Second Honeymoon Page 0,36

uncle I apparently have in Nigeria who left me thirty-five million dollars.

I was about to slip the phone back into my pocket when it rang in my hands. The caller ID didn’t come up with a name, but I recognized the number. It was police commissioner Eldridge down in Turks and Caicos.

“Hey, Joe,” I said.

We were now on a first-name basis with each other. In fact, he even threw out a “Johnny-o” at me the last time we spoke. That’s when I asked if he could find out how many Chinese passports had entered his country over the past couple of weeks.

The results were in.

“Seven,” said Eldridge.

A billion Chinese people in the world and only seven had traveled to Turks and Caicos. Oddly enough, that sounded about right.

“Anyone jump out at you?” I asked.

“What is it your Sarah Palin says up there? You betcha.”

There were three Chinese couples—six people total—who arrived on three separate days, he explained. In each case, the hotel they listed on the customs declaration was the hotel at which they stayed. He’d checked it out.

“Not that the killer had to be staying at the same resort as Ethan and Abigail Breslow,” he acknowledged. “But guess who was?”

That’s right. Contestant number seven.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“His name is Huang Li,” he said. “He checked into the Governor’s Club two days before the murders.”

“When did he check out?”

“Two days after.”

“Do we know anything else?” I asked.

“Not really. A pool guy remembered seeing him, but that’s it so far. I’m having to conduct these interviews off campus, if you know what I mean.”

“I’ll look into the guy from here, see what I can dig up.”

“Let’s hope it’s more than I can find,” he said. “Of course, with all this I’m assuming that where the Breslows were honeymooning was public knowledge, right?”

I didn’t answer. In fact, I barely heard him. He might as well have been the adult in a Peanuts cartoon.

“John?” he asked. “You there?”

I was there, all right. But from the corner of my eye, I suddenly saw something that made me realize there was somewhere else I needed to be.

“Joe, I’ve got to call you back,” I said.

“Is everything all right?”

“I’m not sure.”

Chapter 47

THE PATHOLOGIST DIDN’T even bother to look up from his lunch. “You’re a friend of Larry’s, right?” he asked me.

Truth be told, I didn’t know Larry from Adam or the man in the moon, but I did know the woman with the Joint Terrorism Task Force who worked with Larry at the New York Port Authority, whose brother at the NYPD forensics lab was a friend of the guy in the Queens medical examiner’s office sitting before me at his desk with a diet peach Snapple in one hand and a half-eaten ham sandwich on rye in the other.

Call it six degrees of O’Hara needs a favor.

All starting with two words I saw on the television perched above the counter at the Heavenly Diner.

A CNN reporter was standing outside Kennedy Airport. The sound was muted, but the headline in big white type above the news crawl was screaming, at least to me. NEWLYWEDS DEAD.

As soon as I hung up with Joe, I immediately began calling in favors from my days with the NYPD. I needed details. I needed access.

Maybe these honeymooners dying so soon on the heels of the Breslows was nothing more than a coincidence, but as I learned the gruesome details of what happened at that Delta terminal, it was easy to think otherwise.

The hard part would be getting confirmation. Fast.

The totally uninterested pathologist—officially the deputy chief medical examiner—finally looked up at me in his cramped office in Queens. His name was Dr. Dimitri Papenziekas, and he was a Greek with a Noo Yawk attitude. “Hey, I’m not freakin’ Superman,” he informed me.

Yeah, and I’m not the Green Hornet. So now that we have that settled…

“How fast?” I asked. “That’s all I need to know.”

How fast could he complete a test to determine if cyclosarin was present in the airport couple’s bodies?

“Tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

“How about tonight?”

How about you go screw yourself? said his expression. And that was screw spelled with an f, by the way.

“Okay, okay…make it tomorrow morning,” I said as if I were the one doing him the favor.

Dimitri took a bite of the ham sandwich, his head bobbing in thought as he chewed.

“Fine, tomorrow morning,” he said. Then he wagged his finger. “Just don’t be one of those guys who call me in a few hours to see