Second Honeymoon

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?