Enough said.
"What are you going to tell him?" I asked.
"That it took a while to track you down, but I finally found you," she said.
"Then what happens?"
"Like I said, you go somewhere safe. And that won"t be your house in Connecticut."
"The Bureau Hotel, huh?"
"Now with free HBO," she said jokingly.
"Very funny. Well, kind of funny. No, actually, not funny at all."
The Bureau Hotel was what agents called the various safe houses across the country that the FBI used. They were mainly for trial witnesses who needed protection, but sometimes, as in my case, an agent was forced to check in.
"Seriously, though, you should decide what you want to do about your boys," she said.
"I already have," I said. "If someone"s trying to kill me, I hardly want them at my side, no matter where I"m being stashed."
"Should they still be at camp, though?"
"Yes-but they"re about to get two new counselors, if you know what I mean."
She did. "I"ll make the arrangements from your house," she said.
I thought for a moment about Director Barliss and his perfectly aligned pushpins up at Camp Wilderlocke. I tried to imagine someone telling him that he was about to have two young FBI agents joining his staff for a bit. Other than that, though, there wasn"t much to smile about.
If only to take my mind off everything, I turned on the radio to get the traffic report for the approaching Whitestone Bridge. The station was 1010 WINS-"All news, all the time."
Amazingly, my timing couldn"t have been any better.
If I didn"t kill us first, that is.
"Look out!" yelled Sarah.
I whipped my head up from the radio to see the back of a Poland Spring delivery truck filling up my entire windshield. Had I been a nanosecond later on the brakes, we would"ve rear-ended it for sure. Boom, smash, air bag city.
And all I could say to her, pointing at the radio, was, "Did you hear that?"
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 G.o.d, 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.