couldn’t read his expression. “Got it,” Sean said, and hung up. He handed Lucy back her phone. “Noah wants me to put you on a plane ASAP.”
“Put me on a plane?”
“Commercial. He’s made a reservation for you; it leaves in an hour. He asked me and Patrick to stay here and follow through.”
“What happened to Hans?”
“He didn’t say—he was vague. He said, ‘Follow up on the assignment Hans gave you.’ My guess, it wasn’t an accident.”
First Tony, now Hans. “It’s all connected to what happened to Rosemary Weber.”
Sean maneuvered through New York traffic like a native and merged onto a freeway.
“It all connects here in New York,” Sean said. “I’m going to call Suzanne and find out where she is, fill her in on the news about Hans, and have her or her cop friend pull the files on Theissen.”
“Be careful,” Lucy said.
Sean took her hand. “You, too, princess.”
*
“What’s going on?” Suzanne demanded when she met Sean in front of the Webers’ narrow three-story town house on the Upper East Side. “You’re thirty minutes late, and you tell me to wait? Sunday is usually the only day off I get, and yet I was up at the butt crack of dawn to interview a suspect, then ordered to rush over here, only to be kept waiting by a friggin’ P.I.?”
Sean smiled and handed her coffee. “Black and sweet, right?”
She grabbed the coffee but didn’t return his smile. “Where’s Lucy?”
“Headed back to Quantico.”
“Why?”
“It has to stay between you and me. Can’t even tell your boyfriend.”
“DeLucca isn’t my boyfriend.”
Sean coughed a laugh. “I was speaking metaphorically, but good to know.”
She glared at him from under the brim of her Mets hat, all fire.
“Hans Vigo had an accident yesterday. He’s in critical condition. Lucy was called back in, and my guess is that it wasn’t really an accident.”
“Why are you still here?”
“Hans asked me to find Peter McMahon. That’s what I’m doing.”
“Back up—is this the Peter McMahon whose sister was murdered when he was a kid? The case Tony was so curious about?”
“Four people involved in his sister’s investigation are dead under mysterious circumstances.”
Her brow furrowed. “Four people? Who?”
Sean ticked them off on his fingers. “Weber, Bob Stokes, Dominic Theissen, and Tony Presidio.” He explained the suspicious circumstances of Stokes’s and Theissen’s deaths and how they might not have been accidents, or natural.
“McMahon has been completely off the grid for the last six years,” Sean said. “No death certificate, no Social Security number in use, nothing. FBI is going through their channels; I’m going through mine. I traced him to college at SU; then he seemed to just vanish.”
“There has to be something else.”
“Agent Presidio’s personal file on the McMahon investigation disappeared from his office the day he died. Something is going on, maybe it has nothing to do with Peter McMahon, but it’s not easy to go completely off the grid.”
“So you’re thinking he’s targeting cops who worked his sister’s case because why?”
“I don’t think anything at this point,” Sean said. “I’m just going to find him.”
“And you think Bridget Weber knows something she didn’t tell me?” Suzanne sounded skeptical.
“I think Rosemary Weber has a lot of files and information on the McMahon investigation that may shed light on these deaths.”
“So you don’t think her murder has anything to do with the Cinderella Strangler case?”
“We’re not going to know until the feds are done with their forensic investigation.” Sean walked up the steps to the front door. “Hopefully, there’ll be enough answers here to give us a clear direction.”
Bridget Weber was five years younger than her sister, but judging by Rosemary’s author photo on her book, they had looked very much alike—blond hair, blue eyes, and deep dimples.
“Thank you for agreeing to see us on such short notice,” Suzanne said.
Bridget tried to smile but didn’t quite make it. “Do you have information about Rosie’s murder?”
“We’re pursuing every possible lead,” Suzanne said. “We just have a few questions. Did your sister discuss her books or what she was working on with you?”
“Sometimes. But I travel a lot for work, and when she’s in the middle of a project she’s very focused, doesn’t talk to anyone but her research assistant, if that.”
Sean said, “Did you talk about her current project?”
“The Cinderella Strangler? A little—she was excited about it. She said it had all the hallmarks of a bestseller.” Bridget paused, then said, a bit sheepishly, “Rosie’s first book was a big hit. None of her other books did as well as Sex, Lies, and