Second Honeymoon

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 was 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.