Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(61)

“So I’ve heard,” Rocky says dryly.

As Vic has told Rocky many times over the years—and memorably wrote in his best-selling book—the offender is always going to be playing out some kind of twisted fantasy, and there are certain key elements he needs in order to complete the crime.

“There’s only one way to rule out a copycat and establish whether the same person committed this murder and the ones ten years ago.”

“By studying the behavioral patterns.” Rocky nods.

“Looks like we’ve established that they’re the same. We’ve got the disaster—the freak snowstorm—that could have set him off. We’ve got the stolen lingerie,” Murph points out, “and the Alicia Keys song, the candles, the severed middle finger . . .”

Yes. Phyllis Lewis’s death certainly appears to have the same signature as the Nightwatcher murders, but . . .

“I don’t know.” Rocky shakes his head. “I’m just not convinced.”

“Because . . . ?” Murph looks over at him.

“Because it’s too soon. We don’t have all the information. We haven’t gotten a look at the scene. And . . .”

And maybe I just can’t stand to even consider that I might have arrested the wrong damned guy ten years ago.

Before Jerry Thompson confessed—oh hell, even after he confessed—he blamed the murders on someone named Jamie. Rocky later learned that was the name of his dead sister.

“People don’t come back from the dead, Rock. You know that, right?” Vic is talking about Jerry, not his sister, Jamie.

Either way—yeah. Rocky knows that.

“If Jerry didn’t kill those women,” he says, frustrated, “then who did?”

“Good question,” Vic says. “Wish I could be there to work this case with you guys.”

“So do I,” Murph tells Vic, as Rocky stares at a distant set of red taillights on the winding road ahead, thinking back.

Forget about the murder weapon and the severed fingers of his victims, all found in his apartment. What logical explanation could there be for the wig, the makeup, and the bloody dress that were also there? Forensics determined that strands of long hair found clenched in Marianne Apostolos’s fingers had come from that wig. The dress was a size fourteen—larger than the average woman; maybe barely large enough to fit stocky Jerry . . . but nowhere near large enough to fit his obese mother.

So it wasn’t hers . . .

If it wasn’t Jerry’s . . .

Whose was it?

“Rock? You still there?” Vic asks.

“Yeah. I’m just trying to figure out what I possibly could have missed ten years ago. It’s not like I haven’t been doing this job forever, and I sure as hell don’t go jumping to conclusions, or rely on circumstantial evidence . . .”

“You’re as seasoned as they come, Rock. But look at the timing—you got this case a few hours after a terror attack that killed dozens of guys you knew; thousands of citizens you were sworn to protect.”

“That doesn’t mean I—”

“No, it doesn’t,” Vic cuts him off, “but you’re only human. If there was ever any time in your career that you might not have been on top of your game; any time when you’d have been prone to slip up . . . that was it. For all of us.”

Rocky mulls that over, remembering those shell-shocked days after September 11. The city was in ruins; the force was short-staffed; every available officer was down there on the pile, digging for survivors, digging for corpses with familiar faces, brothers, sons, sisters, colleagues, friends . . .

Did he ever truly consider, on that long ago night in Jerry Thompson’s apartment, that someone else might have been involved?

Or did he take one look into Jerry’s vacant face, recognize that Jerry wasn’t all there, and perhaps subconsciously dismiss his trying to cast the blame elsewhere as desperate babble?

I’m a good detective. That’s not how I operate.

Anyway, even Jerry’s own attorney never introduced the possibility of another actual suspect, and besides . . .

“Look, the person Jerry blamed had been dead for years, Rock.”

Yeah. The sister, Jamie.

How many times had he gone back and looked into the old case file just to be sure?

Too damned many. Seeing autopsy photographs of a child’s bloody corpse is never easy.

Tragic end to a tragic story. She was just a kid.

A kid who beat her brother’s brains out, Rocky reminds himself yet again.

But a kid who never had a chance.

At sixteen, Jerry and Jamie’s mother, Lenore, had gotten herself knocked up by a fourteen-year-old juvenile delinquent named Samuel Shields. Aside from the birth certificate, there’s no evidence that the father ever had anything to do with the twins—although a lone photograph discovered among Lenore Thompson’s belongings might suggest otherwise.

It’s a shot of Jerry and Jamie posing with a man who bears a strong resemblance to Jerry. It might have been taken not long before Jamie died, judging by her apparent age in the photo.

When shown the photograph just after he was taken into custody, Jerry shook his head and said that he had no idea who the man was. Maybe he was lying, or maybe he’d forgotten, thanks to the head injury he’d later suffered.