right.”

Right. She gets it. When you’re with the FBI and you’re investigating a terror attack, chances are, you’re not grounded with everyone else.

Ange lets out a heavy breath. “It’s really bad down there, Vic.”

“I know.”

“Did you see . . . ?”

“Yes.”

He saw.

He saw the gaping hole in the skyline from his window seat on the government plane, and wondered about all those doomed passengers yesterday—what they were thinking, feeling, fearing.

He saw the smoking wreckage up close, from the ground, and he thought about his friend O’Neill, who last spring might very well have been on the trail of the men who ultimately took aim with an airplane missile and murdered him.

He saw the ravaged faces of the rescue workers and the frightened faces of the people who live here. None was familiar and now, after two of the longest and loneliest days of his life, that’s what he craves more than sleep or food or a hot shower. He craves a familiar face.

“Is Rocco back?” he asks Ange hopefully.

“No. I haven’t seen him at all since yesterday afternoon. He was down on the pile all night and most of today—and then he had to go work a homicide. Can you believe that?”

“Believe what?” he murmurs, leaning closer to the screen to read the newly posted death toll estimate.

“Even now, people are killing each other in this city. You’d think that would be the last thing on anyone’s mind after what happened.”

You’d think . . .

Ah, but Vic knows better.

Vic knows that what happened on September 11 was the tipping point for a few unbalanced people who were already teetering on the brink of madness and violence.

He just hopes Rocky hunts down whoever committed this particular homicide before he can strike again.

With a gasp, Allison sits straight up in bed, her heart pounding.

Not from a nightmare, though. She wasn’t asleep.

She’s been lying here for hours, trying to relax her mind and body enough to drift off. But just now, just as she finally felt herself beginning to doze, a thought barged into her head out of nowhere.

Just as she had the key to Kristina Haines’s apartment . . .

Kristina had the key to Allison’s.

How could she not have thought about that until now?

Now, in the middle of the night, when she’d convinced herself at last that she’s safe here, behind her locked door.

Allison gets out of bed and walks through the dark rooms to the door. She stares at it for a long time, long enough to imagine that she’s seeing the knob turning slowly, ever so slowly, from the other side.

That’s enough.

Tomorrow, she’ll have the locks changed.

Tonight . . . she won’t let fear rob her of any more sleep, but she won’t take any chances, either.

She wedges the back of a wooden dining chair under the doorknob.

Will that really work?

She has no idea. But in case it doesn’t, she goes into the kitchen, opens a drawer, and takes out a chef’s knife with a long blade.

This works.

She carries it back into the bedroom and climbs into bed. When at last she falls asleep, her fist is clenched around the handle of the knife.

Delirious with pain, bleeding from a vicious stab wound in her side, Marianne struggles for breath.

“Say it,” the guttural voice is insisting, somewhere above her. “Say it!”

“P . . . p . . . p . . .”

“Say it or you’ll die!”

Die . . . she’s going to die anyway. No matter what she says, no matter what she does . . . she knows she’s going to die. Here, on the floor beside her bed, wearing scanty lingerie she was forced to put on, part of a sick, twisted game.

She thought that if she just did what she was told, she would survive. Put on these clothes, light these candles; play this music, the CD Jerry had given her earlier . . .

“Do exactly what I tell you to do, and you’ll live.”

She believed that, at first. Now, frantic with fear and pain, she realizes there’s no way out of this alive.

“Pl-please . . .” She gasps, drowning in her own blood. “Noooo . . .”

Fear . . . Marianne went to bed thinking that she wouldn’t let it get the best of her. She would never be afraid to live alone, as her mother is.

Fear . . .

She thought she knew what that was.

Now she knows she had no idea.

“Say it!”

She can feel something cold and hard pushing against her cheek. Oh God. Is it the blade of the knife? Or is it a gun?

“I . . . I . . .” She struggles. Somehow, she’s got to get it out.

It’s the only chance she has.

She drags in a wet, shallow, agonizing breath, manages to choke out, “I’m . . . sorry . . .”

“Say the rest. Go on.”

I’m dying. I can’t . . .

“Say it! Now!” The cold, hard thing presses against her cheek.

“I . . . love . . . you . . . Jerry.”

Those words, ending on a gurgle of blood in her throat, are Marianne Apostolos’s last.