Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(3)

Her father walked out on her childhood when she was nine and never looked back; her mother died of an overdose before she graduated high school. She put herself through the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, moved alone to New York with a degree in fashion, and worked her ass off to establish her career at 7th Avenue magazine.

On September 11, the attack on the World Trade Center turned her life upside down, but what happened the next day almost destroyed it.

Kristina Haines, the young woman who lived upstairs from her, was brutally murdered by Jerry Thompson, the building’s handyman.

Allison was the sole witness who could place him at the scene of the crime. By the time he was apprehended, he had killed three more people—and Allison had narrowly escaped becoming another of his victims.

Whenever she remembers that incident, how a figure lurched at her from the shadows of her own bedroom . . .

You don’t just put something like that behind you.

And so, on this night of bitter memories, Jerry Thompson is part of the reason she’s having trouble sleeping.

It was ten years ago tonight that he crept into Kristina’s open bedroom window.

Ten years ago that he stabbed her to death in her own bed, callously robbing the burning, devastated city of one more innocent life.

He’s been in prison ever since.

Allison’s testimony at his trial was the final nail in the coffin—that was how the prosecuting attorney put it, a phrase that was oft-quoted in the press.

“I just hope it wasn’t my own,” she recalls telling Mack afterward.

“Your own what?” he asked, and she knew he was feigning confusion.

“Coffin.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

But it wasn’t ridiculous.

She remembers feeling Jerry’s eyes on her as she told the court that he had been at the murder scene that night. Describing how she’d seen him coming out of a stairwell and slipping into the alleyway, she wondered what would happen if the defense won the case and Jerry somehow wound up back out on the street.

Would he come after her?

Would he do to her what he had done to the others?

Sometimes—like tonight—Allison still thinks about that.

It isn’t likely. He’s serving a life sentence. But still . . .

Things happen. Parole hearings. Prison breaks.

What if . . . ?

No. Stop thinking that way. Close your eyes and go to sleep. The kids will be up early, as usual.

She closes her eyes, but she can’t stop imagining what it would be like to open them and find Jerry Thompson standing over her with a knife, like her friend Kristina did.



Sullivan Correctional Facility

Fallsburg, New York

One hour of television.

That’s it. That’s all Jerry is allowed per day, and he has to share it with a roomful of other inmates, so he never gets to choose what he wants to watch. Not that he even knows what that might be, because it’s been ten years since he held a remote control.

Back then—when he was living in the Hell’s Kitchen apartment that was a palace compared to his prison cell—he liked the show Cops. He always sang along with the catchy opening song, Bad boys, bad boys . . . whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

It was so exciting to watch the cops turn on the sirens and chase down the bad guys and arrest them. Then one night, they came—in real life, the cops did—and they arrested Jerry because Mama was dead in the bedroom and they thought he was a bad boy. They thought he had killed her, and two other ladies, too.

“Admit it, Jerry!” they kept saying. “Admit it! Tell us what happened!” They said it over and over again, for hours and hours, until he started crying. Finally, when he just couldn’t take it anymore, he did exactly what they were telling them to do: he admitted it. He said that he had killed his mother and Kristina Haines and Marianne Apostolos, and then he signed the papers they gave him.

He did that because you have to do what the police tell you to do, and also because maybe he really had killed the women. Maybe he just didn’t remember.

He doesn’t remember a lot of things, because his brain hasn’t been right for years, not since the accident.

Well, it wasn’t really an accident.

Someone doesn’t accidentally bash a person’s head in with a cast-iron skillet. But that’s what Mama always called it, an accident, and that’s what Jerry always thought it was, because the truth about his injury was, of course, just one more thing he didn’t remember.

Ten years ago, right before he was arrested, he finally found out what had really happened to him on that long ago day when his head was bashed in.

His twin sister, Jamie, had attacked him.

Once he knew the terrible truth, he tried to forget it, because it was too horrible. For years, he couldn’t even remember anything about that night. Now, bits and pieces come back to him, though most of the time, when his mind tries to think about it, he can push it away.

Sometimes, though, usually late at night, when he’s lying awake in his cell, the terrible truth sneaks back into his head, and he can’t get rid of it.

It’s the same with Doobie Jones, the big, mean inmate who lives in the cell next to Jerry’s. He talks to Jerry in the night sometimes, and Jerry can never seem to shut out his voice. Even when he pulls the thin prison pillow over his head and presses it against his ears, Doobie’s voice still seems to be there, on the inside, saying all kinds of things Jerry doesn’t want to hear.