Before Cain Strikes (19 page)

Look for the bodies,
Esme had suggested. And it made sense. What had the killer done with the three bodies? The men walked across the floorboards of the empty stockroom.

“I’ll be right back,” said Tom, and he joined Carolyn Harbinger outside. The day already had taken a nasty
turn, with bruised clouds and a galloping wind moving in from the east. She stood erect on the sidewalk, a cigarette in one hand (suck, puff) and the other placidly resting on a hip. She looked like a 1970s ad for Virginia Slims.

“I’m sorry,” he said to her.

“Thank you.” Suck, puff. “I appreciate your sympathy.”

“Were you close with the three girls?”

“I liked to think of my employees as an extension of my family, so, yes, I was close with them.”

“They were recommended to you by another of your employees, right? Sandra Washington.”

“Yes.” Suck, puff. “Sandy went to school with them. I trusted her judgment. They were good girls, all of them.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, Mrs. Harbinger, why did you suddenly need to hire three employees?”

Again, her brow attempted to furrow. She was trying to concoct a lie. Tom made another mental note and waited for that lie to come, which it did, a half second later.

“Business was booming. I needed to expand my sales force to keep my customers satisfied.”

“And so by October your sales force included the three girls, Sandy Washington and your cousin Jefferson.”

She nodded. Suck, puff. She ashed into the street, careful to leave the sidewalk in front of her store clean. Old habits died hard.

“And your family owns this block of shops and apartments?”

“Yes. We bought it before the downtown revitalization. Now the property’s worth twenty times as much as we paid. Not that we’re going to sell. I’d never let that happen. I owe it to Summer, Lydia and Rosalind, don’t you think?”

Briggs and Vitucci sauntered out to meet them.

“I thought you wanted to check the place out,” Briggs said to Tom.

“I did,” Tom replied.

Suck, puff.

Briggs grunted and, perhaps inspired by Carolyn Harbinger, lit up another brown cigarette.

“Mrs. Harbinger,” asked Tom, “would it be all right if we kept these keys for a few days and continued our investigation inside your store?”

She shrugged. “Whatever will help.”

“Thank you.”

Soon, they were escorting her back to her tiny Porsche (the same green hue as her beret) and, shortly after that, she was so much dust in the ever-chilling breeze.

Tom took out his cell phone to call Esme. Once again, as he started to dial her number, she called him.

“I was about to call you. Again.”

“I just like to beat you to the punch.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“I swing, you duck, I goose, you…”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“You go first this time, Tom.”

He stepped away from the cops, who had recommenced their Punch-and-Judy act. “I think I’ve solved the Hoboken case.”

“Was it the bodies?”

“It was, in fact, the bodies, yes. What’s your news?”

“Grover Kirk just got his acceptance letter from Cain42.” Her voice brimmed with giddiness. “We’re in.”

A
s teams of agents, using Grover Kirk’s newly acquired password, scoured and combed Cain42’s robust website for information, as Mineola Wu converted the home page to HTML and perused the code as if it were some kind of poetry for programmers, as Tom Piper shuttled back to the Federal Building to lend his insight and expertise, Esme Stuart remained in suburban Long Island, trying to kick out a houseguest who had long-long-long since overstayed his welcome.

The previous night, after they’d all returned from the strip club and Lester had gone out to join his son and granddaughter at the lighthouse, Esme had retired to bed and closed her eyes and clicked her heels three times, muttering, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.” Only she was home and it was her family who had been whisked away to Oz. She fell asleep before the tears on her pillow had dried…and was awoken at two o’clock in the morning by a shift in weight on the bed. Rafe had come home. Rafe had missed her. Rafe had left Sophie in the care of Grandpa Les and the twin fires of love and hope still flickered somewhere
in the universe. She opened her eyes to stare into his, and Grover Kirk stared back at her.

“I’m lonely,” he said.

The normal reaction would have been to scream, and perhaps retreat into the bathroom, but Esme was a graduate of Quantico. Esme had wrestled madmen and thieves. An oversize Floridian with a head shaped like a penis was not much of a threat.

She curled her fingers so that the knuckles of their joints formed a solid weapon, with her index finger knuckle as the tip, and she lashed out with snakelike speed at the hollow behind Grover’s ear. The hard knuckle of her index finger flattened his auricular artery and, predictably, sent poor Grover rolling off the bed in agony and confusion. He paced around Rafe’s side of the bedroom with the aimlessness of Frankenstein’s monster, all the while rubbing and rubbing at his wounded ear.

“I can’t hear!”
he cried.
“I can’t hear!”

She sat up calmly. “What? What was that? You’ll have to speak up.”

“I can’t hear! What did you do to me?”

“I used some rudimentary karate to knock out one of your mastoidal pressure points!”
she replied, her volume raised, but her body still serene. Perhaps more serene than she had felt in days…

He opened and closed his jaw, with obvious pain, and stumbled into the wall.

“Yeah, you should probably go see a specialist about that!”
she said.
“Common side effects include blurred vision, tinnitus and an unhinged jaw!”

Grover stumbled again into a wall, bounced off it, lost his balance, fell on his ass and began to drool. Loss of consciousness soon followed. Esme considered calling 9-1-1, but a quick check of his pulse didn’t indicate any
cause for alarm. From the smell of it, though, Grover had soiled his Fruit of the Looms. Lovely.

So Esme spent the remainder of the evening in her daughter’s bedroom, curled up with the few dolls Sophie hadn’t brought with her to the lighthouse. They were the newer acquisitions, the Purple Princess and the Disney penguin in the top hat and posable raven-haired Amazon Queen (with her removable girdle of strength), and they just hadn’t made it yet into Sophie’s pantheon of required bedside companions and, God, how Esme missed her little girl! Meanwhile, she had to babysit that dickhead in the other room and therefore had to stay away from her daughter.

But providence arrived the very next morning, around the same time Tom Piper got off the train in Hoboken to meet Carolyn Harbinger. Esme woke up, peeked in on Grover (who hadn’t moved from the bedroom floor) and then padded into the living room to check his laptop and, lo and behold, earlier that morning an email had arrived from Cain42.

Grover’s application for membership had been accepted. A user ID and password were provided.

They were in.

Esme pumped her fists in joy. Success! She forwarded the missive, ran back to the bedroom to grab her cell phone, where it lay in its charger, and immediately dialed Karl Ziegler.

“Check your email,” she said.

“Good morning, Mrs. Stuart.”

“Check your email,” she repeated.

He sighed. “One moment, please.”

Silence, then: “Well.”

“You sure as hell can say that again.”

“This is quite encouraging. Thank you.”

“So now I can kick him out, right? I mean, he doesn’t need protection anymore.”

“Mrs. Stuart, we just obtained inside access to what essentially is a major criminal organization. Are you telling me that your bigger concern is that your guest is using up all your clean sheets?”

Esme clenched her teeth to keep from yelling, took a breath and asked as tranquilly as she could, “Is Grover free to go or not?”

“Tell him to stay local.”

“Yes, sir.”

Click.

Esme sighed. Why did all the men in her life turn out to be utter jackasses? Well, not all. She dialed Tom and informed him of the good news, and he shared his, as well. They agreed to meet up this afternoon at the Federal Building and compare notes.

In the meantime, she had a houseguest to extricate.

Esme nudged him in the cheek with her big toe.

No response.

So she nudged him again, a little more forcefully.

Still nothing. And now she was beginning to smell the mess he’d left in his briefs. Ugh. Time for expediency.

She grabbed Grover’s thick wrists and began the arduous task of dragging the large, limp man into the bathroom, all the while keeping an eye on the carpet to make sure nothing in his underwear left its mark. She was reminded of her college days, and her first roommate, Roberta, who often drank well beyond the tolerance level of her four-foot-eleven, ninety-two-pound frame. According to the alumni newsletter, Roberta was now a successful pediatrician in Cleveland. Esme made a mental note never to bring Sophie to Cleveland and tugged Grover onto the cold tiles of the bathroom floor.

With Roberta, the trick was to escort her into the shower and then blast her face with cold water. Well, by the time Esme reached the bathtub, she reconsidered that option for Grover Kirk. One, his body was a lot more cumbersome than Roberta’s ever was. Two, the porcelain wall of the bathtub was a good two feet in height, and Esme just didn’t feel like hefting Grover’s body up and over that high a barrier.

So she did the next best thing.

She dunked his head in the toilet bowl.

In movies, the bullies and thugs who did this often punctuated their action with a flush, but the rush of water immersion awoke Grover almost immediately. His arms flailed blindly against her, so she just stepped away and watched as he launched his head out of the toilet bowl, spraying the wallpaper behind him with a swarm of droplets, and gazing around the bathroom in muddled unawareness.

Then he spotted Esme, and it all sunk in.

“How’s your hearing?” she asked.

He reflexively put a hand to his ear. “Ringing.”

“That could be from the water.”

He scowled at her.

“I’ll go get you a change of clothes,” she added. “You dumped a load in your shorts.”

At which his scowl dribbled into horror and embarrassment, and it was that look of stone-etched shame on his face, this man who had forcibly inserted himself in her family’s life, that made it all worthwhile.

By noon, she kicked him to the curb, or at least to his Studebaker. He informed her that, per Ziegler’s wishes, he would be returning to the Days Inn, and drove off. Esme took a long shower, scrubbing extrahard to
remove all those Grover-cooties, and drove out to New York. On the way, she stopped at the college to visit her husband.

The department secretary, a wispy man named Hector, informed her that Rafe was currently teaching in Lecture Hall B. Esme thanked him, followed the signs to the lecture halls and snuck into the back of the fivehundred-seat indoor amphitheater. Her husband paced the stage, a microphone bud clipped to the lapel of his blue sports jacket. She bought him that jacket one year for Christmas. On the dry-erase board, in Rafe’s semi-legible script, was a quote from Ovid: “Nature in her genius had imitated art.”

“But who is to blame?” he said. Many of the four-hundred-plus freshmen and sophomores in the room’s cheap plastic chairs were actively taking notes. Some weren’t. A few were asleep. But it was their loss. Rafe had been nominated twice by the student body as Professor of the Year. “The easy target is the media. The first target is the media. The violence is their fault. Violence in movies and TV propagates violence in the streets. Life imitates art. But the cinema and television are inventions of the twentieth century, and violence surely existed before the twentieth century. So what does that leave us? Books? Who reads books? No, seriously, raise your hand if you’ve read a book, for pleasure, in the past two months.”

About a third of the class raised their hands.

“If we as a society don’t read, we can’t very well blame our ills on literature. But we do. The Harry Potter novels are still banned in some American communities. So is
Huck Finn
. All out of fear of influence. And this is what we’re talking about. Fear of influence. Art doesn’t inspire bad behavior but it can shape it. It can point it in
a certain direction. After the tragedy at Columbine, Stephen King had a novel he wrote about a school shooting taken out of print. In 1989, cinemas across the country refused to show Spike Lee’s
Do the Right Thing,
because they believed it would incite violence. Fear of influence. D. H. Lawrence had to go to court to defend the publication of his novel
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Critics were sure it would plant seeds of sin into the minds of children. Fear of influence.
A Clockwork Orange
was filmed in England but wasn’t allowed to be shown there for thirty years. And I’m sure you all remember the anarchy and gang violence that ensued after that film’s eventual London release. No? There was no anarchy, you say? Life didn’t imitate art?

“Well, then, that puts us in a tough position, because if we can’t blame art for our woes, we as a society have run out of scapegoats, and if history teaches us anything, it’s that we react very poorly when the onus of blame falls on us.”

Esme watched his eyes quickly dart to the clock on the wall—and they found her. He hesitated, but only for a moment, and only she, of all the people in the room, noticed.

“Okay, for Tuesday, please read the chapter on ‘Hot and Cool Media.’ There…
hint-hint
…may be a quiz…
hint-hint.
Have good weekends.”

She remained in her seat while the students dispersed. A few lined up at Rafe’s podium to discuss with him today’s lecture or their grades or perhaps just to leave an impression with the prof. She waited out these stragglers, as well.

And then she and he were alone in the cavernous lecture hall.

“Where’s your ward?” he asked, filing his notes back into his valise.

“I set him free.” She remained in her seat in the back row. “Do you really believe what you said? That what we see or read has no effect on how we behave?”

“I didn’t say that at all,” he replied.

“What about
The Anarchist’s Cookbook?
”

“Two kinds of people read
The Anarchist’s Cookbook,
” said Rafe. “There are those who read it to satiate their own curiosity and there are those who read it to learn how to weaponize C-4. The former are not going to get inspired by the book to blow up city hall and the latter are already predisposed to violence before reading page one. Fear of influence, Esme. But my lecture was about the assignment of blame in a media-based global village. Maybe you should audit my course.”

She bit her tongue. She hadn’t come here to argue with him.

“I’m going to be in the city this afternoon,” she said, “but I’ll be home for dinner. We should eat out. As a family. Maybe Little Romeo’s or Michelangelo’s. What do you say?”

“I say that you’re a funny woman.”

Esme knew it wasn’t going to be good, but she had to ask. “How so?”

“You’ll make a special trip home so we can then immediately leave said home and go out. And where would that home even be, exactly? Because it sure as hell isn’t the house you spent the past few nights sleeping in. That hasn’t been a home ever since that monster violated it six months ago, and we’ve been fools pretending otherwise. I’ve said it before, Esme. The only way we’re going to repair this family is through change. Change of venue or change of vocation. Either one. You want to go out to
dinner tonight? That’s fine. I’m sure Sophie would enjoy that. I know she misses you.” He looked away. “I miss you.”

“I miss you, too, Rafe.” She wanted to stand. She wanted to run down the aisle and into his arms. She wanted there to be violins. She also wanted to be ten years younger and have firmer boobs, but she didn’t move from her seat, not at all, paralyzed by her own insecurities.

A student walked in. Of course a student walked in. There was undoubtedly another class set to meet in the lecture hall. So now Esme rose from her seat, and now Rafe climbed the aisle steps to the wall of doors at the aft of the wood-and-plastic cavern. They walked out together, but nobody would have known from their disparate body language that they were emotionally close, much less husband and wife.

“The lighthouse?” he said. “Around seven?”

“Okay,” she replied.

They parted. End of conversation.

Esme returned to her Prius, cranked up the melodic snarl-rock of the Jam, and shouted along with Paul Weller all the way across the George Washington Bridge, down into the Bronx and onto the many-fingered island of Manhattan. The Federal Building had its own parking garage, thank God, but it still took her a good half hour to navigate the avenues. The other cars didn’t make her as nervous as all the pedestrians rushing from street corner to street corner or simply milling so inconsiderately in the crosswalk with their strollers and their dogs. But finally she arrived, and parked, and passed security checkpoint after security checkpoint until the elevator emptied her out onto the high-altitude level of the TriBeCa skyscraper.