Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(73)

Startled by that admission, Allison notices that the mask has lifted. Now she can read the raw, honest emotion in his expression.

“A lot of people didn’t like her,” he tells her. “And in the end, I was one of them.”

Allison stares, shocked. Maybe she heard him wrong. She must have heard him wrong.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “what was that?”

He sighs heavily. “Things weren’t working between Carrie and me. And I don’t know what to do with that now. I feel sick when I think about how I was feeling, what I said, what I did . . .”

Whatever she was expecting when she came over here, this isn’t it.

“I hurt her. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I feel like I have to tell someone.”

Looking at him, seeing the glazed, faraway expression in his eyes, she’s suddenly uneasy.

What does he mean, he hurt her?

“I keep thinking,” he goes on, more to himself than to her, “if I could go back and relive Tuesday morning, would I do it the same way? You know, if I knew what was going to happen.”

She nods. As if she knows.

She doesn’t know, though. She doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

She thinks about Kristina, and she wonders. About Mack. Again.

“The thing that sucks,” he says, “is that I know I did what I had to do. Anything else would have been—”

Interrupted by the buzzing of the wall intercom by the door, he looks over at it.

Startled, Allison follows his gaze. “Are you expecting someone?”

“No.”

Mack hesitates, then walks slowly over to the intercom.

Her thoughts racing back to Kristina, Allison remembers that there was no sign of a break-in at her apartment. Either her killer got in with a key or through an unlocked window, or she let him in the door.

Mack nods and presses the intercom button. “Who is it?”

Allison’s heart sinks at the reply.

“NYPD. We need to talk to you, Mr. MacKenna.”

From the window of her sister’s spare bedroom in Jersey City, Emily Reiss has a perfect view of lower Manhattan. She knows the vantage was a major selling point when Jacky bought the east-facing condo on a high floor.

Now, some might consider it a drawback to see the sun rise every morning over the permanently altered—and still smoking—skyline.

Emily certainly does.

She closes the blinds and turns away, wondering how long she and Dale are going to have to stay exiled in New Jersey. Jacky says she doesn’t mind, and she probably doesn’t—she’s a neurologist and isn’t around much. But her live-in boyfriend, Frank—a writer who works from home—doesn’t seem particularly pleased to have given up the room he uses as an office.

“We really need to think about moving into a vacant apartment in one of your buildings,” Emily tells Dale, who’s lying on the futon.

Either he’s so engrossed in the Times that he doesn’t hear it, or—more likely—he doesn’t want to hear it.

“Dale?”

He looks at her over the top of the paper. “Let’s just see how things go with our own building first.”

“You keep saying that, but how do you think things are going to go?” Their idyllic little corner of the world, adjacent to the Trade Center, is now a crime scene, layered in toxic dust and littered with broken airplanes, broken buildings, broken bodies.

They weren’t home when the planes hit, thank goodness, and they haven’t even been allowed back to collect their property. That’s the least of Emily’s worries.

She never wants to go back there. Ever.

“There are empty apartments in all of your buildings, Dale,” she points out. “Pick one—I don’t care which one—and let’s move in.”

“It’s not like they’re furnished, Emily.”

She shrugs. “We’ll get furniture.”

“You make it sound so simple.”

“You make it sound impossible.”

But the problem, she knows, is not furniture. It’s that the buildings Dale owns—inherited from his father—aren’t nearly as nice as the building where they live now.

Lived.

“It’s all about quality of life,” Dale frequently tells Emily. “Without it, you’ve got nothing worthwhile.”

Their quality of life has certainly never been lacking.

Dale always made a nice salary as a corporate accountant, but was able to retire a few years ago after unexpectedly inheriting a small fortune from his father. Unexpected in the sense that Mortimer Reiss was the kind of robust man who seemed as if he was destined to live forever. But he was just in his mid-sixties when a freak traffic accident took his life, making Dale an overnight multimillionaire—and reluctant landlord.

Mortimer had started flipping real estate years before it became fashionable. At one point, he owned two dozen properties in lower Manhattan, but over the last decade made a killing selling off all but the few buildings Dale still manages. Those, too, will be listed as soon as the market picks up a little. Unlike his shrewd father, Dale doesn’t want to deal with tenants, rent collecting, and maintenance, and Emily, who usually sees things eye to eye with her husband, doesn’t blame him.