Double bingo.
"Yeah," said Martha. "He once joked that I should be careful because he knew all these ways to kill me with certain chemicals. I didn"t think it was very funny."
Sarah and I locked eyeb.a.l.l.s again. Certainly Robert Macintyre had the means. But the motive was still not 100 percent clear.
The guy gets dumped a few weeks before his own wedding, so he decides to kill newlyweds. Fair enough. Or should I say crazy enough? a.s.suming he was suffering from PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, the bitter disappointment and heartbreak could easily cause him to snap. Violently.
But why kill just the Vows couples?
Were we looking for logic where there simply wasn"t any? Insane behavior has its own set of rules.
Patiently, methodically, Sarah pressed on.
"So you read the article in the paper this morning, Martha, and you obviously must have had your suspicions. But what makes you so sure it"s Robert?"
I was hurting for this girl as she wiped her eyes yet again. She felt so d.a.m.n responsible.
"Robbie told me that if it couldn"t be us, it shouldn"t be anyone."
"I"m not sure I follow you," said Sarah.
Slowly, Martha looked at Detective Harris, then me, then back to Sarah. And that"s when she told us.
"The day I broke up with him was the same day we heard back from the New York Times," she said. "They wanted us to be a Vows couple."
Book Five
Payback Is a b.i.t.c.h
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 circ.u.mstantial. 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 ch.o.r.eography. 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 k.n.o.b 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 h.e.l.l were we walking into?
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.