"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The bulk of the file was the submission Cole had originally made to the wedding section of the paper.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 embellishing 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?

My money was on yes.

LaSalle quickly scanned the file on Cole and Macintyre, reading aloud certain bits and pieces as if they were bullets in a PowerPoint presentation.

"Brooklyn residents...met in the army...both sergeants..."

Harris blinked. "Wait: they were both in the army?"

"Figures," I muttered.

Learning how to shoot a sniper rifle with deadly accuracy wasn't exactly something you could do in a night course at the New School. But where the h.e.l.l did Cole learn how to lie so effectively? I would've been more embarra.s.sed over being duped if she hadn't been so d.a.m.n good at it.

"Okay, here we go," said LaSalle. "It says here it was supposed to be at Saint Alexander's in Brooklyn."

"s.h.i.t," muttered Harris. "Do you think-"

"Emily, is there an address?" asked Sarah.

"No, just the name."

"I know where that church is," came a voice.

I turned to see one of the cops stepping forward. He had a face that all but screamed rookie.

"Is it close by?" I asked.

"Maybe twenty blocks," he said. "My sister belongs there."

Suddenly, our best-case scenario was potentially our worst. If Sarah's hunch was right, and that's where Cole was heading...what was she planning to do?

Only thing for sure was that we needed to warn whoever might be at the church. I hoped it was no one.

So much for hoping.

Again, Harris's radio crackled. So, too, did every other radio in the group. A chorus of quick static followed by the voice of a female dispatcher.

It was a 417, she announced. A person with a gun. "Possible hostage situation," she tacked on.

By the time she gave the address, Sarah and I and everyone else were already halfway out the building, racing to every parked patrol car.

Chapter 101