Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(87)

It’s obvious to Mack that both calls were placed by the same person—the murderer—and that the motive for the first call was to lure Nate out of the house, leaving Zoe alone and vulnerable.

And the motive for the second?

“He was trying to get me out of the house and over here,” he tells Cleary and Patterson, careful to keep the note of desperation out of his voice, as they take turns glancing at the phone. “It’s obvious.”

Neither man responds to that.

Mack’s fingers twitch, itching to hold something . . . his BlackBerry, or . . . a cigarette.

Shaken, he again reminds himself that he doesn’t even smoke anymore. How could he crave a cigarette?

Come on, is it any wonder? When was the last time you were under this much stress?

Unless . . .

He’s been eating at night, and not remembering a thing.

What if he’s been doing other things, too? Smoking?

But where would he even get cigarettes?

Could he have bought or bummed them, and forgotten that, too?

Cleary passes the BlackBerry back to Mack.

“Look,” Mack says, trying to keep his voice from quaking, trying not to think unsettling thoughts, “I know what it looks like, but I’m innocent, and I’ll do whatever you need me to do to prove it. Go ahead, check my fingerprints, my DNA, whatever you need.”

“Are you willing to provide a DNA sample?” Cleary asks immediately.

“Absolutely, and anything else you need.”

A few minutes later, left alone again while they arrange for the DNA testing, Mack finally exhales.

It won’t be long now. He just has to hang in there until they clear him and move on.

He only prays, with a growing sense of dread, that his family will be safe in the meantime, and that . . .

No. That’s impossible.

There is no way—absolutely no way—he could have done anything but walk, and perhaps eat, in his sleep.

No way . . .

Staring at herself in the master bathroom mirror as she blow-dries her hair, Randi sees that the rough night is evident in the anxious expression in her eyes and in the purplish valleys beneath them. She ordinarily doesn’t wear foundation on a weekend day when she’s just planning to stay at home, but on this dismal Sunday, she’s going to need it—and some under-eye cover cream, too.

She doesn’t have much time, though, to pull herself together. Greta is watching all three of Allison’s kids in the third floor playroom, and while the girls are no problem at all, J.J. is a handful. Poor baby has been up since the wee hours, when Randi summoned Allison with the news that Nate Jennings was looking for Mack.

Little J.J. wanted his mommy so desperately, straining to reach for her when she came back into the guest bedroom to change quickly before leaving with Ben. Ordinarily, she’d probably have given her beloved mama’s boy a quick cuddle, but she was so utterly discombobulated that she barely seemed to notice, letting Randi hang on to him. She’d gotten sick, she said, and Randi couldn’t tell whether it was because she wasn’t used to drinking vodka martinis—or because she was upset that Mack was gone.

Why the hell was he gone at that hour?

Randi still has no idea what, exactly, went on here in the night. All she knows is that she and Allison stayed up pretty late, talking, drinking.

Randi, who with her own small stature has a low tolerance for alcohol, was taken aback by all the confidences that came pouring out of an inebriated Allison. Some of what she said wasn’t the least bit surprising—like that she resents how much time Mack spends at the office these days.

“It sucks, being alone with the kids all the time,” Allison slurred.

“Don’t I know it,” Randi told her.

Allison delivered some bombshells as well. Like when she said she sometimes fantasizes about moving back to Nebraska, away from the cutthroat pressure of New York.

“You can’t go,” Randi remembers telling her, on the verge of the tears that come so easily when you’ve had several drinks. “What would I do without you? You’re like a sister to me.”

She doesn’t remember Allison’s reply—she doesn’t remember a lot of what was said, come to think of it—but she does remember hugging her and crying, the way you do in college when you’re drunk and prone not just to tears, but to emotional declarations about how much you love your friends.

Going to bed is a blur in her mind.

Then all hell broke loose at around three-thirty in the morning, and on the other side of town, Zoe Jennings was murdered.

When a traumatized Ben called her with the news, Randi simply couldn’t get her head around the idea that a woman so young and vibrant, a woman who just hours ago was talking and laughing right here under the Webers’ own roof, had met such a horrific end.

She wishes Ben would get back and fill in the details, but she hasn’t talked to him since around five-thirty. That was when she took a break from pacing the floor with a miserable J.J. and called her husband’s cell to make sure he was all right. He sounded harried and said he couldn’t talk.

“And my cell’s almost dead, so—”

“But Ben, I just—”

“I’ll turn it off for now to save the battery and call you back as soon as I can,” he promised.

He didn’t call back.