Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(79)

“We have some questions for you,” Rocky tells him, “and we hear you’re a smart guy. You know more than anyone else what goes on around the cell block.”

Ego sufficiently stroked, B.S. nods in agreement. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“You knew Jerry Thompson pretty well, didn’t you?”

“Jerry? Jerry was my best friend.” B.S. twitches in his seat. “I tried to save his life. Gave him CPR for, like, two hours, but he didn’t make it.”

Rocky figures that’s about as likely as Jerry rising from the dead, considering that B.S. was locked in his cell that fateful night, but he commends him for his heroic efforts.

Encouraged, B.S. launches into a detailed account of the action, painting himself as a bold would-be savior who tended to his fallen fellow inmate as the rest of the prison population, staff and medical personnel included, looked on helplessly.

Managing to look duly impressed, Murph says, “Wow, you’re one hell of a good friend, Mr. Silva. How did Jerry get his hands on the orange juice and the poison?”

In a flash, Silva goes from effusive to wary. “I don’t know.”

Yes, you do, Rocky thinks. You know that it came from Doobie Jones, and you’re afraid of what he’ll do to you if you rat him out.

Murph makes a few more futile attempts to get B.S. to reveal the truth. Watching him fidget and glance repeatedly at the door, Rocky decides it’s time to change the subject before the guy clams up altogether.

“So you and Jerry were best friends,” he says. “Did he ever talk to you about what his life was like on the outside?”

Still guarded, B.S. lifts his chin. “What do you think?”

“I think you were the one person he trusted in this place, and you were probably a good listener.”

“Yeah, I’m a great listener. All the guys tell me stuff all the time, because I’m the only one they trust. I used to be a secret agent before I got here, so I know how to keep my mouth shut.”

Masking his amusement, Rocky waits for B.S. to finish telling him about the government secrets he’s been privy to over the years, right up to the raid last spring on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.

“And what about Jerry?” Murph finally cuts him off. “What kinds of secrets did he confide in you?”

“A lot of stuff. You know.”

“Did he ever talk about what he did to get himself in here in the first place?”

“Sure.”

“What did he say?”

“He said his sister, Jamie, killed a bunch of people and he got blamed for it. He said no one believed Jamie was real. Everyone thought she was dead, even Jerry’s mother and father, but she wasn’t.”

Rocky nods, rubbing his chin.

Yes, Jamie was dead—no dispute there.

But what if Jerry mistook someone else for her? Or what if someone convinced Jerry that she was Jamie? What if that person, posing as Jamie—a person who fit into a size fourteen dress—had committed the murders and then slipped away as the police closed in, leaving a confused and hapless Jerry to take the fall?

It would explain how the murders could be replicated now with the deaths of Cora Nowak and Phyllis Lewis.

“Did you say Jerry’s father thought Jamie was dead?” Murph asks.

Startled, Rocky raises an eyebrow, belatedly picking up on what he’d missed.

“Jerry said it was his fault that she died,” B.S. tells them. “That’s what I said.”

No, it isn’t.

But this is even more intriguing, and Rocky raises a hand slightly, in case Murph is about to call him on the lie. Of course, he isn’t. He senses, as Rocky does, that they might be on to something.

Jerry Thompson reportedly never knew his father, Samuel Shields, who was just fourteen years old when he got his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Lenore Thompson pregnant with twins.

At the time, Samuel had even bigger problems than that. His own father, a paranoid schizophrenic, had tried to kill him and later been committed to the psych ward. And Samuel himself had already been in and out of juvenile detention—with an unpromising future ahead of him as a convicted felon.

Remembering the photograph in Jerry’s file—the one that showed him and his sister with a man who looked like he could have been their deadbeat father—Rocky asks B.S., “How was Jamie’s death the father’s fault?”

“He got mad and went after Jerry’s mother. When Jerry went to help her, his sister attacked him. Then she ran away. And she was killed out on the streets after that.”

The latter part of that story is undeniably true.

What about the first part?

“Do you know if Jerry was ever in touch with his father while he was here?” Murph asks.

“Nah, he didn’t know where he was, he said. He never got any visitors. Me, I get visitors all the time,” B.S. brags. “My family comes, and my friends, and the governor came a couple of times—he’s working to get me out of here—and . . .”

The governor. Right.

Rocky and Murph exchange a glance, reminding each other that they can’t believe anything this guy says.

Then again . . .

What if there’s some truth to what he said about Jerry?

They do their best to glean more meaningful information from B.S., but true to his name, he has nothing more to offer.