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Before Cain Strikes
Joshua Corin


When the student is ready, the teacher appears. The only problem is, in this online classroom the students are would-be serial killers eager to learn the tricks of the trade from a master, the enigmatic Cain42.FBI consultant Esme Stuart is struggling to stanch the doubt and fear eating away at her marriage. Now a seedy true-crime writer is dredging up the deadly confrontation that nearly destroyed her. But the link between Esme's old enemy and this new predator is the key to the Bureau's manhunt.Esme knows her involvement in the case could cost her everything. Her marriage. Her daughter. Her life. But when Cain openly challenges his "students" to embark on a killing spree, she has no choice but to act–before Cain strikes another victim down…









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 (http://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.”

He chuckled at her for a moment, then proceeded.

“Honesty. People say they want it, but when they get it, they get it all right. You’re heuristic. You always have been. You trust your instincts. I trust my intellect. But with Lynette Robinson…no, I wasn’t in love with her. But she was in love with me. God knows why. She never told me, of course, but she didn’t make a secret of it, either. The way she looked at me in class. The way she smiled at me whenever I got up to make a presentation. Her face would light up, and her eyes—she had these great eyes. Blue like, I don’t know, a calming swell of the ocean. I liked that she was in love with me. I wasn’t especially popular and some days were pretty brutal, but no matter what, she’d be there with that look of love in those blue eyes and that…helped. And I wish I could have loved her back. But I didn’t.”

“We can’t choose who we love,” said Esme.

“But why?” He looked at her. “Human society is based on our ability to exert free will over ourselves and in our interactions with others. I’m a sociology professor, for Christ’s sake, and I still don’t know what makes love so exceptional. I know it is exceptional, and I know I love you, very much, but I also know it has very little to do with my brain, and that’s a little scary. So, back in high school, I asked myself, Why can’t I love her back? Why couldn’t I choose to think about her the same way she thought about me? And I followed the course of thought to its logical conclusion and decided that it was because of her weight.”

“You were a typical, superficial, pigheaded—excuse the expression—teenage boy.”

“No, I wasn’t. Typical teenage boys don’t score 1600 on the PSATs. Typical teenage boys aren’t beaten by their fathers when they score A-’s instead of A’s. But that’s getting off track, because I’d reached what I felt was a logical conclusion and that left me sort of…satisfied. So I went to school the next day determined to speak to Lynette and share with her my realization.”

“Oh, Rafe, tell me you didn’t.”

“Oh, I did. I thought I owed it to her. I wanted her to understand that it wasn’t her fault. I wanted her to understand that I was, in fact, superficial, and it was my problem and there was nothing she could do about it. Esme, I thought I was carrying out an errand of mercy. I wanted to stop leading her on.”

“That poor girl.”

Again, Rafe chuckled. “You obviously didn’t know her very well. Because I told her this, between home-room and first period, and she didn’t slap me or cry or yell or do any of the things that in retrospect she had every right to do. She just smiled at me with those blue eyes and thanked me and that was that. And nothing changed.”

“I’ll bet she came home that night and cried herself to sleep.” Esme looked around the room. This was her home. This was her bed. This was where Lynette had retreated that night.

“The next day, tickets for the senior prom went on sale. I had no one to ask. There were a few girls I had crushes on—don’t give me that look—but they were either unavailable or very much out of my league. But as silly as it sounds, I really wanted to go to the prom. It was a rite of passage. I was a sociologist even then. The senior prom was something I needed to experience. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to go stag.”

“So you asked Lynette.”

“Yes. I made it clear to her that we were just going as friends—which must have been just another stab in the gut—but she acted cool about it and asked me the color of my cummerbund so she could get a matching dress and I didn’t even know what a cummerbund was, but I learned. And on the night of the prom, I wore a black tuxedo with a teal cummerbund and I showed up at that front door and there she was, beautiful, wearing these earrings. They matched her dress so perfectly. And we left.

“We went to the prom. We had a good time. We ate, we danced. We laughed. We always got along okay. And it was obvious she was still into me. And you’d think that maybe, just maybe, with the dress and these earrings and the magical occasion, that I’d fall for her, and I knew that’s what Lynette hoped. I could see it in her blue eyes. But I felt…nothing. And as the night wore on, I knew that this was not going to be a happy ending, but there was nothing I could do short of faking an illness, and that’s more my cousin Randy’s thing, anyway.

“So I ate and danced and laughed and then it was time to go home. And I drove her home. I walked her to the front door. This was the moment. It would have been so easy to just lean in and kiss her good-night. Even if it were just on the cheek, it would have been the right thing to do. But I knew how she felt and I didn’t want to lead her on. We stood on her front stoop and she looked up at me with those blue eyes and I…shook her hand. And then I left.”

“Oh, Rafe…”

He wiped his eyes. “We saw each other in class the next day, and the day after that, and we said hi to each other in the hallway, but that spark I used to see in her was gone. I’d extinguished it. I’d killed it. And now another monster has come along and I need you to find him and I need you to put him down because, you see, maybe if I do this for her, maybe…I don’t know…she’ll forgive me. And if she can forgive me…maybe someday you can, too.”




4


After the reception, Lynette’s boyfriend, Charlie Weyngold, was brought to the county sheriff’s office for questioning. He came willingly. Rafe and Esme, with the sheriff’s reluctant permission, accompanied them on the trek through the snow, almost three inches now and rising by the hour. On their way out the door at the Robinson cottage, Esme overheard two women mention one to two feet. She hoped they were talking about the size of their toddlers.

The interview was conducted not in a windowless cell with a dangling lightbulb but in the sheriff’s cozy corner office. This was where Sheriff Fallon had interviewed Lynette’s parents and siblings the day before. He passed the file to Esme as soon as she took her seat on a couch in the office. Sheriff Fallon sat behind his desk. The boyfriend, Charlie, took the room’s other chair, a low-back folding number that couldn’t have been comfortable even in the best of circumstances.

Rafe was to wait outside, kept company by those deputies and officers not out on the streets earning double-time behind the wheel of a county snowplow. He sipped herbal tea. He thought about high school.

Charlie Weyngold thought about his necktie. He didn’t like it. It felt constricting around his collar, around his throat. He wanted to loosen it, but didn’t. That would have been disrespectful to Lynette. For her, he kept his necktie tight. For her, he would have done anything, and so he thought about his necktie to keep from thinking about her, to keep from bawling like an infant right there in the sheriff’s office. He had, however, taken off his suit coat. The button-down he wore underneath had short sleeves, which displayed the artful manga tattoos scrawling up and down each arm. He and Lynette were going to go to Tokyo next year. He and Lynette had plans. He and Lynette—

“You need a Kleenex, Charlie?”

Charlie looked up at the sheriff and shook his head.

Sheriff Fallon made a noncommittal grunt and glanced over at Esme Stuart, sitting there on his couch, perusing his case file. Some people in his position could be territorial, and loathed the FBI and any other intrusion from the federal government. Mike Fallon wasn’t territorial. He welcomed assistance. He could stop and ask for directions without feeling the slightest bit less masculine. His wife, Vicky, had trained him well. No, Mike Fallon appreciated help when offered. But nobody appreciated having it stuffed down their throat, no matter how necessary it was. So a small part of him—the very small, selfish, spiteful part that sometimes kept him company late at night after a few too many Coors—hoped Esme Stuart found nothing, hoped this case made her stumble and fall, and publicly. Meanwhile, it was time to question the boyfriend, Charlie Weyngold, who probably had nothing new to add, and who probably was minutes away from a grief-induced nervous breakdown, but sometimes this was the job.

“Charlie, this is the timeline we have so far regarding Tuesday. Correct me if any of this sounds false to you, okay, son?”

“Yes, sir.”

The sheriff peeked at his notepad, and then proceeded. “We’ve got the victim arriving at her office around nine in the morning. She took a coffee break at ten-thirty with a coworker of hers by the name of Lois Feinstein. Around ten forty-five, she left the office to make her daily rounds about town. Her first—and only—stop that day was the public library.”

“She always stopped there right before lunch,” said Charlie. “Sometimes I’d meet her there and we’d hop on to the internet and look at the websites for countries. She especially liked the ones that were untranslated. She’d try to figure out what it said, and then she’d use this program to translate the website to English and see how well she did. She…”

“Are you all right, son?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Charlie, why don’t you tell me about your relationship with the victim?”

Esme looked up from the file. The sheriff had twice now deliberately avoided using Lynette’s name. Good. Keep it impersonal. Keep it objective. High emotion often obscured important truths, as with her and Rafe…

But that was for later. Now: the case. She returned to the file.

Sheriff Fallon’s notes were comprehensive, informative and almost entirely unhelpful. The general facts were these.

11/09, 4:12 p.m.: Members of the Monticello fire department responded to reports of a fire at 18 Value Street. They were able to extinguish the blaze, but the fire had destroyed most of the furniture and a considerable portion of the superstructure. Sections of the second floor had caved into the first, and sections of the first floor had caved into the basement.

11/10, 9:32 p.m.: Careful investigation by the arson team, coordinating with both the local police and the Sullivan County sheriff’s department, determined the source of the fire was the first-floor kitchen and that the origin was electrical in nature. It was at this point, approximately 9:00 p.m., that volunteer fireman Bradley Langer uncovered human remains in the basement of the house. A leather collar attached to a length of industrial chain was found around the neck and—

Esme blinked. Leather collar? Was this some S and M game gone awry? She read on.

11/10, 10:55 p.m.: Forensics finished their documentation of the crime scene and the remains were delivered to the county coroner’s office for determination of cause of death.

11/10, 11:13 p.m.: Sheriff Michael Fallon reached Todd and Louise Weiner, the owners of the Value Street property, by telephone. They are on a two-week vacation in Bermuda with their four children. All accounted for. The Weiners promptly agreed to return home.

11/11, 9:00 a.m.: First reports filed from canvassing. Neighbors are unable to identify anyone entering or exiting the house. The Weiner family is described as “friendly.”

11/11, 11:16 a.m.: Dental records identify human remains as Lynette Robinson. Cause of death impossible to determine due to the deterioration of the body. Note: the hands of the deceased are missing.

Esme frowned. The hands of the deceased are missing? That pretty much nixed the S and M idea, unless dismemberment was a subfetish that she (gratefully) didn’t know about. But she rather doubted it. Unless the hands got misplaced in the transfer from the crime scene to the lab, which was nigh unlikely, they almost definitely had to have been removed from the body by the unsub (unknown subject of the investigation, henceforth known as Sick Son of a Bitch).

“Was there a relationship between Lynette Robinson and the Weiners?” she asked the sheriff.

Sheriff Fallon answered with a red-hot glare.

Ah, right. He was interviewing the boyfriend. She had forgotten. When she fell into investigation mode, the outside world sometimes became an afterthought. This was a necessary part of the routine, although it did little to ingratiate herself with, well, most anybody else. And she usually amplified this distance even further with the aid of her iPod and some kickass British rock, but her iPod was back at her father-in-law’s house. She made a mental note to retrieve it.

“I never heard of them,” replied the boyfriend to her question. “I don’t think Lynette knew them, either. I mean, I knew most everybody she knew. Maybe she sold them a vacuum. That’s what she did. That’s how we met. She sold me a vacuum. She… Excuse me, I need to get some air….”

Charlie got up from his seat and left the room.

Sheriff Fallon’s glare became incendiary.

“Sorry,” said Esme. “Sorry.”

“Are you through with the file? The Weiners should be arriving at the airport in about a half hour and I’d like to meet them there, if you don’t mind.”

“You really think they’ll be able to land in this weather?”

Fallon glanced out his window. His already-caustic mood soured.

Esme considered how to play this. The man was a hornet’s nest. She decided on a little reverse psychology. “It’s not a big deal. They probably won’t have any information that can help you. They’re almost definitely incidental to the crime….”

“Is that so? A couple hundred thousand dollars in property damage begs to differ.”

“The neighbors said they didn’t see anyone enter or exit the house,” Esme explained, “but they weren’t really watching the house until it started burning. So we know the arsonist left before the fire and we know that Lynette Robinson was already in the house by then, as well. She was brought there. Why?”

“With all due respect, ma’am, that’s what I plan on finding out from the Weiners.”

“Who knew they were going to be out of town?”

“Friends, family, coworkers. The usual assortment, I’d assume.”

“That’s who you need to interview.”

“Is that an order?”

“It’s a suggestion….” Her harmless little exercise in reverse psychology complete, Esme handed him back the file. “Do you have a snack machine in this building?”



One to two feet proved accurate. Rafe and Esme wrangled a deputy to help them dig out the Prius, and they drove back to Lester’s house at a steady, safe three miles per hour. The windshield wipers did little to keep the fist-size snowflakes from clotting up the front view. God was emptying his vat of Wite-Out over upstate New York.

If there was a God, thought Esme.

Henry Booth—her erstwhile Galileo—didn’t think so. Henry Booth’s atheism—and his anger at religion in general—had helped fuel his murder spree. Henry Booth had forced Esme to reconsider her own faith. She and Rafe never attended church, aside from the secular functions held there. She owned a copy of the King James Bible, but it was a relic from a lit course she took as an undergrad.

Henry Booth had targeted policemen, firemen, teachers. Mothers, fathers. Good people. In one of his notes, he wrote that if there were in fact a God, these violent crimes would not have been allowed to occur. If there were a God, divine intervention would have ended his massacre.

But God didn’t stop him. Esme did.

And now someone had gone and chained Lynette Robinson, by all accounts a nice woman, in the basement of a house and cut off her hands. Where was God’s hand in that?

More questions, no answers. She looked to her husband. His eyes seemed busy, full of concentration. Rafe.

Talk about questions without answers.

“What do you want for dinner?” she asked him.

“Whatever Dad’s got in the house. Probably canned soup.”

“I’m sure there’s a restaurant between here and there.”

Rafe squeezed the steering wheel. “We stop, we get out, and an hour later we have to shovel out the car. Again. And by then it’ll be nighttime. Unless it’s already nighttime. I can’t see a goddamn thing.”

“You can see me,” she said.

His busy eyes zipped in her direction. She crossed her eyes, wiggled her ears, pulled back her lips with her fingers and stuck out her tongue.

Rafe grinned. He couldn’t help it. He wanted to remain serious, stoic, but when his wife whipped out the funny face, all hope was lost.

He murmured, “My beautiful bride.”

“You better believe it.”

They held hands the rest of the ride home.

By the time they pulled into the carport, it was indeed nighttime. The lights on the street gave each of the falling snowflakes an angelic aura. Esme was reminded of fairies, and then her mind went to Lynette Robinson’s hands, and then each of the snowflakes became a woman’s severed hand, falling, falling.

“Awful early in the season for a blizzard,” noted Rafe as they entered the house.

Esme just nodded and tried to rid her imagination of dark thoughts. What she needed was her music. She quickly grabbed her iPod from her suitcase and searched around for a pair of speakers to plug it in. Surely Lester had something in this house that was compatible…

Rafe emptied two cans of chili into a pot and set it to boil.

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

“The twenty-first century,” she replied, checking inside handmade cabinets and hutches.

“You’re not going to find that here.”

She returned to the kitchen, an exaggerated pout on her lips. Rafe shrugged and started to stir the chili. Esme joined him at the gas stove, hip-checking him to make room, and cooked the contents of a box of white rice on an adjacent burner.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, Rafe turned to her and said, “So do you think it was the boyfriend?”

She lowered the temperature on Rafe’s burner.

“He had an alibi at the time of the fire.”

“Alibis can be falsified.”

She smirked at him. “Since when did you become a criminologist?”

“Everyone who watches prime-time TV is an amateur criminologist.” He grabbed some basil off the spice rack and sprinkled a few dashes into the chili. “I just want to make sure no stone goes unturned.”

There was that melancholy again, quavering the timbre of his voice. Esme noticed the steam from the pots was misting up his glasses. He did nothing to remedy the situation. She waited. He continued to stir, his vision undoubtedly getting foggier and foggier. Christ, the man could be stubborn.

She handed him a dishrag.

“What’s this for?”

“Just give me your glasses.”

He did. She wiped them. He poured the boiled rice into the chili and stirred them together.

“The man who killed her took her hands.”

Esme regretted saying it the moment the words came out. In fact, she had no honest idea why she’d shared with him this information, which was both grisly and confidential. He had no need to know. He had no need to ever know.

But now he knew.

He stared at her, his turquoise eyes so small, so vulnerable, without his glasses on. At that moment he didn’t look like a sociology professor or the father of a seven-year-old girl. He looked like a boy, a broken-hearted little boy.

“I’m sorry…” said Esme. “I—”

He began to pace the kitchen, thinking, thinking. Then he wheeled on her, fists clenched. “Why would someone do that?”

Esme shrugged. “Any number of reasons. What’s important is—”

“There are reasons? There is more than one reason why someone would…?”

“Rafe—”

“This is your world, isn’t it? This is what you deal with, willfully.”

Willfully. That word harkened back to their argument in Dr. Rosen’s office. How he’d accused her of knowingly and willfully killing their family with her selfish behavior. Goddamn it, couldn’t they have made it through one day without this shit coming back up between them?

She handed him his clean glasses.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Really, I am.”

He accepted the glasses from her hands, peered through the lenses and donned them.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome.”

They ate dinner.

They talked about the weather.

And then, while washing the pots and dishes, it all began again….

“What are these number of reasons?”

“Rafe, it’s not important—”

“You know that’s bullshit. The reason someone does a thing is an essential ingredient in… I mean, come on. What causes a person to decide, ‘Oh, you know what? I think I need to lop off a person’s hands’?”

“What you’re talking about is profiling,” replied Esme. She was avoiding his stare, but could still feel it. “That’s not really my area.”

“Then how do you expect to catch this guy when a major aspect of the work is not really your area?”

“I’m not the only person working this case, Rafe. I’m not even officially working this case at all. I’m consulting, off the books, as per your whatever. I’m sure the police have their own experts who can—”

“We’re talking about a woman’s life here!”

“Please stop yelling at me.”

“You want me to stop yelling at you? Okay. Here’s me not yelling.”

That’s when Rafe threw the pot against the wall. A stain of dirty dishwater, dotted with bits of chili, drooled down the white paint and to the linoleum floor below, where the pot had loudly clanged to its resting place, but not before soaking both of them in sodden crap.

They both stared at the mess on the wall. Then at themselves. Then back at the wall.

A minute passed.

“Did I mention,” muttered Rafe, “that everybody who watches prime-time TV is also an amateur melodramatist?”

“That would explain the crescendo of violins I just heard.”

Rafe nodded.

They continued to stare at the mess.

“I’ll clean this up,” he finally said. “Why don’t you go take a shower?”

Esme nodded and walked to the bathroom. She could feel rice in her hair. Oh, how nuptial. She quickly got undressed and turned on the shower. The water would take a minute or two to heat up.

The funny thing was, she knew Rafe was right. This case was bigger than her. There was a sinister psychology at play, and she lacked the skills to analyze it. She needed an expert, but this wasn’t an official FBI case….

Turning off the water, she wrapped herself in an oversize towel, and reached for her cell phone to call Tom Piper.




5


When the phone call came, Tom didn’t hear it. He was too busy quite literally rolling in the hay with the farmer’s daughter. To be sure, the farmer in question was ninety-two years old, half-deaf and asleep at the time, but life had taught Tom Piper that sometimes it was best to ignore the salient details in favor of sauciness. He (age fifty-eight) and Penelope Sue Fuller (age sixty-one) groped, fondled, licked, lapped, nuzzled, squeezed, bucked, sucked and thrust against each other in the pine loft of the Fullers’ stables, several hay bales acting as their makeshift mattress. The hay was itchy, and poked a bit, but that just caused Tom and Penelope Sue to act upon each other with increased, well, assertiveness.

Through it all, Tom’s heart maintained a steady, calm rhythm. Th-thump. Th-thump. Th-thump. Damn pacemaker. It really took some of the fun out of primal, no-holds-barred sex. The pacemaker was his souvenir from Galileo. The fucker had shot him in the chest. Only emergency surgery on Long Island—and the installation of his very own personal timekeeper—saved Tom’s life. Now, six months later, his doctors here in Kentucky were impressed with his recovery. Tom was less than impressed. It was moments like this, moments with Penelope Sue, that he was reminded just how comprehensively Galileo had robbed him, because here, with a beautiful redhead and in an idyllic setting straight out of a dirty limerick, as they went at each other like a pair of id-addled bunny rabbits, Tom was having trouble maintaining his erection.

He tried everything. He concentrated on Penelope Sue, her full breasts, her perfume (peaches…oh, my!), how much she wanted him, how much he desired her. When that didn’t work, he flipped through the Rolodex of memories. Other women he’d been with, other women he’d craved, high school sweethearts, coworkers, that bubbly clerk he once chatted with in Toronto and the way he wanted to bury himself in her dimples. He had more than four decades of memories to choose from, and yet he could feel himself deflate, deflate, deflate….

Finally, between gasps, Penelope Sue asked him if everything was okay, and the sound of honest concern in her voice, of pity, was like a bucket of ice. He sighed, lay beside her and gazed up through the roof slats at the plump, indifferent moon.

She ran a hand across his long gray ponytail. “It’s all right,” she said. “We can just lie here,” she said. “This is nice, too,” she said.

“Mmm-hmm,” he replied, not meaning a syllable of it.

Soon, though, the night air made them chilly, and it was time to get dressed. They did so in heavy silence and walked back to her farmhouse, shivering. Penelope Sue made some tea.

Tom envisioned their upcoming conversation. He’d seen variations of it in every Viagra, Cialis and Levitra commercial. She’d pull out a brochure. They’d go to the doctor. Next shot: they’d be walking hand in hand on the beach and grinning ear to ear as the waves cascaded in the background. Except he couldn’t go the medicinal route even if he wanted to, not with his bad heart.

Which left them where and with what? He wanted to grow old with this woman, but he wanted her to be happy, and her sexual appetite was as gleefully voracious as his. As his was until six months ago.

She handed him his tea. Spice orange. Herbal. No caffeine for him. Hers was a special blend she bought at the farmer’s market. She cuddled beside him on the living room couch.

Commercial time, he thought. Cue the music.

“Tom,” she said, “this is why the good Lord invented vibrators.”

She winked at him lasciviously and sipped her hot tea.

God, he loved this woman.

That’s when he noticed his cell phone, which he’d left on her star-shaped coffee table, glowing on and off. He had a message.

“I should check on Mama in a bit,” said Penelope Sue. “See if she needs her sheets changed.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“I’d like that. Mama wouldn’t, but that’s her problem now, isn’t it?”

She spoke with that sugary Kentucky accent that lent itself so sweetly to bourbon and bluegrass. Tom knew it well. He grew up not fifty miles from here. Hearing her speak was like hearing his past call him home. When Tom returned to Kentucky to recuperate, the hospital assigned him a certain physical therapist with long red hair that smelled of peaches and, well, here he was, in puppy love at age fifty-eight.

“It’s past time to turn the farm over for the winter,” said Penelope Sue. “Got to recaulk the windows and get the pumps double-checked.”

“I can do that this weekend.”

Penelope Sue nodded. Weekends were her busiest times at the hospital. Tom worked a desk at the FBI’s Louisville division, but not on Saturdays and Sundays. His nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday life couldn’t have been more different from his schedule on the national task force, but that just made it all the better. Tom Piper had turned a corner. The pilgrim had finally settled down.

Was it the change in his health? Was it the influence of Penelope Sue? Maybe. But the greater cause, Tom knew, belonged to Galileo. Near-death experiences put life in perspective. It was a simple truism, almost trite, but accurate as a bull’s-eye. And Tom wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Ready for more?” she asked.

Tom knew she wasn’t referring to the tea or (mercifully) sex. She was referring to the room’s thirty-six-inch plasma TV and to the DVD player attached to it and the disc inside. He acquiesced, and she giddily reached for the remote control.

Two minutes later: “Space…the final frontier…”

Yes, oh, yes, the love of his life was a Trekkie.

They were in the middle of an original-series marathon, her adorable attempt to convert him to the cult of Trek. She had a uniform hanging in a bag in her closet. Her bedroom contained signed photographs. And when she’d revealed this part of herself to him, there hadn’t been one ounce of hesitation. There never was, with Penelope Sue. And so he snuggled with her and watched hour after hour, and maybe through her infectious enjoyment he actually began to like this thing. Science fiction was far removed from his own interests, but Penelope Sue simply had a way about her that opened doors.

Around 10:00 p.m., he collected their mugs and washed them out in the ceramic sink. They had three more episodes to go, and it was time for a break. Besides, by now her mother upstairs was undoubtedly in need of a visit.

“It was Esme,” said Penelope Sue, trotting into the kitchen. Tom put the mugs down. “She’s the one who called.”

Penelope Sue handed him his phone.

Tom clicked on the voice mail. He put it on speaker phone.

They listened to Esme’s message.

“I’ll go take care of Mama,” said Penelope Sue, and without waiting for him to object, she walked away. So be it.

He dialed the number. He knew it by rote.

“Hello, Esmeralda,” he said. He was the only one who called her by her full name. He’d done so for almost fifteen years. It was a sign of affection, and they never, ever talked about it. “It sounds like you’ve got yourself a case.”

“I’d love to hear your take on it.”

He sat down at the kitchen table. “I’d love to hear yours first.” No matter how much his life had changed in the past six months, he would never stop being her Socratic mentor.

“The removal of the hands suggests a trophy. The fire could be some kind of funeral pyre.”

“Or you could be giving more meaning to his actions than he is,” he said.

“Everything has meaning, whether it’s intended or not. All accidents have explanations. We can’t help ourselves.”

Tom glanced out the window at the barn in the distance. “No. We can’t.”

“I’m missing something important, aren’t I?”

“We’re all missing something important.” He looked away from the window. “We can’t help ourselves there, either.”

“He didn’t burn her, though. He torched the whole house. That’s significant.”

“Everything has meaning.”

“You know the answer, don’t you?”

He had a notion. It was rudimentary, of course, and without seeing the report and visiting the crime scene it was purely speculative, but yes, he had a notion. He often did.

“I think you need to trust yourself,” he told her.

“I’m off the books up here, Tom. I could use your help.”

The ceiling boards above him creaked. That would be Mama, stubbornly fighting off Penelope Sue’s attempts to deliver her nightly shot. Talk about rituals…

“I have faith in you,” he said to Esme. He stood. His knees were a bit stiff from the cold. “You can do this.”

“Don’t make me beg, Tom.”

He could tell by the tone of her voice that she was teasing him. She knew he’d fly up there. He was reliable. He was ever her instructor. He was Tom Piper. Together they’d solve this case, and another in a long line of deranged scumbags would be in custody.

But that wasn’t him anymore, right?

He looked out again at the barn, bathed in cold moonlight.

“Come on,” she replied, still playful. “What’ll it take? A tantalizing email?”

That was how, last winter, he’d coaxed her out of her early retirement. She’d already been intrigued by the Galileo case, still in its infancy, and he’d sent her a note that Henry Booth had left at a crime scene, and soon she was saying goodbye to her family and boarding a plane for Texas to meet up with Tom’s task force. He’d pushed her buttons and she’d allowed them to be pushed and how was this, now, any different? Surely he owed it to her, if not to that poor girl Lynette. The Galileo case had nearly gotten Esme killed, and he knew the effect it had had on her marriage.

But what about the effect it had had on him?

Penelope Sue padded into the room, a look of curiosity on her brow. He held out his hand to her and she clasped it.

“I’m sorry,” he told Esme. “I’m already home. Best of luck, Esmeralda. I know you’ll do just fine.”

Click.



Esme wasn’t angry.

She expected to be angry. She expected to feel wounded and betrayed. But she didn’t. She wasn’t relieved or happy. She wasn’t quite sure what she felt about Tom’s refusal.

So she compartmentalized it, stepped into the shower to wash off the chili and rice and ruminated about other matters.

More specifically: why did the unsub burn down the whole house?

By all accounts, the fire started with a bang. Electrical fires often did. Some appliance shorts out, goes kablooey, and it’s time to call your insurance provider. The unsub undoubtedly set the fire on purpose, which meant he rigged an appliance to blow, which meant he knew there was going to be a bang, which meant he knew it was going to draw attention to the house—and to him, making a rapid and hopefully burn-free getaway. So he wanted the body to be found. And given that there were no signs of accelerant on or near the remains, he wasn’t particular about the body being identified or not.

Esme moved on from body wash to shampoo, and thought about the victim herself. Maybe Rafe and the sheriff and most everyone else working the case were right. Maybe Lynette was the gateway. It made sense. It was the obvious choice. She rarely favored the obvious choice, true, but that didn’t make it any less valid.

So: Who would want to cause Lynette harm?

No. Better question: What was significant enough about Lynette for someone to go through all this trouble?

Esme didn’t mean to imply that it was difficult to believe that someone found Lynette significant. Her tattooed boyfriend was obviously enamored. And then there was the matter of Rafe’s overcomplicated emotional relationship to her….

Rafe!

Christ, how long had she been in the shower while he waited, soggy foodstuffs still splattered over his hair and cheeks and neck? Granted, he’d done the splattering, but still. Esme hastened her ablutions and hustled out of the shower. She opened the door for Rafe while she was drying her hair. The door wasn’t locked, and he could have come in at any time, and he would have come in during the first year of their marriage, joined her in the shower even, but that was a long time ago.

As her husband soaped and soaked, Esme climbed into a nightgown, rolled her iPod to Roxy Music and snuggled under the covers. Her mind drifted back to the case, back to Lynette Robinson and those teal earrings and her unfortunate fate. How differently people would live their lives if they knew how and when their lives would end. Esme wondered what she would do differently, if she knew, and by the time Rafe had toweled himself off, those musings had carried her off to sleep, at least until the pounding began at 6:16 a.m.

Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.

Esme bolted awake. So did Rafe. A minute passed. Silence. They looked at each other. Had they dreamed that thunderous—

Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.

Apparently not.

“Is it the pipes?” she asked. He’d grown up in this house.

Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.

“No,” he replied. “That’s not the pipes.”

Their eyes scanned the room for something to use as a weapon. But how did one defend against a sound?

Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.

“Maybe it’s the front door,” said Rafe.

“At six in the morning?”

Rafe shrugged. Did she have a better idea?

Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.

“Goddamn it,” she mumbled, and swung her legs out of bed and onto the thin mauve carpet. Her robes were at home. Her slippers were at home. So she slid her bare feet into her sneakers, tugged a navy blue sweater over her nightgown and headed downstairs to probe out the invasive racket.

Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.

As she neared the front door, she knew Rafe’s conclusion had been accurate. Someone was on the other side, knocking. The door shook with each pound. Whoever it was at their door at 6:21 a.m. on this cold, cold Saturday morning, they were both large and insistent.

Maybe it was that dickhead pseudo-journalist Grover Kirk. He had the size and the lack of common decency to track them down to a funeral and pay them a visit. Either way, Esme vowed to use her resources at the Bureau to learn more about Mr. Kirk, maybe pull his IRS records.

She poked her head to one of the windows. Two sheriff’s deputies, each the size of a Dumpster, stood there on the front stoop. They appeared cold and they appeared antsy.

She opened the front door.

“Morning, officers. What seems to be the trouble?”

“The sheriff told us to come get you, ma’am.”

Of course he did.

“Give me a few minutes. Would you like to come in?”

The deputies exchanged glances. “No, ma’am. We’re just fine out here.”

Sure they were.

She closed the door in their frost-tipped faces and made her way back to the bedroom.

“Was it the front door?” Rafe asked.

Ten minutes later, both she and Rafe were back downstairs, fully dressed. She half expected to find two ice statues on the stoop where the deputies had been, but no, the two men remained flesh and blood. When she opened the door, one of them was doing a little dance to keep warm.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“Just you, ma’am,” replied the dancer. “Sheriff’s orders.”

Uh-huh.

Esme kissed her husband goodbye and joined the deputies in their brown squad car. She noticed that the streets were almost all clear of snow and that the sidewalks had already been salted. Impressed, she reclined in the stiff backseat as they drove downtown—and then past the county station and kept on going.

“Um,” she said.

They took a left toward the interstate.

“Excuse me…” she said.

“Sit tight, ma’am. We’ll be there in a jiffy.”

“That’s fine and all but, well, where’s there?”

There turned out to be Stewart International Airport some forty-five minutes later. They pulled up to the terminal. The dancer got out and escorted Esme to the curb while the other deputy remained behind the wheel.

Behind a door marked Official Use Only, Sheriff Fallon was waiting for them, a cup of coffee in his hand. His grin left little doubt in Esme’s mind; this, finally, was the cat that ate the canary.

“Good morning!” he said.

In an adjacent room, he went on to say, sat the Weiner family. A member of airport security was keeping them company. Their plane had finally touched down about two hours ago and he knew, just knew, that she’d want to be there when he questioned them.

“Thanks,” she replied, and added Sheriff Fallon to her list of IRS record pulls.

They began with the father, Todd, who could have carried the sheriff’s deputies in the bags hanging under his eyes. His hands couldn’t keep still, either twitching and fumbling with the zipper on his L.L. Bean ski jacket or fixing the part on his thinning brown hair. This was not a calm man—but then again, how often did one’s house get burned to the ground with a body left in the basement? Perhaps he was worried they suspected him. Perhaps he was worried they thought he put the body there.

“I didn’t know her,” he insisted. “We all looked at those photos and none of us had ever seen her before in our lives. I swear.”

The interview lasted about an hour. Most of it consisted of Todd Weiner repeating that he didn’t know her, or anything, or anyone, and asking several times if this would be covered by his homeowners’ insurance. Esme believed more and more that her hunch—about the house being the key—had been way off.

And then Todd said something odd.

“I knew it was too good to be true.”

Sheriff Fallon nodded at Esme, allowing her to take the bait.

“You knew what was too good to be true, Mr. Weiner?”

“This contest. I told Louise I didn’t remember signing up on their website.”

“What contest?”

Todd Weiner looked up at them like they’d just claimed two plus two equaled an apple. “Hammond Travel Agency. That’s how we went on this trip. We won it in a contest from Hammond Travel Agency out in New Paltz.”




6


Finally—finally!—Timothy had found the perfect pet. Like all true heroes of myth (the Norse legends of the Viking civilization being his favorite), he just needed to recognize his own hubris before achieving success. He had been so quick to blame his previous pet, Lynette, for everything that went wrong when, in fact, some of the finger pointing belonged in his own direction. Had it really been wise to capture an adult? Don’t most pet owners start with puppies and kittens rather than dogs and cats? How foolish he had been to think he could improve on centuries of domestication.

In short, Timothy needed to think younger, and he found his ideal in, of all places, his mother’s veterinary clinic. As the first snow fell Friday morning, he walked the familiar two miles from their house to her clinic, which was in the same strip mall as his father’s travel agency. He enjoyed the taste of the snowflakes, and made sure to catch as many as he could with his tongue.

On his way to the clinic he passed the middle school, where the rest of his peers (and that was the right word—as loath as the old Timothy had been to admit it, these were his peers; he was not a young god) were crowded inside. Timothy hadn’t stepped foot in that building in more than a year, ever since that incident in the cafeteria with Mr. Monroe’s earlobe. His parents had filed the appropriate papers for him to be homeschooled and that was that. Still, as Timothy passed by it, his heart filled with a sense of longing. He was, after all, the new Timothy, person of the world, no different from anyone else. Well, hardly different.

The purpose for his snowbound stroll to Mother’s clinic was to get his wrist reexamined. It had been three days since Lynette had bit him, and although his wound had been properly mended and treated, a bite mark was a bite mark. Perhaps Mother was going to give him a rabies shot.

The other businesses in the strip mall, besides the vet clinic and the travel agency, were a take-out Chinese restaurant, a discount shoe store and a nail salon. The nail salon always had its front door open and emitted such an overpowering reek of ethyl acetate that one whiff of it made Timothy gag. He had tried in the past to circle around and approach the strip mall from the back, but somehow that stench waited for him there. Lynette’s fingernails hadn’t smelled like that. He’d made sure to check each one before removing her hands.

As it happened, he still had the Taser C2 in the left pocket of his coat. He carried it around with him now wherever he went. It was soothing to hold and squeeze. He’d bought it with his father’s credit card from a website in Hong Kong that Cain42 had recommended. The soldering iron, which he’d used to cauterize Lynette’s stumps, had just been a purchase at the local Home Depot. He’d left it in the Weiner house. The soldering iron hadn’t been nearly as soothing to hold and squeeze as the Taser C2, which actually resembled the electric razor he used to trim his peach fuzz. Timothy had once used Father’s manual razor to shave, and had ended up slicing open his chin. He still remembered the blood droplets plunking into the sink—drip…drip…drip—like from a runny faucet. He had a tiny scar there now, a pale white hash mark, and late at night he sometimes ran his fingertips across it. That was soothing, too. He wondered what restful archaeology would be left by the teeth marks on his wrist.

These were Timothy’s aimless thoughts as he crossed First Street at the light and ambled into the parking lot. He held his breath but it did no good. The nail salon’s pungency attacked him, anyway, nauseated his stomach, sent acid up into his throat. He would be safe once he entered the vet clinic. The animals had a safe smell. He would be safe once he—

And then he saw her. Lying there alone in the backseat of a brown station wagon. The station wagon’s engine was still running. Its owner undoubtedly had some kind of pet emergency; otherwise, why leave the engine running? Why leave such perfection alone in the backseat? She was sleeping there, so peaceful, her oversize head listing a bit to the left. A few tufts of blond hair covered what was otherwise a bare scalp. A soft scalp. Because the human skull took a while to completely harden, and this beauty, this wonder, this perfect pet of his, couldn’t have been older than three weeks.

Timothy swooned. Love at first sight.

He had to be swift and very, very careful. He had two options: try to steal her out of her car seat or simply slip behind the wheel himself and drive off to a more secluded location. Given the complexity of buckles and belts and snaps he beheld crisscrossing his new pet’s little body (most of which was swathed in a blue onesie that depicted a name—Marcy—outlined in red sailboats), he decided to pursue the latter course of action. His gaze danced to the clinic door, and then he moved, swiftly, carefully, to the driver’s door. This he knew would be unlocked; the keys, after all, were still in the ignition. He slid into the front seat. It didn’t need much adjusting. The infant’s mother must have been around his own five foot five. The old Timothy may have scoffed at such pedestrian concepts as coincidence, but this new Timothy offered up a thanks to the Powers That Be for his height and for giving him this perfect pet and for his uncle teaching him how to drive when he was twelve. He shifted the brown station wagon into Reverse.

He drove off to his secret place, his special place. His new pet, Marcy, slept through the entire trip. Every ten seconds Timothy would peek at her face in the rearview. The eyes were closed, but Timothy knew what color they would be. Blue.

He parked near his secret place. By now an inch had accumulated on the ground, and his sneakers crunched powder with every step. That was fine. The time for stealth was almost over. He went around to the side of the car, studied those buckles and belts and straps for a good five minutes and then went to work unfastening them, which took another fifteen.

Behind him, traffic passed. No one paid much attention to what they saw. They were too eager to return home before the snowstorm really hit.

Then Marcy awoke. Her eyes were more green than blue, and they searched Timothy’s face for the semifamiliar features of her mother or father. Her eyesight could discern shapes and colors, but details would be a mystery for another few weeks. This wasn’t her mother, she concluded. So it must be her father.

She wanted her mother.

She cried.

Timothy picked her up out of the car seat. Marcy’s face scrunched up and she cried some more. “Shh,” he told her. She ignored him. He held her at arm’s length. Snowflakes dissolved on her round reddening face. “Please stop,” he said. But she didn’t. They were not far from downtown, and although everyone was hurrying home, a crying baby would still draw attention. Had he chosen poorly? Was she maybe not his perfect pet?

“Please,” he begged her.

Silencing Marcy would actually have been relatively easy. All he had to do was cradle her head with one hand and then smash that head, forehead first, into the roof of the station wagon. Her soft skull probably would explode like a piece of citrus, all pulp and juice and ripped ripe peel.

But that was the old Timothy. He was fourteen now. He was a man. He was more patient. The new Timothy held Marcy against his shoulder and bounced at the knee. He’d seen people do this in the mall. It seemed to work.

It had to work.

It worked. Marcy’s face and body relaxed. Her cries stopped. Her eyes recommenced their exploration of the world around her. The sky seemed to be falling. How pretty.

Timothy didn’t waste any time. He hurried her, still on his shoulder, to his secret place. Nobody would find her here. Nobody would hear her. She would be safe and warm and his. He settled her into her new home, made sure she was secure and then rushed back to the brown station wagon. Its engine was still running. He thought about Marcy’s mother. By now she must have returned to the parking lot. By now she must have realized her child was no longer hers. He drove up to the university campus and parked in one of the more populated lots. He unrolled all of the car’s windows, tossed the keys into a sewer drain and caught the next bus back to town.

He bought his new pet some supplies: formula, a pink blanket, diapers, a plush smiling antelope. The stores were beginning to shutter their doors for the day. People in line were talking accumulation. They were talking one to two feet. They paid no mind to a fourteen-year-old boy running an errand for his baby sister.

Once he had returned to his secret place, once he fed his new pet and played with her little hands and watched her close her green eyes—how big they were!—he knew he’d best get on his way. Blizzards inconvenienced the best of intentions, even for the new Timothy.

That night, Mother made lamb. The three of them ate quietly. No mention was made of the baby-napping that had occurred right outside her clinic. Their household was as soundless as the falling snow. Once he was finished, Timothy excused himself and went to his room. It was time to share his great good news with Cain42.

Later that night, around 3:00 a.m., he borrowed his parents’ car, drove out through the snow to his secret place and spent some more time with Marcy. He wasn’t surprised to find her crying, so he fed her some formula and changed her diaper and rocked her in his arms. He was genuinely surprised how much that seemed to quiet her down and deeply regretted having to leave, but he needed to return home before sunup, if only because of the borrowed car.

Timothy awoke late the next morning with rare verve. His thoughts immediately went to Marcy. He couldn’t wait to see her again and play with her. Both of his parents had already gone to work. Mother had left him a note, reminding him to stop by the clinic, since he hadn’t done so yesterday. That would have to be his first destination.

The outside air was crisp. Timothy tucked his hands into his heavy coat. His left hand closed around his Taser C2. He walked slower than usual along the road, cognizant of slippery patches. Such was the price he paid for always wearing sneakers. It was almost noon by the time he first spotted the strip mall and—

There was a squad car parked in front of the travel agency.

Timothy’s mind whirred. Along the side of the squad car were the words Sullivan County Sheriff’s Department. This wasn’t about Marcy. This was about Lynette. Somehow they had made the connection between the house and the free trip. What had he done wrong? He had been meticulous! He had followed all of Cain42’s rules to the letter, hadn’t he? What would Father tell them? What was Father already telling them? If they had come this far, surely they would be able to piece together the missing child. After all, he had taken her from right in front of his mother’s own clinic. Stupid! The old Timothy had been right all along.

He needed to contact Cain42. Cain42 would know how to proceed. Timothy headed back to the house, quickly, his breath sending smoke signals into the sky.



On the walls of Hammond Travel Agency were posters, dozens and dozens of posters, all depicting a Wonder of the World or a Work of Art or Great Sight to See Before You Die. They weren’t arranged by country or even continent. Here was the Parthenon next to the Sydney Opera House next to an ad for a safari in Zaire.

It reminded Esme of a bedroom and a jewelry box and her heart sank a bit. How Lynette Robinson would have loved this place.

The proprietor of the travel agency was a pleasant-faced fellow named Patrick Hammond. “Call me P.J.,” he told them. “Everyone does.”

Esme and Sheriff Fallon sat down by P.J. at his geography lesson of a desk. Two globes occupied opposite corners of the desk. Esme spun one. She couldn’t resist. Her finger landed on the Canary Islands.

“We actually have a package,” said P.J., “that includes the Canary Islands and Casablanca, all expenses paid, for well under three thousand.”

She smiled at him. This man wasn’t one for the soft sell. He exuded confidence and calmness. It was only when she sat back in her seat that she wondered how much of it was an act. If Tom were here, Esme was certain that he would have been able to figure out Patrick “Call Me P.J.” Hammond in half a second…if there were anything to figure out. But that’s why she and Sheriff Fallon were here.

“So tell us about this contest,” the sheriff said.

“Well, that’s our pride and joy!” P.J. flashed them a grin that spanned from wall to wall. “It’s a sales promotion, really, but you’d never know it. Once a year we offer a raffle. All you’ve got to do to enter is fill out a form on our website. That adds you to our emailing list, but it also makes you eligible for the annual contest. In the past, we’ve sent families on cruises to, oh, Bermuda, Cancún, Nova Scotia, the western Mediterranean. We have over a thousand subscribers to our weekly newsletter from all across the state and even a few in Massachusetts and Vermont. Sheriff Fallon, have you ever been to Tahiti?”

“Sir, as I said on the phone, this is a murder investigation.”

“Yes. You’re absolutely right, and trust me, Sheriff, when I read about what happened in the newspaper, I was horrified. What is this world coming to, right? I can’t imagine some of the truly terrible things you must encounter on a daily basis. Our jobs couldn’t be more different. I have tremendous respect for law enforcement. I couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t that be funny, though, if instead of offering vacations to exotic places, we could take trips into other people’s lives? Now that would be some travel agency.”

Sheriff Fallon shifted in his seat. He was not charmed.

Esme, on the other hand, was enjoying P. J. Hammond very much. He was either a genuinely nice, optimistic human being or he was a fantastic performer putting out all the stops to conceal a bottomless darkness. Either way, it made for a great show.

However, Rafe was still stuck at the house, undoubtedly going stir crazy. “P.J.,” she said. “Could you walk us through exactly how you came to choose the Weiners to win the contest?”

“You bet, although it really wasn’t me who chose them.”

“Then who did?” asked Sheriff Fallon.

Because whoever had selected them was their prime suspect.

P.J. pointed a finger at his laptop computer, which was plugged into a cable modem. “It did.”

Sheriff Fallon blinked. “Excuse me?”

“It would take me too much time to sift through everyone who’s a subscriber. Like I said, we’re talking over a thousand people. They don’t make a hat that big, do they? Can you imagine a hat that big? Can you imagine a head big enough to wear a hat that big?”

“So you use a computer program,” said Esme.

“Computers run the world these days,” P.J. replied. “We just turn them on and off.”

“Can you demonstrate this program for us?”

P.J. shrugged and double-clicked an icon. A small window appeared. It listed a number—1,024—and next to that number was a radio button that read Select.

“All I do is press this button,” he said. “Except the name and contact information it’s going to select now won’t be the Weiners. It chooses at random from the 1,024 names in the system. I mean, the odds of it choosing the Weiners again—ever—would be…”

“One in 1,024?”

P.J. nodded. “Not astronomical, but high.”

“Click the button,” said Esme.

He did.

Another window popped up with a name and contact information.

Todd Weiner, 18 Value Street.

“Huh,” murmured P.J. “Well, like I said, the odds weren’t astronomical. That’s kind of cool, actually. Todd Weiner must be one lucky guy. Except for, you know, that whole house-burning-down thing.”

“Click it again, P.J.,” Esme said, so P.J. did.

Todd Weiner, 18 Value Street.

This time, P.J.’s sunny composure dimmed a bit. He stared in confusion at his laptop screen. Then he clicked the radio button again, and again, and again.

“Where did you get this software from, sir?”

“I downloaded it from this business website. Lots of people use it.” His confidence was mushing into a stammer. “I’ve been using it for years and have never had a problem!”

Which left, as Esme saw it, two options: someone had tampered with his software or P. J. Hammond was a lying sack of shit.

Sheriff Fallon rose to his feet. “Sir, I think you’re going to need to come with us.”

The shop door jangled open. All heads turned and saw two men and one woman, all in police browns, saunter in. The woman had a sheriff’s badge and a name tag that read Shuster.

“Afternoon, Mike,” she said.

“Hey, there, Betsy. I know I had one of my guys call your office to give you the heads-up that we were going to be in your neck of the woods. I hope they didn’t tell you we needed an escort.”

“Mike, can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure.”

He stepped away from the desk and followed Betsy Shuster outside. Her two deputies remained inside, appearing uncomfortable. Something was very wrong. Esme glanced over at P.J., who had become even grayer.

Sheriff Fallon returned.

“Let’s go,” he said to Esme.

“What’s going on?”

He looked past her at P.J. “Thank you for your time.”

By the looks of it, P.J. was as befuddled as Esme. She wanted to shout out, Wait, wait, but Fallon was reaching for her. He was eager to leave right now. And since she was only here at all as a courtesy, she really didn’t have a choice.

That said, once they returned to his car…

“What the fuck was that!”

He exhaled a weighty sigh and stared out the windshield at Betsy Shuster and her deputies, who were making their way to the vet clinic several doors down.

“Yesterday a child was abducted here. About ten minutes ago, the police received an anonymous email from the abductor. He said that if the Lynette Robinson investigation didn’t stop immediately, he was going to kill the child. To prove his veracity, he attached a very, very recent photograph of the baby’s face. So get comfortable. We’re heading home.”




7


When Esme relayed the news to Rafe, she was certain he was going to slam another pot against a wall. She wouldn’t have blamed him if he had. She felt like smashing a few pieces of cookware herself.

Sheriff Fallon had notified the state police in Albany of the situation. They were conferring about the matter. But Esme wasn’t sure what they felt they could do. She wasn’t sure what anyone could do. In one move, this psychopath had checkmated them.

If they’d had a stronger case, if they’d had more information, they might have been able to flank him, avenging Lynette Robinson’s murder while simultaneously keeping him from harming little Marcy Harper. But they’d failed. She had failed. Rafe had imbued all this trust in her—for the first time—and she had monumentally fallen on her face. If only she’d had more time…

P. J. Hammond obviously remained the prime suspect. In truth, he remained the only suspect. Had P.J. sent the anonymous email to the Ulster County police? It was possible. Sheriff Betsy Shuster was attempting to get a warrant to sift through his computer. Since the abduction had taken place so close to his place of business, and since time was so essential…

But Esme knew that no judge, not even a provincial saint, would sign such a warrant, not even in antiprivacy post-9/11 America. The FBI possibly could have pushed the warrant through, and she was tempted to call the local office, but until the crime crossed state lines, this remained out of their jurisdiction. She could plant a tip that Baby Marcy had been seen in Vermont…

No.

Tomorrow, Sheriff Fallon would have to break the news to Lynette’s family. Better they find out from him than from a leak in the department. She felt sorry for him. This was his land and an invader had murdered one of the citizens he’d sworn to protect and now that bastard was going to get away with it. There would never be justice. There would never be closure.

Now it was Saturday night. Rafe lay beside her in his parents’ bed. Even though his back was to her, she could tell he was awake. She wanted to say something. She wanted to make him feel better. But how could she, when she was in part to blame for his restlessness? And so she stared at the shape of her husband’s back, barely visible in the darkness of the room, barely more than the shadow of a shadow.

She dreamed about Galileo.

She was in her house back in Oyster Bay, on the second floor, in the hallway. All of the doors—to her bedroom, to Sophie’s bedroom, to the bathroom—were shut. Esme tried her daughter’s door first, but there was no knob. The door was really just an indented part of the wall. Even the flowery wallpaper was beginning to seep across the doors, as if its decorated ivy were real. She raised a hand to touch the design and could feel the veiny texture of the ivy. The width of the curly green stalks was oscillating, almost as if…almost as if the ivy were breathing. Almost as if it were alive. And hungry. Then the green veins bent toward her face and slowly extended, wrapping around her wrists, her forearms, her biceps. She called out for Rafe. She called out for Sophie. She called out for Tom. Her bedroom door at the end of the hallway opened. Henry Booth—Galileo—stood there. He was naked. In the center of his hairless, muscular chest was a peephole. Esme could see through it to the other side. Rafe and Sophie were on that other side, cowering, so small. Panicking now, Esme looked back at the door to her daughter’s room and her arms were no longer being held by veins of ivy but by a pair of hands, and Esme knew they were Lynette’s hands and Esme knew they were angry and would never let her go, and Galileo took a step toward her now and his hands weren’t hands at all but eels, eels with jaws and teeth, snapping jaws, and he held them out to her and the jaws snapped as they approached, snapped, snapped, and soon they would be at her left ear, snap, and soon they would be at her left eyeball, snap, and then her—

She awoke in her own sweat. The bedroom was ablaze with early-morning sunlight. She checked her iPod. It was 6:58 a.m. Apparently, this weekend she was destined to undersleep. Great. At least Rafe, from the sound of it, had finally achieved some semblance of shut-eye. She curled her body around his, careful not to disturb his rhythmic snoring, and forced herself back into dreamland, all the while fearful of what might come.



They woke up together around 10:00 a.m., all warm and toasty under the wool blanket. The mesh of their body-to-body heat didn’t hurt, either. They snuggled.

At that moment both Esme and Rafe were thinking about the same thing, and both wondering what the other was thinking about. It hadn’t always been this awkward, surely, but they hadn’t had sex in more than half a year. They knew each other’s bodies as well as any two people could but at that moment, in that bed, they might as well have been desperate strangers.

The first, obvious step was that they needed to face each other, and since Esme currently had her face nuzzled against Rafe’s nape, that meant the pressure was on him. And he knew it. His eyes were open but he wasn’t looking at anything but what the next few minutes could become. And all the while he heard the tick-tick-tick of Dr. Rosen’s two weeks.

Her hands were near his paunch. How easy it would be to simply guide them a few inches south. He would enjoy that. She would enjoy that. She always said she enjoyed that. She had always been honest with him. She was a good person. He’d married a good person. Why did he always let all of this extraneous bullshit get in the way? Hell, why was he ruminating about his wife, who was lying there right beside him, instead of making love to her? Why not just—

“I’m going to put on some coffee,” she said, and he heard her walk away.

Way to go, Hamlet, he mused. Overanalyzing has won you yet again. He rolled over and buried his face in her pillow. He was his own cold shower. Shortly thereafter, he roused himself out of bed and joined Esme in the kitchen for some Sunday morning joe. Had Lester subscribed to the newspaper, they could have at least spent those few minutes perusing the headlines, trading entertainment section for sports section, but the old man had, of course, since relocating to Oyster Bay, let his subscription lapse, and so the only news Rafe and Esme had to occupy them was their own.

So they sipped in silence.

When they were through, Esme called home. She spoke to Sophie for a few minutes, assured her they would be back soon, and yes, she would be there tomorrow to chaperone the trip to the science museum. Then she handed the phone to Rafe.

“Hi, cupcake.”

“Hi, Daddy!”

Esme started packing.

“So what did you and Grandpa Les do yesterday?”

“We built a snowman and it was tall except he added two pieces of snow to the front so it became a snow-woman.” Sophie giggled. Her father didn’t. “I miss you, Daddy.”

“I miss you, too, cupcake. Very much. Do you have any homework to do for tomorrow?”

“Just some math. But I’m waiting until you come home because I know you like to help me with my math.”

He smiled. “I think you waited because you don’t want to do it.”

“I hate math. It’s boring.”

“I know. But sometimes we have to do things we don’t like so we can do the things we like to do.”

“Like watch TV after my bedtime?”

“Maybe,” he replied. “We’ll see. Put your grandpa on the phone, okay? I love you ten times infinity.”

“I love you ten times one hundred plus infinity and twelve!”

Once Lester got on the phone, Rafe informed him when they expected to be home. Lester chided him about the condition of his old house and warned him to make sure everything was left in good working order and that the faucets were still dripping and the windows were all shut, etc. Finally, Rafe was able to get to the goodbyes.

It was shortly after eleven.

Both Rafe and Esme were hungry for brunch, so they stopped at a twenty-four-hour diner that was on the way to downtown. Rafe didn’t need to look at a menu. As a teenager, he must have eaten at this place, well, ten times one hundred plus infinity and twelve. The food was cheap and the service was quick. This was a no-nonsense establishment and, even as a teen, Rafe had been a no-nonsense type of guy. The kind who’s too indecisive to get laid by his own wife, he noted, and paid for the check with a credit card.

Their next stop was the Robinson house.

They were still receiving visitors, of course. Many relatives had arrived from out of town to pay their respects. Misery may have loved company, but it was company which kept misery at bay.

Lynette’s mother hugged Rafe.

“She was always very fond of you,” the woman said.

And Rafe shattered into a million pieces.

Once he’d regained his composure in the bathroom, which took some doing, he found Esme in the corner of the den, noshing on an Asiago bagel. She had never been one for mingling. Back in Oyster Bay, he had to push her to get involved in local civic activities. For all of her toughness and acumen, his wife could be astonishingly shy.

“Ready to go?” he asked.

She finished her bagel in two bites and they headed outside to the Prius. Around them trickled the sound of melting snow. It had to be in the low fifties already, and probably was going to climb half a dozen digits more by midday. The highway would be clear of ice and Rafe wondered if they might even get to spend some of the drive with the windows down.

He checked his mirrors and shifted into Drive. He was eager to get the hell out of here.

“Can we stop at the station before we go? I want to say goodbye to Sheriff Fallon.”

So instead of taking a left, toward the interstate, they took a right and pulled into the now-familiar parking lot, crowded if only because of the church across the street.

“Want me to stay in the car?” he inquired.

“Don’t be silly.”

They locked the car and mounted the steps to the weather-beaten brick-and-cement building, and were halfway across the front hall, which also led to the county’s many other offices, but neither of them spotted the man by the door until he called out her name.

“Hello, Esmeralda,” said Tom.



“But I thought…” said Esme.

“So did I,” Tom replied. “And then my girlfriend slapped me upside the head for being a fool and got me on the next flight here.”

“I can’t wait to meet her.”

“She can’t wait to meet you.”

Rafe didn’t want to meet any of them. He stood off to the side while his wife and her erstwhile Svengali reconnected. No, he was not a fan of Tom Piper, special agent extraordinaire, still wearing that ancient black leather jacket even though there was no way he rode a motorcycle here, not in his condition, and especially not since his motorcycle was, due to a swindle, busy collecting dust in their garage in Oyster Bay. It had been Rafe’s small victory and it had done very little to diminish the personal disdain he felt for this ridiculous John Wayne wannabe.

“Too bad you came all this way for nothing,” said Rafe.

Tom and Esme looked at him.

“Oh, didn’t you tell him, Esme? The investigation’s been closed.”

Esme sighed. “The unsub sent an untraceable email demanding the investigation be closed or he would murder a kidnapped infant named Marcy Harper.”

“Are we sure he can make good on his claim?” asked Tom. “And that the email is untraceable?”

“He attached a jpeg to the email. And the address it was sent from is a bunch of nonsense.”




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