Second Honeymoon

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 every 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.”