“That damn war!” she nearly shouted. “It wasn’t Robbie’s fault, do you hear me? He wasn’t the same person. The guy who came back wasn’t the guy I’d fallen in love with!”
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 w
as as if he were on display, some type of sick and twisted piece of performance art. Call it The Dead Groom.
Robert Macintyre—reddish hair and angled jaw—was tied to a chair, dressed in what was once a nice tuxedo. Now it was riddled with bullet holes and soaked in blood. If the gunshots didn’t kill him, the knife stuck deep into his heart surely did.
It was not just any knife, either. I leaned in for a closer look. The sterling silver handle caught the light coming through the window just so.
“Is that what I think it is?” asked Sarah.
“It sure is,” I said. A cake knife.
Holy shit, it’s her—Martha Cole!
We immediately turned to Harris, who was already reaching for his radio to call his dispatch. He’d connected the same crazy dots as we had.
“Shit. I think we only took her phone number,” he said. “We can trace it to get the address, but…”
But what were the odds she’d given us her real phone number? I’d say they were somewhere between slim and nonexistent—same as the Cubs winning the World Series.
It all made more sense now, why she turned down the ride home from the precinct. She told us she wanted to walk instead, to “clear her mind.” At the time, who could blame her?
“Wait!” said Sarah.
We all turned to her. Then we turned to see what she was looking at.
The bed.
We were all so focused on Macintyre that no one noticed the outline of something under the sheets. Until now.
Was it another body? Another murder?
No, it was worse. Much worse.
It was everyone’s murder.
Chapter 97
WE GATHERED IN a horseshoe formation around the bed. I was on one end, Sarah was on the other.
“Grab the corner,” she said.
We each took hold of the top sheet, then lifted it up and back. I didn’t know what to expect, but it certainly wasn’t what I saw.
What the…
It looked like oxygen tanks, the kind scuba divers wear. There were a half dozen of them lying down the length of the bed.
“What’s that writing on the side there?” asked the officer standing next to me.
I tilted my head to read the small print, only to be blinded by a ray of sunlight beaming off the metallic cylinders.
“Hey, will someone drop the blinds?” I asked. They were pulled all the way up, every inch of the windows exposed.
“Got it,” said another officer. He was a young Italian guy, his jet-black hair combed straight back. As he turned toward the window, his body blocked the sun for a second, just long enough for me to look back at the print along the tank closest to me. Only it didn’t say OXYGEN.
Oh, no! No! No! No!
But it was already too late.
The first shot smashed through the window, catching the young officer square in the chest, an explosion of blood and bone.
The second shot split the head of the officer next to Sarah.
“Down! Everyone down!”
But that’s what she wanted, everyone out of the way, now that she had us together. These were no ordinary bullets she was firing; they were large-caliber and incendiary.
In other words, just right for exploding a propane tank.
The third shot would’ve killed us all if it hadn’t been for someone bumping the bed as he dropped to the floor. That jostled the tanks just enough. The shell ripped through the box springs, but didn’t hit a tank.
I lunged for the queen-size mattress. I could feel the stitches in my shoulder ripping apart as I lifted as fast and hard as I could.
The tanks went flying, clanking onto the hardwood floor, rolling in every direction.
“Everybody out!” I yelled. “Now!”
The next shot echoed amid the mad dash from the bedroom, but there was no blast. She hadn’t hit one of the rolling tanks.
The entrance to the hallway was like a narrow, unforgiving funnel as we tried to clear the living room outside the bedroom. Feet scrambling, arms flailing, everyone was literally running for their lives.
I was last in line, Sarah right in front of me. If we could just make it out of the apartment before the next shot, then maybe, just maybe, we might be okay.
KABOOM!
Chapter 98
THE FORCE OF the explosion knocked me flat against the floorboards, and a fireball swept over my back. The heat was so intense I could feel my shirt melt into my skin.
It hurt so much I wanted to scream, but I was too busy being thankful. A blast like that? The only way I wouldn’t be in pain was if I were dead.
“God, that hurt,” moaned Sarah.
More good news. She was alive, too. A little better off than me.
I wish I could say it was my intent to shield her. I was thrown right into her and gravity did the rest. She was faceup and I was looking down at her. Our noses were practically touching.
“You okay?” I whispered.
“Think so. You?”
“A little toasty on the back. I’ll live.”
She didn’t say anything more. She didn’t have to. I could see it in her eyes. It was really important to her that I was okay.
Off in the distance I could already hear sirens. The curtains in the living room were on fire. So were the couch and rug. There was a chance at least one of those propane tanks hadn’t exploded.
Yet.
“C’mon,” said Harris. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
The street outside Macintyre’s building was chaos central. Fire trucks and more police cruisers were honking their way through traffic, swirling lights everywhere.
Tenants and neighbors spilled out to the sidewalk en masse, looking bewildered and scared. I glanced around, finally catching my breath. Breathing. An old woman in a red robe was clutching rosary beads and saying a prayer. Next to her was a young Hispanic mother holding her baby boy.
Sarah was ripping through a description of Cole, sending off a dozen officers to push the perimeter in every direction. The rest followed us as we searched the buildings behind Macintyre’s, from basements to rooftops.
Meanwhile, Harris was on his radio, getting officers out to the surrounding subways.
“Over here!” I yelled on the very first rooftop we reached. On the tar paper next to the ledge overlooking Macintyre’s apartment, propped up by an attached bipod, was an FN SPR, one of the sniper rifles I knew by name because it was used by the Bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team.
“An SPR,” said Sarah as soon as she laid her eyes on it. “Talk about irony.”
She was right. SPR stood for “special police rifle.” It sat there, along with a few scattered casings, taunting us.
“Every door!” shouted Harris. “We knock on every door!”
We were funneling again, this time off the roof and down the stairs, when Harris’s radio crackled. Calling in was an officer on the street. He’d found a witness. Or, rather, the witness had found him.
It was a man who lived on the top floor of a taller building behind Macintyre’s. Looking down, he had a perfect view of Martha Cole after the explosion.
“What did he see?” asked Harris.
The officer paused, the radio falling silent.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said finally.
Chapter 99
MY FIRST CYNICAL thought was, You wanna bet?
After everything I’d seen over the years—let alone over the past few days—was there really anything out there I couldn’t believe, anything left that could still surprise me?
But I had to admit, this sort of did.
Same for Harris. “Say again,” he said into his radio.
We listened for a second time, the officer accenting every word. Especially the last ones. “The witness claims he saw a woman running across the roof after the explosion,” he said. “She was wearing a wedding dress.”
Harris didn’t skip a beat. Nor was he taking anything for granted. He was about to broadcast this to e
very cop in the area code and beyond. The details mattered.
“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?”