Before Cain Strikes

by Joshua Corin

  P.J. unlocked the door and stepped out into the sun shine.

  Esme looked at Tom. Tom looked at Esme.

  Then they followed the man out the door.

  10

  P.J. wanted to drive, but Tom insisted they take his Mustang. Before he joined them in the car, though, he suddenly stopped, turned and walked along the strip mall parking lot toward the Chinese restaurant.

  “P.J.,” said Esme.

  “I just want to give a heads-up to my wife.”

  He passed the Chinese restaurant and reached for the door to the veterinary clinic. Esme and Tom quickly caught up with him and followed him inside.

  The small lobby was full of chairs, and the chairs were full of people, and the people were full of pets. Esme recognized half the dog breeds and maybe a quarter of the cat breeds. One rail-thin gentleman hugged a cage to his chest; inside the cage were a pair of chatty parakeets. The dogs were barking at the cats. The cats were hissing at the dogs. Several fish in a bowl held by a four-year-old boy were ignoring them all and casually swimming away in their water-filtrated universe. The whole place smelled like wet fur. P.J. waved hello to the people he knew—which numbered about fifty percent—and approached a window cut into a wall, behind which the frog-faced receptionist, Bonnie Twitter, sat and typed.

  “Hey, there, P.J. What’s the buzz?”

  “Is Mary busy?”

  “For you, doll? Please.”

  Bonnie tapped a buzzer and the door to her side loudly unlocked. P.J. grasped the knob, turned to the two special agents and said, “I’ll be just a minute.”

  “Are you kidding me?” replied Esme. “We’re coming with you.”

  P.J. shrugged—no big deal, apparently—and opened the door to let them through. Though exasperated at his suddenly cavalier attitude—when Marcy Harper was somewhere in God knows what condition—Esme and Tom knew they had little choice at the moment but to placate the man. Tom was wearing his shoulder holster, and it did have his 9 mm Glock snugly tucked into its leather pocket, but he knew from experience that P. J. Hammond, especially in his current mental state, would probably shut down entirely at the first suggestion of violence.

  So, for now, they played along.

  “Hello, Mary, my buttercup!” P.J. opened his arms in a Y and rounded his wife in an O. She was standing beside her examination table, its surface covered with wax paper, its wax paper covered with a large and lazy schnauzer. The schnauzer’s owner, a delicate coed swathed in an oversize SUNY New Paltz sweatshirt, sat off to the side, chewing a pen.

  “Dr. Hammond, should I leave?” she asked.

  “No, no,” replied Mary.

  P.J. gave her shoulder a subtle squeeze.

  “Well, maybe just a minute, if you don’t mind.”

  The coed nodded, cooed a fond farewell to her half-asleep dog and exited back into the waiting room.

  “What’s wrong with him?” asked P.J., indicating the animal.

  “Heartworm,” his wife answered. “Not too bad, though.”

  Mary Hammond then waited for her husband to introduce her to the two strangers currently in her examination room. P.J. abashedly picked up on her cue and did so.

  “Mary, may I introduce Special Agent Piper and Mrs. Stuart of the FBI.”

  Mary’s reaction was understandable. She didn’t smile. She didn’t offer her hand in welcome. She just nodded. She knew.

  “They’re here to help us fix things, Mary. Isn’t that terrific of them? And it’s about time, too. I’m sure you agree.”

  In a glance, a thousand words passed between husband and wife. Esme and Tom had little way of deciphering their meaning, but they hoped for the best. This was, to say the least, a very delicate situation for everyone involved.

  Esme checked the time on the wall clock. Every second they spent here, little Marcy Harper was alone—or worse, not alone.

  Her mind went to Lynette Robinson’s hands.

  “P.J.,” she said, “we really need to…”

  “Yes, of course,” he replied. “Mary, do you have any suggestions for our guests?”

  But the good doctor just shook her head. Her expression remained fixed, and filled with countless conflicting emotions. Again, Esme tried to imagine what it could be like to be this woman, to know that your child was responsible for such ugly acts of depravity and violence. Again, Esme failed. It was beyond her considerable powers of comprehension—and she was grateful for that. She didn’t take Sophie for granted…but just the same, her daughter would be receiving a very long hug from her mother, hopefully very soon.

  “All right,” said P.J. “I guess we’ll be off. I’ll call you when we’re through, Mary.”

  He hugged her again and briefly whispered something into her left ear and petted the schnauzer goodbye and headed for the door.

  “Goddamn it,” muttered Tom.

  Esme picked up on his line of thought. “P.J., wait.”

  P.J. stopped, but he couldn’t help adding, with his usual cheer, “I thought we were in a hurry.”

  Tom let out a long sigh. “Dr. Hammond, we’re going to need you to close up for the afternoon.”

  Mary seemed to be expecting this news.

  P.J. wasn’t. “What? Why?”

  “Because now we need to keep track of both of you,” Tom explained.

  “I’m sure Mary’s not going to interfere with a federal investigation.”

  “Why not?” quipped Esme. “You did.”

  P.J. replied with a grimace, but didn’t protest the argument.

  “Let me just finish up in here,” said Mary.

  While Mary administered some medicine to the schnauzer, who by then was fast asleep, Tom took Esme off to a corner of the room. Before Tom even opened his mouth, Esme knew what he was going to say and said it herself. “We’re going to have to split up.”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is getting suckier by the second.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Maybe we should call the county sheriff.”

  Tom shook his head. “Too many cooks in the kitchen.”

  Esme wasn’t sure if she agreed with him. Reinforcements might actually be ideal here, especially when the locals knew the area far better than two visiting FBI agents. Because what if Marcy Harper wasn’t where P.J. led them? What if P.J. were deliberately obfuscating the investigation? But Tom was Tom, and that meant going it alone.

  Which made her, what, his sidekick? She preferred to think of him as her partner, but knew their relationship would never be like that. Nor did she really truly want it to be, come to think of it. Tom had the experience. Tom taught her everything she knew. To consider him an equal—or for him to consider Esme an equal—that just felt wrong to her. So maybe she was his sidekick. That meant the most perceptive criminal investigator she had ever met trusted her implicitly. And who could complain about that?

  But the question remained: Who would go with whom?

  In the end, they decided to cross along gender lines. Esme would go with P.J. to the probable location of Marcy Harper, and Tom would accompany Mary back to her house and confront Timothy himself. This made sense if only because Tom was armed and Esme was not, although they both hoped it didn’t come to that.

  Mary Hammond rushed her patients (and their owners) out the door and closed up shop. She and Tom would take his Mustang. Esme slid behind the driver’s seat of P.J.’s bulky RAV4. And they were off.

  The drive to the house took mere minutes, but Tom made sure to park the Mustang a block away so as not to put the boy on alert. He got out of the car, but Mary remained in the passenger seat. So Tom returned to his. He could have proceeded without her but he preferred to have her cooperation, if only to defuse a potentially violent confrontation.

  He watched her eyes peek at his shoulder holster.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  They started toward the house.

  The day couldn’t have been more beautiful. As they stroll
ed toward their destination, they even heard, from the emaciating branches of this tree and that, a flock of birds carrying on a musical conversation. What did they care about justice or Monday or even November? They were probably gabbing about their favorite places to dine, perhaps partial to the Dumpster behind Bouton Hall at the SUNY New Paltz campus or the Mohonk Preserve, just a short wing-flap away from their current perch here on Parliament Drive.

  Mary led Tom to a house quite like its neighbors—a square two-story with whitewashed wooden porticos—only distinguishable really by its yellow door and the healthiness of the bushes that lined its forefront. According to her, Timothy was at that moment almost definitely in his bedroom. Tom considered instructing her to return to her car and to pull it into the garage—so the boy wouldn’t be alarmed by the sound of the opening door not being preceded by the sound of the opening garage—but by the time the thought had occurred to him, she had already inserted her key into the knob and twisted it. The die was cast, and they crossed the threshold into the Hammond home.

  On the drive over, Tom had also asked Mary if the boy had, in his bedroom, anything sharp. Tom offered himself as an example, recollecting to her about the BB rifle he used to store underneath his bed when he was ten years old. His father hid the BBs themselves in his toolshed, which had encouraged Tom, at ten, to learn how to dismantle a toolshed lock. There was whimsy in Tom’s voice as he shared this tale, but they both knew that, today, this wasn’t simply a question of BBs or even boys and their toys. If Timothy came at him with a blade, he would do his best to disarm the boy defensively, but if matters escalated…

  “Timothy!” she called. “I’m home!”

  There were no scampering footsteps from the bedroom to the top of the stairs. Tom hadn’t expected any. From what little he had learned about the boy, and this hadn’t even included Timothy’s checkered history with pets, Tom had postulated, not surprisingly, a diagnosis of psychopathic personality disorder, and antisocial behavior was a tenet of this categorization.

  In short, he wouldn’t come to them. He would force them to come to him.

  So Tom mounted the first of the softly carpeted steps. He casually reached for the railing. His pacemaker maintained a steady mechanic rhythm, but Tom still felt a bit off. He hadn’t been back in the field since his confrontation with Galileo. He wasn’t nervous per se, but he did feel a growing sense of uneasiness, as if there were a precaution, something utterly obvious, that he had overlooked.

  He took the steps slowly. Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen.

  Mary stood at the foot of the staircase. At any moment, her maternal instincts could get the better of her and she could cry out a warning to her son. Run, run! But where would he run to? If he escaped out his bedroom window, he had nowhere to go but down, and it would be difficult to dodge the law with a pair of broken legs. No, if she alerted him, Timothy wouldn’t run. He would arm himself. She had told Tom that she didn’t know what weapons he might have in his bedroom. She had told Tom that she hadn’t gone into her son’s bedroom in more than a year, not since the time she’d opened the door to ask him if he needed anything from the store and…well, she refused to say what she saw. And that was fine by Tom.

  Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.

  Seventeen.

  Once Tom was out of Mary’s eyesight, he drew his Glock. Better to be safe. He wouldn’t fire unless he had no choice, and maybe the sight of the pistol would be enough to get the boy to surrender peacefully.

  The bedroom lay at the end of the hall. The door was ajar, but only by a thumb-length.

  Tom heard no sounds coming from the room. The boy could be asleep. The boy could be quietly reading a book. The boy could be lying in wait behind the door, breath held, a blade in his grip.

  Tom swallowed his own breath and approached the bedroom door. The Glock remained in his left hand. With his right, he reached for the door and tapped it open. It creaked with every inch and revealed the sparse blue bedroom of a fourteen-year-old boy.

  Minus the boy.

  Tom checked behind the door.

  Tom checked in the bedroom closet.

  Tom hustled through each of the other rooms on the second floor, perusing each possible hiding spot for Timothy Hammond but finding no one. He made a mad dash down the stairs. Mary, still at the foot, stepped aside, confused. Tom whipped through the kitchen and dining room and living room and every room and Timothy wasn’t there, and Tom realized—recognized—the something utterly obvious he had overlooked: What if the boy wasn’t here at all?

  What if he was at his special place?

  By now Esme was there. And she was unarmed.

  Tom reached for his cell phone, knowing even as he dialed her number that it was too late.

  Timothy’s special place was the Ellis House, a three-hundred-year-old mansion located off to the side of New Paltz’s historic Huguenot Street. In truth, only the stonework first floor of the mansion dated back that far; the second story, as it stood now, was a wooden reconstruction built approximately one hundred years later by George Ellis, great-great-grandson and namesake of the house’s first owner. The result was a surprisingly elegant marriage of colonial and Queen Anne architecture, the light green coloring of the house providing a pleasant complement to its acre of still-green grass and healthy brown pines. As Esme approached the place, she wondered what secret ingredients the grounds keepers used to keep the property in such healthy shape when everything else around them had begun to dull and decay as autumn began its lumbering slouch to winter.

  “The rest of the houses are open to the public pretty much year-round,” said P.J., “but the Ellis family only keeps this place open from May till October. It saves them money, I suppose. Nobody I know has even met an Ellis. Some people wonder if maybe the family’s all gone and the house is being run now by some law firm out in Boston.”

  “Why would he bring the child here?” asked Esme.

  “Well, for one, Timothy loves the place. He’s crazy about it. Ever since he was a little kid, he’s made sure we were here the first of May for its annual opening. Don’t ask me what it is he loves so much.”

  P.J.’s sunny demeanor had once again begun to dim. Maybe the gravity of the situation had finally been too much for his facade to bear. When Esme ascended the house’s slate landing, P.J. remained steadfast on the lawn.

  Just as well, she thought. She didn’t want to have to wrangle both him and the baby, anyway. She climbed up to the house’s gray stone porch.

  The door was locked, but that was to be expected. Somehow, Timothy had found a way in. P.J. didn’t know what it was, but Esme, encouraged by the puzzle, intended to find out. Not to mention the fact that she refused to be outsmarted by a fourteen-year-old.

  The house lacked a basement, so Esme could immediately rule that out. There were, as far as she could tell, two doorways on the first floor, the most obvious being the front entryway, which faced the street, and the other being a rear set of doors that opened out onto another foreshortened patio, and the back lawn. Those doors, too, were locked.

  Also, the first floor had ten windows. These were much more difficult to access since they were quite high off the ground. But Esme figured that if she couldn’t reach them, neither could Timothy. Unless he were freakishly tall. Or employed a ladder…

  There was a tall strip of shrubbery off to the side, separating this property from the next. Esme didn’t find a ladder, but she did find where Timothy had stashed his bicycle. If Timothy carried it back to the house and locked its wheels, it could function as a handy-dandy, if somewhat wobbly, stepstool. And a quick examination of the earth around the house’s foundation revealed the impression of tire tracks underneath one window in particular. She set the bicycle wheels in their own earthen grooves, placed her left foot on the leather seat, and hefted herself up to the height of the window, making sure to catch the sill with her fingers to keep from toppling back down. Keeping a precarious grip on the sill, with her feet crowding the small bicy
cle seat, she used her free hand to nudge the window open. It squeaked, but complied, and within a minute she had the window lifted high enough for her to climb through into a tiny room.

  Esme had been to enough minimansions in Oyster Bay to recognize this cramped space as the butler’s pantry. The walls in here weren’t papered, but the shelves still held an assortment of Victorian cleaning products and household tools, all utterly useless and simply for show. There were two swinging doors on either side of the pantry. Esme chose one and found herself in a sizable dining room. There were fourteen place settings, complete with soupspoons, soup bowls, salad forks, salad plates, dinner forks, dinner plates, dessert forks, knives and embroidered napkins. The china appeared genuine.

  For a moment, she was tempted to steal some of it.

  But then she heard an unusual sound. It came from upstairs—and it sounded like singing. The acoustics in the house being what they were, she couldn’t decipher the words, but the melody seemed so very familiar and the voice was undoubtedly male.

  Timothy was here.

  Esme had been aware of the possibility. She had hoped otherwise, but, ah, well. At least his presence confirmed P.J.’s suspicions—and hopefully confirmed that Baby Marcy was here, as well. And that he hadn’t heard the squeaking window. She turned to her right and stepped into the foyer.

  Now she could hear the song lyrics. Now she could identify the words sung from upstairs in a boy’s soft tenor voice.

  My God, he was singing Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”

  The stairs leading up to the second level were narrow and wooden. Esme snatched an ornate carving knife from the dining table, removed her sneakers and with her feet encased in nothing but pink socks she took the stairs, two at a time, using the railing to help keep her balance. With each giant step, Timothy’s tenor lullaby became clearer and louder.

  She reached the landing, her footsteps quiet, her shoulders hunched, turned the corner to meet the second flight of stairs and her cell phone sounded, the jaunty synth-pop of Squeeze’s “Pulling Mussels from the Shell” emanating from her pants pocket. The ring tone meant the call came from home, probably from her daughter to tell her about the museum trip, but not right now, Sophie, please, and Esme silenced her phone without answering it, and the ring tone hadn’t been that loud, right? She gazed up at the second flight of stairs and prepared to take her next step but Timothy was already there, with his beloved Taser C2 aimed squarely at her face.