Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(91)

I have to get out of here so that Jamie won’t know that I saw.

But he doesn’t want to stand up, because he can’t bear to look at her again. He didn’t see any bugs the first time, but what if he does now? What if they’re crawling on her? What if they crawl on Jerry?

I have to get out of here.

On his hands and knees, his heart pounding like crazy, he begins inching his way to the door.

Good.

Almost there.

Just a few more . . .

A voice stops him in his tracks.

“What are you doing, Jerry?”

It’s Jamie. Jamie is back.

Dialing Rocky again, Vic wonders how clean the hotel room coffeemaker is. The way things are going, there’s no way he’s getting any sleep tonight. He only had a couple of hours to spare to begin with. Might as well start in again with the caffeine.

As Rocky’s phone rings, Vic opens the lid of the four-cup Krups machine sitting on the bathroom vanity and peeks inside. A grungy film of something is growing on the plastic. Ugh. He won’t be drinking any coffee that was brewed in there, that’s for damned sure.

“Yeah, Manzillo here.”

“Rocky, I found him.”

“Jerry? Where?”

Coffee forgotten, Vic strides over to his open laptop and the e-mail he received a few minutes ago from a willing tech analyst back in Quantico. “He lives in the West Thirties, in a subsidized building.”

“Do you have the address?”

“I do, and I’ll give it to you, but do you want to know the rest first?”

“Is it about his sister trying to kill him when he was a kid?”

“You know. And—”

“And then something happened to her right after that, and she died, too. Only a thirteen-year-old doesn’t usually drop dead of natural causes. Got any info on what happened to her?”

“Looks like she was mugged during a robbery. They found her in an alley, throat was slit.”

“And there’s no way the kid, Jerry, did it.”

Vic consults the e-mailed report again.

“Not unless he came out of his coma and escaped the hospital without anyone seeing him, then went back and slipped back into the coma again right afterward. He was out of it for weeks,” he tells Rocky. “He’s lucky to be alive.”

“Then who killed the sister? That was no random mugging.”

Vic had been thinking the same thing.

“What’s the mother’s story?” Rocky asks.

“Her name’s Lenore Thompson. Single welfare mother, forty years old.”

“Drugs? Violence?”

“Who the hell knows? History of mental illness. But she doesn’t have a record. Never been arrested.”

“What about the kids’ father?”

“Name on the birth certificate is Samuel Shields. He was just a kid himself, grew up in the projects, a couple of years younger than Lenore. Samuel’s father was a paranoid schizophrenic who tried to kill the kid and wound up in a mental ward. Still there.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah. Long story short, Samuel gets Lenore pregnant with twins when she’s sixteen—”

“Sixteen? And he was a couple of years younger?”

“Ah, May-December romance,” Vic says dourly. “Lenore drops out of school to have the kids, he drops out of the picture altogether, far as I can tell—he’s a convicted felon, violent character, has a nice, long rap sheet and spent years in and out of juvy before he graduated to jail, then the state pen here and, most recently, out in Ohio.”

“Nice,” Rocky says again. “Just another happily-ever-after tale of the inner city, huh? Okay, give me a 10–20 on that address. We’ve got reasonable cause to head over there to find our boy Jerry.”

“You’re not alone, are you?”

“Nah, I’ve got Detective Brandewyne here with me.” The lady cop Rocky wasn’t crazy about, Vic remembers. The smoker who isn’t seasoned—not exactly the best quality in a sidekick when you’re dealing with a serial killer.

“Want to come along for the ride?” Rocky offers.

Vic is only a couple of blocks away, but he’s supposed to be sleeping.

“I know, I know, you can’t,” Rocky says before he can reply. “Protocol, and all that. Forget I even—”

“I’ll meet you there.”

What the hell are you doing? Vic wonders as he gives Rocky the address, then hangs up and straps on his gun.

He thinks of his dead friend John, and he thinks of Rocky.

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.

I’m just doing what I can—what I have to—do to help a friend in need.

Sitting in the backseat of a parked squad car with Mack beside her and a uniformed officer at the wheel, Allison shudders, looking up at the brick building.

She can’t stop thinking about what could have happened to her up there in her apartment; can’t stop wondering what’s going to happen to her now.

“What if I killed him?” she asks Mack in a low voice, not moving her gaze from the building, watching for the pair of cops who went in earlier, guns drawn, to emerge.

“I hate to say it, but I hope that you did.”

Taken aback, she turns to look at him.