Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(93)

A mother and her children.

Jamie watches Allison tuck the photo into her overnight bag, then zip it closed.

Ah, yes, Allison, that’s a great idea. Take the picture with you. Take all the pictures with you.

After all . . . you’re going to need something to remember them by.

Gazing down at what’s left of Zoe Jennings, Rocky feels sick to his stomach.

Not because of the badly mutilated corpse—he’s all but immune to gruesome murder scenes after all these years—but because the son of a bitch got to her before Rocky got to him.

There I was paranoid about myself, worrying about Ange, and this poor innocent woman—

“Detective Manzillo?”

He looks up to see Jack Cleary striding into the room.

“I just spoke to your partner downstairs,” he tells Rocky. “He said I’d find you up here.”

Yeah, Murph hadn’t felt the same need to hang around the dead body . . . not when one of the local uniforms had popped into the room to say that they’d just tapped a Box O’ Joe from Dunkin’ Donuts somewhere outside.

“I’m gonna take a coffee break,” Murph decided. “Who knows, maybe there’s doughnuts, too. Or fancy pastries, with these Westchester guys.”

After Murph left the room, Rocky had placed a quick call to the hospital to see if there’d been any change since he last spoke to them.

“I just came on duty, Mr. Manzillo,” the nurse told him, “and I heard that you’re worried about some security issues. I don’t know anything about that—all I can tell you is that it looks like she had a peaceful night.”

Peaceful—he supposed that was good, as opposed to . . .

He looked at the body on the bed, knowing Zoe Jennings’s last minutes on this earth had been anything but peaceful.

But Ange—Ange, he doesn’t want to see peaceful. Ange, he wants sitting up, talking, walking, laughing, scolding him about his lousy diet.

“I expected to see you at the press conference I called yesterday morning about the case.” Cleary jars him back to the moment.

“Yeah, I was planning to be there but . . . I couldn’t make it. My wife is . . . she’s been sick. I needed to be with her.”

Rocky doesn’t miss the flicker of disapproval in Cleary’s blue eyes. Even then he expects the guy to say something—ask how his wife is, or express his regret that she’s been sick—but he says nothing at all.

Rocky glances down at the captain’s left hand and is surprised to see a wedding band. For all he knows, Cleary could be the best husband in the world—but somehow, Rocky doubts it. And somehow, that matters to him more than it should.

Cleary gets down to business, indicating the body on the bed. “Same signature as the Lewis case.”

Right. Multiple stab wounds, missing middle finger, iPod earbuds hanging from her ears. There are votive candles, too. And she’s wearing an ill-fitting lace teddy that Rocky is willing to bet came from another woman’s bureau drawer—probably Phyllis Lewis’s.

“Exactly the same signature?” he asks.

“Other than the fact that he got in through a window . . .”

Right. Rocky knows that. They found broken glass downstairs beneath one of the windows overlooking the backyard.

Clearly this time, the Nightwatcher didn’t have a key. But that didn’t stop him.

There was broken glass in Rocky’s house, too, beneath a window.

Had he come in looking for Ange?

If she hadn’t been in the hospital, would she be . . . ?

“And this time, we got the weapon. Kitchen knife with a red handle. He dropped it. No prints. But if you’re asking whether she was raped, Detective Manzillo,” Cleary says, “the answer is yes.”

Rocky nods. He’d figured as much.

“Cora Nowak wasn’t raped,” he tells Cleary, then clarifies, “she’s the wife of the CO over at Sullivan Correctional.”

“I heard about that. Look, I don’t know how it ties into this. All I know is we’ve got a semen sample here to match to the one we got at the Lewis place, and we’ve got a suspect who volunteered to provide us with his own DNA.”

“Volunteered? Who is it?”

“James MacKenna.”

Rocky’s eyes widen. “Why him?”

Cleary quickly explains about the phone call that had conveniently summoned Zoe Jennings’s husband from their bed in the middle of the night, Rocky hears the song he’d sung—well, tried to sing—just a few hours ago echoing in his head.

Mack the Knife.

Suddenly, it seems less a serenade to Ange and eerily like a harbinger of things to come.

But of course, that’s ridiculous. He’s no psychic. The song was just a coincidence. Besides . . .

“What about other prints? Not just on the knife, but . . .” The room has been dusted, of course.

“So far, it looks like he didn’t leave any.”

“So he wore gloves, but not a condom,” Rocky says, more to himself than to Cleary.

“Looks that way.”

“And Jennings is sure that it was MacKenna on the phone?”

“The call came from his number.”

“But the voice—he was sure?”

Cleary hesitates. “He says MacKenna was whispering, so it was hard to tell.”