While Galileo Preys (16 page)

Next call: 911.

“911,” intoned an Asian-inflected operator, “please state the nature of your emergency.”

Lilly reiterated her situation to the operator. Accordingly, “patrol cars would be dispatched to her area as soon as possible” and she was “to remain calm.” How was she supposed to remain calm? How was anyone supposed to remain calm in an emergency? It was natural to go crazy. Evolution had programmed the human body with a biological imperative to survive, and adrenaline played its part in that process. Her panic attacks—and she noticed she wasn’t having one right now—were as much an overreaction, as much a wrong reaction, as “remaining calm” would be.

The traffic stream had finally poured her across the Bay. The first exit was the one she needed—Fremont
Street. She didn’t bother with her blinker. No reason to give Galileo advance notice, right? Fremont Street emptied out into the city’s financial district, mecca of high-rises and corporate logos. Lilly passed the headquarters of VISA and The Gap. She remained hunched in her seat—not that difficult given her tiny frame—and chanced another glimpse at the rearview. Galileo remained fifteen feet behind her, steady as a stone.

She took Pine and then north to Kearny, and the neighborhood began its transformation from California chic to Mandarin peasantry. Tiled awnings stretched out over entrances. Cubical buildings became pagodas, and signage—so commonly horizontal—now hung vertical, to better suit the ancient language being conveyed.

The major thoroughfare in Chinatown was Grant Avenue, so Lilly made sure instead to take one of the slender side streets. So many of these were dead ends, but Lilly knew the area well and avoided getting trapped. Galileo was still on her tail, but the overall foreignness of the area had to be frustrating him, and his chunky blue Ford barely squeezed between the brick buildings in a narrow lane like Ross Alley.

Take that, motherfucker…

Lilly felt her grip ease up a bit on her wheel. She was actually going to win. She, Lilly Toro, was going to defeat the big bad wolf. Strangely, she suddenly thought about her parents, and not with malice. They would be proud of her. They, who loathed her lifestyle, who had kicked her to the curb at age sixteen, would be bragging about her victory to their neighbors.

When she saw the police substation coming up on
the right, her nascent joy blossomed into unbridled bliss. She was home free. She had made it. She pounded on her horn, which got the attention of the three or four cops hanging out on the station’s front steps, and then she pulled alongside the curb.

“Can we help you?” one of them asked.

“Yes, I…” Lilly looked back to point at the Ford—but it was gone.

“Ma’am?”

“I was being followed,” she said with a grin, “but I guess I lost him.”

As the cops glanced back down the street at the complete absence of a threat, Lilly shifted into Park and got out of her car. Her legs felt rubbery from tension, but alive. Alive! Her cell phone rang. It was probably Tom Piper, finally calling her back. Late again. She put the phone to her ear.

“Yo,” she said.

“Thank you for standing still,” answered Galileo, and from 2,000 feet away he tugged the trigger of his rifle and ended Lilly’s life.

“F
ear,” said Rafe, “and desire.”

He wrote the words in large black ink on the dry erase board, and some of the more dutiful freshmen in the lecture hall jotted them down. Rafe took a moment to smirk at this—would they forget those two words if they didn’t copy them down? Then again, these were college students. With their away-from-home-for-the-first-time overindulgence of alcohol, drugs and sleep deprivation, who knew what condition their recently matured brains were in?

He continued his talk.

“It’s the dialectic of human psychology. When we say that people ‘push our buttons,’ there are only two buttons and these are they. And as societies can be said to have a collective psychology, we can too list them on this paradigm. To wit—the Roman Republic falls closer to Fear, yes? The xenophobia of the early Romans allowed them not only to be on guard for the elephants of Hannibal but also informed the way they absorbed nearby cultural memes and without exception
colored them decidedly Roman. The psycho-sociology of the Roman Empire, interestingly but not surprisingly, is another story altogether.”

He paused again, to allow the note-takers (few and far between as they were) to catch up. Rafe knew that the effectiveness of using historical examples to explain sociological concepts was waning with each passing year, but in his heart of hearts he was a history buff and couldn’t resist the efficacy these comparisons provided, at least to the astute in the room. Catering to mediocrity was not his style.

His mind drifted to his old father, now ensconced in their guest bedroom with his dumbbells and his magazines, and to his wife, for all intents and purposes an invalid on the living room divan. Much like the Romans of old, his life of late had shifted quite dramatically along the Fear-Desire paradigm.

A student raised her hand.

“Yes?”

“How do you spell ‘Hannibal’?”

When Amy Lieb laughed, which she did with inordinate frequency, she sounded very much like a panting dog. Oftentimes when Amy had launched into one of these laughing fits, Esme felt the need to take a step back, lest she be splashed with hot air and germs. So even though she was on the phone, even though she was in her home and Amy was miles away, ensconced in hers, as soon as that breathy canine laughter began, Esme instinctively moved away from her phone receiver.

“I’m sorry,” Amy said finally, once her breathing had simmered down, “it’s just that, well, you can’t be serious.”

“I am very serious. At the very least, Amy, you need to remove the Unity for a Better Tomorrow from the fundraiser’s list of sponsors.”

“Because—and let me make sure I understand you—because this serial killer specifically targets cities where—”

“Yes.”

“Esme, honey, have you eaten today?”

Esme blinked. “What?”

“Let me bring over a casserole. I’ll have Lupe whip something up. She’s a wonder with noodles. How do you feel about scrod?”

Esme clenched her teeth. She was lying on the sofa, ice packs numbing both sides of her slowly-mending abdominal wound. She still felt pain, though, because no amount of ice or Tylenol or even Percocet could combat the anguish of talking to a fucking wall.

“Amy, listen. Even if you think I’m wrong, even if it’s inconvenient, wouldn’t you rather err on the side of caution? Galileo is still out there.”

“Oh, honey, I know he is. Do you have a pen handy? I used to see this shrink, Dr. Fleishman, back when I had that episode with my gardener, and he worked miracles for my post-traumatic stress. He’s board certified.”

Esme did have a pen handy, and she was doodling an unflattering caricature of Amy Lieb on the back of one of her Sudoku books. How could anyone be so
willfully naive? Was the stereotype accurate? Was enough exposure to suburban life the equivalent of a lobotomy?

“Anyway, I hate to cut and run, but the caterer’s on the other line. Don’t ever try and order lobster bisque in April. Ta!”

Ta.

Before moving to the next person on her list—the mayor—Esme needed a few minutes to calm down. It wouldn’t do to vent her frustration with Amy Lieb at Mayor Connors. She knew the mayor a little, more from social functions at the college than anything else. He was a cleavage-watcher, but he also seemed to have the best interests of the community at heart. She would appeal to his sense of duty—but first, she needed to tranquilize herself with some TV. And if only Tom Piper would return any of her messages, she wouldn’t be feeling like she was fighting this battle alone.

She clicked on the remote and watched Fox’s talking heads gab about oil and about a minute later read along the bottom of the screen, embedded in the nonstop crawl of succinct ledes, these words:
Journalist involved in Galileo case found dead near home.

For Tom Piper, the optimal dialectic wasn’t Fear-Desire but Win-Lose, and he knew exactly where this case fit on that paradigm. But that didn’t stop AD Trumbull, with whom he was on a conference call along with several other higher-ups, from reminding him.

“It’s disgraceful,” said Trumbull, and then coughed
for a minute. It was an open secret that the old man had lung cancer, but if a career employee for the United States government wanted to die in his office, so be it. Everyone on the conference call patiently waited for Trumbull’s bronchial attack to subside. Tom used the time to rub his tired eyes. He was in a secure room behind closed doors at Eppley Airfield, the historic airport which served the greater Omaha metropolitan area. Most rooms of this nature—where questionable passengers were detained—had chipped paint on the walls and creaky furniture. This room had recently been repainted—eggshell white, of all colors—and the wooden chair on which he sat couldn’t have been more comfortable. It was simple pleasures like these that Tom had to embrace right now, because they were all he had. His own phone buzzed from inside his luggage. Someone was calling him. Whoever it was had to be better conversation than this. Tom was tempted to press mute on the room phone and take the personal call, but then Trumbull cleared his throat and carried on with his tongue-lashing:

“Explain to me how it is that you diverted manpower to Santa Fe and our guy shows up in San Francisco. Was San Francisco even on your radar, Tom?”

“With all due respect, sir, I asked for surveillance on Lilly Toro. I believed she might be at risk, and my request was denied.”

“I read your request,” piped in another assistant director. “You had twenty-two names on that list. How are we supposed to prioritize when you give us twenty-two names?”

“I’m sorry, sir.” Tom stared at the bright wall. “I wasn’t aware there was a limit on the number of people the Bureau is supposed to protect.”

“There is a limit on the number of resources the Bureau has at its disposal, as you well know. And when those resources are squandered in the middle of New Mexico—”

“We have credible evidence that Santa Fe is on Galileo’s list. What happened in San Francisco doesn’t—”

“And how long is
that
list, Special Agent Piper? Twenty-two names?”

Tom sighed.

“I’ve also looked at this so-called ‘credible evidence’ and it is awful flimsy, Piper. “

“Except what happened today, sir, confirmed the connection between Galileo and the Kellerman campaign, which was the lynchpin of Esme Stuart’s hypothesis. It stands to reason—”

“The Kellerman campaign is off-limits, Piper.”

“Beg pardon?”

“They don’t want federal intrusion on their day-today operations. They seem to think we’re beholden to the vice president since he used to be Bureau director and that we’d report everything back to him. That’s their paranoia, not mine.”

“Sir, paranoia’s not really a defense against obstruction of justice.”

“It’s an election year, Piper.”

“It’s always an election year,” Tom replied.

“We need to tread carefully, especially given your—our—recent performance. We need to reassure the
public that contrary to popular belief our heads are not up our asses. We’re going to have ourselves a press conference, gentlemen. The people want someone to blame for this clusterfuck, and since we can’t seem to get the son of a bitch who’s actually responsible, whether he’s in San Francisco or Santa Fe or Timbuktu, we’re going to have to throw one of our own to the lions.”

Tom knew this was coming, but it still hurt to hear.

Trumbull’s hoary voice hammered in the nail: “That means you, Tom. You and your team are going to take the fall here. I’d apologize, but with the body count this perpetrator is accruing, which includes police officers and firefighters not to mention one of our own, I’m not sure if the media crucifixion you’re about to suffer is entirely undeserved.”

The SWAT team descended on the car. They wore ceramic body armor over bulletproof vests. Thick black helmets protected their skulls. As they were well aware, Galileo was partial to head shots. Each member of the 12-man squad carried an assault rifle in his hands and had a pistol strapped to his left leg.

It was a beat cop named Mary Chu who had found the blue Ford sedan—license plate JG3-94Q—parked in an alleyway in the urban Mission District. This was miles outside the canvass area, but nevertheless, the vehicle matched the description. Mary had maintained her distance, called it in, and waited inside a nearby bodega. The SWAT van had showed up twenty minutes later, at exactly 6:16 p.m. Lilly Toro and the three cops
on the stairs of the substation had been dead for almost ninety minutes.

As the SWAT team slowly approached the Ford, Mary Chu watched from the grocery store. The bodega’s owner stood beside her, sipping from a hot cup of Mexican coffee. Both were thinking the same thought: this could be a trap. Hadn’t Galileo lured his victims in Atlanta and Amarillo much the same way these twelve men and women now were being lured to this abandoned car? Mary knew their body armor was bullet-resistant. She knew these were the city’s finest. Nevertheless, she took a step back from the bodega window and into the shadow of a shelf.

The car sat in a dark alley. The falling sun’s fiery light failed to provide the slightest illumination. The SWAT team activated their helmet lights. Twelve beams of bright blue shot forward, and passed across the Ford like a kaleidoscope of long fingers.

It was a stolen Ford. Its owner, a Mrs. Harriet Rehoboth of Oakland, had reported it missing yesterday. She’d gone into her neighborhood Safeway to spend her social security check on some groceries and when she returned to the parking lot, her shopping cart stuffed with oranges and lamb chops and two-for-one bottles of Pert, her Ford was gone. Mrs. Rehoboth was upset, but she was also confused. The parking lot was dotted with Saabs and Jaguars and Mercedes. Why would anyone steal her crappy eighteen-year-old blue Ford? Who would do such a thing?

The police now had their answer. The SWAT team advanced on her car, every step measured, every breath
modulated. They had spotters on the lookout for Galileo, but he was a crafty bastard, and could be anywhere. Like Mary Chu, most of the officers on the scene were assuming the worst—that this was another one of Galileo’s bait-and-hooks. But what was the alternative? Leave the car alone? They had a job to do, and none of them joined SWAT for the stylish uniforms.

They approached in a modified phalanx formation. It was the most defensive stance they could take. This was why Sgt. Tyler Murphy, who was at the fore of the column, was the first to spot the shoe box on the passenger seat. To better facilitate matters, the window to the passenger seat was already down. Galileo wanted the shoe box to be seen. Murphy reported his discovery to Captain Rodriguez. Rodriguez ordered the SWAT team to retreat, and sent in the bomb dogs.

Mary Chu nibbled on her lower lip.

Three German shepherds were escorted into the alley and sniffed the car for several minutes. The K-9s were specially trained at detecting explosives. All it took was a bark, and the bomb squad, on the standby, would march in. But the dogs didn’t bark. They didn’t even growl. The car was safe.

Rodriguez himself took out the shoe box and looked inside.

“What the hell?”

Someone had to claim the body. It wouldn’t be released until an autopsy was performed—standard operating procedure for a homicide—but claiming the body at least set into motion the other requisite task—
finding a mortician, etc.—which accompanied death. As the police were busy tracking Galileo, the coroner’s assistant, a fidgety man named Chiles, took it upon himself to locate the next of kin. He took out the deceased’s cell phone, found the number, traced the number to an address, and hopped into his SUV. Due to the manhunt, many streets were cordoned off, making evening traffic a bitch, but Chiles managed to get to his destination by 7:00 p.m. His stomach growled for sushi. Dinner would have to wait. Someone had to claim the body.

The deceased’s next of kin lived on the sixth floor of a walk-up in Oakland. Chiles, ever impatient, took the stairs two at a time. By the time he reached the apartment door, 6F, his hamstrings were displeased. He located the doorbell and pressed it.

A middle-aged Asian woman answered the door. She wore a flower print dress. From her apartment came the smell of boiled cabbage. Once again, Chiles had to ignore his appetite. Someone had to claim the body.

He took out a photograph from a pocket of his wind-breaker. She looked at the photograph and then nodded. Her face became wet. Chiles informed her that she would have to come with him to the morgue. She nodded again, and got her coat. On her way out, she left a note for her husband. He was working late.

On the way down, they took the stairs one at a time.

Because return journeys are always quicker, they arrived at the morgue shortly before 7:30. The rain clouds from that morning had come back, and provided
a steady drizzle to their walk from the parking lot to the deliberately featureless building which housed the M.E.’s office. As the M.E. herself often put it, death needn’t advertise.

Next to the meat locker was a small quiet room set aside especially for purposes like this visit. The body was already on the table, and covered with a clean white sheet. They used an industrial-strength bleach to get the sheets that white. Appearances were important.