James Patterson - Second Honeymoon

“The wedding dress,” he said. “The color—was it white?”

“Yeah,” the officer came back with a touch of New York sarcasm. “The bride wore white.”

What an image. The more I tried to picture it, the more everything else seemed to click. The whole picture.

“Christ, she was telling the truth, wasn’t she? She just flipped it around,” I said.

“What do you mean?” asked Harris.

“Martha Cole didn’t break off the engagement, Macintyre did,” said Sarah, right in step with me. “It’s her motive, not his.”

Sarah reached for her cell.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“All dressed up and nowhere to go? I doubt it,” she said.

I’d been around Sarah long enough now to know she was following a hunch. It was the look on her face, the way she bit her lower lip. Problem was, I wasn’t following along with her.

Until she was done dialing.

“Emily LaSalle, please,” she said. “Tell her it’s Agent Brubaker and it’s urgent.”

Chapter 100

IT TOOK LASALLE only a few strokes on the keyboard in her New York Times office to come up with what we needed. The woman’s files were as meticulously kept as everything else about her.

Sarah put her on speakerphone just in time for all of us to hear.

“Got it,” LaSalle announced.

It was the Vows article that never was. The marriage of Martha Cole to Robert Macintyre.

The bulk of the file was the submission Cole had originally made to the wedding section of the paper. The rest were notes made by one of LaSalle’s editors, whose job it was to verify the information. Fact-checking was critical, we’d learned, whether to catch actual couples in the act of embellishing their bona fides or to identify the numerous bogus announcements routinely submitted by pranksters—e.g., the wedding of Ben Dover to Ivana Humpalot.

“What am I looking for?” asked LaSalle.

“Only one thing,” said Sarah. “Does it say where Cole and Macintyre were planning to get married?”

“You mean the town?”

“No. The actual church.”

“Let me check.”

Sarah bit her lower lip again in full hunch mode while I watched Harris and the other officers exchange more looks, as if to say, Wow—could this get any more twisted than it already is?

My money was on yes.

LaSalle quickly scanned the file on Cole and Macintyre, reading aloud certain bits and pieces as if they were bullets in a PowerPoint presentation.

“Brooklyn residents…met in the army…both sergeants…”

Harris blinked. “Wait: they were both in the army?”

“Figures,” I muttered.

Learning how to shoot a sniper rifle with deadly accuracy wasn’t exactly something you could do in a night course at the New School. But where the hell did Cole learn how to lie so effectively? I would’ve been more embarrassed over being duped if she hadn’t been so damn good at it.

“Okay, here we go,” said LaSalle. “It says here it was supposed to be at Saint Alexander’s in Brooklyn.”

“Shit,” muttered Harris. “Do you think—”

“Emily, is there an address?” asked Sarah.

“No, just the name.”

“I know where that church is,” came a voice.

I turned to see one of the cops stepping forward. He had a face that all but screamed rookie.

“Is it close by?” I asked.

“Maybe twenty blocks,” he said. “My sister belongs there.”

Suddenly, our best-case scenario was potentially our worst. If Sarah’s hunch was right, and that’s where Cole was heading…what was she planning to do?

Only thing for sure was that we needed to warn whoever might be at the church. I hoped it was no one.

So much for hoping.

Again, Harris’s radio crackled. So, too, did every other radio in the group. A chorus of quick static followed by the voice of a female dispatcher.

It was a 417, she announced. A person with a gun. “Possible hostage situation,” she tacked on.

By the time she gave the address, Sarah and I and everyone else were already halfway out the building, racing to every parked patrol car.

Chapter 101

A DOZEN OR more police cruisers doing sixty with sirens blaring have a funny way of unclogging traffic. Harris drove; Sarah and I held on. We covered the twenty blocks in a couple of minutes flat.

At first glance, the scene outside Saint Alexander’s was the epitome of irony. It looked like a wedding, of all things—or the end of one, at least. A gathering of well-wishers was milling about on the steps of the church as if at any second the bride and groom would come marching out through the doors, arm in arm.

“Jesus, we’ve got to clear everyone out of here,” I said as Harris skidded to a stop along the curb. We all knew what happened to the last building Cole had set her sights on.

The people outside were an easy fix: that was simple crowd control. It was the ones inside the church who were the real problem. The words of the dispatcher were still fresh in my head. Possible hostage situation.

I stepped out of Harris’s unmarked Explorer, nearly getting myself run over by another arriving patrol car. They were everywhere now, coming in droves.

Every cop converged on the sidewalk while Harris, Sarah, and I started up the steps of the church. I was about to shout to get the crowd’s attention when a young priest with close-cropped red hair and freckles stepped forward.

“Are you one of the FBI agents?” he asked me.

Strange first question. How did he know that?

“Yes. I’m Agent O’Hara.”

“Oh, good,” he said. “Thank God you’re here.”

“Were you inside?” I asked the priest.

“We all were, but she let us go,” he answered. He immediately corrected himself. “Almost all of us.”

“Who’s still inside?”

“Another priest,” he said. “Father Reese.”

“Anyone else?”

“No, that’s it. We were having choir practice when the woman in the wedding dress came storming in. I thought maybe it was some kind of joke at first. Then I saw the gun.”

“A handgun or something bigger?” asked Sarah.

“A handgun,” he said. “She was carrying something else, too. It looked like a big green soda bottle. But no label.”

Ten to one it wasn’t 7UP.

“What did she say?” Sarah asked.

“That everyone could leave, except for one person,” he turned to Sarah and said. “Father Reese insisted he be the one.”

“Was there anything else?”

He nodded. “Yes. A message.”

“For whom?” I asked.

“You,” he said. “And Agent Brubaker.” He turned to Sarah. “I assume that’s—”

“That’s me,” said Sarah.

“Oh, good,” he said. “You’re both here. She wants to talk to you—both of you.”

Chapter 102

“DON’T DO IT,” said Harris. “Don’t go inside. That’s a terrible idea.” He pointed to the two alleyways on either side of Saint Alexander’s, which separated it from the adjoining brownstones. “There’s got to be a couple of other ways to get in there without her knowing. We can have a SWAT team here in less than ten minutes.”

“What if we don’t have ten minutes?” said Sarah. “I don’t think we do.”

“She’s already murdered over a dozen people and is now wearing a wedding dress, waving a gun around,” I said.

That all but put an end to Harris trying to talk me out of it. “What about you?” I asked Sarah. “Are you in?”

She removed her Glock from her holster and wedged it into her slacks behind her back.

“At least let’s check the perimeter for other ways in,” said Harris, resigned. “Just in case.”

Two teams of four dispersed right and left around the church. In less than a minute we heard back from both.