Part 63 (1/2)
”Yeah,” the officer came back with a touch of New York sarcasm. ”The bride wore white.”
What an image. The more I tried to picture it, the more everything else seemed to click. The whole picture.
”Christ, she was telling the truth, wasn't she? She just flipped it around,” I said.
”What do you mean?” asked Harris.
”Martha Cole didn't break off the engagement, Macintyre did,” said Sarah, right in step with me. ”It's her motive, not his.”
Sarah reached for her cell.
”What are you doing?” I asked.
”All dressed up and nowhere to go? I doubt it,” she said.
I'd been around Sarah long enough now to know she was following a hunch. It was the look on her face, the way she bit her lower lip. Problem was, I wasn't following along with her.
Until she was done dialing.
”Emily LaSalle, please,” she said. ”Tell her it's Agent Brubaker and it's urgent.”
Chapter 100
IT TOOK LASALLE only a few strokes on the keyboard in her New York Times office to come up with what we needed. The woman's files were as meticulously kept as everything else about her.
Sarah put her on speakerphone just in time for all of us to hear.
”Got it,” LaSalle announced.
It was the Vows article that never was. The marriage of Martha Cole to Robert Macintyre.
The bulk of the file was the submission Cole had originally made to the wedding section of the paper. The rest were notes made by one of LaSalle's editors, whose job it was to verify the information. Fact-checking was critical, we'd learned, whether to catch actual couples in the act of embellis.h.i.+ng their bona fides or to identify the numerous bogus announcements routinely submitted by pranksters-e.g., the wedding of Ben Dover to Ivana Humpalot.
”What am I looking for?” asked LaSalle.
”Only one thing,” said Sarah. ”Does it say where Cole and Macintyre were planning to get married?”
”You mean the town?”
”No. The actual church.”
”Let me check.”
Sarah bit her lower lip again in full hunch mode while I watched Harris and the other officers exchange more looks, as if to say, Wow-could this get any more twisted than it already is?