Before Cain Strikes

by Joshua Corin

  “Never a pleasure,” said Rafe. And then, to his wife: “Use the spare key to Dad’s house. You know where it is. Use the bed for all I care.” That last statement was for the both of them.

  He indeed had his window open on the drive back to Oyster Bay.

  It was still light out by the time he pulled into his tony development. His shoulders and hands ached with tension. He made sure to wave at every one of his neighbors he saw as he drove by, keeping to the child-friendly five-miles-per-hour speed limit. Some were out with their kids, at play in the softening snow. Some were winterizing the outsides of their homes. Winter was coming. Only a fool stood in the way of inevitable change.

  Only a fool.

  Rafe’s thoughts turned to lawyers. He knew enough of them. Half of the men and women he greeted just now were either associates in a Manhattan firm or junior partners in a firm out here on the Island. No, there was no shortage of litigation in this part of the country.

  So many of the people he knew from his own college days were divorced. Even some of his graduate students—bright folks only in their midtwenties—had one or two divorces under their belts. The American divorce had become its own subfield of sociology. Rafe had always leaned more toward popular culture, and contemporary popular culture was infused with the idea of most marriages being temporary. After all, this was the twenty-first century. Everything was temporary: trends in the stock market, personal careers, diets, e-companies. For he and Esme to still be married after eight years was practically quaint.

  Not that that was a reason to seek a divorce. But he had other reasons, better reasons, didn’t he? The situation had become untenable. Dr. Rosen had given them two weeks, but that had really been nothing more than her kind way of offering two weeks’ notice on their marriage. Only a fool stood in the way of inevitable change, and a practical man like Rafe needed to act before the curve. Procrastination was a simpleton’s game. She had called him a quitter, but it was she who had quit this marriage, wasn’t it?

  Rafe pulled into his garage. There was Tom’s motorcycle, draped in a leather shroud to protect it in case, God forbid, it ever rained inside their garage. So often he’d wanted to take a bat to that piece of machinery, but all this reflection about divorce had planted a better idea in his mind. He would sell the motorcycle on eBay.

  He carried his suitcase into the house and was immediately besieged by Sophie, her arms wrapping around his legs like a love-struck boa constrictor. How he missed his little girl. Why couldn’t all love be this simple? Maybe true love was.

  “Where’s Mommy?” she asked. She peered up at him with his own eyes. They searched his face with the curiosity of innocence. How exactly does one explain divorce to an angel?

  Before he could answer, Lester padded into the room, half a grilled-cheese sandwich in his hand. The football game was on mute, and that just went to show how interested the old man was in what Rafe was about to say.

  “She had some business she had to finish upstate,” Rafe replied, choosing his words carefully. “It might take a while.”

  Almost immediately, Sophie’s curiosity drooped into a pout.

  Lester’s expression was much more positive.

  “Will she be back in time for the science museum?”

  “I don’t think so, cupcake.”

  “But she promised.”

  Lester stepped in. He couldn’t resist. “Guess whatever she’s doing up there she thinks is more important.”

  “More important than the science museum…?” Sophie’s eyes watered. “But she promised…”

  Rafe hugged her close. He would take care of her. He had his priorities in order.

  8

  Tom and Esme were at the twenty-four-hour diner, sharing a breastplate full of nachos and perusing the Sunday paper. There were front-page articles about both Lynette Robinson’s murder and Marcy Harper’s kidnapping. The reporters hadn’t linked the two, but it was just a matter of time before someone in the county sheriff departments, either Sullivan or Ulster, leaked.

  “So what’s the plan?” she asked.

  His eyes scanned hers. “If you want to talk about it…”

  “I want to talk about this,” she replied.

  Tom nodded. Far be it from him to step in the way of her compartmentalization. For now, at least.

  “First, I need you to update me on everything I’ve missed.”

  So she did. It took about twenty minutes and most of the nachos. Through it all, Tom absorbed the information, sifted it, organized it. The picture was far from vivid, but it was getting there.

  He paid for the nachos. “Now we go to the crime scene.”

  They took his rental, a black Mustang that had seen better days, but so had they, hadn’t they? Regardless, Value Street wasn’t too far away. Nothing was too far away here. Tom parked across the street from the ruins that had once been the residence of the Weiner clan. The snow had weighed down the police tape so much that even with the thaw, the yellow plastic remained only inches from the ground, only a deterrent now for ants and spiders.

  The fire had gutted most of the interior and shattered at least the front-facing windows, decomposing the house into a thirty-foot-tall eyeless, toothless corpse. The uniformity in structure, color and condition of 18 Value Street’s neighbors made the contrast even more hideous and distasteful. Here was a half-acre of 1945 Dresden in the middle of 1955 Levittown.

  Esme stepped through slush toward the rotted two-story box and its contents of ashes. The ashes themselves intermingled with snow, resulting in salt-and-pepper scatterings all across the lot, occasionally carried aloft by currents of wind. It all had a strange, hellish beauty.

  “So our most likely suspect is an affable travel agent from New Paltz, huh?”

  Just hearing the words spilling out of Tom’s mouth underlined the doubt she had in her mind that P. J. Hammond was their guy. But it wasn’t P.J.’s affability that had her worried. She had, in her time, met plenty of gregarious psychopaths, and had studied the Ted Bundy case at the academy. Outward personality rarely mirrored inward turmoil, even in the most sane of people. What had her worried, what raised her concern that P. J. Hammond wasn’t their guy, was all the evidence indicating that he was.

  “Our first question has to be, how did he find this location? New Paltz is an hour away, isn’t it?”

  They looked around at the neighborhood. They saw houses and lawns. Some doors still had their papier-mâché Halloween witches. Some had their Thanksgiving turkeys. Several doors down from the crime scene, Value Street was bisected by Turner Road. Esme and Tom walked the length and turned the corner. Turner Road was more of a thoroughfare. A public library sat at the intersection, with a sign and bench for public transportation at its front curb. About a quarter of a mile to the east was a modest-size church. About a quarter of a mile to the west was a cemetery.

  “Maybe he has family in the area.” Her questioning of the suspect had been interrupted well before she’d had a chance to ask many personal inquiries. “But according to the police report, that library’s the last known location of Lynette Robinson before she went missing. And we also know that the victim frequented the library on a fairly regular schedule. So he chose the house because of its vicinity to the library and knew when to show up to grab her. But it still doesn’t answer the basic question of how he found her in the first place, or here, or anything.”

  “That’s not the half of it.” He turned on his heel and started back toward the crime scene. “You’re the unsub. You go through the trouble of making sure a house is going to be empty for almost two weeks. You buy a collar, some chains, and you kidnap Lynette Robinson and tie her up. You’ve got plenty of time to have your fun, but instead you burn down the house?”

  “Maybe something happened. Maybe there was an accident. Except the evidence contradicts that theory. The fire started in the kitchen and it was an electrical explosion. So unless our unsub is incredibly incompetent with appliances, there’s no acciden
t. Which means he burned the house down on purpose even though he had ten days left of free rein in the place. Something Lynette did set him off and he overreacted.”

  “You overreact by killing the victim. You don’t overreact by destroying the sanctuary, do you? But that’s what he did. He intentionally destroyed his sanctuary, his special place. Now why would a man do that?”

  “Guilt, perhaps, after committing the actual murder?”

  “And then he kidnaps a child from a running car?” Tom shook his head. “The kind of guilt that causes a man to burn down a house doesn’t fade in a few days, does it? This wasn’t an act of guilt.”

  “Then what was it? Why did he destroy his sanctuary?”

  They had returned to the ash heap. Tom stood by the mailbox, incongruously brand-new, freshly painted red and planted at the foot of the driveway.

  “We need to have a sit-down with Mr. Hammond,” he said, staring at the rubble. “We’re trying to draw a cube with two dots and a crayon.”

  “He’s seen me. He knows I’m with the Bureau. I step foot anywhere near him and Marcy Harper’s life gets put in immediate jeopardy.”

  “Make no mistake,” replied Tom. “Marcy Harper’s life is in immediate jeopardy.”

  They trundled through the slush to his rented Mustang. Its white sidewalls were already splattered with wet dirt from the roads. Value Street itself was narrow and his car, parked in front of the wreckage, nearly took up half the width of the street.

  Tom climbed into the driver’s seat.

  Esme paused.

  And then she walked back up to Turner Road.

  Tom got out of the car and followed her.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking, where did he park?”

  They looked back at the Mustang.

  “Not in the street,” replied Tom.

  “Not unless it was a timed explosion. Half the neighborhood would have seen him peel away from the crime scene.”

  “So he escapes out the back door and cuts behind these houses to here. There’s no parking on the road, but it looks like both the library and the church have plenty of space in their lots.”

  Esme crossed the street to the library, but stopped at the bench. “The police report said that a city bus showed up about five minutes after the explosion was first called in. Interviews with the driver verify that timeline.”

  “So you’re saying our guy escaped on the bus?”

  Esme sat on the bench, and then very quickly stood, the seat of her pants now moist. “Damn it. No. I mean, yes. I mean, it’s possible. Isn’t it?”

  “When you’re working with a blank canvas,” replied Tom, “anything’s possible.”

  The streetlight by the bus stop blinked on. It would be dark soon, and cold. Tom and Esme walked back to the Mustang. She gave him directions to her father-in-law’s house. As they left the neighborhood, she turned around in her seat and watched the bus stop fade into the distance, and Tom watched it in the rearview, both of them hoping that there was a straight line that led from that bus stop to Marcy Harper and justice.

  The candlelight vigil was very well attended.

  Ostensibly, it was a spontaneous event. Word of mouth inspired acts of solidarity, and by 8:00 p.m. a swarm had gathered in the parking lot of the strip mall where Baby Marcy Harper had been taken. Not many of the attendees actually knew the Harpers, but a missing child was the universal horror, and so everyone sympathized with the mother, razor-blade-thin Gladys, and the father, alcohol-dipped Harold. Candles were lit. Hymns were sung. Strangers were hugged and held.

  The manager of the local Kinkos had made a blow-up poster of Marcy’s photograph. It sat on an easel under the strip mall awning.

  From the outskirts, the media affiliates filmed b-roll. This had been a busy week for them—first the scandalous murder and now a child abduction. And not just a child, but an infant. This kind of kismet birthed national careers. This kind of drama led to Pulitzers. The reporters and anchormen and bloggers shuffled their ambition to the backs of their minds, where it remained, well-behaved and grinning. Of course, these journalists had as much compassion as the other attendees at the vigil. The other attendees, though, had Sundays off. The journalists, as they jostled for the prime footage, the most heartwarming interview, the pithiest encapsulation, were on the clock.

  The mother, Gladys, smoked like, well, smoked like a burning house. She smoked Newports. She’d gone through half a pack in half an hour. It was her last pack. Soon she’d have to hit up someone in the crowd for a cigarette, maybe one of those journalists who interviewed her earlier. The least they could do was spare a cigarette. That’s why these people were here, anyway: support. Her child was missing and her box turtle had cancer. That was what she was doing here yesterday, why she’d panicked and driven to the vet and left her daughter in the car seat. She knew what the other mothers were saying about her, that she was irresponsible, that she deserved whatever misery she got, but Gladys had had that turtle since she was two years old. Growing up, her classmates had made fun of her because she had a reptile for a pet while they had their cute little kittens and loyal dependable puppies but those kittens and puppies died after fifteen years, and she’d had Rex now for almost twenty-five. So when she noticed the curlicues of blood floating in the shallow water of Rex’s terrarium, yes, she packed up Marcy and drove straight to see Dr. Hammond.

  Now Rex was at home, convalescing, and Marcy was gone, and at that moment Gladys Harper didn’t know her left from her right and so she did the only thing in her life that had been reliable as Rex. She smoked her Newports. Harold was no help. Harold worked his factory job and came home and drank. Harold was her cliché of a husband. Could a cliché offer comfort? Could a cliché ease pain? Even now he stood off to the side in a twelve-pack daze. At least that meant he wouldn’t be coming to bed and she wouldn’t have to deal with his grabby hands.

  Gladys searched the faces in the crowd for Dr. Hammond, but the veterinarian still hadn’t shown up. Her husband, P.J., was here, enjoying a pleasant conversation with some black fellow she didn’t know, not that Gladys knew many black fellows or black ladies or black anything. Her parents had raised her not to associate with that type, and so she didn’t. They’d had the foresight to get her a turtle instead of a kitten or puppy, so their judgment had to be sound. They’d recently moved down to Virginia to escape the north’s implacable winters.

  She hadn’t told them yet about their granddaughter’s disappearance.

  The cigarette between her fingers was dying, its powdery tip crawling back toward her skin. Gladys had two, three puffs left at the most. How much longer was she supposed to stay out here? She at least was glad those moron county cops hadn’t shown up here, coming to her place of residence this afternoon with apologies and some bullshit about that dead girl in Monticello. Who was she to care about some dead girl in Monticello? Were they trying to make her feel guilty for leaving the car running? The police were untrustworthy. They planted evidence and pursued their own agenda. Her aunt spent ten years in Sing Sing on some bogus drug charge and she wasn’t ever the same once she got out. Calling them pigs was an insult to—

  Well, no more cigarette. Time to see how much goodwill goes for these days.

  She chose P. J. Hammond.

  “Excuse me, P.J.,” she said.

  “Gladys, I am so sorry for what’s happened.” He hugged her. “I’m sure everything is going to work out.”

  She eyeballed the black fellow standing next to him. He got the hint and walked away.

  “P.J., do you happen to have a cigarette?”

  “Me? Oh, no. If I smoked, I’d give you my whole pack. But you know my Mary. She’s a stickler for health.”

  “Is she coming tonight?” P.J. scanned the group, as if his wife could have snuck into the mix without him knowing. “Yeah, I don’t think so. She’s a bit under the weather, to be honest. It happens like clockwork, every year, first ti
me we get a big dump of snow, she starts sneezing and coughing.”

  “That’s too bad,” replied Gladys. She needed a cigarette.

  “Timothy’s here, though. You know our son, Timothy, right?”

  He indicated a lanky boy shuffling his feet by one of the camera crews. His father probably dragged him down here.

  “Timothy, come here and say hello to Mrs. Harper.”

  Timothy crossed toward them, his gait unmistakably teenage in its awkwardness. He bumped into a few people on his way. Poor shy kid, Gladys decided.

  “Hi,” the boy whispered. His eyes were dark and downcast.

  “Hello, Timothy. Your mother’s a very good veterinarian. I’ll bet you’re an animal lover. I have a pet turtle named Rex. He’s twenty-six years old. Can you believe that?”

  “You must take good care of him,” replied the boy.

  “Oh, turtles are easy.” She leaned in confidentially. “It’s people you’ve got to watch out for.”

  Timothy nodded at the sage advice. Then he seemed to be working up his courage to ask a question. His brow curled in concentration and his chin dimpled like a golf ball. Then, finally, the question came: “Does your daughter cry a lot?”

  Gladys blinked. “Does she what?”

  “When she gets upset, how do you make her stop crying?”

  Wisdom out of the mouths of babes, and the defense mechanism her subconscious had built, fixating about cigarettes and her lazy husband, blinked away like the illusion it was. Her eyes went to the giant picture on the easel, which at first she’d found to be a tasteless display—none of these people even knew Marcy—but now, now it looked so much to Gladys like a headstone.

  “God…” she muttered, and almost fell to her knees right there in the parking lot. The hot, raw emotions her brain had kept in illusory check these past few hours were flooding and flooding her being and it was too much, too much, but she had no protection against it, not anymore, and still the emotions came, this unceasing onslaught of grief, yes, but grief was such a small word to describe this hellish deluge drowning her very soul. “God…”