Sleepwalker (4 page)

Allison and Mack became two more New Yorkers trying to pick up the pieces of shattered lives that September. Two more New Yorkers drawn together by unspeakable tragedy . . .

And somehow, we fell in love.

But not right away. No, that would have been wrong. Though Mack had confessed to Allison that his marriage to Carrie was crumbling before she died, he had a lot of grief and guilt to work through before he was ready to move on.

Earlier that year, Allison had endured a bitter breakup with Justin, a biologist, for whom she’d fallen hard. Bruised, regretting that she’d let someone into her life despite having promised herself that she never would, she wasn’t interested in another relationship. Ever.

She was there for Mack when he needed her; when he didn’t, she steered clear for her own sake as well as his. She knew she was attracted to him long before anything romantic happened between them, but it felt wrong.

Then one December night more than a year later, he kissed her—and suddenly, it felt right.

She tries not to look back at the tragic circumstances that brought them together.

Sometimes, though, she just can’t help it.

She stares at the televised photo of Sullivan Correctional Facility, where Jerry Thompson is serving a life sentence. Why is the media dredging all this up again? Is it just another dismal footnote on the heels of the wall-to-wall retrospective September 11 coverage?

Or is it something much more ominous?

How many nights has she lain awake—thanks, in part, to her husband’s chronic tossing and turning—and imagined what would happen if Jerry were to somehow escape from the maximum security prison? How many times has she imagined him creeping into her bedroom the way he did the others?

The great irony in all of this is that she never would have believed—even though she saw him at the murder scene that night—that he was capable of murder. She didn’t know him well, but her gut instinct told her he was innocent.

Then he confessed.

So much for my gut instinct.

That same
undependable
gut instinct had also made her wary of Mack in the beginning. She’d actually entertained the fleeting notion that he might have been having an affair with Kristina, and that he’d killed her in a fit of violent passion or passionate violence or . . .

God only knows what I was thinking. But I couldn’t have been more wrong about Mack.

Or about Jerry.

He’s a cold-blooded murderer, and now he’s back in the news. Why? Did he break out of prison?

But there’s a witness notification program. She would have been told immediately if Jerry were back out on the street.

Then again, no system is foolproof.

She looks at Mack, watching the screen intently, and asks, “What if—”

“Shh, wait, listen!”

Allison clamps her mouth shut.

“This past weekend marked ten years not just since the worst terror attack in our nation’s history,” the reporter is saying, “but ten years since Jerry Thompson’s murderous rampage through a scarred, burning city. Sometime in the wee hours of September 12, however—perhaps to exactly the hour, the very minute, that he murdered aspiring Broadway dancer Kristina Haines ten years ago—Jerry Thompson took his own life.”

Allison clasps a hand over her mouth, her blue eyes wide.

Again, she looks at Mack. This time, he meets her gaze, nods slowly.

“He’s dead.” For some reason, she finds it necessary to say it aloud.

“Yeah.” Mack’s expression is so relieved that she knows she wasn’t the only one who’s always worried that Jerry might escape one day and come after her again.

But they don’t have to worry anymore. Thank God. Thank God.

It’s over at last.

A
nd so it begins . . . again.

The need—the overpowering need, consuming every waking moment, every thought, every breath . . .

The need is back. And so is Jamie.

After all these years.

Ten, to be exact.

Funny how it happens. One morning, you wake up and everything is great, and then the next . . .

Wait a minute,
great
? Your life was never great.

All right, no, it wasn’t.

But it was manageable.

For almost ten years now you’ve been functioning, going to work, paying bills, taking meds, and Jamie was nowhere to be found. . .

Then, out of nowhere, came the news that Jerry was dead.

Dead, and you had to find out on television.

Well, what did you expect? No one even knows you exist—not in Jerry’s world, anyway.

If it weren’t for the media, you wouldn’t even have a clue what happened to Jerry after you left him there that night ten years ago, helpless and alone, with his mother’s stinking corpse in the bedroom and the cops closing in.

But what were you supposed to do? You tried to make him run, too. He wouldn’t budge. He wouldn’t go with you. You had no choice but to leave him there.

You didn’t even go far. Just took the train north to Albany—a safe distance, but close enough to keep tabs on the trial.

Serial killers are big news. The Nightwatcher trial was covered blow-by-blow in the newspapers, on the radio, on the TV news.

When it was over, Jerry went to prison for crimes he’d confessed to committing.

But you knew better.

You knew he wasn’t guilty—because you knew who
was
.

You knew that Jamie’s soul had taken over your body and killed those four people, including her own mother—hers and Jerry’s.

Yet you let Jerry take the fall.

But what were you supposed to do? Come forward and admit that you thought you might have done it? That someone else—your own dead daughter—was living inside of you, making you do terrible things? That you had let your own son take the fall?

No. No way. You’d have been hauled off to the loony bin for the rest of your life, just like your crazy old man was when you were a kid.

It’s just like that Old Testament quote, the one that’s resonated for so many years.

There’s not much to do when you’re stuck behind bars; sometimes, you read the Bible they give you. Sometimes, you actually learn something from it.

The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son.

Those words couldn’t be more true.

You paid for the sins of your father—and now your son is paying for yours.

After Jerry was convicted—well, it wasn’t easy to live with the anger. The guilt. The injustice of it all.

Things got a little crazy . . .

You
got a little crazy. A lot crazy—and it wasn’t the first time.

Suddenly, Jerry wasn’t the only one behind bars.

For me, though, it was just for aggravated assault. Nothing so bad.

No one had died . . . this time.

During that last jail sentence, Dr. Patricia Brady came into the picture. And at last, everything changed.

For the first time ever, someone was willing to listen. Dr. Brady was young, new at her job, so eager to help . . .

She didn’t know the whole story, of course.

She knew nothing about the twins, Jamie and Jerry, whose teenage father, Samuel Shields, walked away from their pregnant mother many years ago, denying that they were his.

Denial is so easy until you get your first glimpse of a fourteen-year-old child and see your own face looking back at you.

Dr. Brady knew the rest, though—about the childhood beatings by a mentally ill father, and all the years in and out of juvy and then jail, and one state pen after another. . . .

She said that all those bad things that happened could be partly due to illness. Not physical, but mental illness. She said it runs in families. If your father has it, chances are you might, too.

She said that when people are mentally ill, they can’t help what they do, because they’re only following the commands of the voices that never stop talking, never, never, never, never,
never
 . . .

Dr. Brady said the medicine would make the voices go away.

“All of them? Even Jamie’s?”

“Even Jamie’s,” Dr. Brady said, not realizing that Jamie had ever been real, an actual person who lived—and died. His own daughter.

She was my child, just like Jerry was. And I failed her when I walked away from their pregnant mother, just like I failed Jerry.

“I don’t want Jamie to go away, Dr. Brady. She’s a part of me.”

No. It was more than that.

Jamie is me, and I am Jamie . . .

But Dr. Brady couldn’t possibly understand.

She said, “Look, Sam, I know you don’t want Jamie to leave. But you have to trust me. You have to try it. Please. For me.”

She had such kind eyes. The kindest eyes anyone could ever have.

“All right. I’ll try it.”

Dr. Brady was right: it worked.

Jamie was gone, but somehow, that was okay. Everything was okay—especially when that final sentence had been served and handcuffs and inmate jumpsuits became relics of the past.

“You’ll never go to jail again, Sam,” Dr. Brady promised on that last day. “You’ve got your life back.”

Back? I never had a life, never thought I could.

A normal life, the kind of life other people—normal people—get to live. A life spent working hard and hoarding every spare cent, saving up to hire the best lawyer in the world to get Jerry out of prison . . .

And now . . .

It was all for nothing.

Jerry is gone. He never even realized he had a chance—that he hadn’t been abandoned by his father to waste away the rest of his life behind bars.

I was going to surprise him, one day soon. Go visit him. Remind him I promised to take care of him, and that I didn’t forget. I was going to get him out of there . . .

But it’s too late now.

Jerry took his own life before he could be rescued.

The news was devastating, and in its wake, the whole world came crashing down. Suddenly, it was all so pointless. Work, money, medicine . . .

For years, there had been regular visits to the Albany mental health clinic that wrote prescriptions and set up the obligatory follow-up appointments. But the doctors there weren’t nearly as engaging as Dr. Brady had been; not nearly as invested in their patients’ treatment. There was a lot of turnover at the clinic; you couldn’t really count on seeing the same shrink from one visit to the next.

For a long time, though, that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered in all those years except that the medicine helped. Now, with Jerry dead, nothing mattered at all.

The big blue capsules went swirling down the toilet in an impulsive flush, and Jamie came back shortly after, whispering, taunting, teasing, wanting to take over again.

Now Jamie is all I have.

She’s inside me again, and she’s becoming me again and I’m becoming her, and that’s okay. That’s how it used to be. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

And this time, I don’t need any medicine and I don’t need Dr. Brady to tell me that none of this is my fault.

No, because there are two other people who are to blame for destroying Jerry: Rocky Manzillo, the homicide detective who got him to confess, and the prosecution’s star witness, Allison Taylor—now Allison MacKenna.

She was supposed to die, too, ten years ago. Remember?

I know, Jamie. I know she was.

We were close, so incredibly close . . .

I know. We almost had her. But somehow, she got away.

At the trial, Allison told the court that she had seen Jerry furtively leaving the Hudson Street apartment building the night Kristina Haines died.

There should have been video evidence, too, from the building’s hallway surveillance cameras. But the footage for that particular time frame was mysteriously missing.

The prosecution implied that Jerry obviously took it and destroyed it in an effort to cover his tracks. After all, he had the keys to the office where the videotape was kept.

But Jerry wasn’t the only person in the world who had access.

I did, too.

No one, though, not even the defense, wasted much time considering that someone other than Jerry might have stolen the incriminating tape. Jerry had confessed; there was a witness; there were no other viable suspects; he had a clear motive for every one of those murders.

Well, for three of them, anyway.

Kristina Haines and Marianne Apostolos had spurned his advances.

Lenore Thompson, Jerry’s mother, had been cold and abusive.

As for the fourth victim . . . Hector Alveda was a street punk, found stabbed to death in a Hell’s Kitchen alleyway a few hours after Jerry’s arrest. It was only the timing, and the proximity to Jerry’s apartment building, that caused the cops to consider a possible link. Sure enough, Alveda’s blood turned up on the knife that was found in Jerry’s apartment.

There was plenty of speculation during the trial about how Jerry’s path might have crossed Hector’s.

But it didn’t. It crossed mine. Mine and Jamie’s.

“Please don’t hurt me. Take my wallet. Please. Just don’t hurt me . . .”

Those were Hector Alveda’s last words.

Ah, last words. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing them from quite a few people, and they’re always the same, begging for mercy . . .

It’s been a while, though.

Too long.

But now it’s back: the urge, the overpowering urge, to kill. For Jerry’s sake. To make things right.

Because the thought of an innocent soul like Jerry killing himself in a lonely prison cell when he never should have been there in the first place . . .

Someone has to pay.

There they are, pictured in newsprint photographs lain out on the table, spotlighted in a rectangular patch of bright sunlight that falls through the window above the sink.