Nightwatcher (21 page)

Marianne never wants to find herself in that position, ever.

She loves Rae . . . but she can live without her.

She goes into the bathroom, opens the small vented window there, then hunts through the medicine cabinet supplies she unpacked just this afternoon.

She’s out of Advil, but there’s a sample packet of Tylenol PM. Perfect—it’ll take care of her headache
and
her nerves. She swallows the two capsules with tap water from her cupped palm and goes straight back to bed.

She takes one last glance at the cruise photograph of her and Rae before she turns out the light.

Things will look brighter in the morning, she promises herself, closing her eyes and waiting for the sedative to do its thing as sirens wail on in the night.

I
n a midtown hotel room lit only by the blue light from the muted television, Vic dials a familiar phone number. He’s exhausted, and he only has a few hours before he has to head back out again, but his need to make this connection is as important as his need for sleep.

Ange Manzillo answers on the first ring with a breathless, “Hello?”

“Hey, it’s just me.”

“Vic?”

“Yeah. Sorry to call so late. I hope I didn’t wake you up.”

“Are you kidding? Who can sleep? We’ve got fighter planes buzzing over the house.”

“I know—I’m here.” He keeps an eye on the television, where a split screen shows footage of the burning towers from yesterday and a FEMA agent being interviewed live, plus several bullet point announcements and a news crawl along the bottom.

“You made it to New York, then?” Ange asks. “How did you get here?”

“I flew,” he says simply.

“But I thought the FAA—oh. Right.”

Right. She gets it. When you’re with the FBI and you’re investigating a terror attack, chances are, you’re not grounded with everyone else.

Ange lets out a heavy breath. “It’s really bad down there, Vic.”

“I know.”

“Did you see . . . ?”

“Yes.”

He saw.

He saw the gaping hole in the skyline from his window seat on the government plane, and wondered about all those doomed passengers yesterday—what they were thinking, feeling, fearing.

He saw the smoking wreckage up close, from the ground, and he thought about his friend O’Neill, who last spring might very well have been on the trail of the men who ultimately took aim with an airplane missile and murdered him.

He saw the ravaged faces of the rescue workers and the frightened faces of the people who live here. None was familiar and now, after two of the longest and loneliest days of his life, that’s what he craves more than sleep or food or a hot shower. He craves a familiar face.

“Is Rocco back?” he asks Ange hopefully.

“No. I haven’t seen him at all since yesterday afternoon. He was down on the pile all night and most of today—and then he had to go work a homicide. Can you believe that?”

“Believe what?” he murmurs, leaning closer to the screen to read the newly posted death toll estimate.

“Even now, people are killing each other in this city. You’d think that would be the last thing on anyone’s mind after what happened.”

You’d think . . .

Ah, but Vic knows better.

Vic knows that what happened on September 11 was the tipping point for a few unbalanced people who were already teetering on the brink of madness and violence.

He just hopes Rocky hunts down whoever committed this particular homicide before he can strike again.

W
ith a gasp, Allison sits straight up in bed, her heart pounding.

Not from a nightmare, though. She wasn’t asleep.

She’s been lying here for hours, trying to relax her mind and body enough to drift off. But just now, just as she finally felt herself beginning to doze, a thought barged into her head out of nowhere.

Just as she had the key to Kristina Haines’s apartment . . .

Kristina had the key to Allison’s.

How could she not have thought about that until now?

Now, in the middle of the night, when she’d convinced herself at last that she’s safe here, behind her locked door.

Allison gets out of bed and walks through the dark rooms to the door. She stares at it for a long time, long enough to imagine that she’s seeing the knob turning slowly, ever so slowly, from the other side.

That’s enough.

Tomorrow, she’ll have the locks changed.

Tonight . . . she won’t let fear rob her of any more sleep, but she won’t take any chances, either.

She wedges the back of a wooden dining chair under the doorknob.

Will that really work?

She has no idea. But in case it doesn’t, she goes into the kitchen, opens a drawer, and takes out a chef’s knife with a long blade.

This
works.

She carries it back into the bedroom and climbs into bed. When at last she falls asleep, her fist is clenched around the handle of the knife.

D
elirious with pain, bleeding from a vicious stab wound in her side, Marianne struggles for breath.

“Say it,” the guttural voice is insisting, somewhere above her. “Say it!”

“P . . . p . . . p . . .”

“Say it or you’ll die!”

Die . . . she’s going to die anyway. No matter what she says, no matter what she does . . . she knows she’s going to die. Here, on the floor beside her bed, wearing scanty lingerie she was forced to put on, part of a sick, twisted game.

She thought that if she just did what she was told, she would survive. Put on these clothes, light these candles; play this music, the CD Jerry had given her earlier . . .

“Do exactly what I tell you to do, and you’ll live.”

She believed that, at first. Now, frantic with fear and pain, she realizes there’s no way out of this alive.

“Pl-please . . .” She gasps, drowning in her own blood. “Noooo . . .”

Fear . . . Marianne went to bed thinking that she wouldn’t let it get the best of her. She would never be afraid to live alone, as her mother is.

Fear . . .

She thought she knew what that was.

Now she knows she had no idea.

“Say it!”

She can feel something cold and hard pushing against her cheek. Oh God. Is it the blade of the knife? Or is it a gun?

“I . . . I . . .” She struggles. Somehow, she’s got to get it out.

It’s the only chance she has.

She drags in a wet, shallow, agonizing breath, manages to choke out, “I’m . . . sorry . . .”

“Say the rest. Go on.”

I’m dying. I can’t . . .

“Say it! Now!” The cold, hard thing presses against her cheek.

“I . . . love . . . you . . . Jerry.”

Those words, ending on a gurgle of blood in her throat, are Marianne Apostolos’s last.

Chapter Nine

W
hen the alarm goes off on Thursday morning, Allison rolls over and hits the snooze button, same as she does every weekday at seven
A.M
. She’s about to doze off again for a few minutes, as usual, when she remembers.

Her eyes snap open.

The terror attack.

Kristina.

The knife.

Is this what it’s going to be like from now on? Will she spend the first few seconds of every morning in blissful oblivion before harsh reality hits her all over again?

It was like this after her mother died. But only for the first few days, when her brother came to stay with her in the house in Centerfield.

She would wake up in her own bed and she would think everything was normal—a relative description, in her world, anyway.

Then it would hit her, and she’d force herself to get up to face another long day of packing up her mother’s things and dealing with strangers who were obligated—professionally, morally, guiltily obligated—to help her. They only made things harder, all of them, regardless of their motives. She didn’t want anyone’s pity—not even her brother’s.

“You want to come back and live with me and Cindy-Lou?” Brett offered—reluctantly, she could tell. “I can ask her folks if it’s okay . . .”

“No, thanks. I want to finish school here,” Allison told him.

And the second she had her diploma, she wanted to get the hell out of there—not just Centerfield, but Nebraska, the Midwest.

So Brett signed some papers, and she went to live with a foster family on a farm just outside of town. Every morning before dawn, a rooster’s crow would jar her from a sound sleep, reverberating instant awareness about where she was—rather, where she
wasn’t
—and what she had lost.

That was hard.

Is this harder?

Maybe they’re a blessing—those first few misty moments of morning, when you’re allowed to forget what your life is really like today.

But then you remember and you suck it up and deal, the way you always have.

Allison sits up and pulls back the covers. The knife is there, on the mattress.

Great. She could have rolled over on it and cut herself in her sleep.

She leaves it there, gets out of bed, and goes over to the window. Looking down at the street, she notes that there are no longer police cars parked in front of the building.

What does that mean?

Is it over?

Did they arrest Kristina’s killer sometime in the night?

Was it Jerry?

The way he behaved in the laundry room . . .

And the way he furtively ducked out into the alley that night . . .

It had to be Jerry.

Not Mack . . .

No way.

Allison goes into the living room and takes the chair out from beneath the doorknob. For all she knows, Kristina’s killer
could
have tried to get in here with the key sometime in the night, and
could
have been stopped by the chair.

Somehow, though, Allison doubts it.

She starts a pot of coffee, then starts the computer, thinking she can find the names of a couple of locksmiths and call one this morning. As the brewing and the booting get underway, she showers and throws on a T-shirt and the same jeans she wore yesterday, the one pair of functional old Levi’s she keeps around for cleaning days and sick days.

Farm girl clothes, she used to call them, back in Nebraska. She used to wear black spandex and suede stilettos to school when everyone else was in jeans and boots—the kind of boots you wear to muck out stalls. Even the girls.

Allison vowed she would never go out in public looking like that.

Yesterday, she left the building in these tattered jeans, and she had on sneakers, no less, on the streets of Manhattan.

Yesterday, it didn’t seem to matter. Today, though . . . today will be different. Today, she needs to look like herself again, feel like herself again. That’s important.

People like to say that what’s on the outside doesn’t count, but they’re wrong, as far as Allison is concerned. It’s always best to look like you’ve got it together even when the world is falling apart around you and you’re falling apart inside. That way, at least you can pretend you’re okay, and people give you some space. If you feel like hell and you
look
like hell, people hover, trying to help.

Before her mother’s funeral seven years ago, one of the church ladies insisted on taking Allison shopping in Omaha for something “suitable” to wear to the service. The drive was interminable—the lady kept talking about how Allison had nothing to worry about, because God was going to save her.

Really? Is God going to give me my mom back—not my mom the way she was, but healthy and strong, wanting to live, wanting to take care of me . . . And, while he’s at it, is he going to give me a dad, too? Not my dad. A decent one. One who will stick around.

She didn’t say any of that to the church lady, of course. Her mother had taught her to be polite to her elders. Her manners always seemed to catch people off guard, though. Given the way she and Mom lived, they probably assumed she was a rude, rough-around-the-edges brat.

When the church lady walked Allison into Von Maur, the fancy department store, she loudly informed the saleswoman that “this little lady’s mama has just killed herself, isn’t it awful? She was on
drugs
.” That last word was stage-whispered, and delivered with a knowing, disgusted nod. “Poor little thing needs something respectable to wear to the funeral.”

The saleswoman, a glasses-on-a-chain, grandmotherly type whose name tag read Eileen, looked at Allison not with pity, but with sympathy. That was the first time she ever realized there was a tremendous difference between the two.

“Come with me,” Eileen said, and led her toward the dressing room.

The church lady started to follow, but Eileen told her the dressing room area was much too small.

When they got there, Allison saw that it wasn’t, and she wanted to hug Eileen. Especially when she starting bringing in clothes—armloads of clothes, beautiful clothes, far nicer than anything Allison had ever owned.

She picked out a black crepe Ralph Lauren dress.

Her mother would have loved to see her in it. She used to tell Allison about the beautiful clothes she’d had when she was growing up, before she got mixed up in trouble, got pregnant with Brett—not even sure who the father was—and her wealthy family disowned her.

The black dress was expensive. When the saleswoman rang it up, the church lady paled a bit beneath her rouge, but she handed over her credit card with a forced smile.

The dress is still hanging in the back of Allison’s closet, draped in dry cleaner’s plastic. It’s a classic style. She could wear it again, really—if she wanted to. She doesn’t. But she won’t get rid of it, either. It’s a reminder—oddly, not a sad one.

When Allison pulled that luxurious dress over her head that morning in the dressing room, she felt a glimmer of hope.

It’s only a dress
, she reminded herself, looking in the mirror, twirling back and forth and admiring the way the fabric swished around her legs.

And yet . . . that dress helped her to cope during that terrible time in her life. It helped more than anything else: more than the church lady’s chatter and the minister’s eulogy about a woman he’d never met, more than Brett’s gruff attempts to comfort her or the foster care system’s attempts to pick up the pieces of her life.