Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(115)

“Your children were in the back of the car your husband was driving . . .”

Were.

They were.

“Where are they now?” she asks shrilly, wrenching herself free.

“Your husband pushed the car into the water with the children in the backseat . . .”

“Noooooo!” she wails, and this time she does go down, sinking onto her knees. From where she is, she can see, for the first time, a pool of blood out on the jetty. Beside it is a prone figure covered in a tarp. Much too big to belong to a child, but . . .

“What happened? Oh my God, who is that?”

“Mrs. MacKenna, please try to calm down. We think it was a Good Samaritan who must have come along and tried to stop him. Your husband shot him in the back as he tried to—”

“Mack shot him?” she echoes, and shakes her head. “No. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He doesn’t have a gun.”

“He does. We recovered it. He—”

“No! I just told you, he doesn’t—”

“Mrs. MacKenna, we have his gun and he admitted to using it to shoot the man, okay? He confessed.”

She goes absolutely still.

Mack shot someone?

Killed someone?

Confessed?

“But that . . . that doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m sorry,” Detective Looney says quietly. “But we have word that DNA evidence has linked him to a series of murders in Westchester County, and—”

She gasps, clasping trembling hands over her face, covering her eyes, as if to protect herself somehow from seeing the shocking truth.

But it’s there anyway, right in front of her.

I’m married to a complete stranger.

A few months ago, she remembers, she’d asked Randi, “How could I be such a terrible judge of character?”

She was talking about Jerry Thompson at the time—about how sure she’d been that he was incapable of violence.

Ironic that she might have been right about him after all—and wrong about Mack.

“Mrs. MacKenna?”

“Where are my babies?” she asks dully, lowering her hands and staring at the cold water.

Hudson . . . Madison . . . J.J. . . .

“Your husband, we believe, had second thoughts and pulled the girls out.”

“What?” she turns back to the detective. “They’re out? He got them out?”

“Yes, the girls are—”

“J.J.?” she asks frantically. “What about J.J.?”

“He was still in the car when we got here—”

“Allison!” Mack calls.

“No, no, no, no . . .” Sobbing, she shakes her head. “My baby . . .”

“Mrs. MacKenna, listen to me. Our men went down immediately and managed to get to him. He was revived, and he was in that ambulance that just—”

“He’s alive? And the girls? The girls are—”

“They’re all alive, Mrs. MacKenna. All three of them.”

“Allison!” Mack again. “Allison!”

Dazed, she looks over.

Tears are streaming down his face. “They’re saying I did this. Please, Allie, you know me.”

I don’t. I don’t know you at all.

She turns her back on Mack.

“Allison, please! I promise you I would never hurt them.”

I promise you . . .

She remembers a string of broken promises.

Her mother’s far outweigh Mack’s. Maybe she’s overly sensitive because of the way she was raised; maybe that’s why she has a hard time forgiving, forgetting, trusting . . .

“You have to believe me, Allison. This guy—this is no Good Samaritan. He’s a monster. He came into the house and he took the kids. I was trying to save them. I chased them here in our car—” He points at the SUV. “If that isn’t true, then why is it here? How could I have driven two cars here?”

Allison looks at Detective Looney, who tells her somberly, “We think that he parked the SUV here earlier and then walked or hitchhiked back to the house to load the kids into the other car—it was a rental, in his name. We think he planned to use the SUV as a means of escape after he . . . uh . . . after the other car was . . . in the water.”

With the children in it.

Oh, Mack.

Oh, God.

“Detective Looney, take a look at this.” A crime scene technician holds out something in his gloved hand. “It was wedged in the padding of the baby’s seat.”

The baby. They’re talking about J.J.

As Detective Looney takes the object, Allison realizes, with a start, what it is.

An iPhone.

“That’s mine,” she tells the detective abruptly. “It has to be. J.J.—he’s always . . .” Her voice breaks.

“Allison!” Mack calls. “Please, just listen to me. I swear to you, I’m not lying. I never lie. You know that.”

Mack . . .

Mack doesn’t lie.

Ever.

He’s a monster . . . he came into the house and he took the kids . . .

I was trying to save them. . .

Allison was so sure he’d taken her phone so that she wouldn’t be able to call for help, but if J.J. had it . . .