Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(58)

“That’s one hell of a coincidence, don’t you think?” Murph asks.

Yeah. One hell of a coincidence.

Anything is possible . . .

“The way I see it, Rock, either Thompson has come back from the dead . . .”

Okay, almost anything is possible. Not that.

“ . . . or,” Murph goes on, “the wrong guy confessed.”

That . . .

That’s . . .

Possible.

Ten years ago, Rocky honestly didn’t think so. Nor did the jury.

In hindsight—remembering the blank, terrified expression in Jerry Thompson’s eyes—he’s suddenly not so sure.

But you don’t get as far as Rocky has in the ranks of the NYPD by second-guessing yourself. There could be something else going on here, and that’s his job—to be thorough and consider every remotely possible explanation.

“I’m heading up there now,” Murph tells him.

“Pick me up at home on your way,” Rocky says grimly. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Make that twenty. I just need to go back up and tell Ange I have to leave for a while.”

“Tell Ange . . . ? How is she, Rock? Any change?”

“For the better, Murph. Only for the better.”

It isn’t until after he disconnects the call that Rocky uneasily remembers the broken window in his own basement. It’s not something that’s weighed heavily on his mind amid all that’s gone on with Ange.

But ordinarily, he probably wouldn’t have dismissed it so readily after a search showed nothing out of order.

Someone was in the house while he was away. Someone who took nothing away, and left nothing behind.

Or so Rocky assumed—perhaps too quickly.

“Here. Drink this.”

Allison looks up to see Mack standing beside the couch holding a steaming mug. “What is it?”

“Tea. Herbal. It’ll help you sleep.”

“I don’t want to sleep,” she says automatically, but she accepts the mug from him.

“Ever?” He sits beside her. “Al, you have to get some rest. J.J.’s going to be up in a few hours.”

She shakes her head. There’s no way she’s going to close her eyes for even a few seconds; knowing that the minute she closes them, she’s going to see again the horrific scene she stumbled upon next door.

Phyllis Lewis lay on her side, just like Kristina. She, too, was wearing lingerie, a champagne-colored silk, lace-trimmed nightgown Allison recognized immediately, though it was heavily smeared with brownish stains; blood.

In those few stunned moments before she fled, Allison noticed a couple of other things: the dead cat, eviscerated, on the floor beside the bed, and the dozens of white candles around the room. They were mostly votives that had long since burned out, but a few were pillars that flickered still.

The scene in Kristina’s apartment ten years ago had been exactly the same—not the cat, but the candles around the bed, almost as though her body lay on a sacrificial altar.

He’s back.

She abruptly sets the tea aside. It sloshes over the rim of the mug and puddles on the wooden coffee table. She ignores it.

Now that she’s had the time to process what happened—what she saw—there’s no denying that the Nightwatcher has resurfaced. And if Jerry Thompson is dead . . .

He’s dead. You know it.

Okay. He’s dead.

That means she was wrong about him being the Nightwatcher. And that means . . .

“We have to take the kids and get out of here, Mack.”

She doesn’t like the look on his face—the same expression he wore earlier, when she assumed he’d be staying home from the office tomorrow.

“Go . . . where?”

“I don’t care. Anyplace where he won’t find us.”

“We can’t just go, Allison.”

“Because you have to work? Is that why?”

“That’s one of the reasons, yes,” he says evenly. “And there are cops right outside the front door. We’re safe here. For now.”

“You really believe that?”

He doesn’t answer, just leans forward, plucks a couple of tissues from the box on the coffee table, and wipes up the spilled tea.

He brought her the box of tissues earlier, when she couldn’t stop crying about poor Phyllis.

She hadn’t allowed the floodgates to open until after the girls had left with Randi. Neither she nor Mack wanted to upset them further.

Nor did she cry in front of Ben, who showed up about a half hour later, having bolted from a business dinner to get to them.

He sat with Mack and J.J. in the kitchen while Allison told yet another detective every detail that might be relevant concerning Phyllis Lewis, and the silk nightgown, and of course, the case ten years ago.

“You told your husband that you knew all along Jerry Thompson wasn’t guilty?” the detective asked, apparently having been briefed by the officers who’d been standing with her when Mack arrived. “You testified under oath that you’d seen him at the scene. Are you contradicting yourself now?”

“No!” she said quickly. “He was at the scene. And he confessed to the murders. But before that, my gut instinct was that he couldn’t be guilty.”

And of course, in the end, logic overruled instinct.