“Are you sure the sauna’s off?” she asked.
Actually, Ethan wasn’t sure at all. If anything, the room was beginning to feel hotter. How could that be?
He didn’t care. His ace in the hole was the pipe in the corner, the emergency shutoff valve.
Standing on the bench, he turned the valve perpendicular to the pipe. A loud hiss followed. Even louder was Abby’s sigh of relief.
Not only had the heat stopped, there was actually cool air blowing in from the ceiling vent.
“There,” said Ethan. “With any luck, we’ve triggered an alarm somewhere. Even if we didn’t, we’ll be okay. We’ve got plenty of water. Eventually, they’ll find us.”
But the words were barely out of his mouth when they both wrinkled their noses, sniffing the air.
“What’s that smell?”
“I don’t know,” said Ethan. Whatever it was, there was something not right about it.
Abby coughed first, her hands desperately reaching up around her neck. Her throat was closing; she couldn’t breathe.
Ethan tried to help her, but seconds later he couldn’t breathe, either.
It was happening so fast. They looked at each other, eyes red and tearing, their bodies twisted in agony. It couldn’t get worse than this.
But it did.
Ethan and Abby fell to their knees, gasping, when they saw a pair of eyes through the small window of the sauna door.
“Help!” Ethan barely managed, his hand outstretched. “Please, help!”
But the eyes just kept staring. Unblinking and unfeeling. Ethan and Abby finally realized what was happening. It was a murderer—a murderer who was watching them die.
Chapter 4
IF I’VE SAID it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. Things aren’t always as they appear.
Take the room I was sitting in, for instance. To look at the elegant furniture, plush Persian rugs, and gilt-framed artwork adorning the walls, you would have thought I’d just walked into some designer show house out in the burbs.
Definitely not some guy’s office on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Then there was the guy sitting across from me.
If he had been any more laid-back his chair would have tipped over. He was wearing jeans, a polo shirt, and a pair of brown Teva sandals. In a million years you’d never have guessed he was a shrink.
Up until a week ago, I seemed pretty laid-back, too. You’d never have known that I was on the verge of trashing a somewhat promising eleven-year career at the FBI. I was hiding it well. At least that’s what I thought.
But my boss, Frank Walsh, thought otherwise. Of course, that’s putting it mildly. Frank basically had me in a verbal headlock, screaming at me in his raspy, two-pack-a-day voice until I cried uncle. You have to see a shrink, John.
So that’s why I agreed to meet with the very relaxed Dr. Adam Kline in his office disguised as a living room. He specialized in treating people suffering from “deep emotional stress due to personal loss or trauma.”
People like me, John O’Hara.
All I knew for sure was that if this guy didn’t ultimately give me a clean bill of mental health, I would be toast at the Bureau. Kaput. Sacked. The sayonara special.
But that wasn’t really the problem.
The problem was, I didn’t give a shit.
“So, you’re Dr. Grief, huh?” I said, settling into an armchair that clearly was supposed to make me forget that I was actually “on the couch.”
Dr. Kline nodded with a slight smile, as if he expected nothing less than my cracking wise right from the get-go. “And from what I hear, you’re Agent Time Bomb,” he shot back. “Shall we get started?”
Chapter 5
THE GUY CERTAINLY didn’t waste any time.
“How long ago did your wife die, John?” Dr. Kline asked, jumping right in.
I noticed there was no pen or notepad in his lap. Nothing was being written down. He was simply listening. Actually, I kind of liked that approach.
“She was killed about two years ago.”
“How did it happen?”
I looked at him, a bit confused. “You didn’t read any of this in my file?”
“I read all of it. Three times,” he answered. “I want to hear it from you, though.”
Part of me wanted to leap out of my chair and pop the guy with a right hook for trying to make me relive the single worst day of my life. But another part of me—the part that knew better—understood he wasn’t asking me to do something that I hadn’t already been doing on my own. Every day, no less. I couldn’t let it go.
I couldn’t let Susan go.
Susan and I had both been FBI special agents, although when we first met and married, I was an undercover police officer with the NYPD. I became an agent a few years later and was assigned to a completely different section from Susan’s, the Counterterrorism Division. A few exceptions notwithstanding, that’s really the only way the Bureau allows for married couples.
Susan gave birth to two beautiful boys, and for a while everything was great. Then everything wasn’t. After eight years, we divorced. I’ll spare you the reasons, especially because there wasn’t one big enough to keep us apart.
Ironically, it wasn’t until I worked on a case involving a black widow serial killer who nearly poisoned me to death that we both realized it. Susan and I reconciled, and along with John Jr. and Max, we were a family again. Until one afternoon roughly two years ago.
I proceeded to tell Dr. Kline how Susan was driving home from the supermarket when another car ran a stop sign and plowed into her side at over sixty miles an hour. The posted speed limit on the road was thirty. Susan died instantly, while the other driver barely had a scratch on him. What’s more, the son of a bitch was drunk at the time of the accident.
A drunk lawyer, as it turned out.
By refusing the Breathalyzer and opting instead to have his blood drawn at a hospital, he was able to buy himself a couple of hours—enough time to allow his blood alcohol level to dip under the legal limit. He was charged with vehicular manslaughter and received the minimum sentence.
Was that justice? You tell me. He got to see his kids again while I had to sit mine down and explain that they were never going to see their mother again.
Dr. Kline remained quiet for a few seconds after I finished. His face gave nothing away. “What was she buying?” he finally asked.
“Excuse me?”
“What was Susan buying at the supermarket?”
“I heard you,” I said. “I just can’t believe that’s the first question you’re asking after everything I told you. How is that important?”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“Butter,” I blurted out. “Susan was going to bake cookies for the boys, but she didn’t have any butter. Pretty ironic, don’t you think?”
“How so?”
“Never mind.”
“No, go ahead,” said Dr. Kline. “Tell me.”
“She was an FBI agent; she could’ve died on the job many times over,” I said.
Then it was as if some switch inside me had been flipped on. Or maybe off. I couldn’t control myself; the words spilled angrily out of my mouth.
“But no, it’s some drunk asshole who plows into her on the way back from the supermarket!”
I was suddenly out of breath, as though I’d just run a marathon. “There. Are you satisfied?”
Dr. Kline shook his head. “No, I’m not, John. What I am is concerned,” he said calmly. “Do you know why?”
Of course I did. It was why the Bureau had suspended me. It was why my boss, Frank Walsh, insisted on my coming here to get my head examined.
Stephen McMillan, the drunk lawyer who killed Susan, was being released from prison in less than a week.
“You think I’m going to kill him, don’t you?”
Kline shrugged, deflecting the question. “Let’s just say people who care very much for you are worried about what you might be planning.
So, tell me, John…are they worried for a good reason? Are you planning revenge?”
Chapter 6
RIVERSIDE, CONNECTICUT, IS about an hour’s drive from midtown Manhattan. Channeling my inner Mario Andretti, I drove it in forty minutes flat. All I wanted to do was get home and hug my boys.
“Jeez, Dad, you trying to crush me or something?” chirped Max, who was throwing a baseball against a pitchback on our front lawn when I pulled in. For a ten-year-old, the kid could really rifle it—all fatherly bias aside, of course.
I finally unwrapped my arms from around him. “So are you all packed?” I asked.
School had been out for a week. Max and his older brother, John Jr., were heading off to sleepaway camp the next morning for a month.
Max nodded. “Yeah. Grandma helped me get everything together. She even wrote my name in all my underwear with a Sharpie. Weird. Whatever.”
I would’ve expected nothing less from Grandma Judy. “Are she and Grandpa here?”
“No. They’re out shopping for dinner,” said Max. “Grandpa wanted steaks for our last night all together.”
When Susan died, her parents, Judy and Marshall Holt, insisted on moving up from Florida, where they’d retired. They said it would be impossible for me to raise the boys alone while I was still working at the Bureau, and they were right. Also, I think they knew that being around Max and John Jr. would help—if only a little bit—ease the pain of having lost their daughter, their only child.
They’d been nothing short of incredible since the day they arrived, and while I could never fully express my gratitude for their time, love, and sacrifice, the least I could do was treat them to a four-week Mediterranean cruise while the boys were off at camp. I was just glad I paid for it while I was still getting a paycheck from the Bureau. Not that I would’ve changed my mind. It’s that Marshall and Judy would’ve never accepted the trip. That’s the kind of people they are.
“Where’s your brother?” I asked Max.
“Where else?” he answered with an eye roll underneath his Yankees cap. “On his computer. The geekazoid.”
Max went back to striking out imaginary Red Sox batters while I headed inside the house and upstairs to John Jr.’s room. Naturally, the door was closed.
“Knock, knock,” I announced, walking right in.
John Jr. was indeed sitting at his desk, in front of his computer. He immediately threw up his hands at the sight of me.
“C’mon, Dad, can’t you knock for real?” he said with a groan. “Haven’t you ever heard of the right to privacy?”
I chuckled. “You’re thirteen, dude. Talk to me when you can shave.”
He rubbed the peach fuzz on his chin, smiling. “It might be happening sooner than you think,” he said.
He was right. My older boy was growing up fast. Too fast, maybe.
John Jr. was eleven when he lost his mother, a very tricky age. Unlike Max, J.J. was old enough to feel everything an adult would feel—the full pain and anguish, the overwhelming sense of loss. But he was still just a kid. That’s what made it so unfair. The grieving forced him to mature in ways no kid should have to endure.
“What are you working on?” I asked.
“Updating my Facebook page,” he answered. “They won’t let us do it at camp.”
Yes, I know. That’s one of the reasons why you’re going, sport. No video games, cell phones, or laptops allowed. Only fresh air and Mother Nature.
I walked behind him and shot a peek at his MacBook. He instantly flipped out, slapping his palms against the screen. “Dad, this is personal!”
I never wanted to be a parent who spied on his kid or secretly logged on to his computer to make sure he wasn’t saying or doing things he wasn’t supposed to. But I also knew that there was nothing “personal” about the Internet.
“Once you post something online, anyone in the world could be looking at it,” I said.
“So?”
“So you need to be careful, that’s all.”
“I am,” he said. He was looking away.
It was moments like these when I really missed Susan. She’d know just what to say and, equally important, what not to say.
“John, look at me for a second.”
Slowly, he did.
“I trust you,” I said. “The thing is, you have to trust me, too. I’m only trying to help you.”
He nodded. “Dad, I know all about the creeps and stalkers out there. I don’t give out any personal information or stuff like that.”
“Good,” I said. And that was that.
Or so I thought. Walking out of J.J.’s room, I had no idea, no clue at all, that I was just about to crack one of the biggest and craziest cases of my career.
And as fast as you can say “Dinner is served,” it was all about to begin.
Chapter 7
“DO YOU KNOW what the Italians call dining outdoors?” asked Judy, looking at her two grandsons as if they were sitting at desks in a classroom instead of at our round patio table.
Susan’s mother had been an elementary school teacher for twenty-eight years. Old habits sure die hard.
“Honey, give the boys a break,” said Marshall, cutting into a full pound of New York strip. “School’s out.”
Judy happily ignored him. They’d been married even longer than she’d been a teacher.
“Alfresco,” she continued. “It means ‘in the fresh air.’” She then repeated the word slowly, as it would have been pronounced on one of those classic Berlitz language tapes. “Al-fres-co.”
“Hey, wait a minute, I know him!” announced Marshall, shooting the boys a wink from behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “Al Fresco! He and I fought in Vietnam together. Good old Al Fresco. What a character.”
Max and John Jr. cracked up. They always did at their grandfather’s jokes. Even Judy cracked a smile.
As for me, I was smiling, too. I was looking around the table at a family that had been devastated by a tragedy but had somehow managed to regroup and carry on.
Gee, any thoughts of regrouping and carrying on yourself, O’Hara? Maybe get your badge back? Some semblance of a life? Yes? No?
A couple of minutes later, Judy was even doing something she hadn’t done since Susan’s death. She was talking about someone else’s death. For a while there, the mere mention of the word would trigger her crying.
“I saw the most awful thing on the news earlier today,” she said. “Ethan Breslow and the doctor he just married were murdered on their honeymoon.”
Marshall shook his head. “I never thought I’d say this, but I actually feel sorry for his father.”
“Wait—who’s Ethan Breslow?” asked John Jr.
“He’s the son of a very wealthy man,” I said.
“A very, very wealthy man,” added Marshall. “Warner Breslow is a lot like Donald Trump…only less modest.”
Judy shot him a disapproving look, although she wasn’t about to disagree. Warner Breslow’s ego was world-renowned. It even had its own Wikipedia page.
“Have they caught the killer?” I asked.
“No,” said Judy. “The news said there were no witnesses. They were in Turks and Caicos, I think.”
“Turks and where?” asked Max, unaware that he’d just walked into another one of his grandma’s teaching moments.
“Turks and Caicos,” she said. “It’s an island in the Caribbean—really a bunch of islands.”
As she began a brief history lesson about the British West Indies, I heard the phone ring inside the house. I was about to get up when Marshall beat me to the punch. “I’ll get it,” he said.
Less than twenty seconds later, he returned to the table, looking utterly shocked and confused. He had his hand over the phone.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“It’s Warner Breslow,” he said. “He wants to speak to you.”
Chapter 8
COINCIDENCE WAS NOT the word; downright spooky was more like it.
Marshall handed
me the phone and I walked inside the house, finally sitting down in the den off the kitchen. I’d never met Warner Breslow, let alone spoken to him. Until now.
“This is O’Hara.”
He introduced himself and apologized for calling me at home. I listened to every word, but what I really heard—what really struck me—was his voice. When I’d seen him on television doing interviews, he spoke every bit like the powerful and überalpha male that he was. A true world beater.
Now he just sounded beaten, and maybe vulnerable.
“I assume you’ve heard about my son and his wife,” he said.
“Yes, I have. I’m very sorry.”
There was silence on the line. I wanted to say something more, but I couldn’t think of anything useful or appropriate. I didn’t know this man, and I didn’t know yet why he was calling.
But I had a gut feeling.
“You were recommended to me by a mutual friend,” he said. “Do you think you can help me?”
“I guess that depends. What do you need? What kind of help are you looking for?”
“I can’t put my faith in a bunch of palm-tree detectives,” he said. “I want to hire you to conduct your own investigation separate from the police in Turks and Caicos.”
“That’s a little tricky,” I said.
“That’s exactly why I’m calling you,” he retorted. “Do I need to recite your resumé?”
No, he didn’t. Still.
“Mr. Breslow, I’m afraid FBI agents aren’t allowed to moonlight.”
“What about suspended FBI agents?” he asked.
I was racing through my mental Rolodex, trying to think who our mutual friend at the Bureau could be. Breslow had access to somebody.
“I suppose I could talk to my boss,” I said.
“I already have.”
“You know Frank Walsh?”
“He and I are old friends. Given the circumstances, both yours and mine, he’s willing to make an exception in this case. You have a green light from the Bureau.”
Then, before I could even take a breath, Breslow got right down to it. He might have been consumed by grief, but he was still a businessman. An extremely formidable one.
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