Chapter 83
COME OUT, COME OUT, wherever you are…
Faruth Passan had all the information he needed about young Charlie and Melissa Cosmer, including a photograph of them. It came straight from the wedding section of the New York Times, a candid shot of the smiling couple on the dance floor during their reception at the St. Regis hotel.
VOWS, said the headline above them.
I know you’re out there, Charlie and Melissa. Where are you hiding?
Faruth kept to the trail previously used by the tour group that the happy honeymooners had ditched. With each step his eyes moved like the second hand of a watch, scanning in a circle, covering every inch of the terrain around him.
They called it Haleakalā National Park, but it was really more like a jungle in most places. The trees, the arching branches, the incredibly lush and green leaves—it was so dense it was almost dizzying.
It was loud, too.
The chirps, squawks, and calls from the more than forty species of birds in the park were relentless, but they were nothing compared to the wall of sound created by the various waterfalls along the route.
As Faruth approached one of the largest, Makahiku, he was already well aware that there was no offshoot from the trail that led to the very top of it.
Of course, that didn’t mean an adventurous young couple wouldn’t give it a shot.
Pushing his way through the banyan trees, Faruth almost gave up and turned around. He was so close to the falls, but that was all he could see.
Wait just a second. Hold on.
Amid the tall grass near the very edge there was something moving. With a few more steps forward he saw what it was. Make that who it was.
Talk about an element of surprise.
Faruth smiled. How could he not? These two don’t have the slightest clue that someone wants to kill them.
Oh, well…
The smile left Faruth’s face as he took a deep breath, his hands hanging at his waist. His fingertips were mere inches from the knife strapped to his belt.
It was time to break the news to Charlie and Melissa.
Their honeymoon was over.
Chapter 84
“YOU’RE NOT GOING to believe this,” said Sarah, hanging up the phone in our makeshift FBI command post, which was really a spare conference room in the New York Times building.
I couldn’t get a read from her face. “Were they found?” I asked.
She broke into a laugh. “Oh, they were found, all right,” she said. “In fact, that was the park ranger himself who did the honors. Turned out the two had ditched the tour group their hotel had arranged for them.”
“So where were they?”
She told me. Including what they were doing when the ranger found them. “Can you imagine?”
I smiled. “I’ll do my best.”
That got me one of those half-amused, half-disapproving looks that women have been perfecting since the Stone Age. “Would it help if I dimmed the lights?” she cracked.
“It might.”
“Maybe put on some Barry White?”
“Now we’re talking. I think I have the picture now.”
No one could blame us for kidding around a bit. And as my father used to say with his hand wrapped around a Ballantine Ale, “Screw ’em if they tried.”
After a ridiculous number of phone calls and a considerable amount of maneuvering, we’d finally managed to account for all the remaining Vows couples through local police. They were safe and sound. For some reason the killer had spared them. Now, why was that?
As for Charlie and Melissa Cosmer, they were currently packing up their suitcases at the Ritz-Carlton, Kapalua, in Maui and heading home with an FBI escort, courtesy of the Honolulu office. Needless to say, they weren’t too pleased. But better to cut short their honeymoon than their lives.
Sarah reached for her cell. “I’ve got to call Dan back,” she said. “He’s waiting to hear where we stand.”
Of course, Sarah’s first call to Dan Driesen hours earlier had been to let him know that the John O’Hara Killer wasn’t, as she put it, “the only game in town.” He had company. The Honeymoon Murderer, we were calling him.
Unfortunately, coming up with the name was the only thing that was easy. Coming up with anything else—his motive, why he chose some Vows couples and not others, and how he knew where they were honeymooning—was proving a little more difficult.
Trying to link the victims together was like twisting a Rubik’s cube. We looked for similar names, schools, jobs, socioeconomic backgrounds—anything and everything, from hair color to how the couple first met. But we kept coming up with nothing. Bubkes.
“Hey, before you call Driesen again, we need to make another call first,” I said.
“To whom?” she asked.
As badly as I needed a shower, there was something else I needed even more. Food.
“How about the nearest Chinese restaurant?” I said. “I’m starving. I’m actually getting woozy.”
Sarah nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. Me, too.”
We’d been working nonstop since we arrived at the New York Times offices without so much as a Tic Tac.
I dialed Emily LaSalle’s extension and asked her where we could place an order. She’d been holed up in her office the entire time, scouring the Internet to see if the Gawker.coms of the world had made the connection yet between her Vows columns and the honeymoon murders. It was only a matter of time.
“Ming Chow’s is right down the block, and they deliver,” she said. “I recommend the kung pao chicken.”
“Great. Do you know the number?” I asked.
“Actually, you can order online from their…” Her voice trailed off. I thought maybe we got disconnected.
“Are you there?” I asked.
“Wait one second,” she said.
Actually, it was more like ten seconds, or about the time it took for her to rush down to the conference room in her sky-high heels. She was half out of breath when she pushed through the door.
“Do you remember when I said I gave you all the information we had on each Vows couple?” she asked.
Sarah and I answered in stereo. “Yeah.”
“Well, I just thought of something else,” she said.
Chapter 85
THAT WAS IT. The link. Literally.
“Websites,” said LaSalle, tugging on her double strand of pearls. “Couples these days have their own wedding websites…some of them do, at least.”
Before she could even finish the sentence, Sarah’s thumbs were pounding away on her BlackBerry again.
“I’ll take the victims,” she called out.
I quickly grabbed the MacBook that LaSalle had let us borrow. Divide and conquer.
“I’ll take the rest,” I said. In other words, the newlyweds who were spared.
I Googled the names of the first couple on our list, Pamela and Michael Eaton. They were the Vows couple who appeared the week after the Kellers. In addition to their names, I added a few more words you’d expect to see on a wedding website—gift registry and reception. That oughta do it, I thought.
Nothing was coming up, though. Meanwhile, Sarah yelled out like it was Friday night at the Elks lodge. “Bingo!”
“Which couple?” I asked.
“The Pierces…from the airport,” she said. “It says at the top of the site that it was created by Scott Pierce’s best man.” She scrolled down on her phone, her eyes quickly scanning. “Oh, get this—there’s even a section called The Honeymoon.”
“Christ—it actually says where they were going?”
“Worse.” She read it to me. “The lovebirds will be flying off the next day from JFK to Rome. Guess all those frequent flyer miles they had on Delta really came in handy.”
“They might as well have just put targets on their backs,” I said.
All I could suddenly think about was my conversation with John Jr. up in his room the night before he left for camp. You n
ever know who’s reading about you online, I’d told him. Case in point, no?
Sarah and I kept searching for other websites. We were able to verify the pattern lickety-split: all the victims had a website. Those who didn’t were still alive.
There was one exception, but it actually proved the rule. One couple who was spared had a website but, unlike the victims’, theirs didn’t divulge any details about the honeymoon.
“So now we know,” I said. This was exactly how the killer was targeting his victims.
Sarah drew a deep breath and exhaled. “Yes, but now what do we do?”
“I know what I have to do,” said LaSalle.
I’d almost forgotten that she and her pearls were still in the room. “What’s that?” I asked.
“I have to suspend the Vows column effective immediately,” she said.
Of course. It was common sense. The right thing to do. Who could argue with that?
Well, actually, I could.
I got out of my chair, walked over to Sarah, and promptly got down on one knee. She looked at me as if I were crazy. Ditto for LaSalle.
“What the hell are you doing?” asked Sarah.
“Proposing,” I answered. “Sarah Brubaker, will you marry me?”
Chapter 86
“GET UP, YOU fool,” she said.
I took that for a yes.
It was the way Sarah said it—the “Holy shit, O’Hara, you might be onto something” tone in her voice. I knew instantly that we were on the same page.
Of the wedding section, to be exact.
The idea was a lot of things—risky, dangerous, a candidate for the Hazard Pay Hall of Fame—but it was also something else: the best chance we had to stop this thing. I was sure of it. So was Sarah.
Poor Emily LaSalle, however, wasn’t sure what the hell to think.
“I’m sorry, what just happened?” she asked with a hand on her hip.
“You’re looking at the next Vows couple,” I explained.
It took a few seconds, but she finally got it. After another few seconds, though, her face went from “Aha” to “Oh, wait.” There were frown lines everywhere, and she looked overly concerned.
“I don’t know if the Times can do that,” she said. “I mean, that’s a decision for—”
“Your publisher, of course,” I said. “And trust me, I understand the ramifications.”
Whether it was Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bush White House when the NSA was engaged in domestic eavesdropping, or the Obama administration after the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a top Taliban commander, there have been occasions during which the Times has been asked to delay or “sit on” a particular story in the interest of national security.
However, this was different. Yes, people’s lives were in danger, but this request would have the paper printing a story they knew up front wasn’t true. Notwithstanding the fact that most staunch conservatives already had a name for that phenomenon—they called it the Times editorial page—it was easy to understand how this threshold might be one the so-called Gray Lady wouldn’t want to cross.
“Listen, we’re getting ahead of ourselves,” said Sarah. “Before we can get the paper’s blessing, we need someone else’s. The father of the bride, if you will.”
I knew she wasn’t talking about her actual father, Conrad Brubaker, whom she’d described to me as a retired art history professor usually found swinging a 7 iron on the back nine somewhere out in La Quinta, California. She was referring to Dan Driesen, who would surely have an aversion to dangling one of his agents as human bait.
“Maybe I can get Walsh to call him,” I said, only to immediately shake my head in contradiction. “On second thought…maybe that isn’t the best idea.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. “Talk about another blessing we’ll need.”
She was right. I had a little issue to work out with my own boss. My suspension. Throw in the breaking news of the John O’Hara Killer and I could already hear Frank Walsh yelling at me.
Jesus Christ, it’s not enough you’ve already got one serial killer coming after you—now you want to arrange for another? You don’t need therapy, O’Hara, you need a damn straitjacket!
“Yeah, cancel Walsh running interference,” I said. “Driesen is all yours.”
Sarah turned to LaSalle. “When is the Sunday wedding section viewable online?” she asked.
“Saturday at five.”
That gave us less than three days. I glanced at my watch. Sixty-eight hours, to be exact.
“Amazing,” said Sarah. “Who would’ve thought planning a fake wedding could be harder than planning a real one?”
“At least we’ve got one thing to look forward to,” I said, keeping a straight face.
“What’s that?”
“The honeymoon, of course.”
Chapter 87
“SOMEHOW I ALWAYS pictured Paris,” said Sarah. “You know, a hotel room on the Left Bank with an Eiffel Tower view.” She gazed around our tiny, rustic cabin with its knotty-pine paneling and let out a slight chuckle. “This ain’t Paris.”
No, it wasn’t. Not even close.
But for Cindy and Zach Welker, a couple of avid environmental types who first met—as the Vows column explained—on intersecting trails while hiking in Telluride, it was perfect. Two weeks in a Lewis Mountain cabin deep in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park. A little secluded bliss in the great outdoors.
“Hey, who knows?” wrote Zach, otherwise known as me, on our wedding website. “We may even venture out of the cabin once or twice during the honeymoon and do some actual hiking.”
Of course, the Lewis Mountain cabins weren’t really all that secluded, not if you knew what—or whom—you were looking for. Fifteen dollars for an automobile pass at the park entrance and you were in.
Heck, any serial killer could do it.
Or so we—Sarah, I, and the four other agents from the Washington, D.C., field office who were stationed in the brush outside—were hoping. The D.C. agents were rotating with other agents on eight-hour shifts.
That was the only way Dan Driesen would ultimately go along with the plan. He still wasn’t entirely sold on it, but he could hardly deny the ancillary benefit of having me surrounded by other agents. The Honeymoon Murderer wouldn’t know what hit him, and the John O’Hara Killer wouldn’t even know where to look for me.
In other words, my idea wasn’t as crazy as it first sounded to him.
Ditto for Frank Walsh, who was willing to cut enough corners and red tape to essentially suspend my suspension. I had a badge and company firearm again. “Until further notice,” he said.
Throw in the tag-team arm-twisting of Driesen and Walsh to get the New York Times to cooperate with our fictitious Vows article, and here we were, Sarah and I playing the role of tree-hugging crunchy-granola newlyweds who just happened to be locked and loaded. Birkenstocks and Glocks, I was calling us.
Now the only question was whether or not the plan would work.
Sarah, fully aware of the irony, summed it up best. “After all the time and effort we went through to get here I’d be seriously disappointed if no one tried to kill us.”
Chapter 88
“A PARIS HONEYMOON, huh? Sounds nice,” I said, pouring myself some more coffee from the stove. We’d just finished dinner and were hanging out in the small sitting area outside the bedroom. As modest as our cabin was, it did, thankfully, have indoor plumbing, a small kitchen, and electricity.
The mosquitoes they threw in for free.
“What about you?” asked Sarah, tugging on the bottom of her sweatshirt from the University of Colorado, Cindy Welker’s alma mater. “Where would you want to spend your…”
Her voice trailed off, her face flushing red with embarrassment. She’d forgotten. I was once married. I’d already had a honeymoon.
“It’s okay,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Really, it’s fine. For the record, we went to Rom
e.”
“Was it great?”
“It absolutely was,” I said. “Right up until I broke my arm.”
“You broke your arm on your honeymoon?”
“Yep. I tripped and fell down the Spanish Steps while eating a double scoop of chocolate gelato.”
She started to crack up. For someone so attractive, she had this really goofy laugh, almost like Arnold Horshack’s from Welcome Back, Kotter. I liked it.
“I know—how clumsy, right?” I started laughing, too. “Damn good gelato, though.”
It occurred to me that up till now Sarah and I had barely talked about our lives outside of work. Felt pretty good. Natural. I could sense she thought so, too.
“So tell me about your two boys,” she said.
“Ah, my favorite subject…”
I told her about Max and John Jr. while trying to keep the excessive fatherly pride at a minimum. Still, it was hard not to gush, especially given how much I was missing them. When I finally shut up about how great they were, Sarah simply stared at me and smiled.
“What? What’s that look for?” I asked.
“I was thinking how lucky they are to have you as a father,” she said. “They mean the world to you, don’t they?”
“They do, but it’s the other way around. I’m the lucky one,” I said. “Now, what about you? Do you and your boyfriend both want kids?”
She shot me a look. “Nice try, O’Hara. You just want to know if I’m dating anyone.”
“Well, we are on our honeymoon, after all. It’s only fair that I know.”
“In that case, the answer’s no. I’m not currently cheating on you with anybody.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but she stopped me with a raised palm.
“And please don’t tell me how surprising it is,” she said. “You know, the fact that I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Actually, all I was going to say is that I understand. It’s got to be hard for you.”
She looked at me, unsure. “How do you mean?”
“You’re a female FBI agent. You’re trained in hand-to-hand combat and you carry a gun,” I said. “Most guys would be intimidated by that.”
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