Second Honeymoon

Chapter 84

“YOU’RE NOT GOING to believe this,” said Sarah, hanging up the phone in our makeshift FBI command post, which was really a spare conference room in the New York Times building.

I couldn’t get a read from her face. “Were they found?” I asked.

She broke into a laugh. “Oh, they were found, all right,” she said. “In fact, that was the park ranger himself who did the honors. Turned out the two had ditched the tour group their hotel had arranged for them.”

“So where were they?”

She told me. Including what they were doing when the ranger found them. “Can you imagine?”

I smiled. “I’ll do my best.”

That got me one of those half-amused, half-disapproving looks that women have been perfecting since the Stone Age. “Would it help if I dimmed the lights?” she cracked.

“It might.”

“Maybe put on some Barry White?”

“Now we’re talking. I think I have the picture now.”

No one could blame us for kidding around a bit. And as my father used to say with his hand wrapped around a Ballantine Ale, “Screw ’em if they tried.”

After a ridiculous number of phone calls and a considerable amount of maneuvering, we’d finally managed to account for all the remaining Vows couples through local police. They were safe and sound. For some reason the killer had spared them. Now, why was that?

As for Charlie and Melissa Cosmer, they were currently packing up their suitcases at the Ritz-Carlton, Kapalua, in Maui and heading home with an FBI escort, courtesy of the Honolulu office. Needless to say, they weren’t too pleased. But better to cut short their honeymoon than their lives.

Sarah reached for her cell. “I’ve got to call Dan back,” she said. “He’s waiting to hear where we stand.”

Of course, Sarah’s first call to Dan Driesen hours earlier had been to let him know that the John O’Hara Killer wasn’t, as she put it, “the only game in town.” He had company. The Honeymoon Murderer, we were calling him.

Unfortunately, coming up with the name was the only thing that was easy. Coming up with anything else—his motive, why he chose some Vows couples and not others, and how he knew where they were honeymooning—was proving a little more difficult.

Trying to link the victims together was like twisting a Rubik’s cube. We looked for similar names, schools, jobs, socioeconomic backgrounds—anything and everything, from hair color to how the couple first met. But we kept coming up with nothing. Bubkes.

“Hey, before you call Driesen again, we need to make another call first,” I said.

“To whom?” she asked.

As badly as I needed a shower, there was something else I needed even more. Food.

“How about the nearest Chinese restaurant?” I said. “I’m starving. I’m actually getting woozy.”

Sarah nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. Me, too.”

We’d been working nonstop since we arrived at the New York Times offices without so much as a Tic Tac.

I dialed Emily LaSalle’s extension and asked her where we could place an order. She’d been holed up in her office the entire time, scouring the Internet to see if the Gawker.coms of the world had made the connection yet between her Vows columns and the honeymoon murders. It was only a matter of time.

“Ming Chow’s is right down the block, and they deliver,” she said. “I recommend the kung pao chicken.”

“Great. Do you know the number?” I asked.

“Actually, you can order online from their…” Her voice trailed off. I thought maybe we got disconnected.

“Are you there?” I asked.

“Wait one second,” she said.

Actually, it was more like ten seconds, or about the time it took for her to rush down to the conference room in her sky-high heels. She was half out of breath when she pushed through the door.

“Do you remember when I said I gave you all the information we had on each Vows couple?” she asked.

Sarah and I answered in stereo. “Yeah.”

“Well, I just thought of something else,” she said.