Second Honeymoon

Chapter 80

I CRANKED UP the volume, all the way to eleven. It was a news story about the murder of a young couple.

Killed on their honeymoon.

First came Ethan and Abigail Breslow, then Scott and Annabelle Pierce. So much for coincidences.

Two’s company; three’s a serial killer.

My head was spinning. Sarah and I both officially had one now. A his-and-hers set, like washcloths—that is, if washcloths went around murdering people.

“Reporting from Long Island is Bianca Turner with more on this story…”

Parker and Samantha Keller were avid sailors, leaving Southampton two Sundays ago aboard their forty-two-foot schooner, heading for Saint Barts. On their way back they’d spent a night docked in Bermuda, meeting up with friends and shopping for additional supplies. An hour out of port the following morning, the boat apparently suffered some type of explosion, killing them both.

“At this time, the Coast Guard has no comment on the nature of the explosion or what might have caused it.”

“Try who might have caused it,” I said, only to be shushed by Sarah, who wanted to hear the rest.

“Friends said Parker and Samantha Keller had delayed their honeymoon until after their law school graduations. They were married this past April in Sag Harbor, New York.”

Sarah suddenly screamed so loud I nearly rear-ended another truck. “Oh, my God, that’s the couple!”

“What couple?”

“I read about them in the Times,” she said. “I can’t believe it! They were the Vows couple.”

She’d lost me after “I can’t believe it.” I looked at her blankly.

“The Vows couple,” she repeated. “Every week in the wedding section they highlight one couple and tell an in-depth story of how they first met and stuff like that. You’ve never seen it?”

I wanted to explain that until they started printing the sports section in the middle of the wedding section, the odds were pretty slim that I was ever going to come across any “Vows couple.”

Instead, I simply shook my head. “No. I’ve never seen it,” I said.

By then, though, Sarah wasn’t even looking at me. She had her head buried in her BlackBerry.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Checking something,” she answered. “A hunch.”

With one eye on the road, my other eye was watching her thumbs jab away at the phone. She was typing something. Furiously.

Then she stopped. She was staring at the screen, waiting.

Waiting some more.

“C’mon…c’mon,” she muttered impatiently. Finally, she slapped the dashboard. “I knew it!”

There was something in her voice, a sense that whatever plan we had was all about to change.

“I’m not even going to get my shower, am I?” I asked.

“Not quite yet,” she said, looking over her shoulder. She was checking out the traffic heading in the other direction.

“Okay, lay it on me. Where are you taking us?”

“Manhattan,” she answered. “We need to get off at the next exit and turn around.”

I glanced over at Sarah, smiling at the way her hunch—whatever it might be—was like a shot of pure adrenaline. Not just to her, but to the both of us.

I grabbed the wheel at twelve o’clock, then spun it like a top as we jumped the median into the southbound lanes. Then I straightened out the wheel and hit the gas like I was stomping out a fire.

“So where in Manhattan would you like to go?” I asked calmly.