Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(78)

But he’s aggravated with Mack, too, wondering what the hell is going on.

Oh well. At least tomorrow—today—is Sunday and I can sleep in, he thinks.

Then again—probably not. The kids are always up pretty early, and Zoe likes to consider those early morning weekend hours “family time.”

Meaning, if she has to get up and suffer through the kids’ antics, so should he.

He climbs out of the car and hits the remote twice—one button to close the garage door behind him, the other to lock the car.

It drives Zoe crazy that he does that—“Why lock the car when it’s already locked into the garage?” she asked before bed, frustrated at having to come back into the house for the keys after running out to grab the purse she’d forgotten in the car.

But Nate can’t seem to break the habit. Before they moved here to the suburbs, he parked on the street in their Manhattan neighborhood, where even locking the car doors didn’t keep thieves from breaking into it four times.

“This is Glenhaven Park, Nate—it’s safe here,” Zoe told him after he—out of guilt—went back out to unlock the car and fetch her purse. “You’re the one who said we probably don’t even have to install an alarm system here.”

“I was talking about the house, not the car.”

“Right, and you could probably leave the car parked out front all night, unlocked and running, and no one would steal it.”

“Then nobody would have stolen your purse, either, right? You could have left it there until morning.”

“My phone is in it.”

“So? Do you have a desperate need to get in touch with someone now?”

“Maybe,” she said, annoyed, and he watched her retrieve the phone and start pressing buttons, probably checking for texts.

She often goes back and forth with her sister, and with the friends she left behind in the city, and with God only knows who else.

Now, stepping into the kitchen, lit by the bulb beneath the stove hood, Nate sees her open purse still on the counter, right where she left it earlier. He tosses the keys beside it, drapes his jacket over the back of a chair, and heads for the stairs.

Again, he thinks about the wild-goose chase and wonders what it was about.

In the old agency days, Mack—and Ben, too—was a practical joker. They all were. So was this some kind of prank? Was Ben in on it, too?

Nate would buy that if not for the somber circumstances. Would Mack—a grown man now, and on the heels of a tragic wake—really have gone out of his way to do something so ridiculous?

Say he had actually gone to the trouble of staging a ruse that dragged Nate out into the rain in the dead of night . . . wouldn’t he have jumped out of the bushes to have a good laugh at him?

The old Mack would have.

The new Mack . . . who the hell knows?

He’s a virtual stranger after all these years. People change. Things change. And he’s going to remind Zoe of that first thing in the morning. She’d be better served by starting from scratch here in Glenhaven Park, rather than trying to reignite old friendships . . . or anything else.

Reaching the top of the stairs, Nate is sure he left the bedroom door open earlier, but now it’s closed.

Maybe Zoe got up with one of the kids while he was gone.

Who are you kidding?

She probably wouldn’t hear them if they screamed bloody murder.

Nathan Jennings opens the bedroom door—and crosses the threshold into . . .

Bloody murder.





Chapter Thirteen

Bobby Silva’s prison nickname, Rocky and Murph have been informed, is B.S.—and not just because of his initials.

According to the corrections officer who led them to the small room where they’re conducting inmate interviews, Silva is a pathological liar.

“Don’t believe a word he says,” the CO advises them.

“Terrific,” Murph mutters under his breath. “Why are we bothering?”

“A lot of times with guys like this, there’s a grain of truth in there somewhere,” Rocky reminds him.

With any luck, Silva will be more forthcoming than Doobie Jones was when they talked to him a short time ago. The guy couldn’t have been less cooperative, staring through them when they questioned him about Jerry Thompson. He simply refused to talk.

“You can’t get blood from a stone,” Murph muttered to Rocky after Jones was escorted away, “and that was the most stone-cold SOB I’ve ever met.”

Now it’s Silva’s turn to take a seat across from them as the armed CO takes up a watchful post on the other side of the glass-paneled wall. His presence was a definite comfort when Doobie Jones was in here.

But this guy isn’t anywhere near as menacing. Where Doobie Jones sat stealth-still, B.S. is full of nervous energy. He’s small in stature, with jet black hair, close-set black eyes, and sharp features. If he were a cartoon character, Rocky finds himself thinking, he’d be a rat.

“Do you know what time it is?” he demands, left alone with detectives.

Murph pushes up his sleeve and consults his watch. “Almost three-thirty.”

“I know that!”

Murph shrugs, calmly lowering the sleeve. “You asked.”

“Why’d you drag me out’a bed in the middle of the night?”