Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(71)
“I never went to the magazine parties where the guys all met the Penthouse Pet of the Year,” Zoe is saying, ostensibly to Randi and Allison, though she’s looking at their husbands, “and I wasn’t even invited the time Hugh Hefner flew everyone out to the Playboy Mansion for—”
“Whoa, easy now, Zoe,” Ben cuts in with a laugh. “Randi doesn’t want to hear about that, do you, babe?”
“Trust me, I don’t, and Allison doesn’t, either, do you, Al?”
“No, thanks,” she says with absolute conviction.
Now she remembers—Zoe. She’s the woman Mack used to work with, the one who got married and moved up here not long ago. Allison didn’t recognize her with her hair pulled back. Mack was talking to her the night of the Webers’ party, the night . . .
The night I noticed that my nightgown was missing.
She closes her eyes and swallows hard, remembering the last time she saw it—bloodstained, on Phyllis Lewis’s lifeless body.
The others continue talking and laughing around her as though nothing terrible has happened, and Allison loses herself, once again, in the nightmare.
“ . . . just the way you look . . . tonight.” Rocky finishes singing and leans over to kiss his wife’s forehead. “Yeah, yeah, I know . . . I’m no Sinatra, but I’d say that wasn’t half bad, huh, Ange?”
Encouraged by the ripple of movement beneath her closed eyelids, his heart lifts another notch, buoyed by a gust of hope.
It’s been happening more and more frequently today—this visible twitching of her eyes and her mouth and her fingers. Yesterday, too, according to Carm, but Rocky wasn’t here much, busy with the case up in Westchester.
The news that Phyllis Lewis had been raped really threw things off for him, and instantly led to a couple of conclusions. Most importantly, he’s almost positive—much to his relief—that he hadn’t arrested the wrong guy in the Nightwatcher case after all.
Given the departure in signature, it looks more like they’re dealing with a copycat killer—and clearly, it isn’t a female, which lets Allison Taylor MacKenna off the hook. As for her husband . . . James MacKenna was there with her that day ten years ago. Not married to Allison at the time; he was just a neighbor, as was Kristina Haines.
Rocky clearly remembers interviewing him back then, and quickly dismissing him as a suspect. He was as all-American Mr. Nice Guy as they come: former altar boy and Big Brother volunteer, with a respectable family background and solid career, not an overdue library book or parking ticket to his name. Beyond that, the guy’s wife had been among the thousands of New Yorkers missing in the twin towers; his alibi the night of Kristina’s murder was that he’d been desperately searching hospitals and victim centers for her.
As Rocky recalls, Carrie MacKenna was one of the first names to emerge on the official lists of those who had been confirmed dead.
Later, the New York Times printed the “Portraits of Grief” series that captured each of the victims—not in formal obituaries, but essays about their personal lives, about who they had been, rather than what they had done. He remembers reading the one about Carrie, and noting that her husband mentioned that they’d been trying to start a family, battling infertility . . .
At the time, Rocky’s oldest son, Tony, and his wife, Laura, were enduring the same grueling, expensive treatments. He remembers feeling sorry for James MacKenna, who had gone through so much already in his efforts to become a father, and in the end found himself alone and bereft.
What are the odds that the guy might emerge a decade later as a cold-blooded copycat killer?
Not nearly as high as the odds that Jerry Thompson talked in prison.
Rocky and Murph are planning to head over to Sullivan Correctional to see what they can find out. Thompson could very well have shared the details of his crimes with a since-released inmate—one who decided to duplicate the crimes for kicks, and add rape to the signature. With luck, they’ll be able to pinpoint a suspect and match him to the semen collected at the scene.
But right now, with Ange showing signs of coming out of the coma, the case can wait. Rocky’s been at her side since early this morning. The doctors instructed him to talk to her, so he did, and when he ran out of things to say, he started singing to her—every song in his repertoire, with repeat performances of his favorites.
“The Way You Look Tonight” was the first dance on their wedding day. He’s sung it maybe ten, twelve times in the last hour or two, filling in his own words wherever he forgets the lyrics. He knows that one pretty well, but some of the others, he has to wing almost completely.
“What else do you want to hear?” he asks Ange. “More Sinatra?”
He gets through a few lines of “Mack the Knife” before faltering on the lyrics.
“Never mind,” he tells Ange. “How about some pop? ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’?”
She’s not big on that song, but he’s always loved it, because it makes him think of her.
“Okay, okay, I know—forget ‘Brown-Eyed Girl.’ This show is for you. I’ll do some Beatles.”
He remembers teasing her back in junior high when she camped out in front of the Ed Sullivan Theater with a bunch of other girls, trying to catch a glimpse of the Fab Four. And he remembers being secretly, irrationally jealous of her favorite Beatle, Paul McCartney, for most of seventh grade and part of eighth.