“Till death do us part, Edgar,” he replied, his own eyes misting.
I stopped fighting him. “But you’ll die,” I sobbed. “Don’t you get it? You’ll die!”
“Abs,” he said gently, wrapping me into his arms. “Don’t you get it? Without you I can’t live.”
I shook my head. “Not like this,” I said to him. “You can’t go like this!”
He just looked at me with such love and sympathy that it was hard to hold his gaze. “Abigail Cooper, there’s something you don’t know about me. Three and a half years ago, after you and I had shared a bowl of ice cream on your back porch, I called my mom and told her that I’d just had dessert with the woman I was going to marry. And you know what else? I think I knew the moment I laid eyes on you at the restaurant where we had our first date that you were the one for me. I might as well have married you back then. You are my one and only, sweethot, and I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life. I love you, Abby. I take you for my wife today, here and now, to love, honor, cherish, and occasionally call you out for swearing. I will be there for you to the end of my days, and if that day is today, well…then I’ll go out with you wrapped in my arms, and that’s better than the next fifty years without you.”
“But—”
“But nothing, Edgar. I love you. So I do. I do, I do, I do.”
I realized I was shaking from head to toe. It was all too much for me. I didn’t want to be the cause of Dutch’s murder, but I couldn’t help feeling so glad, so relieved, so loved wrapped in his arms as the last moments of my life counted down. I was left speechless as Dutch wiped away my tears and kissed me so sweetly.
And then the chop, chop, chop of the helicopter was approaching again, and I looked up to see that we were literally surrounded by squad cars and black sedans. They were all about fifty yards away and the cops and agents who’d driven here were outside of their cars, eyeing us with a mixture of fear and trepidation. Instinctively, I also glanced at the clock on the bomb. Even upside down I could see that we had barely two minutes left to live.
T-Minus 00:01:57
The chopper landed well away from Abby and Dutch, but close enough to M.J. so that she had a good view of who got out. She saw Brice and Candice and two other men in suits, and between them was a man of about thirty with a black eye, torn tuxedo, and victorious smile. His hands were secured behind his back and he had no chance of escape, but still, his smile widened when he saw Abby and Dutch. It made M.J. sick to her stomach to look at him. He had to be this Buslawski character they’d all been talking about.
Candice yanked on his arm and tugged him to the front of all the cars to face Abby and Dutch.
M.J. instinctively wound her way through the cars and police toward them, that intuitive sense that she stay close to Candice pushing her forward. “What’s the code to deactivate the bomb!” Candice demanded.
Buslawski simply laughed.
M.J. walked forward; someone from the other side had just entered her energy. This was a new soul. And she felt strongly it was connected to the man who’d strapped Abby to a bomb.
“Candice, please!” Abby yelled from across the road as she pulled up her wrist to show that Dutch had handcuffed himself to her. “Please! Someone get Dutch out of these! Please! Save him!”
Dutch reacted by pushing Abby’s hand down and pulling her close to him. He was willing to die with her and everyone there knew it.
“What’s the code?!” Candice shouted again. This time she struck Buslawski so hard he doubled over. But then he lifted his head and actually laughed. “You’ll never guess it,” he sang. “And you only get one try!”
Candice raised her hand to strike him again, but at that moment M.J. rushed forward and yelled, “Wait!”
Candice’s eyes darted to her, but her arm remained high, ready to strike.
M.J. bent down to look at the bomber in the eye. “Someone from the other side wants you to tell us the code,” she said.
He merely snickered at her.
“I’m a medium,” M.J. said quickly. “Someone with an M is trying to connect to you. She keeps saying it’s me! It’s mememememe!”
Buslawski’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t believe her for a second.
M.J. reached out to the woman with the M name. “Mary,” she said to him. “Her name was Mary. She says that she’s so disappointed in you. She never wanted this.”
Buslawski turned away from her.
Candice struck him again. “What’s the code?!”
M.J.’s jaw clenched. She wanted Candice to calm down, but she knew they were quickly running out of time.
“What’s the timer say?” Brice called to Abby and Dutch as a large metal truck arrived with the words BOMB SQUAD on the side.
“It’s too late,” Dutch called back. “Less than a minute. You guys all get back!”
Around them people began to move away, but Candice stood there with Brice and M.J., who all refused to move.
Meanwhile Mary was practically yelling at M.J. to keep trying to talk to the bomber. “Mr. Buslawski,” M.J. said, squatting down again to get right up into his face. “Mary says that she’s the one who’s responsible. She decided to take her own life, and nothing anyone else said or did contributed to it. She says please don’t do this. Tell them the code!”
Buslawski remained unmoved.
In frustration M.J. stood. She had only seconds left to figure this out, she knew, and she reached out to Mary and begged her for a number that might have meant something to this man. One, she heard Mary say. One, one, one, one, one, one!
M.J. shook her head. She needed the other digits. Closing her eyes, she pleaded again, but Mary only continued to shout the number one, and then, in desperation she filled M.J.’s mind with the image of a wedding cake. And then she showed her M.J.’s symbol for suicide—a noose.
“Fusco! Harrison!” shouted a voice full of authority. “Grab that girl and the unsub and get back!”
A hand landed on her shoulder and M.J. shrugged it off. She knew Mary was giving her all the clues to the code, but she wasn’t the one that was going to be able to put it together. She needed help, so she lifted her chin and shouted at Abby and Dutch. “The code is connected to a wedding, but not this one, and it’s also connected to a suicide! I think one of the digits is a one!”
Abby reacted by gasping. “Ohmigod! I know the code!”
Chapter Sixteen
T-Minus 00:00:08
“What is it?” Dutch said, bending down in front of me to focus on the keypad of the bomb. “Abby, what’s the code?”
“Eleven, eleven, eleven!” I shouted, and I looked at Russ, whose triumphant smile evaporated. Mimi had killed herself at eleven eleven on the eleventh, and died a month after abandoning Russ at the altar, which would have been the eleventh of November 2011. I prayed that I was right and then I prayed that Dutch’s shaking fingers could type the date in fast enough.
He began to tap at the keypad and I gripped his free hand tightly. At the last second I closed my eyes tight and whispered, “Please!”
At my chest there was a little ping and then…nothing.
Nothing at all happened. For several more seconds Dutch and I stood together, squeezing hands and waiting, but then there was a sound that began to fill the air. The sound was clapping. I opened my eyes. Everyone—all the cops, the FBI agents, Candice, M.J., and even the chopper pilot—was clapping, and then they were cheering, and then they were all shouting and giving each other high fives.
Barely able to take it all in, I looked down and saw that the face of the clock had stopped with two seconds on the timer. Two seconds. My knees wobbled and I nearly went down, but Dutch caught me and held me close. “We did it, dollface!” he said. “Holy shit, we did it!”
I sobbed with relief and when I could support myself again, I looked to the crowd, searching….
At last I found M.J. She was crying too. We exchanged a look and I knew that I would be grateful to M. J. Hollida
y for the rest of my life. And I planned to live a very long life as the wife of Special Agent Dutch Rivers.
The bomb squad had me out of the metal harness in about twenty minutes; it probably would’ve taken less time, but Dutch refused to remove the handcuffs until after they’d safely deposited the bomb in the metal truck.
And then, from down the street came a limo, and out of it stepped my sister, who looked like a complete wreck. She seemed rattled not only by what’d happened—or nearly happened—to me, but also by what’d apparently happened to her.
She was disheveled and just a complete mess from head to toe. There were butterflies still flapping in her hair, crescent-shaped bite marks on her legs, and in her hand she carried a broken arrow from one of the cupids’ bows.
I had a feeling that Cirque du Ceremony may have perhaps gotten a little away from her. Still, she was so happy to see I was alive and, except for some cuts and bruises, okay, she barely mentioned the havoc the swans, butterflies, and rebellious little people had caused.
“Well, the minister has gone home with a hundred and two fever,” she announced as I was being patched up by the paramedics. “But a few of the guests are still at the estate. We might be able to find someone to get the two of you hitched.”
“Who’s still at the estate?” I asked.
“Dave and his wife,” Cat replied, picking at a swan feather clinging to her stocking.
“Dammit,” I swore. I’d missed her again.
“We’re not getting hitched today,” Dutch said firmly.
Cat eyed him moodily. “I can’t go through this whole wedding plan again, Dutch,” she said.
“You won’t have to,” he said, taking my hand and kissing it, but what he meant by that, he wouldn’t elaborate on.
Later that night Dutch and I were at our new home in the master bedroom resting comfortably on our new beautiful bed when the doorbell rang. One of Dutch’s brothers answered the door and Dutch and I heard Gaston’s voice in the foyer. “You don’t have to see him,” Dutch said to me. He’d been doing a great job of keeping everybody else at arm’s length while I recovered emotionally from our ordeal.
Truth be told, I was more worried about the big lump on his forehead. He had yet to tell me all that’d happened to him that day, and Candice had vowed to tell me only after I’d had some rest.
“It’s cool,” I told Dutch when a knock on our bedroom door alerted us that Gaston was waiting to be seen.
Dutch let him in, and the director smiled as he entered. I noticed he was no longer formally dressed, but he still looked dignified in a black sweater and matching slacks. “Sorry to disturb you,” he said. “But I wanted to let you know that Russ Buslawski has made a full confession.”
I sat up to hear what the director had to say. Dutch came to sit next to me, and he took up my hand and we listened without interrupting the director as he told us that in Russ’s apartment they’d found a suicide note, where he’d confessed to being responsible for all the bombs. He’d planned all along to detonate the bomb the moment I came down the aisle, and he probably meant to die in the blast.
His note and his confession, Gaston said, were something of a manifesto, where he claimed that the bombs were his revenge against those who’d driven his fiancée to kill herself. He’d wanted the bombs to be a message to the general public to be kinder to one another, which I thought was crazy twisted.
“Russ managed to easily gain access to Michelle’s apartment by posing as the exterminator. And he did the same at Taylor’s apartment when Taylor and her roommate were off to class. He rigged the latches, then waited for a time when the girls were alone to abduct them.”
“He couldn’t have done that with Debbie Nunez,” I said. “She would’ve recognized him.”
“Yes, that’s why he had to risk taking her on the street.”
“How did he get the girls to go to their targets?” Dutch asked.
“He told them that he’d be watching them every step of the way, and if they didn’t do as he said, he’d set off the bomb remotely.” It was exactly as I’d suspected, I thought. “He wanted them to suffer,” Gaston continued, “so he set each girl up with an obstacle course of sorts. Making them find their way out of wooded areas, he gave them a route to each of the locales that would be difficult physically and also keep them out of the view of anyone who might notice they were strapped to a bomb.”
Gaston then focused on me. “You were the biggest challenge Russ faced. He said that when he found Dutch’s note on your car, he thought it was something of a miracle. He knew how to lure you to your own house after everyone else had left, and he filled it with the same gas he uses when he tents a home for termites. It works on the central nervous system and, in large quantities, quickly knocks humans unconscious. Russ knew you’d fought your way out of difficult circumstances before, and he told us he didn’t want to underestimate your ability to fight him, so he decided the gas would kill two birds with one stone by knocking you out, and anyone who immediately came looking for you.”
I rubbed my forehead. “No wonder I still have a headache.”
“Yes, well, it could have been worse. Miss Fusco is home in bed, where I hope she’ll stay for the next day or two, and your best man, Rivers, was just released from the hospital.”
Dutch squeezed my hand. “Remind me to call Milo before we leave tomorrow, babe,” he said.
I nodded but then turned my attention back to Gaston. “Did he say how he got into my house in the first place?” I asked.
“Yes. Apparently he made a copy of the key your construction manager gave him.”
I blinked and in an instant I remembered meeting Dave the night my landscaper came by to check out the damaged urns. He’d lifted a key out from underneath a paint can, and I realized that Dave had gone to meet his wife for happy hour the night before and hadn’t met Russ at the house. He’d just left him a key under the paint can. “Dave…,” I growled.
“Hmm?” Dutch asked.
Not wanting to get Dave in trouble, I shook my head. “Nothing. Sorry, Director, you were saying?”
Gaston shrugged and turned for the door. “That’s really all there is to tell, Abigail.” But then he paused and turned back to us. “Oh, except for this,” he said. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out two airline tickets. “Agent Frost wanted me to give these to you and wish you congratulations.”
I stood up and held out my hand for the tickets. “We’re not married, Director.”
“Yet,” he said, and then he and Dutch exchanged a knowing look before he was gone.
I turned to my fiancé. “What’re you up to?”
“You’ll see,” he said cryptically. “You’ll see.”
* * *
A few days later, I donned my beautiful silk slip wedding dress and took up the small bouquet of lotus flowers a young girl in a sarong had brought me earlier. I then walked out of the thatched bungalow set just off a beautiful white sand beach on the coast of Bali and made my way down a winding path lit by the tranquil rays of the setting sun. Inhaling the perfume of tropical flowers set all along the path, I sighed contentedly at the serenade of the tide coming in and going out along the beach.
After one final turn I came out to a stone walkway, at the end of which stood my fiancé, looking more radiantly handsome than I could ever remember. Dutch was dressed in a white linen shirt that set off his tanned skin and midnight blue eyes, which lifted when they saw me. I watched him gasp, and then place a hand over his heart, and it filled me with such sweeping emotion that he was so moved by the sight of me. I walked without my cane, steady and sure toward him, my gaze locked with his. When I reached him, he took my hand, tucking it into the fold of his arm, and with a cabana boy, the flower girl, and the hotel manager as the only witnesses, Dutch and I were finally married. It was the most beautiful wedding ceremony ever. And absolutely perfect.
THE PSYCHIC EYE MYSTERY SERIES
Abby Cooper, Psychic Eye
Bette
r Read Than Dead
A Vision of Murder
Killer Insight
Crime Seen
Death Perception
Doom with a View
A Glimpse of Evil
Vision Impossible
Lethal Outlook
THE GHOST HUNTER MYSTERY SERIES
What’s a Ghoul to Do?
Demons Are a Ghoul’s Best Friend
Ghouls Just Haunt to Have Fun
Ghouls Gone Wild
Ghouls, Ghouls, Ghouls
Ghoul Interrupted
What a Ghoul Wants
Victoria Laurie, Deadly Forecast
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