Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(65)

Basically, it was all about learning to live alone again.

Rocky, who’d gone directly from his parents’ house to the army to marriage with children, has never lived alone in his life.

And I don’t want to learn how.

His partner’s voice jars him from his melancholy thoughts.

“I daresay that the bloodbath in the master suite takes away from the impeccable decor,” Murph declares in a fake-haughty accent.

Ah, gallows humor. Whatever gets you through.

Every homicide detective has his own way of coping with the violent horror witnessed on an almost daily basis.

Murph, ever the jokester, tends to laugh it all off, or blow some steam playing practical jokes around the station house. Other guys throw themselves into sports in the off hours—running, hoops, even boxing—probably one of the healthiest ways of dealing with the stress. Many of their colleagues, conversely, have their share of vices—mainly cigarettes and alcohol—to help ease the tension.

Rocky has never gone in for any of that.

All he ever needed, at the end of a grueling day or night on the job, was to come home to Ange. And now . . .

Now you just have to bide your time until Ange is home and things are back to normal again, that’s all.

The first floor of the Lewis house, like the second, is humming with activity.

Uniformed patrol officers, crime scene technicians, the team from the medical examiner’s office—some shooting the breeze, others going about their investigative procedures, a few simultaneously engaging in both banter and business.

Early morning light falls through the windows on either side of the front door at the foot of the stairs. Rocky really needs to get back to the hospital. What if Ange is waking up right at this moment, while he’s forty minutes away? What if she opens her eyes and asks for him and he’s not there?

Again, he thinks of Phyllis Lewis’s husband and he feels blessed because at least he, Rocky, has hope.

For Bob Lewis, there is none.

A gallery of framed family photos hangs on the wall alongside the stairway. The usual: a wedding picture, a couple of family group photos, baby portraits, grade school portraits, senior portraits, cap and gown shots. Mother, father, sister, brother. Just your average, all-American happy family . . .

Shattered by a brutal crime, and the only saving grace is that Phyllis’s bloody corpse wasn’t found by her husband or children.

No, it was found by Allison.

Rocky has yet to voice his suspicions to anyone but Murph, but he’s about to.

Captain Jack Cleary of the local police department greets them at the foot of the stairs. Tall, lean, and handsome —with just the right hint of five o’clock shadow on his chiseled jaw—he looks to Rocky more like an actor playing a detective than the real thing.

“Looks like everything around here is picture-perfect” was Murph’s response, under his breath to Rocky, when they first met Cleary on the heels of their journey through the most charming town this side of a Hollywood-manufactured Americana set.

Glenhaven Park is one of those northern Westchester suburbs you often read about in the papers—on the society pages, not the crime blotter. When the New York tabloids write about the celebrities and socialites who live there, they invariably use words like “leafy” and “tony” to describe the town.

Rocky has been around and past it, but until tonight, has never had occasion to get off the highway here. Sure, he has friends in high places—who doesn’t?—but not quite this lofty.

Main Street is going to be abuzz today, that’s for damned sure. Your classic case of “This kind of thing just doesn’t happen here.”

Oh, but it does. It happens everywhere.

And it’s going to happen again, Rocky knows. Another woman is going to be found hacked to death in her bed.

Maybe not here, but somewhere. Most likely in the general area.

Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow night, maybe next week, depending on the cooling-off period. Most likely sooner rather than later.

Unless . . .

He thinks about a case he worked years ago, one that remains unsolved. The Leprechaun Killer, he and Murph called it—but only privately, because the name stemmed from a clue that wasn’t released to the press or the public.

A woman was murdered in her Manhattan apartment in the early morning hours after Saint Patrick’s Day, and a short-stemmed green carnation was found at the scene. Rocky speculated that it was a fledgling serial killer’s calling card and waited for the guy to strike again. The fingerprints that were lifted from the stem and petals yielded no match from the database.

As always, when the Leprechaun Killer pops into his head, Rocky wonders about the security guard. That’s just one aspect of the case that troubled him for years afterward.

Around the same time the woman was murdered, the lobby guard from the office building where she worked was found brutally stabbed in Central Park, the apparent victim of a random mugging. His wallet was missing and it took more than a week to identify his body. There was no record of a green carnation at that scene—but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been there and been overlooked in the park foliage, or displaced by an animal.

As a detective, Rocky didn’t believe in coincidences. He thought the two cases were linked, and was convinced that the killer would soon strike again.

He never did.

But this, Rocky reminds himself, is different.