James Patterson - I, Michael Bennett

At every curve on that twisty rural road, I was sure that I was about to see her. I’d pull over, there’d be some yelling, some tears, but we’d fix it. I’d fix it somehow. The problem was, I didn’t see her. She wasn’t on the road five miles in each direction. I raced to the parking lot of the pizza parlor and then the bowling alley. I went in and asked the turbaned clerk at the 24-7 gas station if Mary Catherine had come in, but he just shook his head and went back to the cricket match he was watching on his laptop.

I even drove out to I-84 and went up and down it for over an hour, but it was fruitless.

I’d lost her, I thought, near tears as I stared into the roadside darkness. I’d finally done it. I’d finally gone and completely ruined everything.

I woke up the next morning on the porch just before dawn. I sat up, my back and neck stiff as plywood from falling asleep on the ancient wicker love seat. Head ringing from my hangover, I lifted my itchy arms to see that I’d been eaten alive by mosquitoes.

Then I remembered the night before, and I really felt bad.

I lurched back into the house. I was hoping that perhaps Mary Catherine had come home while I was asleep and that I’d find her fast asleep in her room. I crossed my fingers as I came through the living room. I even said a little prayer by her closed door, one of those childish if-you-give-me-this-one-God-I-promise-to-be-a-better-person specials. Then I cracked the door and dropped my head in despair.

God must have been off duty this morning, because Mary Catherine’s bed was completely empty. “What’s going on?” Seamus whispered, suddenly appearing in the hallway beside me in his robe and slippers.

Great, a priest, I thought. Just what I needed. I was going to need last rites when everyone found out I had driven Mary Catherine away.

I stared at Mary Catherine’s empty, made bed and then back at him, speechless.

“I heard the yelling last night, Mike. Something happened with you and MC? What is it?”

“Mary Catherine,” I said. “She’s, um, left.”

“What?” Seamus said in shock.

I shook my head.

Rather than wait for an explanation, Seamus put on the coffee and waited patiently.

It actually took two cups of joe and a couple of eggs over easy to give my full confession to the old priest.

“Well, you can’t blame the lass, can you?” he said, slathering butter across a piece of multigrain toast. “Running loose with wild women tends to irk the little lady at home.”

“The funny thing is, I wasn’t running loose with a wild woman,” I argued. “I was tempted, don’t get me wrong, Father. Sorely tempted, but I resisted. I could never do that to Mary Catherine.”

“You’re an idiot, Michael Sean Aloysius Bennett,” Seamus said. “How many Mary Catherines do you think are out there? Exactly how many good-looking, caring, strong females dumb enough to fall head over heels for the likes of you do you think presently exist? You string people along long enough, the string withers, then it breaks.”

“Don’t say that. Please don’t say that, Seamus,” I said, groaning. “I need to get her back. How can I get her back?”

Seamus just shook his head and pointed at the toast stack in front of me.

“Eat some carbs, son,” he said. “You’re going to need them for all the creative thinking you have to do.”

I was in the bathroom rubbing calamine lotion on my skeeter bites after my shower when my cell phone started ringing. I raced into my bedroom, thinking it was Mary Catherine, but of course it wasn’t. It was a number I didn’t know. Manhattan; 212. I answered it anyway.

“Hello?”

“This is Patricia Reese, Tara McLellan’s assistant. Is this Detective Michael Bennett?”

“Speaking,” I said with mock cheeriness.

“Detective, Ms. McLellan wanted me to let you know that it looks like your testimony is going to happen today, and we need you in court.”

I took the phone off my ear and just looked at it. Of course I had to go to work today. What was I thinking? That I could actually have a day off to repair my wrecked family life? How silly.

“Ten o’clock, Foley Square. Will you be there?” Tara’s personal assistant wanted to know.

“Sweetheart,” I said, “where else would I be?”

After I found a suit, I went to the powder room, where Seamus was shaving.

“This just in. I’m going to work.”

“Work? What about Mary Catherine?”

“I’m testifying today in the city on the Perrine case. You’ll have to be in charge of the brood for now.”

“Me?” Seamus said, putting down the razor. “Who’ll take care of me? I’m elderly.”

“Please, I’m dying here. Juliana and Jane know where everything is. Refer to them. That’s what I do when Mary Catherine isn’t around. Also, you need to be on the lookout for Mary Catherine. Please text me the second she comes back. If she comes back.”

“Ah, don’t be too worried,” Seamus said, dipping his razor into the sink before passing it down his pale cheek. “I’m sure she’s around here somewhere. I have a funny feeling she hasn’t just flat-out left the kids. You, maybe, but them? No way. We’ll find her, but you have to stop losing her.”

It was hurry-up-and-wait time when I arrived in the witness room at Foley Square that morning. I was growing more and more anxious until I got a chance to speak to the parents of the murdered Macy’s waiter, Scott Melekian, in the courthouse cafeteria during the lunch break.

The Melekians were retired restaurant owners from Bethesda, Maryland, and told me that their only child, Scott, had attended the U.S. Naval Academy before coming up to New York to fulfill his lifelong dream of playing sax for a living.

“He’d worked on cruise ships and sold some stuff on iTunes, but once he subbed for someone at The Phantom of the Opera, that was it,” the beefy dad, Albert, said. “Down in the pit with the stage lights and all the excitement, he’d found his destiny, he told us. He’d also finally gotten the call from the Local 802 of the musicians’ union to work on an upcoming musical. Can you imagine? He’d just given Macy’s his two-week notice. Then this bastard kills him.”

The round-faced mom, Allie Melekian, started crying.

“He used to play for the whole family every Christmas Eve. ‘O Holy Night’ and ‘Silent Night.’ We’d all be sitting around, smiling and crying our eyes out, it was so beautiful,” she said. “And whenever he’d come home, he’d always come down into the kitchen and play ‘You Are So Beautiful.’ I always thought it was a corny joke, but I know now that it wasn’t.”

The red-faced woman looked up at me, trying to gather her tears with her fingertips and failing.

“Did you ever think, Detective Bennett, that there would come a day in your life when you wanted to die? When you actually longed for it?”

I squeezed the woman’s hand.

“I know one thing, ma’am,” I said. “I know your son is watching us right now, and he couldn’t be more proud of you guys for coming here today to see that his killer never gets a chance to hurt anyone ever again.”

When we went back up after lunch, Ivan Vogel, the chief prosecutor of the narcotics unit in the U.S. attorney’s office, stood at the front of the small, windowless gray courtroom.

“The prosecution would like to call its first witness,” the short, stocky, former collegiate wrestling champ said. “We call Detective Michael Bennett to the stand.”

Mrs. Melekian’s words still rang in my ears as the court clerk asked me to tell the whole truth and nothing but. Then I lifted my hand off the Bible and turned and stared Manuel Perrine right in his pale blue killer’s eyes.