Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(8)
“Al?” Mack calls from the bedroom. “You coming?”
“I’m coming, I’m coming.” She reaches the second floor and detours down to Hudson’s room to make sure she’s getting ready for school. She needn’t have bothered. The bed is neatly made—her daughter takes care of that the moment she climbs out of it—and Hudson is sitting on it, busy transferring things from her well-organized desk to her open backpack.
Looking into the room next door, Allison sees Madison curled up on her rumpled purple bedspread with one of her favorite books, a dog-eared copy of Tikki Tikki Tembo that had once belonged to—and been equally cherished by—Allison. Twirling a long strand of honey-colored hair around her index finger, Maddy is so lost in the pages she doesn’t notice her mom in the doorway.
A faint smile plays at Allison’s lips as she heads back down the hall, thinking about her budding bookworm. Maddy was thrilled to start a Monday-Wednesday-Friday preschool program last week, and the teacher was impressed that she was already reading.
The conversation reminded Allison of one she’d once overheard between Mrs. Barnes, her own kindergarten teacher, and her mother.
“Allison is already reading, Mrs. Taylor. It’s really quite impressive. Did you teach her at home?”
Naturally, her mother took credit for it—but in truth, it had been Allison’s father who taught her to read. He was the one who had bought her that cherished copy of Tikki Tikki Tembo and all the other books she’d loved; the one who read her bedtime stories and had her sound out the words on the pages.
Allison’s smile fades, as it always does when unwelcome memories of her father drift back to her.
But he’s completely forgotten the moment she crosses the threshold into the master bedroom and sees the image frozen on the television screen.
It’s not a television commercial, as she expected.
It’s a face. A mug shot. One she’s seen many times.
“What’s going on?” she asks Mack, heart pounding.
“I was watching the news, and—here, just sit down.” Her husband, sitting on the foot of the unmade bed, pats the mattress beside him. “I rewound it to the beginning of the story.”
She sits.
J.J. emits an ear-splitting objection.
“Shh, sweetie.” She bounces him a little on her knee, already wobbly-weak from the mug shot shock.
But J.J. has fixated on the BlackBerry that is a regular fixture in Mack’s hand. He covets it, and Allison’s iPhone, too—not that they ever let him get his sticky little fingers on their electronic devices if they can help it.
J.J. wails and strains for Mack’s BlackBerry, which Mack quickly tucks out of his son’s view. He reaches toward the pair of yesterday’s jeans that are dangling from the bedpost, pulls his key ring from the pocket, and jingles it. “Here, J.J., look! J.J.!”
Delighted, J.J. reaches for it, the BlackBerry instantly forgotten.
Hoping he’ll be kept occupied for a minute, maybe even two, Allison sets him down in a rectangle of sunlight that falls across the rug at her feet. She gently pats the tufts of fine dark hair that cover his head and he babbles happily, inspecting the keys.
“Are you ready for this?” Mack is poised with the remote aimed at the television.
“I don’t know . . . am I?”
No reply from Mack. He simply presses play.
“They called him the Nightwatcher,” a female reporter’s voiceover begins, and a chill runs down Allison’s spine.
It’s not as if she hasn’t thought about him every day for the past ten years, about her own role in putting him behind bars, but still . . .
“In the waning hours of September 11, 2001, as the shell-shocked citizens of New York City were grappling with the horrific terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, a serial killer was launching a deadly spree. By the time the NYPD arrested handyman Jerry Thompson a few days later, four people, including Thompson’s own mother, lay dead.”
The mug shot gives way to footage of Jerry Thompson being led in handcuffs up the steps of the courthouse.
“During the trial, the defense team argued that he was mentally impaired due in part to a childhood brain injury inflicted by the defendant’s own twin sister, Jamie Thompson—who in a bizarre twist was killed in an apparent random mugging in December 1991, just days after she attacked her brother.”
The scene shifts to show a school portrait of an eighth-grade girl with pigtails, her crooked front teeth revealed by a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.
Allison knows the terrible story: how one night, Jamie Thompson snapped and attacked her brother with a cast-iron skillet. As the ambulance and police rushed to the scene, Jamie ran away—not seen again until her stabbed, mutilated body was found in an alleyway a few days later.
When Allison thinks about a girl that age trying to survive alone on the mean city streets . . . well, is it any wonder she didn’t?
One tragedy triggered another, and so the dominoes began to topple.
“The jury rejected the insanity defense,” the reporter continues, “convicting Thompson on four counts of second-degree murder.”
The scene has shifted again, showing footage of a handcuffed Jerry Thompson being led down the courthouse steps past a media mob.
Allison wasn’t there the day the verdict came in. She had done her part, testifying when she was called as a key witness, but she had no interest in reporting daily to the trial of her friend Kristina’s murderer.