James Patterson - Second Honeymoon

“Agent Brubaker? Lee McConnell,” he said. “Talk about timing. I was just about to call you back.”

Yeah, right. And I was just about to elope with Johnny Depp.

Sarah riffled through her notes, checking for the name she’d scribbled down. McConnell’s patient. Or former patient, as it were.

She found it.

“So what can you tell me about Ned Sinclair?” she asked.

Chapter 64

THERE WAS A hitch in McConnell’s voice. Not a stutter or stammer but, weirdly, something more like a swallow, a sort of dyspeptic reflex, as if the pastrami-on-rye sandwich he had for lunch was repeating on him. The result was that he randomly accentuated words for no reason.

Talk about a Monty Python skit, she thought. Paging John Cleese…

“Ned Sinclair, huh? What… would …you like to know about him?” he asked.

Sarah suppressed a laugh and asked her first question, a no-brainer. “What’s his race? Is he white, black, Hispanic?”

If Ned Sinclair wasn’t white, this was going to be a very short conversation.

“He’s white,” said McConnell. “I’m afraid I don’t have his file… in …front of me, so I can’t give you height and weight, or even exactly how old he is.”

“Can you ballpark his age?”

“I’d say thirtyish, maybe a bit older. I didn’t have much interaction with him; in fact, no one here… really …did. Ned Sinclair barely spoke.”

The age, thirtyish, was a possible match, but the part about his not speaking couldn’t be any more different from the guy back at Canteena’s. Jared Sullivan was definitely a talker, a very smooth talker.

“What else can you tell me about him?” she asked.

“The guy you’d probably want to speak with is the admitting psychiatrist. Ned was his patient for some time, but I don’t know his name offhand,” he said. “Let me actually… grab …the file. Hold on a second, okay?”

Before Sarah could even respond, she was listening to a trombone-heavy Muzak version of the Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road.” Not an appropriate song title when you’ve been put on hold.

If only to kill a few seconds, she quickly checked her e-mails. Make that singular. There was only one new message since she last checked after leaving the Oval Office. An invitation to the next state dinner? A seat at the president’s table?

Sarah smiled. A girl could always dream…

She looked at the sender’s name. Who? She didn’t recognize it at first. Then it came to her.

Mark Campbell. From her call log.

He was the sheriff from Winnemucca, Nevada, the town where the first John O’Hara victim lived.

Sarah’s eyes slid over to the subject heading and immediately lit up.

FOUND SOMETHING, it read.

Chapter 65

SARAH QUICKLY CLICKED on the e-mail, the promise of “found something” edging her closer to the screen. The message couldn’t load fast enough.

Meanwhile, she was still on hold with McConnell. Where did he go for Ned Sinclair’s file? Cleveland?

She’d originally spoken to Sheriff Campbell in Winnemucca before heading out to Park City. The thinking was simple. If the John O’Hara Killer had indeed left behind that copy of Ulysses , perhaps he’d also left something behind with his first victim. A clue that hadn’t been found yet.

She wanted Campbell to reexamine the crime scene, every last inch of it, paying particular attention to the victim himself.

“Check all the clothing again,” she’d told him. “Socks, underwear…everything.”

Sarah knew she was being a pain in the ass, but it had to be done, simple as that. Sometimes the only way to catch a break is to chase down the long shots.

Campbell’s e-mail popped open at the exact moment McConnell got back on the line. Figured.

“Sorry about that,” said McConnell. “Couldn’t find it at first, but I’ve got it now.”

Curiously, he didn’t seem to be emphasizing random words in his sentences anymore, or maybe that was because Sarah was barely listening to him. Her ears had given way to her eyes as she began reading Campbell’s message.

“You were right,” it began.

Campbell described how his men had overlooked the cuffed hems that the first John O’Hara victim had on his khaki slacks. Peeling them back, the sheriff found a small, crumpled piece of paper, a note that was jammed into the fold of the right cuff, as if it were a prayer stuffed into the Western Wall. On it were two handwritten lines.

Sleep now little children who hear the monster roar.

Make me a witness of what he has in store.

Sarah’s first thought was that it came from an old children’s book, albeit one she didn’t know. She read the lines again. Maybe it was from a poem. Or maybe it wasn’t from anything—except the killer’s own mind.

She brought up Google while McConnell continued talking. He was reciting the highlights from Ned Sinclair’s file in bullet-point fashion. “Mathematics PhD…professor at UCLA…fired nearly four years ago…”

Sarah typed in the lines from the e-mail.

McConnell droned on. “Diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder…unnatural fixation with sibling…Nora, his sister…”

“Damn!” Sarah muttered under her breath as she looked at her screen.

The search results—there were thousands of them. She forgot to put the lines in quotation marks. Quickly, she added them, and—bingo—thousands of results turned into one.

It was a website for a certain musical group. The name said it all.

Sarah suddenly jumped up from her chair, practically lunging for her shoulder bag, which was on the floor behind her. The DVD of You’ve Got Mail was in the side pocket. She flipped it over to the back, scanning the credits. She’d read the name, knew it well, but wanted to make sure.

Back at her desk she rifled through her notes on Ulysses . She was positive she’d written it down, the woman James Joyce married.

“What did you say Ned’s sister’s name was again?” she asked McConnell, interrupting him.

His dyspeptic swallow and punching of random words had returned. But there was nothing random about this one word. It was dead-on.

“His sister’s name was…Nora,” he said.

Chapter 66

THE CALLER ID on my cell said QUEENS MED. EXAM.

I put down my glass of OJ, muted the small television in my kitchen, and answered “Hello?” before the second ring.

“Agent O’Hara, this is Dr. Papenziekas,” he said.

The deputy medical examiner was getting back to me in the morning, as promised. Bright and early, too.

“What’s your verdict on our airport couple?” I asked. “You have anything good for me?”

“You were right,” he said.

“Cyclosarin?”

“Lots of it.”

“Are you sure?”

I’d expected the doctor with the Noo Yawk attitude to fire back with a smartass retort like, “Hey, numbnuts, feel free to get a second opinion if you want!” But the ground had shifted a bit. I was no longer just some random guy with a crazy hunch. I was clearly on to something.

So the attitude was gone. Sidelined. “Yes, I’m sure it’s cyclosarin,” he said. “I take it you’ve had some experience with poisoning?”

“Yes,” I answered. Firsthand, no less. Let’s just say I’m very careful who cooks for me nowadays.

“Of course, this isn’t just any poison,” he said, his voice trailing off.

He was hinting around now, trying to see what, if anything, I might tell him. I could practically read his mind, what he was thinking. A busy New York airport. A deadly substance unleashed by terrorists.

But I wasn’t about to elaborate, if for no other reason than I still didn’t know what to make of all this. Two dead newlywed couples, both victims of an exotic poison. It wasn’t officially a pattern, but—call me Einstein—it was certainly more than a coincidence.