Kitabı oku: «Before Cain Strikes»

Praise for Joshua Corin’s debut novel WHILE GALILEO PREYS

“I never understood what spine-tingling meant until I read this book.”

—San Francisco Book Review

“Joshua Corin is a new name to watch in crime fiction. Fearless, inventive and intuitive, his writing is incredibly self-assured.”

—J.T. Ellison, bestselling author of The Cold Room

“Enjoyable thriller [with] faultless action scenes.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Corin has created a quirky, savvy profiler in Esme Stuart and a first-rate antagonist in the sniper. Readers are going to hope Corin has a whole series of books planned for Esme.”

—RT Book Reviews

“For suspense/thriller fans like me, author Joshua Corin is a dream come true. The intensity levels were insanely high throughout this book from beginning to end. I couldn’t get enough.”

—Manic Readers

“An excellent, bone-chilling tale. The plot is tightly woven, and the action doesn’t stop until the last page. I look forward to seeing more of Mr. Corin’s work. This is a must read.”

—Romance Reviews Today

Before Cain Strikes
Joshua Corin

www.mirabooks.co.uk

To my niece Abby (for when she is much, much, much older)

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Acknowledgments

Prologue

We are a nation of outlaws. It’s in our history.

It’s in our blood.

Our first colony in Massachusetts was settled as a sanctuary and refuge for those souls brave enough to defy the Anglican Church. These men and women were the first American heroes and they were rebels one and all. That their ancestors should rise up one hundred and fifty years later and throw off the shackles of British tyranny was inevitable. What was the Civil War, really, but a re-creation of the Revolution from a Southern point of view?

We are not a people who respond well to authority.

Is it any wonder, then, where our sympathies lie? Of course the chroniclers of the Wild West preferred Billy the Kid to Pat Garrett. Of course we all know the legend of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but how many of us can mention—or even care about—the Pinkerton detectives who were on their trail?

Look at our literature. Look at our theater. Time and again, our fascination sides with the felon, the ne’er-do-well, the desperado.

By sales alone, who is the most popular American comic book character of the twentieth century? Not that “over-grown Boy Scout” Superman. Not “guilt-ridden” Spider-Man. According to industry experts, the most popular comic book character of the twentieth century was the shadow-dwelling vigilante Batman. Of course he was.

It’s no surprise that we as a nation have become so fascinated by serial killers. As an ever-growing government has euthanized our convictions and emasculated our passions, we recognize in the serial killer a figure of unabashed liberty, and we are attracted.

Let there be no misunderstanding: murder is reprehensible. The thesis of this text will be an analysis of the recent series of murders committed by Henry “Galileo” Booth in the context of the outlaw mystique. If you are looking for a championing of men such as him, look elsewhere. There is a vital line between attraction and acceptance.

John Dillinger is much more appealing from afar.

Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil wrote that when we gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into us. Hold my hand. Take a breath. The abyss we are about to study in its dark geography is at the very core of America and its honesty cleanses with acid.

Are you ready?

Let’s begin.

1

Timothy’s first pet was a yellow-haired hamster named Dwight. Dwight came with his own glass container and his own wheel and Timothy’s parents placed it all on a folding table by a window in Timothy’s bedroom. Timothy was six years old. Dwight was his birthday gift. The next morning, after he and his mother fed Dwight his breakfast (a lettuce leaf), Timothy’s mother left her son alone in his room with the creature. Timothy sat cross-legged in the center of his mint-green carpet and held Dwight in his hands and ran his fingers along the rodent’s spine. The vertebrae reminded Timothy of a pipe cleaner. In nursery school, he built a man and a woman out of pipe cleaners. Timothy bent the hamster’s spine this way and that way. Through it all, the animal kicked and kicked, so Timothy held him firm with his left hand and ran the fingertips of his right hand along the thin yellow fur and the ridges of Dwight’s spine, which, again like a pipe cleaner, was so bendable, but just how bendable was it? Timothy grabbed Dwight’s hindquarters and twisted. Dwight’s feet kicked and kicked and kicked and kicked and then stopped kicking altogether and Timothy had his answer.

He opened the window in his bedroom and tossed the corpse out and told his parents in between sobs that Dwight had fallen. They consoled him. His father, a travel agent, helped Dwight bury the animal and took his son out for ice cream. Three weeks later, his mother, a veterinarian, got him a tabby. Timothy named the cat Boots. Boots, to her credit, lasted many months longer than Dwight, until Timothy was able to finally reach his father’s tools, which were kept on a wall in the garage. Dwight chose the claw hammer, which proved doubly useful because he was able to later use it as a shovel to bury Boots in their neighbor’s yard.

So his parents bought him another cat.

Then another.

Then a puppy.

Then a parakeet.

Then a pair of goldfish in a sealed aquarium.

The goldfish he poisoned with Drano. By then he was nine years old. The goldfish were his last pets for a long, long time.

Until today.

And today was a very special day not only because he had a new pet on a new birthday but because he had acquired her all by himself. No one else knew about her, which was fine by him. Pets were personal. And she was his.

Her name was Lynette. She had yellow hair—much like Dwight, actually—and a pair of eyes so blue they reminded Timothy of wrist veins. His were prominent. He used to wonder if he had the same number of skin layers as everyone else, but a simple dissection with a straight razor (from his dad’s shaving kit) and a microscope (from his old grammar school) solved that mystery.

Lynette’s limbs were meaty. Her whole body was, really. Whoever had owned her before him had fed her well. Catching her had been easy but transporting her had been a challenge. Timothy ended up stuffing her in a heavy-duty duffel bag he bought at an army surplus store and dragging her. No one asked questions. Why would they? By the time he brought her down the wooden steps of the unfinished basement and deposited her in the corner, his heart was pounding a cocaine rhythm and his vision had become misty with exhaustion. He left her zipped in the bag, climbed the stairs to the kitchen and poured himself a tall glass of ice water. That did the trick.

Then he returned to the basement and unzipped the bag. Lynette was still unconscious. Her bare chest—as amorphously plump as the rest of her—languidly crested and troughed. He looked to see if there were any scorch marks on her neck where he had Tasered her. That was when he noticed the dime-size mole at the bend of her left clavicle. He fingered its spongy texture. Hmm. He might have to take her to see a doctor. The mole could be cancerous. He filed that thought in the back of his mind and secured the leather collar around her thick throat and gathered the almost-empty duffel bag from under her and brought it with him to the wooden stairs. He had made it halfway up when Lynette made a noise.

Was it a conscious moan? Timothy wasn’t sure. He remained fixed on that middle step and watched her. She lay fifteen feet away and, yes, she was beginning to awaken. Good. Good. He gently placed the duffel bag on an upper step, all the while keeping his gaze firmly on her body. Forearms twitched. Legs stretched. Eyes opened. Those eyes as blue as wrist veins. They belonged to him now. She belonged to him now. It was time for introductions.

“Hi,” he said. The timbre of his voice quavered. Was he nervous? Of course he was. Lynette was the first pet that was truly his. “I’m Timothy. Today is my birthday. Welcome to your new home.”

Her blue eyes widened. She saw him, standing there. Her mouth formed words. Her brow formed confusion. Those eyes flickered from Timothy on the stairs to the cement walls around her, to the eleven feet of heavy chain attached from her collar to a rafter ten feet above her, and then to her own bare thighs and breasts and finally to her arms, which used to conclude with long lovely hands but now ended only with…

Well, he’d declawed her.

Oh, how she screamed. And screamed. And screamed.

“Poor thing,” muttered Timothy. “You’re going to need to be housebroken.”

She rushed forward. The chain yanked her back. She rushed again. She bared her teeth. She cried out something like “What have you done to me?” but Timothy wasn’t paying attention. By then he’d reached the top of the stairs and shut the basement door.

It was lunchtime.

If there was any surefire way to domesticate an animal, it was with food. Wasn’t that how his parents had tried to domesticate him? Timothy removed the remaining items from the duffel bag and then tossed it aside. Most of the items were, of course, Lynette’s clothes. Those might come in handy later, but for now, they were useless, so he folded them up, just as he’d been taught, and placed them on top of the discarded bag. He had never folded a bra before. That proved the trickiest. He ended up doubling it over, cup onto cup. That seemed to be the thing to do. Then he returned to the kitchen and picked up the other items from the bag and placed them on the counter.

This wasn’t his house, so he had to search for a pan and utensils. He finally found what he needed and set the pan on top of the gas stove and almost activated the burner when he realized he was skipping a very important step. His mother would have been very angry with him. Before cooking the meat, he needed to debone it.

That took some time, not because he was inexpert at what he was doing but because there seemed to be so many tiny bones to take away. Gradually, the garbage bin underneath the sink filled up with inches and inches of slender joints and ligaments, and all the while, from below, Lynette screamed. A bread-box-size TV hung below one of the kitchen cabinets and Timothy clicked it on. Lynette’s voice, which was quickly hoarsening, was drowned out by a rerun of Law & Order. By the time the court case had begun, he had vegetable oil and soy sauce sizzling in the frying pan. By the time the shocking verdict was reached, he had fried the sliced boneless meat to a handsome brown.

The kitchen smelled like summertime.

Excited, Timothy switched off the burner. He forked several slices onto a green ceramic plate, sprinkled on some herbs he’d found in the cabinet above the TV and carried the meal, along with some eating utensils, to the basement door. Lynette had to be hungry and the fried flesh had a savory aroma that even a vegan couldn’t resist. Not that Lynette, by all appearances, was a vegan. Timothy opened the basement door and descended into her home.

She was crouched on the floor in the corner. Her long blond hair was moist with sweat and clung to her face like fresh-spun silk. Through the silky yellow, though, peered those blue eyes. He saw hatred in those eyes. That would change.

“I’ve brought you lunch,” he said. “Doesn’t it smell good?”

“Let…me…go,” she rasped. All that screaming had really done a number on her vocal cords. Timothy regretted not carrying down a glass of water to accompany the meal. So thoughtless! He promised to reprimand himself later.

“Don’t you want some nice steak, Lynette? I made it all for you.”

“How…do you know…my name?”

“Why wouldn’t I know your name? You’re mine.” He smiled at her. “And I also went through your wallet.”

Her eyes briefly went to the meat, then back to his face.

“Why are you…doing this?”

Timothy’s smile turned upside down. Had he chosen poorly? When he first spotted her in the library, those blue eyes so intent on the words in that thick paperback, he’d assumed she was intelligent. The last thing he wanted was a dumb pet.

“Please,” he said. “Have something to eat. The food’s not poisoned, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He speared a slice with the fork and slid the thin wet flesh into his mouth. It was gamey, but the soy sauce and the herbs really added flavor. He chewed, swallowed, smiled. “See?”

Did her throat swell with a bated gulp? With that leather leash bound so tight, it was so difficult to tell. Timothy took a step forward. He speared another slice and held it out to her, mere inches from her nostrils.

She stared at it.

Timothy was certain Lynette had an appetite. It had nothing to do with her size. She had been through an ordeal, and animals dealt with stress via sex and/or food. He was just trying to make her comfortable. He wanted this relationship to work. After Dwight and the puppy and—

She reached forward and with her teeth she sucked the meat off the fork. Timothy wanted to clap, but that would have meant putting down the plate. Instead, he took another step forward. Now maybe fourteen inches away from her.

“Thank you,” she muttered. Her lips gleamed with steak blood. “What is it?”

“You should know, silly. It’s your left hand. Silly, silly pet. Want some more?”

With his left hand, he loaded another slice onto the fork and brought it to her mouth. He almost made an airplane noise.

Briefly, their breaths intermingled. This, finally, was intimacy. Timothy felt warm inside. This was true love, an owner to his pet.

And then she forcefully chomped down on his left wrist. Timothy recoiled, but her jaw held fast. Her incisors pierced his paper-thin flesh and dug deep into his plump antebrachial vein. Blood squirted into her throat and almost made her gag but she held fast and squeezed tighter with her jaw. She wanted to hear his bones snap. She heard something shatter but that was just the ceramic plate with the pieces of her hand, her hand, her hand…

She opened her mouth briefly for air—she needed to breathe, she needed to throw up!—and that’s when Timothy stabbed the fork into one of those blue eyes that had attracted him so, stabbed her all the way into the soft tissue of her frontal lobe. Blue ran red. Blue ran red.

Timothy took a step back. He held his gnawed wrist to his chest. He would need a tourniquet. But first he took one last, long, disappointed look at Lynette. What a bad, bad pet she had turned out to be.

He found a first aid kit upstairs, in a bathroom attached to the master bedroom, and after dousing his wrist in fiery iodine, wrapped it tightly in toilet paper and then Ace bandages. It was a temporary solution, but it would have to suffice. While upstairs, Timothy wandered the halls. This wasn’t his house, but he knew the occupants wouldn’t be back for another twelve days (according to the information he’d gleaned at his father’s travel agency). He tested each of the three beds. The king-size in the master bedroom was the most comfortable—firm but not too stiff. Timothy wanted to take a nap. His left hand felt…well, felt nothing at all, and he knew that was not a good sign. Begrudgingly, he roused himself from the king-size bed and made his way back downstairs to the kitchen. It was time to go.

But first, the photographs.

He slid out an iPhone from his jeans pocket. Taking pictures was not his cup of tea, but Cain42 had posted strict requirements, and Timothy intended to meet them all. Of course, he hadn’t intended to meet them today—he’d hoped to have a lot more time with his pet—but c’est la vie. He ambled down the wooden stairs into the basement and aimed his smartphone’s camera at his expet. She lay crumpled in the corner. Her head lolled to the side like an infant’s. Timothy quickly snapped off a series of pictures and reviewed them on the camera’s LCD screen. They weren’t the most original photographs in the world—for one, the sixty-watt lighting in the basement dispersed in uneven patches and cast some unfortunate shadows across Lynette’s corpse—but they would have to do. Timothy slid his iPhone back into his jeans pocket, waved goodbye with his good hand to the one-eyed blonde in the corner and returned to the kitchen. Now it was time to go.

He dialed the gas stove. It activated with a hiss. He then opened the nearby microwave door, snagged six cans of Campbell’s soup from the pantry shelves and hefted them one by one onto the microwave’s glass plate. The microwave door closed with an agreeable click. Hiss, click. Such pleasant sounds a kitchen made. He set the timer for thirty minutes and hightailed it for the back door. He had no idea how long the metal cans would take to spark and ignite, and he didn’t want to take any chances.

As it turned out, he was able to make it all the way to the end of the residential block before the kitchen exploded. One of Cain42’s cardinal rules: the cleanest crime scene is a destroyed crime scene. Glass splattered onto the front lawn. Flames licked through the open windows at the house’s placid green exterior. Green became black. Soon everything on that plot of land—the master bedroom, the grass, the remains of Timothy’s pet—would be black.

Fire always painted in monochrome.

Timothy inconspicuously joined the gathering crowd come to watch the fireworks. There weren’t many people, really. Most of the suburban neighborhood’s occupants were at work. But there were enough to blend in, at least until the M7 bus arrived and Timothy was whisked far away from the blaze. The bus left the curb as the first of the fire engines showed up. Timothy hoped none of the firefighters got injured. Good people, firefighters.

He unrolled his earbuds, plugged them into his iPhone and listened to an album of Brahms lullabies as the Sullivan County bus traveled into the next town over. Once there, he transferred to a Trailways bus, which deposited him a few dozen miles east to New Paltz. By then it was dusk, dusk on his birthday. From the New Paltz terminal, Timothy used some cash from Lynette’s wallet, which he had in his other pocket, to pay for a cab home.

Another of Cain42’s rules: always hunt far from where you sleep.

Timothy’s house was not far from historic Huguenot Street, a minivillage of Colonial America located in the heart of New Paltz. When he was much younger, sometime between the cats and the goldfish, Timothy’s parents took him to Huguenot Street to tour rustic Locust Lawn and the nearby spacious Ellis House, with its spooky Queen Anne interior. All the while, folks dressed up in colonial drapery mingled to and fro. Many of them were students at the local university looking to earn a few extra bucks. Even at that young age, Timothy found the whole affair to be delightfully weird. He longed to live in the Ellis House, and often wondered how difficult it would be to break in, and steal a nap on that small, square, starched bed.

Timothy apparently had a thing for other people’s beds.

His own bed lay in a two-story American foursquare on a street lined with two-story American foursquares. All were squat, with faces made of brick and stucco. Most had cookie-cutter porticos bookending their front doors, which were various shades of white. Timothy only recognized his by rote. He offered the cabdriver a modest tip and hopped out onto the well-trimmed front lawn. Old, knee-high bushes bracketed the two short steps that led from lawn to landing. Timothy had several pets buried in the soil behind those bushes. He thought of them with fondness every time he opened his front door.

“There he is!” he heard his mother say, and this kept him from bounding up the stairs to his bedroom. Instead, he made his way into the den. Mother sat in her chair, predictably engrossed in her needlepoint. Today’s project was embroidering the smiley face of Christ Jesus onto a mauve cushion. She donated all of her needlepoint to the local Salvation Army, where she volunteered every Saturday from ten to two.

He stood in the middle of the den. She didn’t look up from her needlepoint. “Your father and I weren’t sure if you were going to come home. And on your birthday, no less.”

Timothy noted that she didn’t ask him where he’d been or what he’d been doing. Both she and his father stopped asking him that a long time ago.

The Ace bandages swathing his left wrist were becoming caked with blood. “I got bit by a dog,” he said.

At this she raised her eyes from her work. “Oh, Timothy, come here.” There was no concern in her voice, only disappointment.

He approached. Carefully, Timothy’s mother unwrapped his bandages and examined the wound.

“Did you disinfect it?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She sniffed the iodine and nodded. “Good boy. Nevertheless, you’re going to need stitches.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She peered at his face, trying to read it. What could she see? What did she know? It didn’t really matter, because at that moment the garage door roared open. Father was home.

Quickly, she brought Timothy to the first-floor bathroom, rinsed his wrist under the faucet and reached down for her emergency supplies below the sink. She had an ample stock: antiseptics, gauze, a suture kit, etc. She got a discount through her veterinary practice. Timothy had a habit of getting cut up.

“Hello!” bellowed Father. “I’m home!”

“One minute!” she replied. Although much of the skin on her son’s thin forearm had darkened a nasty purple, the broken vein itself had already clotted nicely. The sutures could wait until after dinner. She rewrapped his wrist in gauze, sealed the bandages with a metal clip and brought Timothy back out to the den.

Father was holding a large box.

“Happy birthday!” he declared.

“Thank you, sir.”

While the box was placed on the dining room table, Mother sifted into the sideboard for candles, and then quickly went upstairs for the matches. She kept them hidden.

“Did you have a good day, sport?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good, good.”

Their gazes never met. If Timothy’s father had noticed the bandages, he hadn’t reacted. Timothy didn’t expect him to.

As Mother returned with the matches, the rectangular cake was removed from its box. German chocolate cake with genuine coconut pecan frosting. His favorite. Mother haphazardly arranged the pinky-size birthday candles across the cake’s surface, lit one and used it to light the others.

“Make a wish, sport.”

Timothy closed his eyes. He thought about Lynette. He thought about what went wrong. He thought about her blue eyes. He thought about Cain42. He couldn’t wait to send him the pictures.

He thought about his next pet.

There were so many possibilities.

With a deep breath, Timothy blew out his candles in one gust, all fourteen of them. Happy birthday to him.

2

“And that’s my point, Esme,” said Rafe Stuart. “That’s what I’ve been getting at all this time. You’re knowingly and willfully killing our family.”

Before Esme could respond, Dr. Rosen—a teensy, wrinkly pink woman in a green corduroy dress—cleared her throat repeatedly and yanked on her left earlobe. Dr. Rosen did this often. She claimed it was a combination of congestion caused by seasonal allergies and, well, being seventy-eight years old. Nevertheless, as a marriage counselor, she had come highly recommended.

Esme patiently waited until Dr. Rosen’s fit passed, all the while wanting to give the bite-size old woman something, anything, to ease her discomfort. But Esme had quickly learned during their first session so many weeks ago, when Dr. Rosen had vehemently pushed away an offered blister pack of Sudafed, that any assistance offered in this office was strictly one-way. This office, part of a three-story walk-up in downtown Syosset, twenty minutes from their home in Oyster Bay. Their home, which Esme was apparently, knowingly and willfully killing by, what, serving as a consultant for the FBI?

“Bullshit,” Esme answered.

Dr. Rosen leaned forward in her black leather chair, which, given her diminutive size, nearly swallowed her whole. “I think that statement calls for elaboration, Esme.”

Esme looked to her husband, who sat at the other end of the long divan. His arms were crossed. His jaw was clenched. If she’d had to paint a portrait of Rafe in the months since all this had begun, it would have to include this: arms crossed, jaw clenched. She supposed it was a posture of defense, but that implied she was the assailant here, and she wasn’t, was she? There were no villains in this circumstance, right?

“What I mean to say,” she added, after a calming hesitation, “is that, well, to call what I’m doing intentionally hurtful? That I would want to bring conflict into our household?”

“You brought Galileo into our household.”

And there it was. The elephant in the room. He didn’t resent her for going back to work. He wasn’t that prehistoric. He resented her because of Henry Booth, a crazed sniper who called himself Galileo and eluded national authorities until Special Agent Tom Piper, who Rafe hated, brought Esme out of her early retirement to help track him down. But at what cost? Time on the case had meant time away from home, away from Rafe, away from their six-year-old daughter, Sophie. In the end, in a bit of caustic irony, Booth invaded Esme’s home and took Rafe and Sophie captive. A bit of last-minute ingenuity ended Booth’s menace, but her husband and daughter had come so close to becoming casualties.

These were her sins.

And yet—

“Should we move to Iceland?” she asked.

Rafe raised an eyebrow. “Iceland?”

“I mean, it’s really just one city and the temperature does tend to drop into the negatives six months out of the year, but they’ve got practically no crime rate, so we should move to Iceland. We’ll have to take Sophie out of school, of course, and away from her friends, but she’ll be safer. In fact, why doesn’t everyone move to Iceland?”

“Esme…”

“Or Yemen. The crime rate in Yemen is, if you can believe it, even lower than in Iceland! There’s the whole Sunni thing, but I think I’d look good in a burka, don’t you, Rafe?”

“There’s a difference between overreacting and performing common due diligence.”

“I am performing due diligence! Do you know how many lives the FBI has saved in the six months—six months!—since I rejoined as a consultant? Do you, Dr. Rosen? No, you don’t, because if we do our job correctly, it doesn’t make the headlines. Balancing all of this hasn’t been easy, but it’s been necessary. It’s been the right thing to do. And you talk to me about due diligence. I love my family, and for you to even suggest otherwise, Rafe, makes me want to fucking clock you upside the head.”

“Okay,” interjected Dr. Rosen. “And that’s our hour for this week.”

She scooted out of her chair and held out her arms. Every session ended with a hug to each of them, and then the requisite hug between husband and wife. Dr. Rosen was a big fan of rituals. Esme and Rafe eyeballed each other. Who would stand first? It was an unspoken game of chicken that they played. But after the past five minutes, Esme was not in the mood for games.

She stood, and left Rafe in her shadow as she embraced their tiny therapist, carefully patting her potato-chip bones. By the time Esme stepped aside, Rafe was on his feet, and it was his turn. His black beard, shaggier than usual, brushed against the top of Dr. Rosen’s white scalp.

And then it was their turn.

So they wrapped their arms around each other and squeezed. It was awkward and emotionless and lasted all of three seconds. Then they turned to Dr. Rosen. Did they have her permission to leave?

Dr. Rosen sighed, sounding very much like a deflating balloon. “My mother, may she rest in peace, always taught me to be frugal. ‘Never waste,’ she said. She was a good woman.”

Rafe and Esme exchanged a confused glance.

“She raised two daughters, myself and my sister, Betty. She raised us all by herself, and in a community where women just didn’t raise two daughters alone. Our mother’s solution to every problem was always the same—preemption. Keep the problem from happening in the first place. Frugal, you see, even when it came to making mistakes.”

“Um?” said Rafe.

But Dr. Rosen continued unabated. “Betty and I developed different ideas about problem solving. Neither of us had the foresight of our mother, so our methods were more reactive. I came to believe that the best solutions were reached through compromise. Betty, on the other hand, has more of a, shall we say, scorched-earth philosophy. So I became a marriage counselor and what did Betty choose to become?”

“A lawyer,” Esme whispered. “She handles divorces.”

Sometimes she did not enjoy her gift for riddles.

“That’s right.” Dr. Rosen smiled. “Very good. And so here we are.”

Rafe raised an eyebrow. “What are you getting at?”

“She thinks we went to the wrong Rosen sister,” replied Esme. “Don’t you?”

Dr. Rosen shrugged her itty-bitty shoulders.

“So, wait, you’re giving up on us?”

“You tell me, Rafe. Why should I invest my time and energy when you and your wife are unwilling to invest yours?”

“Because we’re paying you!”

“How can I with a clear conscience continue to accept your money when I know it’s just being thrown away?”

“Is that how you feel?” asked Esme, her voice still mouselike. “We have no hope?”

Again, Dr. Rosen shrugged.

‘This is bullshit,” Rafe grumbled.

“So prove me wrong,” replied the doctor. “I’ll give you two weeks. Today is Wednesday, November 10. Come back here on Wednesday, November 24, and show me that I am wrong and I will gladly offer an apology. And if I’m right, I’ll put you in touch with my sister and that will be that.”

“You’re giving us an ultimatum.”

“I’m doing you a favor. Two weeks, boys and girls. Good luck. And drive home safe. It’s supposed to drop below freezing tonight.”

They drove home, predictably, in silence. Dr. Rosen had been right: the weather had taken a turn for the chilly. Rafe kept an eye out for black ice. This helped to keep his mind distracted. Esme had no such luck. The dying trees they passed on the highway offered little respite from her dark, dark thoughts.

Eight years of marriage. Love, a family, a life.

A beautiful child.

Esme knew they were having trouble, but were they really that close to the edge? Could six months put an end to eight years? The math alone didn’t make sense, but very little of this did. Why couldn’t Rafe just be supportive? She stood by him through his dissertation defense, his job search, his battle for tenure. She had never asked him to scale down his responsibilities. She would never have asked him to give up on his passions.

There he sat, less than an arm’s length away. Had he looked at her once since they left the therapist’s office? What was he thinking? She could ask him, but she already knew his answer would be “Nothing,” and that would be that.

Despite it all, she still loved him.

His lenses on his glasses were dirty. He rarely cleaned them himself, not out of laziness but plain apathy. How could he see out of them? She wanted to reach for his glasses case, take out that cheap piece of microfiber cloth that came with it and wipe his lenses clean right now, while he was driving. Six months ago, she would have. He would have protested and then he would have pretended to be blind and he would have forced her to take the wheel and it would have been fun.

Only six months ago.

They drove home in silence and pulled into their affluent neighborhood. The digital clock on the Prius’s dash read 9:22 p.m. Sophie should be in bed by now. During the Galileo incident, Rafe’s ornery father, Lester, had come down from upstate to help out and, well, never left. On one hand, this meant they had a babysitter whenever she and Rafe wanted some alone time. On the other hand, this meant that every day she had to put up with the old man’s judgmental mutterings. He did not like her, had never liked her, and made no apologies for it.

As they neared the driveway of their two-story colonial, they could tell something was wrong. There was a car already in the driveway, not Lester’s old Cadillac, which was in the shop, but a fat, immaculate white Studebaker. It was blocking Rafe’s spot in the garage. There were lights on in the house, but the curtains were drawn.

“Are we expecting guests?” asked Esme.

Rafe shook his head and pulled alongside the Studebaker.

They had a gun in their bedroom, locked in the bottom drawer of Esme’s night table. But Esme shuffled that overreaction to the back of the line and got out of the car. They were safe here in Oyster Bay. Yes, their home had been violated once before, but that had been a special case. To panic only gave credence to her absurd suggestion about Iceland. She looked over at Rafe.

He remained in the car.

“It’s okay,” she told him.

“You don’t know that,” he replied.

This wasn’t cowardice. This was textbook post-traumatic stress disorder. Henry Booth had almost killed him. She wanted to reach back into the car and give her husband a real hug, a protective hug, a hug to keep away all the demons. But she couldn’t.

Instead, she walked toward the front door.

Who would be visiting them at nine-thirty on a Wednesday night? There was a Florida license plate on the back of the Studebaker, so whoever it was had driven a long way. And nobody traveled one thousand miles for a surprise visit, not even one of Lester’s old buddies.

Esme reconsidered her overreaction.

She glanced back at the Prius. Rafe remained paralyzed. He probably wanted to move. He probably was willing his muscles to move. But they weren’t responding. Esme assumed he was thinking about Sophie, about his father, inside the house, possibly in danger, about her perhaps even, unarmed, her hand now on the doorknob. But still, his hands remained on the steering wheel and his legs didn’t budge an inch. No, she wasn’t upset with him. She pitied him. The cold air misted the breath in front of her lips, and through the dissipating mist, she turned the unlocked doorknob and opened the front door.

There was a stranger in the den. He had a glass of wine in his hand. His head looked like a penis. It was bald, ruddy, oblong, and protruded from a brown turtleneck sweater that looked scratchy and lint-infested. He was a large man, easily six-four, and had the gut of a beer keg.

“Grover Kirk,” said the stranger, by way of introduction. He reached out a sweaty-looking hand. “I’ve left you several messages.”

Grover Kirk?

“I’m writing that book about the Galileo murders. I’ve been trying to get an interview with you and your family.”

Ah, yes. Grover Kirk. Esme glanced again above his shoulders. Definitely a dickhead.

“Mr. Kirk, who invited you into my house?”

“Your father-in-law. Lovely fellow. Relayed to me some terrific anecdotes. He’s in the bathroom at the moment. I’m afraid he might have had a bit too much red wine. I brought up a bottle from my vineyard in central Florida. Would you like some?”

He reached for a half-empty bottle on the coffee table. The bottle had stained a purple ring on the cover of one of Esme’s Sudoku books.

She knew forty-four ways of rendering him unconscious in five seconds.

“Mr. Kirk,” she said, “if you’ll recall, I did respond to your first phone message. I told you that I wasn’t interested in participating. I told you that my family wasn’t interested in participating.”

“Your father-in-law seemed very interested.” He offered her the bottle. “How was marriage counseling?”

The front door opened. It was Rafe. Finally.

“I… Who’s this?”

Grover again reached out with his hand and introduced himself.

“He’s the one who’s writing that book about Henry Booth.”

“And all associated with what he did,” added Grover. “My book would be incomplete without long passages about you and your wife. Just to be here, in this house, where it all went down, is an honor.”

Esme gritted her teeth. “He wasn’t Elvis Presley, Mr. Kirk. He was a psychopath and this family is trying to put all of that behind us.”

“You can’t escape the past, Mrs. Stuart. Surely you of all people know that.”

She wanted to ask him what he meant, but she really, really wanted to clock him upside the head, and had taken a step forward when they all heard the downstairs toilet flush. There was nothing like that sound to eliminate the tension in a room.

“Leave,” muttered Rafe. “Now.”

Grover looked to him, then back to Esme, then finally to his bottle.

“All right,” he said. “I know when to call it a night. My card’s on the table. I’ll be staying at the Days Inn over in Hicksville. Give my regards to your father-in-law. Lovely fellow.”

He waited for them to move out of his way.

They moved out of the way.

“Be seeing you,” he said, and winked, and left.

Rafe locked the door.

“What an ass,” he said.

“I liked him,” replied Lester, shuffling into the room. “Wait…where’s the bottle of wine he brought?”

“He took it with him.”

Lester frowned. “Took it with him? What an ass.”

His reason for socializing gone, the old man continued on his way to his room. Esme counted the seconds until she heard his door slam shut.

Then she turned to her husband. He hadn’t moved far from the door.

“Are you okay?” she asked him.

“I…”

She reached out to him.

But once again: an interruption. This time it was Rafe’s cell phone, vibrating in his pants pocket.

“If it’s a Florida area code,” said Esme, “don’t answer it.”

Rafe examined the screen. “Five-one-eight.”

“Upstate?” asked Esme.

Rafe nodded and pressed Talk. “Hello?”

Esme watched him as he listened. His parents, Lester and Eunice, had raised him in upstate New York. It was only luck that Rafe chose a graduate school in Washington, D.C. Otherwise, they would never have met.

Eight years.

“Who is it?” Esme whispered.

Rafe put up a hand to silence her. His face had gone pale. Whatever he was hearing was not good news.

She had accompanied him a few times to his old house. His childhood in upper-middle-class suburbia had been very different from hers on the streets of Boston. But opposites attracted, right?

Rafe spoke a bit to the person on the other line, thanked them and then hung up the phone. He looked even more rattled than he had in the car.

“Rafe, what is it?”

“Do you…remember that girl you met at my reunion…the one I took to the prom?”

Esme vaguely recalled the woman in question. She was a sales rep for a vacuum cleaner company. A bit heavy-set. Very pretty blue eyes.

“Lynette something, right?”

“Yes. Lynette Robinson. She… Anyway, that was my cousin Randy…on the phone. The police…they just identified the…remains of…Lynette’s body…in the basement of a torched house.”

3

The funeral was done in black and white.

The black, of course, was provided by the mourners. More than a hundred people came out to pay their respects. Half of them didn’t even know the deceased, but had read about the tragedy in the Sullivan County Democrat. The national press was there, too, at the outskirts of the cemetery, and even they had the good sense to wear dark colors.

The priest wore black, naturally. The grave diggers, who stood a few feet from the crowd, wore long black coats. When the time was right, they would operate the pulleys, which were painted brown to camouflage with the sod, and lower the coffin into the four-by-eight-by-three hole they’d shoveled this morning.

The weather provided the white, covering the soil and the grass and the hundreds of gravestones scattered about the cemetery. Almost an inch of pale accumulation lay fixed above the cold earth, with more to come.

Even snowflakes were eager to attend Lynette Robinson’s funeral.

As the priest, a youthful redheaded tenor, recited scripture, Esme’s mind wandered (as it was wont to do when in the presence of recited scripture). She thought back over the past two days, from Grover Kirk (who had had the audacity to phone her Thursday morning) to Lester’s long list of supplies he wanted them to get while upstate. She and Rafe had arrived at his old house in the early evening. Immediately, they opened all the windows to air out all the dust and mildew off forty-year-old linen upholstery. Lester had kept the kitchen faucet dripping so as to prevent his pipes from freezing, but Rafe descended into the cellar nonetheless to double-check.

Esme phoned Oyster Bay.

“Hello,” grumbled Lester on the other end. “Hi, Lester.”

After exchanging hollow pleasantries, Esme asked if he could put Sophie on the line. And she waited. A breeze wafted in through one of the open windows in the bedroom and tickled at the back of Esme’s neck.

Then, finally: “Hi, Mom!”

“Hey, baby. How was school?”

“Zack Portnoy wet his pants. There was a big puddle under his chair. The janitor had to come and clean it up and everything. It was gross.”

Esme grimaced. “I’m sure it was, sweetie. Did you learn anything today in class?”

“To clean up pee, you need to use ammonia.”

“Did you learn anything else?”

Silence.

“Sophie?”

“I’m thinking, I’m thinking! Oh, yeah—Mrs. Morrow wanted me to remind you that you’re shap…shap…uh…”

“Chaperoning?”

“For the science museum trip on Monday.”

“Are you excited to go see the science museum?”

“Uh-huh. Will I get to touch the electricity in the crystal ball?”

“That’s up to Mrs. Morrow. She might have a lot of activities planned.”

“Okay. Oh, Grandpa Les bought Chinese tonight and I bet him that I could put a whole egg roll in my mouth and I did.”

“Sweetie, that’s not a good idea,” said Esme, caught between a giggle and a groan. “You could have choked.”

“Nuh-uh, I had water and also, if I choked, I would just put my arms up and I’d be all better.”

Rafe stepped into the room, a pair of his father’s worn workman’s gloves in his left hand.

“Just promise me not to do it again, all right, Sophie?”

She’d said their daughter’s name to let Rafe know who she was talking to.

Rafe indicated, a little vehemently, that he wanted to talk to her, too.

“Okay, Sophie. I’m going to put Daddy on. I love you.”

“I love you, too, Mommy.”

As the priest genuflected and stepped away from the podium, Esme’s thoughts returned to the present, and the funeral, and all around her, amid the light snow, a concerto of sobs. She glanced over at her husband. Like many there, he wore dark sunglasses. They’d stopped at a Walgreens on the way to the service to pick them up and had run into Rafe’s cousin Randy, from the ne’er-do-well branch of the Stuart family tree. Randy walked with a cane—not to support any actual injury but to support his claim for disability. He used to work at the Pepsi factory on the outskirts of the city and a case had fallen near his foot, and near his foot became on his foot and there it was. At Walgreens he bought a pair of knock-off Ray-Bans and walked off with a box of M&M’s.

It was Randy who’d called Rafe and Esme about Lynette. Randy was drinking buddies with one of the deputies in the county sheriff’s office, and rumor, when lubricated with cheap Scotch, traveled easy and fast. Randy had never personally known Lynette, but he was there at the funeral nonetheless, standing a few feet behind Esme and Rafe. He would be at the reception, too, with his cane, and would probably attempt to parlay his “disability” and his “grief” into a one-night stand.

The two grave diggers winched the coffin into the ground. Lynette’s immediate family was seated up front—both parents, two pairs of grandparents, three brothers and a sister. They had the best view. Not for the first time, Esme longed (in the event of her untimely death) to be cremated.

The coffin reached its resting place four feet below topsoil. This cued the crowd of mourners to slowly, quietly disperse. Esme followed Rafe back to his Prius. A thin coat of snow outlined the carlike shapes in the cemetery parking lot. Were it not for the chirp of Rafe’s electronic fob, they might have had to go door to door.

Once inside, Rafe powered up the seat warmers. Esme loved the seat warmers. Esme believed that every chair, couch and bench needed a seat warmer. They idled in the parking lot for several minutes while the windows defrosted the snow. In the rearview they could see the bottleneck of vehicles fighting to be the first to leave. Esme looked away from the mirror and clicked on the radio.

Rafe clicked it off.

“Have a little respect,” he said.

So Esme respectfully sat there in silence as the hybrid’s engine idled and the heat breathed out of the dashboard vents and the melting snow drooled down her window. Only once the parking lot had emptied did Rafe shift into Reverse.

The GPS navigated them to Lynette’s parents’ cottage, located at the end of a lower-middle-class cul-de-sac just outside the Monticello town square. The street was cramped with cars, so Rafe had to back up and park by the county courthouse. By the time they got out of their car, the flurries had thickened in a snowstorm. If they’d had the radio on, mused Esme, maybe they could have found out how many inches were forecasted. In the meantime, it was trudge-trudge-trudge and hope-hope-hope.

Esme wanted to be more sympathetic. She really did. Her sense of detachment didn’t have anything to do with the fact that Rafe went to the senior prom with this girl. Lynette had seemed pleasant enough, and what had happened to her was a horror. But ever since that session with Dr. Rosen, ever since she’d pronounced her ultimatum, Esme had felt as if she were a dispassionate spirit, floating outside of her body. The only moment in the past two days she’d felt anything close to actual emotion was that confrontation with Grover Kirk.

In other words, when it had to do with Galileo.

Had she become an adrenaline junkie? When she had been full-time with the FBI, she’d known her share of those. The type who only smiled under duress. The type who sought out increasing scenarios of danger (whether picking fights in a D.C. bar or parasailing in South America). The type who, whenever their heart rate dropped below the speed of a Keith Moon drum solo, became inordinately depressed. But, no, that wasn’t her…was it?

As expected, the Robinson house was wall-to-wall with the same black-clad guests as the cemetery. Lynette’s immediate family was among the last to arrive; the media had dogged them the moment they stepped off the holy ground of the cemetery. Fortunately, some neighbors had volunteered to stay at the house during the service and set everything up. A few faces looked vaguely familiar to Esme, but she was hard-pressed to put a name to any of them.

Many people knew Rafe. They shook his hand, patted him on the back, told him how glad they were to see him, asked how his father was doing. Each time, Rafe dutifully introduced (or reintroduced) Esme. She could tell that his heart wasn’t in it. He seemed detached, too, but for very different reasons. For the right reasons.

The local police were in attendance, as well, in uniform and paying their respects. Esme spotted Randy chatting up a freckled deputy. That must have been the drinking buddy. Then Rafe escorted her to the sheriff, a stout man in his sixties standing by a card table with a punch bowl. He had the awkwardness of a wallflower at a junior high school prom, albeit a wallflower with salt-and-pepper hair and a sidearm clipped to his belt. His name tag read Michael Fallon.

“It’s a pleasure, Sheriff,” said Esme, and shook his hand, which was dry but warm.

“And how’s your father, Rafe? Still kicking your ass, I assume?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We all heard about that ugliness last spring.” Sheriff Fallon shook his head in sadness. “I’m glad you all emerged in one piece. Are you okay, Rafe?”

Rafe offered Esme a quick glance, then answered, “As good as could be expected, Sheriff.”

The man nodded, then took a sip from his punch.

But Rafe wasn’t finished.

“So you’re aware, then, of who my wife is? Of what she does?”

This time Esme shot him a quick glance. Where was he going with this…?

“Of course,” Fallon replied.

“Be honest with me, Sheriff, for my father’s sake. This case… How out of your league are you?”

If Fallon was insulted, he didn’t show it. “We’ve got every man in the county working on it.”

“I’m willing to bet they’re all working hard, Sheriff, but I’m also willing to bet that none of them have my wife’s mind or her experience.”

Now Esme was the one who felt like the flower—a shrinking violet. Where was all of this praise coming from? Rafe had never even hinted that he thought about her like this. Even when they were dating, he disapproved of her job, and now this?

“If we need the FBI, Rafe, if it comes to that, we’ll call them. I promise you.”

“That’s what I’m saying, sir. You don’t need to call them. They’re already here. Esme is already here. And you’re going to use her, or I’ll tell the media camped outside that you could have but you didn’t. They know who she is. You’re going to put your provincial pride in your back pocket and let her help you solve this case. Are we clear?”

“What the fuck was that!”

They had retreated to one of the rooms in the cottage. Rafe motioned for Esme to keep her voice down, and he closed the door behind him. It took Esme a second to realize their dumb luck. This had to be Lynette’s room. An assortment of national flags decorated one of the walls. Esme recognized maybe half of them. From what she knew about Lynette, the woman had never even left New York State. The flags must have represented a dream of hers: to travel the world. On her vanity lay a jewelry box, open. Lynette trusted people. Esme wasn’t a profiler, but some of these conclusions were obvious.

Lynette probably trusted her assailant, until things turned dark.

The bedsheets were white and recently laundered. The room smelled sweet. There were lilacs by the window. Esme almost approached them to inhale their scent but then remembered what brought her into this room in the first place. She wheeled toward her husband, who was staring at the contents of the jewelry box.

“Let’s start simple,” she said.

He looked at her. His eyes were sad. “Fine.”

“First, I am not a prostitute and you are not my pimp. Don’t ever, ever offer my services without consulting me.”

“I thought you’d want to help.”

“That’s so beside the point!”

Rafe shrugged. That obnoxious dominance he’d displayed with Sheriff Fallon had been replaced by a mournful smallness. His gaze shifted back to the jewelry box.

“Second, since when have you given a damn about what I do? Since when have you done anything but criticize and ridicule my job? Eight years ago, you forced me to quit! Two days ago you accused me of ‘knowingly and willfully killing our family’!”

“I know what I said.”

“What’s changed?”

“Lynette is dead.”

“Were you close with her? Had you even spoken to her since the reunion?”

“No.”

“Then what makes her so special that you’re willing to upturn everything you’ve believed in and argued?”

“I would think you’d be happy,” replied Rafe. “Your husband finally values what you do. I would think you’d be thrilled.”

“Thrilled? I’m dumbfounded! I need you to explain this to me, Rafe. I need you to do it now and I need you to do it so I understand, because at this moment I have no idea who you are.”

“Someone I knew has been murdered. I’m asking you to help find who did it. It’s what you tell me you do, Esme. Why is anything else relevant?”

“Because it is!” She caught her own reflection in the vanity mirror. The tips of her ears, poking out from her shoulder-length brown hair, were scarlet. As sure a sign as any that she was pissed off. “How can you not see how this has to do with us?”

Rafe ran a hand over his face and let out a long sigh. Then he reached into the jewelry box and took out a pair of teal earrings.

“She wore these once,” he said.

Esme’s brow furrowed. “I don’t understand.”

“Please don’t make me… It’s not important….”

“Jesus, Rafe! Were you in love with her?”

“No! No. I never was in love with her. That’s the… Okay, fine. You want to know the whole truth? You want to know the story? You want to know why this is tearing me up inside?”

“All I’ve ever wanted is honesty.”