Keeper of the Bride

Sam felt his pulse give a little gallop of excitement. “Interesting.”

“We’ve already got an APB out. The man’s name is Jimmy Brogan. And he has a record. Petty theft four years ago and two OUI’s, that kind of stuff. Nothing major. I sent Cooley out to talk to the wife and check the house.”

“Does Brogan have any explosives experience?”

“Not that we can determine. The wife swears up and down that he’s clean. And he’s always home for dinner.”

“Give me more, Gillis. Give me more.”

“That’s all I have to give, unless you want me to slit open a vein. Right now I’m bushed and I’m going home.”

“Okay, call it a day. I’ll see you in the morning.”

All the way home, Sam’s mind was churning with facts. A cancelled wedding. A missing church janitor. An assassin in a black Ford.

And a bomb.

Where did Nina Cormier fit in this crazy thicket of events?

It was eleven-thirty when he finally arrived home. He let himself in the front door, stepped into the house, and turned on the lights. The familiar clutter greeted him. What a god-awful mess. One of these days he’d have to clean up the place. Or maybe he should just move; that’d be easier.

He walked through the living room, picking up dirty laundry and dishes as he went. He left the dishes in the kitchen sink, threw the laundry in the washing machine, and started the wash cycle. A Saturday night, and the swinging bachelor does his laundry. Wow. He stood in his kitchen, listening to the machine rumble, thinking about all the things he could do to make this house more of a home. Furniture, maybe? It was a good, sound little house, but he kept comparing it to Robert Bledsoe’s house with its Steinway piano, the sort of house any woman would be delighted to call home.

Hell, Sam wouldn’t know what to do with a woman even if one was crazy enough to move in with him. He’d been a bachelor too long, alone too long. There’d been the occasional woman, of course, but none of them had ever lasted. Too often, he had to admit, the fault lay with him. Or with his work. They couldn’t understand why any man in his right mind would actually choose to stay with this insane job of bombs and bombers. They took it as a personal affront that he wouldn’t quit the job and chose them instead.

Maybe he’d just never found a woman who made him want to quit.

And this is the result, he thought, gazing wearily at the basket of unfolded clothes. The swinging bachelor life.

He left the washing machine to finish its cycle and headed off to bed.

As usual, alone.

THE LIGHTS WERE ON at 318 Ocean View Drive. Someone was home. The Cormier woman? Robert Bledsoe? Or both of them?

Driving slowly past the house in his green Jeep Cherokee, he took a good long look at the house. He noted the dense shrubbery near the windows, the shadow of pine and birch trees ringing both edges of the property. Plenty of cover. Plenty of concealment.

Then he noticed the unmarked car parked a block away. It was backlit by a streetlamp, and he could see the silhouettes of two men sitting inside. Police, he thought. They were watching the house.

Tonight was not the time to do it.

He rounded the corner and drove on.

This matter could wait. It was only a bit of cleanup, a loose end that he could attend to in his spare time.

He had other, more important work to complete, and only a week in which to do it.

He drove on, toward the city.

AT 9:00 a.m., the guards came to escort Billy “The Snowman” Binford from his jail cell.