James Patterson - Second Honeymoon

Sarah put her hand on Martha’s shoulder, rubbing gently. “We understand, we really do,” she said.

“But Robbie didn’t,” said Martha. “I tried to explain it to him, but it’s like he wouldn’t even listen.”

“How long ago was this?” asked Sarah.

“The end of last year, right after Thanksgiving. We were supposed to get married on Christmas Eve,” she said. “When I broke it off he just went ballistic.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“No. But I was scared.” She paused, her voice dropping. “He owns guns.”

“Do you know what kind? Handguns? Rifles?”

“All of the above. His favorite was what he carried in the war. I forget the name, but it was one of those semiautomatic rifles.”

Sarah and I exchanged a quick glance. Bingo.

“So what kind of missions was Robert involved with in Afghanistan?” asked Sarah. “Did he ever say anything to you?”

Martha worked the handkerchief on her eyes again as she thought for a moment. “There was this one time,” she said. “He’d been drinking and, well, I don’t know how we got on the subject, but he started to tell me things.”

“What kinds of things?”

“It was sort of like he was bragging,” she said. “There was this group he got recruited for, some kind of special weapons unit. He called it the James Bond crew because they trained with all these new gadgets and stuff like that. Poisons, too.”

“Poisons?”

Double bingo.

“Yeah,” said Martha. “He once joked that I should be careful because he knew all these ways to kill me with certain chemicals. I didn’t think it was very funny.”

Sarah and I locked eyeballs again. Certainly Robert Macintyre had the means. But the motive was still not 100 percent clear.

The guy gets dumped a few weeks before his own wedding, so he decides to kill newlyweds. Fair enough. Or should I say crazy enough? Assuming he was suffering from PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, the bitter disappointment and heartbreak could easily cause him to snap. Violently.

But why kill just the Vows couples?

Were we looking for logic where there simply wasn’t any? Insane behavior has its own set of rules.

Patiently, methodically, Sarah pressed on.

“So you read the article in the paper this morning, Martha, and you obviously must have had your suspicions. But what makes you so sure it’s Robert?”

I was hurting for this girl as she wiped her eyes yet again. She felt so damn responsible.

“Robbie told me that if it couldn’t be us, it shouldn’t be anyone.”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” said Sarah.

Slowly, Martha looked at Detective Harris, then me, then back to Sarah. And that’s when she told us.

“The day I broke up with him was the same day we heard back from the New York Times, ” she said. “They wanted us to be a Vows couple.”

Book Five

Payback Is a Bitch

Chapter 95

A DOZEN OFFICERS, Detective Harris, Sarah, and me. As numbers go we were approaching a small army, certainly more than protocol when bringing in a guy for questioning. Then again, this wasn’t just any guy.

There was no hard proof, not a single witness, and no direct evidence linking Robert Macintyre to the Honeymoon Murderer. Everything was circumstantial. It all could’ve been a coincidence.

If so, I’d be the first to shake his hand and apologize.

“The only way he escapes alive back there is if he knows how to fly,” said Harris, returning to the front of Macintyre’s Brooklyn brownstone, where the rest of us were gathered. He’d just checked the rear of the building, along with two of the officers. Macintyre’s apartment was on the fifth floor, the top. “There’s a small courtyard back there but no fire escape.”

I turned to Sarah. “You ready?”

“Yeah,” she said.

The outside of Macintyre’s prewar building was definitely showing wear and tear. The stone was chipped and stained, and there were even a couple of cracked windows. I expected the same, if not worse, once we got inside.

Not so, though. It was clean, modern, and quite nice, actually. Brooklyn hip. You would’ve thought I’d have learned by now.

Things aren’t always as they appear.

We left one officer covering the foyer. The rest of us began climbing the stairs. By the fourth floor a couple of the officers—let’s just call them big-boned—were seriously cursing the absence of an elevator. About a hundred cops-and-doughnuts jokes came to mind. I kept them all to myself.

“There,” I said, pointing at Macintyre’s door when we reached the fifth floor. It was in the middle of the hallway. Apartment 5B.

Silently, Sarah took control of the choreography. She and Harris lined up on one side of the door, I lined up on the other. Fanning out behind us were the officers—two crouched, the rest standing. Guns drawn.

I knocked.

When we didn’t hear anything, I reached over and knocked again.

Still nothing.

It was Sarah’s hand that reached out across the door this time. She gripped the knob and shrugged. It was worth a shot.

Well, what do you know…

The good news? The door was open.

The bad news? The door was open.

The little man in my head in charge of waving the red flag suddenly got very busy.

What the hell were we walking into?

Chapter 96

IT WAS SO silent in the hallway the squeak of the hinges sounded like a jet taking off.

Slowly, the door opened. No one moved.

I counted to five seconds. Then ten. Finally, I called out. “Robert, are you in there?”

If he was, he wasn’t answering.

The nudge at my side was one of the officers handing me the telescopic mirror, or, as I liked to call it, the peekaboo. It sure beat sticking my head out and getting it blown off. Been there, and almost done that, at the cabin with Sarah. I wasn’t about to press my luck.

Angling the mirror around the corner of the door, I could see a narrow hallway in the apartment that had two openings off of it, one on each side, staggered. At the end of the hallway was what appeared to be a small living room. There was a couch, a flat-screen TV, a lamp next to a coffee table.

But no sign of Macintyre. No six-foot broad-shouldered guy with cropped reddish hair and an angled jaw, as he was described by Martha Cole.

I shook my head at Sarah, and she immediately resumed her choreography. She turned to Harris and the officers, flashing two fingers before pointing back to herself and me.

Translation: We’re going in two at a time. He and I will lead the way.

The girl certainly didn’t shy away from the action, did she?

Three…two…one…

Sarah and I peeled around the doorway, our Glocks out front, pointing down the hall. I pulled up before the kitchen; she stopped before the bathroom.

I motioned behind me for the next wave.

Two by two they came in, moving past us. I turned in to the kitchen while Sarah took the bathroom.

“Clear!” I yelled out.

I could hear Sarah yanking back a shower curtain. “Clear!” she announced.

“Clear!” we heard from the living room.

I returned to the hallway, meeting up with Sarah. The rest of the guys were ahead of us, including Harris. I was assuming there was one more room, the bedroom. I was also assuming that it would be more of the same. Clear.

Instead, we heard two officers yell out in unison. “Body!”

Huh?

Sarah and I turned the corner of the hallway, making a beeline from the living room into the bedroom. The officers were all standing around, staring at him in silence. It was as if he were on display, some type of sick and twisted piece of performance art. Call it The Dead Groom .