James Patterson - Second Honeymoon

“What did she have to do with anything?” I asked.

“You mean what did he have to do with anything,” he said. “He was a male nurse.”

“Is that the one Ned killed?” asked Sarah.

“Yes. His nickname was Ace.”

I shrugged. “So?”

Drummond leaned back in the armchair. “So now ask me what his real name was.”

Chapter 79

SCORES OF MILES of driving, thousands of miles in the air, multiple time zones, and all within twenty-four hours, thanks to a red-eye flight from LAX that we just made with only seconds to spare.

Sarah and I were back in New York and in my car, pulling out of the short-term parking lot at Kennedy Airport.

“Do you smell that?” I asked, fidgeting with the vent. “What’s that smell?”

Sarah laughed. “I think it’s us.”

I sniffed down at my shirt, then recoiled. “Wow—maybe it’s just me. Sorry about that.”

“It’s us, John. Now we have something else in common. We stink to high heaven.”

Showers were in our near future, that much we knew. The agreement before we landed was that we’d drive to my house in Riverside and clean up. The fact that Sarah’s rental car was there made the decision a no-brainer.

The disagreement, however, was about what would happen next.

For the umpteenth time I argued that we should camp out at my house and simply wait for Ned Sinclair to show up.

“It’s not too late to change your mind,” I said as we pulled onto the Van Wyck Expressway, heading toward Connecticut.

And for the umpteenth time she shut me down.

“It’s not my call,” she said. “And speaking of calls, if I don’t make one soon to my boss, I’m going to be in big trouble. Seriously.”

I was pretty familiar with Dan Driesen, her boss, albeit only by reputation—a stellar reputation, I might add.

Quick, name a serial killer active within the last ten years who’s still at large.

Enough said.

“What are you going to tell him?” I asked.

“That it took a while to track you down, but I finally found you,” she said.

“Then what happens?”

“Like I said, you go somewhere safe. And that won’t be your house in Connecticut.”

“The Bureau Hotel, huh?”

“Now with free HBO,” she said jokingly.

“Very funny. Well, kind of funny. No, actually, not funny at all.”

The Bureau Hotel was what agents called the various safe houses across the country that the FBI used. They were mainly for trial witnesses who needed protection, but sometimes, as in my case, an agent was forced to check in.

“Seriously, though, you should decide what you want to do about your boys,” she said.

“I already have,” I said. “If someone’s trying to kill me, I hardly want them at my side, no matter where I’m being stashed.”

“Should they still be at camp, though?”

“Yes—but they’re about to get two new counselors, if you know what I mean.”

She did. “I’ll make the arrangements from your house,” she said.

I thought for a moment about Director Barliss and his perfectly aligned pushpins up at Camp Wilderlocke. I tried to imagine someone telling him that he was about to have two young FBI agents joining his staff for a bit. Other than that, though, there wasn’t much to smile about.

If only to take my mind off everything, I turned on the radio to get the traffic report for the approaching Whitestone Bridge. The station was 1010 WINS—“All news, all the time.”

Amazingly, my timing couldn’t have been any better.

If I didn’t kill us first, that is.

“Look out!” yelled Sarah.

I whipped my head up from the radio to see the back of a Poland Spring delivery truck filling up my entire windshield. Had I been a nanosecond later on the brakes, we would’ve rear-ended it for sure. Boom, smash, air bag city.

And all I could say to her, pointing at the radio, was, “Did you hear that?”

Chapter 80

I CRANKED UP the volume, all the way to eleven. It was a news story about the murder of a young couple.

Killed on their honeymoon.

First came Ethan and Abigail Breslow, then Scott and Annabelle Pierce. So much for coincidences.

Two’s company; three’s a serial killer.

My head was spinning. Sarah and I both officially had one now. A his-and-hers set, like washcloths—that is, if washcloths went around murdering people.

“Reporting from Long Island is Bianca Turner with more on this story…”

Parker and Samantha Keller were avid sailors, leaving Southampton two Sundays ago aboard their forty-two-foot schooner, heading for Saint Barts. On their way back they’d spent a night docked in Bermuda, meeting up with friends and shopping for additional supplies. An hour out of port the following morning, the boat apparently suffered some type of explosion, killing them both.

“At this time, the Coast Guard has no comment on the nature of the explosion or what might have caused it.”

“Try who might have caused it,” I said, only to be shushed by Sarah, who wanted to hear the rest.

“Friends said Parker and Samantha Keller had delayed their honeymoon until after their law school graduations. They were married this past April in Sag Harbor, New York.”

Sarah suddenly screamed so loud I nearly rear-ended another truck. “Oh, my God, that’s the couple!”

“What couple?”

“I read about them in the Times ,” she said. “I can’t believe it! They were the Vows couple.”

She’d lost me after “I can’t believe it.” I looked at her blankly.

“The Vows couple,” she repeated. “Every week in the wedding section they highlight one couple and tell an in-depth story of how they first met and stuff like that. You’ve never seen it?”

I wanted to explain that until they started printing the sports section in the middle of the wedding section, the odds were pretty slim that I was ever going to come across any “Vows couple.”

Instead, I simply shook my head. “No. I’ve never seen it,” I said.

By then, though, Sarah wasn’t even looking at me. She had her head buried in her BlackBerry.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Checking something,” she answered. “A hunch.”

With one eye on the road, my other eye was watching her thumbs jab away at the phone. She was typing something. Furiously.

Then she stopped. She was staring at the screen, waiting.

Waiting some more.

“C’mon…c’mon,” she muttered impatiently. Finally, she slapped the dashboard. “I knew it!”

There was something in her voice, a sense that whatever plan we had was all about to change.

“I’m not even going to get my shower, am I?” I asked.

“Not quite yet,” she said, looking over her shoulder. She was checking out the traffic heading in the other direction.

“Okay, lay it on me. Where are you taking us?”

“Manhattan,” she answered. “We need to get off at the next exit and turn around.”

I glanced over at Sarah, smiling at the way her hunch—whatever it might be—was like a shot of pure adrenaline. Not just to her, but to the both of us.

I grabbed the wheel at twelve o’clock, then spun it like a top as we jumped the median into the southbound lanes. Then I straightened out the wheel and hit the gas like I was stomping out a fire.

“So where in Manhattan would you like to go?” I asked calmly.

Chapter 81

WITH BARELY ONE foot in the door, you couldn’t just hear the hum of the New York Times building. You could feel it.

Sarah and I walked quickly through the cavernous lobby, looking at the hundreds of small screens hanging from wires that were showcasing snippets of the news, the type flipping and scrolling in a seemingly synchronized dance.