left for the office at seven fifteen. As her leggy strides ate up the sidewalk, the stalker’s gloved hands gripped the SUV’s wheel and twisted the key.
The glossy black rental looked like thousands of others on the city streets, but the stalker had taken no chances. The white New York plates had been splattered with mud. A fedora had been purchased, sunglasses worn, a collar turned up.
The location was perfect: Sutton Place, a picturesque nook of the Upper East Side. The area was quiet and exclusive. Best of all, it skirted the Queensboro Bridge, allowing swift and easy egress from a Manhattan crime scene.
At this hour, traffic was still light. The sanitation truck was long gone. Only two cars moved down the one-way street. The SUV rolled slowly, just behind the target. Breanne nattered as she moved, cell phone plastered to her fair head, unaware of the dark monster pacing her. She looked like a seagull, white and graceful, gliding with ease through the concrete canyons, wings spread, beak high . . .
The stalker’s eye twitched.
She was attractive. So? Even beautiful birds were made to die unfair deaths. This was something the stalker knew firsthand. Breanne’s fate was a necessary reckoning: A treasure had been taken. Now a price would be paid.
The stalker’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. Several times, this course had been run. An ideal stretch was coming up, where signs warned of active driveways. No cars were parked there. No curbs were blocked—nothing to come between the bride-to-be and certain death.
Everything was perfect. Now it was going to happen. Now—
The stalker cut the wheel. Tires bounced over the concrete curb. The engine roared, and the vehicle shot forward. Breanne half turned, blond hair flying, finally aware of the threat. But it was too late. In another second, Beauty would be broken beyond repair—
DIE! DIE!
But she didn’t.
Before three tons of metal could smash her slender form, Breanne’s body was struck by another; a lunging, muscular man slammed her off the sidewalk and into a recessed doorway.
The SUV hurtled past the pair, crushing the woman’s dropped cell phone, mangling her designer handbag. The stalker cut the wheel again, banged off the curb, clipped a parked car.
There was screaming, shouting, commotion. The stalker checked the rearview. A man in workout sweats helped Breanne to her feet; a flash of profile told the stalker who he was.
With a raging string of curses, the stalker continued driving the route that had been planned. Breanne and her muscular savior would call 911, report the incident. In ten minutes, maybe less, the police would start looking. By then the vehicle would be off Manhattan’s streets.
The SUV made the corner on First Avenue; turned again to the side street that led to the bridge ramp, headed for the Queens side of the East River. There was a place near the warehouses, deserted and dingy. The stalker would ditch the vehicle there. Then a short hike to the subway and back to Manhattan.
It would take a few days to create a new plan, but one would be made, and then it would be done. When the handsome groom saw his bride at the altar, her white gown would be replaced with a burial shroud. Yes, one way or another, Breanne Summour was going to die before her wedding day.
ONE
THE way I see it, a wedding is a new beginning, full of hope and possibility. Death is an ending—black, dark, final. Flowers are involved with both, and tasteful music selections, but for the most part, brides and corpses have nothing in common, unless you’re talking about the bride of Frankenstein, in which case the bride is a corpse.
This particular wedding story involved a bride and several corpses. I was not one of the corpses. I wasn’t the bride, either. The one and only time I’d been a bride took place at Manhattan’s City Hall, where I waited with my groom in a long line of couples to obtain the proper paperwork, after which my future husband and I were ushered into a room with all the charm of a DMV office. A fleshy-faced justice of the peace in a snug-fitting suit then auto-stamped our marriage license in the midst of declaring us wed, which sounded something like—
“I now pronounce you” . . . ker-chunk . . . “man and wife.”
I was nineteen at the time.
In calendar years, my bridegroom was barely three years older than I. Sexually speaking, however, Matteo Allegro had traveled light-years beyond. Case