Nightwatcher (2 page)

The transition occurred without warning, right before Vic’s incredulous eyes. Everything about the man changed—not just his demeanor, but his physical appearance and his voice. A doctor was called in, and attested that even biological characteristics like heart rate and vision had been altered. Calvin could see twenty-twenty. Edie was terribly nearsighted. Stunning.

It wasn’t that Calvin
believed
he was an entirely different person, a woman named Edie—he
was
Edie. Calvin had disappeared into some netherworld, and when he returned, he had no inkling of what had just happened, or even that time had gone by.

The experience would have convinced even a die-hard skeptic, and it chilled Vic to the bone.

Case closed, yes—but this one is going to give him nightmares for a long time to come.

Vic tidies his desk and finds himself thinking fondly of the old days at the bureau—and a colleague who was Annabelle Wyatt’s polar opposite.

John O’Neill became an agent around the same time Vic did. Their career paths, however, took them in different directions: Vic settled in with the BSU, while O’Neill went from Quantico to Chicago and back, then on to New York, where he eventually became chief of the counterterrorism unit. Unfortunately, his career with the bureau ended abruptly a few weeks ago amid a cloud of controversy following the theft—on his watch—of a briefcase containing sensitive documents.

When it happened, Vic was away. Feeling the sudden urge to reconnect, he searches through his desk for his friend’s new phone number, finds it, dials it. A secretary and then an assistant field the call, and finally, John comes on the line.

“Hey, O’Neill,” Vic says, “I just got back from Chicago and I’ve been thinking about you.”

“Shattuck! How the hell are you? Happy birthday. Sorry I couldn’t make it Saturday night.”

“Yeah, well . . . I’m sure you have a good excuse.”

“Valerie dragged me to another wedding. You know how that goes.”

“Yeah, yeah . . . how’s the new job?”

“Cushy,” quips O’Neill, now chief of security at the World Trade Center in New York City. “How’s the big 5–0?”

“Not cushy. You’ll find out soon enough, won’t you?”

“February. Don’t remind me.”

Vic shakes his head, well aware that turning fifty, after everything O’Neill has dealt with in recent months, will be a mere blip.

They chat for a few minutes, catching up, before O’Neill says, “Listen, I’ve got to get going. Someone’s waiting for me.”

“Business or pleasure?”

“My business is always a pleasure, Vic. Don’t you know that by now?”

“Where are you off to tonight?”

“I’m having drinks with Bob Tucker at Windows on the World to talk about security for this place, and it’s a Monday night, so . . .”

“Elaine’s.” Vic is well aware of his friend’s long-standing tradition.

“Right. How about you?”

“It’s a Monday night, so—”

“Football.”

“Yeah. I’ve got a date with the couch and remote. Giants are opening their season—and the Yankees are playing the Red Sox, too. Clemens is pitching. Looks like I’ll be channel surfing.”

“I wouldn’t get too excited about that baseball game if I were you, Vic. It’s like a monsoon here.”

A rained out Yankees-Red Sox game on one of Vic’s rare nights at home in front of the TV would be a damned shame. Especially since he made a friendly little wager with Rocky Manzillo, his lifelong friend, who had made the trip down from New York this weekend for Vic’s birthday dinner.

Always a guy who liked to rock the boat, Rocky is also a lifelong Red Sox fan, despite having grown up in Yankees territory. He still lives there, too—he’s a detective with the NYPD.

In the grand scheme of Vic Shattuck’s life, old pals and baseball rivalries and homemade macaroni casseroles probably matter more than they should. He’s rarely around to enjoy simple pleasures. When he is, they help him forget that somewhere out there, a looming stressor is going to catapult yet another predator from the shadows to wreak violent havoc on innocent lives.

September 10, 2001

New York City

6:40
P.M.

“H
ey, watch where you’re going!”

Unfazed by the disgruntled young punk, Jamie continues shoving through the sea of pedestrians, baby carriages, and umbrellas, trying to make it to the corner before the light changes.

Around the slow-moving elderly couple, the dog on a leash, a couple of puddle-splashing kids in bright yellow slickers and rubber boots . . .

Failing to make the light, Jamie silently curses them all. Or maybe not silently, because a prim-looking woman flashes a disapproving look. Hand coiled into a fist, Jamie stands waiting in the rain, watching endless traffic zip past.

The subway would have been the best way to go, but there were track delays. And God knows you can’t get a stinking cab in Manhattan in weather like this.

Why does everything have to be such a struggle here?

Everything, every day.

A few feet away, a passing SUV blasts its deafening horn.

Noise . . .

Traffic . . .

People . . .

How much more can I take?

Jamie rakes a hand through drenched hair and fights the reckless urge to cross against the light.

That’s what it’s been about lately. Reckless urges. Day in, day out.

For so long, I’ve been restrained by others; now that I’m free, I have to constantly restrain myself? It’s so unfair.

Why can’t I just cross the damned street and go where I need to go?

Why can’t I just do whatever the hell I feel like doing? I’ve earned it, haven’t I?

Jamie steps off the curb and hears someone call, “Hey, look out!” just before a monstrous double city bus blows past, within arm’s reach.

“Geez, close call.”

Jamie doesn’t acknowledge the bystander’s voice; doesn’t move, just stands staring into the streaming gutter.

It would be running red with blood if you got hit.

Or if someone else did.

It would be so easy to turn around, pick out some random stranger, and with a quick, hard shove, end that person’s life. Jamie could do that. It would happen so unexpectedly no one would be able to stop it.

Jamie can feel all those strangers standing there, close enough to touch.

Which of them would you choose?

The prune-faced, disapproving biddy?

One of the splashing kids?

The elderly woman, or her husband?

Just imagine the victim, the chosen one, crying out in surprise, helplessly falling, getting slammed by several tons of speeding steel and dying right there in the gutter.

Yes, blood in the gutter.

Eyes closed, Jamie can see it clearly—so much blood at first, thick and red right here where the accident will happen. But then the gutter water will sweep it along, thin it out as it merges with wide, deep puddles and with falling rain, spread it in rivulets that will reach like fingers down alleys and streets . . .

Imagine all the horror-struck onlookers, the traumatized driver of the death car, the useless medics who will rush to the scene and find that there’s nothing they can do . . .

Nothing anyone can do.

And somewhere, later, phones will ring as family members and friends get the dreaded call.

Just think of all the people who will be touched—tainted—by the blood in the street, by that one simple act.

I can do that.

I can choose someone to die.

I’ve done it before—twice
.

Ah, but not really. Technically, Jamie didn’t do the choosing. Both victims—the first ten years ago, the second, maybe ten days ago—had done the choosing; they’d chosen to commit the heinous acts that had sealed their own fates. Jamie merely saw that they got what they deserved.

This time, though, it would have to be different. It would have to be a stranger.

Would it be as satisfying to snuff out a life that has no real meaning in your own?

Would it be even better?

Would it—

Someone jostles Jamie from behind.

The throng is pressing forward. The traffic has stopped moving past; the light has changed.

Jamie crosses the street, hand still clenched into an angry fist.

Chapter One

September 10, 2001

New York City

7:19
P.M.

A
llison Taylor has lived in Manhattan for three years now.

That’s long enough to know that the odds are stacked against finding a taxi at the rainy tail end of rush hour—especially here, a stone’s throw from the Bryant Park tents in the midst of Fashion Week.

Yet she perches beneath a soggy umbrella on the curb at the corner of Forty-second and Fifth, searching the sea of oncoming yellow cabs, hoping to find an on-duty/unoccupied dome light.

Unlikely, yes.

But
impossible
? The word is overused, in her opinion. If she weren’t the kind of woman who stubbornly challenges anything others might deem impossible, then she wouldn’t be here in New York in the first place.

How many people back in her tiny Midwestern hometown told her it would be impossible for a girl like her to merely survive the big, cruel city, let alone succeed in the glamorous, cutthroat fashion publishing industry?

A girl like her . . .

Impoverished, from a broken home with a suicidal drug addict for a mother. A girl who never had a chance—but took one anyway.

And just look at me now.

After putting herself through the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and working her way from an unpaid postcollege internship at Condé Nast on up through the editorial ranks at
7th Avenue
magazine, Allison finally loves her life—cab shortages, rainy days, and all.

Sometimes, she allows herself to fantasize about going back to Centerfield to show them all how wrong they were. The neighbors, the teachers, the pursed-lipped church ladies, the mean girls at school and their meaner mothers—everyone who ever looked at her with scorn or even pity; everyone who ever whispered behind her back.

They didn’t understand about Mom—about how much she loved Allison, how hard she tried, when she wasn’t high, to be a good mother. Only the one girl Allison considered a true friend, her next-door neighbor Tammy Connolly, seemed to understand. She, too, had a single mom for whom the townspeople had disdain. Tammy’s mother was a brassy blonde whose skirts were too short, whose perfume was too strong, whose voice was too loud.

Tammy had her own cross to bear, as the church ladies would say. Everyone did. Mom was Allison’s—hers alone—and she dealt with it pretty much single-handedly until the day it ceased to exist.

But going back to Centerfield—even to have the last laugh—would mean facing memories. And who needs those?

“Memories are good for nothin’,” Mom used to say, after Allison’s father left them. “It’s better to just forget about all the things you can’t change.”

True—but Mom couldn’t seem to change what was happening to them in the present—or what the future might hold.

“Weakness is my weakness,” Brenda once told a drug counselor. Allison overheard, and those pathetic words made her furious, even then.

Now Mom, too, is in the past.

Yes. Always better to forget.

Anyway, even if Allison wanted to revisit Centerfield, the town is truly the middle of nowhere: a good thirty miles from the nearest dive motel and at least three or four times as far from any semi-decent hotel.

Sometimes, though, she pictures herself doing it: flying to Omaha, renting a car, driving out across miles of nothing to . . .

More nothing.

Her one friend, Tammy, moved away long before Mom died seven years ago, and of course, Dad had left years before that, when she was nine.

Allison remembers the morning she woke up and went running to the kitchen to tell her mother that she’d dreamed she had a sister. She was certain it meant that her mom was going to have another baby.

But that couldn’t have been farther from the truth. In the kitchen, she found the note her father had left.

Can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry. Good-bye.

God only knows where he wound up. Allison’s only sibling, her half brother, Brett, wanted to find him for her sake after Mom died.

“Well, if you do, I don’t want to hear about it. I never want to hear his name again,” she said when her brother brought it up at the funeral.

It was the same thing her mother had told her after her father left. Mom considered Allison’s deadbeat dad good for nothin’—just like memories. True as that might have been, Allison couldn’t stand the way the townspeople whispered about her father running off.

The best thing about living in New York is the live-and-let-live attitude. Everyone is free to do his or her own thing; no one judges or even pays much attention to anyone else. For Allison, after eighteen years of small-town living and a couple more in college housing, anonymity is a beautiful thing. Certainly well worth every moment of urban inconvenience.

She surveys the traffic-clogged avenue through a veil of drenching rain, thinking she should probably just take the subway down to the Marc Jacobs show at the Pier. It’s cheaper, arguably faster, and more reliable than finding a cab.

But she’s wearing a brand-new pair of Gallianos, and her feet—after four straight days of runway shows and parties—are killing her. No, she doesn’t feel up to walking to Grand Central and then through the tunnels at Union Square to transfer to the crosstown line, much less negotiating all those station stairs on both ends.

Not that she much likes standing here in the deluge, vainly waiting for a cab, but . . .

Lesser of the evils, right?

Maybe not. She jumps back as a passing panel truck sends a wave of gray-brown gutter water over the curb.