Second Honeymoon

Chapter 87

“SOMEHOW I ALWAYS pictured Paris,” said Sarah. “You know, a hotel room on the Left Bank with an Eiffel Tower view.” She gazed around our tiny, rustic cabin with its knotty-pine paneling and let out a slight chuckle. “This ain’t Paris.”

No, it wasn’t. Not even close.

But for Cindy and Zach Welker, a couple of avid environmental types who first met—as the Vows column explained—on intersecting trails while hiking in Telluride, it was perfect. Two weeks in a Lewis Mountain cabin deep in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park. A little secluded bliss in the great outdoors.

“Hey, who knows?” wrote Zach, otherwise known as me, on our wedding website. “We may even venture out of the cabin once or twice during the honeymoon and do some actual hiking.”

Of course, the Lewis Mountain cabins weren’t really all that secluded, not if you knew what—or whom—you were looking for. Fifteen dollars for an automobile pass at the park entrance and you were in.

Heck, any serial killer could do it.

Or so we—Sarah, I, and the four other agents from the Washington, D.C., field office who were stationed in the brush outside—were hoping. The D.C. agents were rotating with other agents on eight-hour shifts.

That was the only way Dan Driesen would ultimately go along with the plan. He still wasn’t entirely sold on it, but he could hardly deny the ancillary benefit of having me surrounded by other agents. The Honeymoon Murderer wouldn’t know what hit him, and the John O’Hara Killer wouldn’t even know where to look for me.

In other words, my idea wasn’t as crazy as it first sounded to him.

Ditto for Frank Walsh, who was willing to cut enough corners and red tape to essentially suspend my suspension. I had a badge and company firearm again. “Until further notice,” he said.

Throw in the tag-team arm-twisting of Driesen and Walsh to get the New York Times to cooperate with our fictitious Vows article, and here we were, Sarah and I playing the role of tree-hugging crunchy-granola newlyweds who just happened to be locked and loaded. Birkenstocks and Glocks, I was calling us.

Now the only question was whether or not the plan would work.

Sarah, fully aware of the irony, summed it up best. “After all the time and effort we went through to get here I’d be seriously disappointed if no one tried to kill us.”