Before Cain Strikes (21 page)

He continued straight.

The lighthouse it was!

“Where are you going?” Mom asked him.

“We’re going to the lighthouse,” explained Sophie.

“Rafe, why—”

“You want to discuss this now?” he asked, obviously indicating their backseat passenger. “Do you?”

“Were we going to discuss it ever?”

“We should have moved out of that house six months ago. After what happened there? We should have moved out of that house the next day. But we didn’t. We pretended that we were above it all, that we weren’t going to be affected, but we all know now that was crap.”

Sophie’s eyes widened. Dad said
crap!

“If we’re going to move forward,” he said. “The first thing we need to do is move. I’ve already started looking at a few properties. I’ve been waiting for you to return from the city to show you and Sophie.”

Wait. Move? What? Sophie leaned forward. This was a very important conversation.

“We can afford a nicer place,” he said. “Maybe with a sunroom. A library for all our books in the basement. An office for you. A few more bedrooms for, you know, the future. Because that’s what I’m talking about. The future. Our future. If you want to be a part of it, Esme.”

They pulled up to the lighthouse.

He turned to her.

Sophie looked to her, as well.

They both waited for an answer, as if it were another entrée in their meal, as if it needed to cool down before it could be sampled. They waited and they waited and then Esme opened her mouth, and delivered.

T
he first step, Tom realized, was deciding who to kill.

But he couldn’t decide.

He stared at the phone inside the cubicle Karl Ziegler had assigned him. Esme was just seven digits away. This was her kind of puzzle. He picked up the receiver…and put it down. No, Esme had been emphatic. He wasn’t going to pester her. She wasn’t a member of his task force anymore. There
wasn’t
even a task force anymore. Galileo had seen to that.

When she and Rafe first became serious, Tom had pestered her. Sometimes he had been downright possessive. But at the time she had been on the task force. She was his employee. She was a valuable member of the team and everyone depended on her. Perhaps if she’d been with Rafe earlier, it would have been different, but they’d become accustomed to her being available 24/7 and when that flexibility, that status quo, suddenly changed…

Tom sometimes wondered if his aggressive behavior during those months had, in fact, pushed Esme even closer toward Rafe. It was classic, in a way. Here he was, her father figure, essentially telling her not to date, and
so of course her instinct would be to run into her lover’s arms. For all Tom knew, his stubborn resistance was the single greatest motivator for Esme marrying that schmuck. Rafe Stuart was the love of her life? Please. She could do so much better. She deserved so much better. But instead of helping her realize that, Tom just stood in her way.

But he was digressing. He needed to work this plan. He needed to figure out who Grover Kirk was going to “kill” for the Great Hunt. And with what weapon. And when. And where. It needed to be a viable scenario, something that fit in with who Grover was. Pretending that he suddenly went on a knifing spree wouldn’t sell.

Tom glanced again at the phone, then at the clock: 9:24 p.m.

Fuck it. He’d tackle this tomorrow. If Esme came in, great. If not, so be it.

He phoned Penelope Sue and told her he was on his way home. She was, predictably, still out, exploring the Upper West Side. They agreed to meet up at a brightly lit diner on Broadway and Ninety-ninth—if only because that was a landmark in front of her while they were on the phone.

By 10:00 p.m., they were in a corner booth, sharing a six-dollar plate of nachos. Every now and then, the wind smacked against the windowpane beside them, shaking it slightly. Penelope Sue held her palm to the glass to feel the vibrations. She closed her eyes and imagined she was a fish and the wind was the waves in the sea.

“I love this city,” she said.

“Want to live here?”

She opened her eyes. “Hell, no. I love nachos but I wouldn’t want to eat them every day of the week.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Okay, man of a thousand grunts, why don’t you like New York?”

“I never said I didn’t like it.” He picked at the nachos, dragging a line of cheese from one end of the plate to the other. “I just prefer where we’re from.”

“Even though you’ve been to all fifty states…”

“I’ve never been to Hawaii.”

“You went to Alaska and you didn’t go to Hawaii? What kind of a tourist are you?”

“Alaska wasn’t a vacation,” he replied, and left it at that.

Their main courses arrived—a pair of burgers. Penelope Sue dove into hers, but Tom barely lifted a finger. Finally, she asked him what was wrong.

“Nothing.” He picked up his burger and took a bite. And put it back down.

“Tom Piper, look at me.”

He looked at her.

“You tell me what’s wrong or so help me you’re sleeping on the floor tonight.”

“It’s my hotel room.”

“You think that makes a difference to me?”

He knew it made no difference to her. This was a woman who ran her own physical therapy business, dealing every day with clients whose emotional states ranged from depressed to suicidal, not to mention the holier-than-thou doctors she had to put up with day in and day out. This was a woman who sometimes wore a Starfleet uniform to the grocery store. No, the fact that the hotel room was under his name made no difference to her.

And he couldn’t help but grin.

She smiled back at him. “Okay, then. Now that your wall’s down, tell me what’s wrong. Is it this case?”

“No. Maybe.”

“Are you afraid of change?”

His eyes found hers. What made her say that?

“When I get a new client, a car accident victim or someone recovering from a stroke, you know what the first thing I ask them is? Do you remember the first thing I asked you?”

He thought. Those first few weeks of recovery were such a blur. His only real memories of that time were of attending the funerals of Galileo’s victims, and of being unable to breathe without the aid of a respirator. He had never felt so old, or so alone. And then she had come into his life.

“You asked me what scared me the most,” he said.

“That’s right. Do you remember what you answered?”

He didn’t. “Do you?”

“You don’t remember what you’re most scared of?”

“Change?”

Once again, the wind shivered the glass. She didn’t feel it with her palm this time. Her attention belonged to Tom.

“No,” she replied. “Failure.”

Ah, yes. Failure.

“But that’s all fear of change is, anyway. Failing to prevent the inevitable. Failing to beat the clock. The clock always wins, Tom. The trick is to not be alone when it happens.”

She clasped his hand in hers.

They finished their meal with innocuous chatter about the weather (she was praying for snow) and about the upcoming holiday (deep-fried turkey, ahoy!), and by the time it came to pay the bill, they both were a little sleepy. To keep themselves from dozing off on the train, they played a game of I Spy.

“I Spy with my little eye…”

“Your adorable little eye…”

Tom blushed. “Will you stop that?”

The train, sparsely populated on this Thursday evening, careered southward. At the Forty-second Street stop, the few passengers on the car with them got off. They were alone. The train recommenced its rickety journey.

“Did I ever tell you,” said Penelope Sue, “that I knew who you were before we met?”

“No, you most definitely did not.”

She replied with a smirk.

“How did you know who I was?”

“I do read the papers, Tom Piper. The Galileo case was on the front page for days. Your name, right there, lead investigator. But not your picture.”

“I don’t like having my picture taken.”

“Who does? But I always wondered what you looked like.”

“And now you know.”

“Galileo was targeting you and you knew he was targeting you and you still went after him.”

“It was my job,” replied Tom, shifting in his seat.

They were nearing their station.

“And I wanted to meet the man who did that. He sounded like a good man to me.”

Again, Tom blushed. Fortunately, at that moment, the train squeaked to a stop, and so did this topic of conversation (he hoped). He and Penelope Sue trundled out into the icebox that was their subway station.

“Do you ever worry about it?” she asked him.

“Worry about what?”

They approached the metal turnstiles.

“You know,” she replied. “People reading all that
Galileo stuff in the papers and thinking, well, he’s famous now, maybe I can be famous, too. Copycat killers. Does that happen in real life? Because it happens all the time in movies and—”

He stopped.

“Tom?”

He smiled.

“Tom?”

He knew exactly who he was going to kill.

Grover was in the shower when he heard the door to his hotel room open. He almost hadn’t heard it—he was warbling Sinatra while soaping his privates—but thought he’d heard
something
. When the hotel room door shut with a loud thump, he knew he hadn’t been mistaken and someone had, in fact, just illegally entered his room.

Panicking, he searched the shower for a possible weapon. The bar of soap in his hands had been reduced to a misshapen nickel. Since he was bald as an onion, he didn’t shampoo. His razor was over on the bathroom sink, but it was electric, and its rotating blades were nothing more than slivers. The best he could do with it was give his intruder a close, personal shave. Damn it! Why had the FBI released him? Actual psychopaths knew who he was and where—because he’d told them! Psychopaths who were this very minute—

The shower curtain was slid to the side. The two lean FBI agents who had accosted him so many days ago in the parking lot stood there, wearing the same cheap brown suits.

“Your presence is requested downtown,” said the taller. Was he the one who’d called Grover a pedophile and shoved him into the backseat of the car? “You should get dressed first.”

The other G-man just stood nearby, arms crossed, staring unimpressed at Grover’s dangling privates as the rapidly cooling shower water continued to jet, cascade and drool across the would-be journalist’s paunchy body.

Having an audience inspired him. He dried off and dressed up in under five minutes. He failed to towel some of the soap off his testicles, though, and as he sat down in the backseat of the now-familiar unmarked sedan, he could feel his balls begin to itch. This was going to be a long day.

Since traffic transformed the Long Island Expressway at this early hour into a fifty-mile-long parking lot, Grover used the downtime to reflect on
Galileo’s Aim
. Yesterday—Thursday, November 18—had been a very fruitful day in his literary life.

With the manuscript now complete, he phoned several of the publishers in New York to whom he had sent his proposal months ago to update them on its status. Most of the editors he wanted to reach were in meetings, but one of them gave him the name and phone number of an agent to contact. So he contacted the agent. The agent was in a meeting. So he left a voice mail, and searched online for more publishers. He wanted an answer
now
. Current-events stories like this lost their interest value with every day that passed. So he compiled a list of smaller publishers that accepted email submissions and sent out query letters to them, emphasizing the block-buster potential of his exposé. His wasn’t the first book to be written about Galileo, of course—the market had been flooded with trashy tomes that had obviously been scribbled by some hack in under a week—but
Galileo’s Aim
was the only comprehensive examination of not only the many murders but also of the man himself.
The audience was there for this book. Heck, he’d just joined a website with more than two thousand people who would love to have a copy in their home. Perhaps not on display, true, but purchased. Ka-ching.

So far, no one had replied.

He hoped this new business with the FBI, whatever it was, didn’t take too long. If he got out early enough, maybe he could stop by some of the smaller publishers. Person-to-person communication was always preferable, anyway. He had made sure to interview every person in his book face-to-face. He could have settled for a phone call, but no. He needed to see their expressions. He needed to feel the texture of their hands when they said hello. It made his book matter. The right publisher would see that, and together they would make a fortune. Together they would—

Goddamn it! There went his ear again. Ever since Esme had Vulcan nerve-pinched him, the quality of hearing in his left ear had been diminished, and sometimes plain went silent, as it did just now. Should he have climbed into her bed like that? Maybe not. But her violent reaction had far outweighed any invasion of privacy he may have committed. If he sued her for even one of her many, many offenses, that bed she had been so eager to kick him out of would belong to him. The house would belong to him. He could turn it into a museum dedicated to the life and death of infamous serial killer Henry “Galileo” Booth.

He banged against his ear with the palm of his hand, but it did little good. At least he didn’t hear that god-awful chiming sound in it, as he had last night when he’d tried to go to sleep. He knew from one of his favorite poems what his condition was called: “tintinnabulation.” He also knew that as soon as he returned to Florida,
he was going to pay a visit to the highest-priced ENT specialist he could find, and send the bill care of Esme Stuart.

It just proved the well-known fact that one should never meet well-known people. They were always liable to be a disappointment.

Grover discreetly attempted to scratch his itchy balls with his right hand, but the agent who was driving almost immediately spotted him in the rearview. So Grover just sat there and stewed. By the time they pulled into the parking garage, he was ready to rip off his trousers, grab the nearest rake and scratch himself with that. The agents escorted Grover up to the requisite floor, and once again he was deposited in an interview room. No handcuffs this time, at least.

One-way mirror be damned, he used the corner of the table to go to work, running his crotch up and down the pointed-edge wood. This was what he was doing when the door opened and Tom Piper walked into the room.

“In some states, that’s considered rape,” said Tom.

Grover looked down. It indeed looked like he was humping the table. He returned to the chair.

“I got soap on my balls,” he replied.

“Of course you did.”

Tom had a series of nine snapshots in his hand. He spread them out on the table. Each picture depicted a decently dressed man or woman, posing as if for a work ID.

“Who are they?”

“These,” answered Tom, “are your targets.”

“My what?”

“Tomorrow afternoon, you’re going to take an elevator to the roof of an office building in downtown Melville, across from the Long Island Resident Agency of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Once there, you’re going to remove an unassembled sniper rifle from its case, assemble it, load it, aim it and take out these nine agents.”

“Take out?”

“Kill.”

Grover blinked. “Excuse me?”

“I’m just kidding.”

Grover relaxed.

Tom turned to the door. “Bring in the gun.”

The door opened. A young woman brought in a long leather case. She placed it on the table, unfastened its clasps and lifted its top. Inside was an unassembled sniper rifle.