Before Cain Strikes

by Joshua Corin

  “Hello,” he said, and from fourteen inches away sent fifty thousand volts of electricity straight into her body.

  11

  This is how an ordinary Taser works:

  Inside the grip is a pair of batteries. The batteries power an internal circuit that generates an electrical charge, as internal circuits are wont to do. When the trigger on the grip is depressed, a compressed air cartridge within the apparatus is released. This propels forward a pair of electrodes, which are attached via wires to the internal circuit, which generates a considerable voltage, which travels the length of the wires, which zaps and thus briefly incapacitates anyone unfortunate enough to be struck by the two aforementioned electrodes. The End.

  However, Timothy’s was no ordinary Taser. Using instructions provided by Cain42, he’d juiced up his weapon from its legal limit of .05 amps to a rather scary .10 amps. This increased the likelihood of the victim suffering from prolonged loss of consciousness as well as heat burns and possible nerve death.

  He dragged Esme’s limp body up the remainder of the stairs, her feet in their pink socks thumping against each step they passed. Fortunately, the nursery wasn’t far and the wood floor relatively smooth.

  When Esme awoke, she felt as if she were filled with a thousand tuning forks, each of them vibrating against her organs and veins and tissues. A horrible relentless tingling reverberated throughout her brain, behind her eyes, beside her ears. As her vision cleared, she beheld a Victorian room, its walls papered with endless prints of chubby-cheeked cherubim. She tried to lift her hand, either hand, any hand, but her arm muscles refused to obey, as did her legs, as did her neck. Her mind was awake, but her body remained stunned and useless.

  Then she noticed the shadow across the wallpaper and her eyes followed the shadow to the boy, Timothy, who stood beside a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old cradle. Through the bars along its sides, Esme could see Baby Marcy in a blue onesie. She appeared asleep, mercifully asleep.

  Next to the cradle was a toddler’s cupboard, and on top of it was a bottle of formula and an assortment of disposable diapers, all neatly piled in a small white tower. On top of the tower of diapers was his Taser C2.

  The carving knife was in his right hand.

  He must have detected a change in Esme’s breathing, because he turned his attention from the baby to his intruder. The sunlight that decorated his shadow on the wall originated from the room’s small hexagonal window. By now it was probably noon. By now Sophie’s museum trip was over. Esme’s mind went to her daughter and thoughts of Sophie kept her grounded. Thoughts of Sophie kept her from screaming, because Timothy was approaching her now and her muscles remained as fixed and firm as the approaching long blade of the—

  “Agent Stuart?” It was P.J. He was coming up the staircase, the floorboards creaking with his every step. “Agent Stuart, are you up here?”

  Now she tried to scream, but it was too late, it was far too late, because P.J. was here, he was here in the nursery and his son was facing him, his shadow on the wall elongated now by the shape of the knife, almost as if it were, Christ, an eel, stretching out from Timothy’s own flat belly toward his father.

  “So,” said P.J.

  Timothy didn’t move, not yet. He didn’t have to move. He had the advantage. He had the knife.

  Then P.J. grinned. “So here you are, after all! I could have sworn you’d be at home. I did swear you’d be at home, in fact. Is that little Marcy over there in the crib? Can I see her?”

  “She’s asleep,” replied Timothy, softly.

  “I can see that. That couldn’t have been easy, calming a baby to sleep. She must have taken to you. You get that from me, you know? When you were a baby, you used to scream and scream bloody murder in the middle of the night and you didn’t stop for your mother, not even when she offered to feed you. You only stopped for me. On one hand, it was a bit of a pain. I don’t think I got a full night’s rest for six months. On the other hand, though…it was lovely.”

  Esme remained immobile, propped up against the wall, but she could feel that maddening tightness in her muscles beginning to ooze away. Its replacement was soreness, but it was a soreness that might, maybe, allow mobility, and the cupboard with the diapers and the Taser were only a short crawl away. If P.J. kept distracting him, then perhaps…

  But P.J. then pointed straight at her.

  “What did you do to her?” he asked.

  Now Timothy’s attention returned to her, too.

  Damn it.

  “Agent Stuart, can you hear me?”

  Esme overdramatized an effort to nod.

  Then P.J. spotted the Taser. “Oh.”

  Timothy shifted the knife to his left hand, the hand closer to her.

  “Where did you get that?” asked P.J.

  “Online.”

  “Was it expensive?”

  “No.”

  P.J. nodded, aware now that it was his credit card number that had been used for the purchase. But he had ignored those mysterious charges on his card, just as he had ignored so, so much in the past few years.

  “Timothy,” he said, leveling his gaze with the boy’s. “The police are going to be here soon. By now they must have figured out you’re not at the house, and it won’t take your mother long to point them in this direction. You always were so fond of this place. What I’m saying is, we don’t have much time.”

  The boy frowned. Don’t have much time to do what?

  “My SUV is parked outside. If we leave now, we have a chance. You know how well I know these back roads.”

  Whether P.J. was playing it straight or spinning his son a tale to distract him, Esme used the opportunity to inch toward the cupboard. She had to be very subtle about it, and that would take another few minutes. She needed P.J. to keep gabbing away. Fortunately, gabbing was what P.J. did best.

  “There are so many places we can go, Timothy. There are so many places in the world I would love to show you. The shores of Nova Scotia. Paris at night. Paris in the daytime! Egypt. When you were maybe four or five, you used to be fascinated by mummies. Do you remember that?”

  Timothy wasn’t sure. It sounded familiar. He certainly had read a lot about the process of mummification. Had his interest in death started that young? His mind suddenly filled with all these questions he needed to ask his father. There was so much he wanted to know.

  Esme’s right hand began its clandestine crawl across the floor, toward the cupboard, toward the Taser. She needed about one more minute and then the stun gun would be hers and then the boy would be down and then all this would be over.

  “Come on,” said P.J. He held out a hand. “Let’s go.”

  Timothy glanced back at the cradle. “Can we take Marcy?”

  “After all this trouble you went through? Of course we can, Timothy. But you can’t hold her with that knife in your hand. Why don’t you give it to me?”

  Timothy thought for a moment, and then handed it, handle first, to his father.

  “Thank you,” P.J. replied. “Now come here.”

  P.J. opened his arms.

  How often had they, father and son, actually hugged each other? Sure, his father had hugged him on numerous occasions. His father was a hugger. But had Timothy ever hugged him back? No. Timothy didn’t think he had. But at that moment, for some reason he couldn’t identify, he wanted to hug him back. There was an emotion swelling up inside of him like a spirit and it seemed to be demanding they embrace; it seemed to take possession of Timothy’s arms and wrap them around his father’s burly shoulders and even force tears to fall out of the boy’s dark eyes.

  “It’s okay,” said P.J., embracing his son, and then he eased the knife, blade first, into the boy’s back. He felt Timothy’s body tense up in his arms, so P.J. just held him tighter, with all the love in his heart, until the tension slipped away, like a shadow at dawn.

  Over his son’s shoulder, he saw Esme standing with wobbly balance by the cupboard, the Taser in her hands, the barrel
aimed in their direction.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” she muttered.

  “Yes,” P.J. replied, “I did.”

  It actually took Mary Hammond, in her addled state of mind, quite a while to figure out where Timothy might have gone to, so by the time Tom showed up at the Ellis House, with a good portion of the Ulster County sheriff’s department in tow, Esme and P.J. were exiting onto the front porch. She had Baby Marcy in her arms. The child appeared malnourished, but alive. The Taser and the murder weapon she left upstairs, with Lynette’s murderer.

  With an eerie serenity, P.J. held his wrists out to the police to be cuffed and led away. He had almost made it to the cruiser before he broke, like a snapped marionette. Just fell to his knees. For a moment that was all, and then his mouth gradually opened, as if in slow motion, and P.J. let out a deep-throated guttural moan. It had hit him. He had murdered his own boy.

  It took two uniformed officers to carry him into the back of the cruiser.

  An ambulance came five minutes later and took Marcy Harper. One of the paramedics gave Esme a once-over, but she shrugged off his concern. She still felt jittery, but at that moment she wasn’t sure if it was from what had happened to her or from what she had seen happen afterward or from the haunting sound of P.J.’s primal grief that, even though he was now long gone, refused to leave her ears.

  She gave her statement to Sheriff Betsy Shuster back at the Ulster County Law Enforcement Center in Kingston. Sheriff Fallon and a pair of his deputies showed up halfway through the deposition. Esme spotted him and nodded in his direction. He nodded back. Enough was said.

  Which left it to Tom to explain to the FBI special agent in charge of the region why two federal officers were operating without authority or notice or even proper jurisdiction in this investigation. Tom grinned through most of the phone call. Something about him just loved giving the bird to authority.

  While Tom was on the horn with the demigods of the Justice Department, Esme turned her phone back on, ostensibly to call Rafe and, if he didn’t hang up in the first five seconds, inform him that Lynette’s death had been avenged, but she noticed she had two new messages, so before she called anyone, she listened to them.

  As she expected, the first message was from home. She still remembered the Squeeze ring tone going off on the landing of the Ellis House. So sad that such a good song would now be associated with such a bad moment.

  “Hi, Mom, it’s Sophie.”

  Only four words, innocuous, uttered all the time, and Esme immediately felt a pit in her stomach. Something was wrong. Her daughter sounded…not upset, really, but rattled. She sat down on a pine bench outside the squad room and listened to the rest of Sophie’s message.

  “A man, he said his name was Grover, he came up to me today at the science museum and he touched my hand and his breath smelled like corned beef and he told me he was friends with Grandpa and then he said he had a message for you and I didn’t write it down but I remember it so here it is. He said, ‘Get in touch with me or I’ll get in touch with Sophie Ellen.’ Mommy, how did he know my middle name? Is he really a friend of Grandpa’s? He scares me. Oh, I have to go. Grandpa is making me a peanut-butter-and-Fluff sandwich. I’m not very hungry, though. Can you come home now, please? Bye.”

  Click.

  And Esme seethed. Oh, how she seethed! Grover Kirk had the audacity—no, the fucking impudence—to approach her daughter, to approach Sophie, and in a public place no less. And how did he even know she was going to be there? Was he stalking her?

  Esme now understood Rafe’s impetus the other night, tossing the pot against the wall. She suddenly wanted to throw every bench, chair and appliance in sight. She almost pitched her cell phone against the nearby stairwell.

  That son of a bitch.

  He dared to mess with her family? He dared to threaten her family? Well, Grover Kirk was in for the clusterfuck of the century. Esme bolted back into the sheriff’s department and found Tom, sitting in an unused office, still on the phone.

  “Is that Ziegler?” she asked. Karl Ziegler was the bureau chief of the New York field office. He also was a bit of a prick. “Are you on the phone with Ziegler?”

  Tom covered the phone’s speaker. “What’s wrong?”

  “Give me the phone.”

  To his credit, Tom didn’t ask her any more questions. He just complied with her request.

  “Karl? Hi, it’s Esme.”

  “Mrs. Stuart?” Karl Ziegler’s voice hovered somewhere between a grumble and a whine. And he emphasized her title as Mrs., as if to remind her she was now only a consultant—but that was a battle for another day. “Mrs. Stuart, I was in the middle of—”

  “Yeah, yeah, and I’ll give you back to Tom in a minute. My seven-year-old daughter was just confronted while she was on a goddamn field trip by this middle-age hack named Grover Kirk. He’s been trying to get me to talk with him about this exploitative piece of garbage he’s writing about the Galileo case and I’ve been noncooperative and so he confronted my daughter and told her to tell me to ‘get in touch with him or he’d get in touch with her.’ I want you to find him and I want you to detain him, and when I come down there I’m going to personally introduce him to some of our more controversial post-9/11 interrogation techniques. Okay?”

  “Mrs. Stuart, you know full well that—”

  “He crossed state lines to come here, Karl. That makes it a federal case. Are you going to tell me that a threat to my seven-year-old daughter doesn’t constitute action? Are you that desperate to be reassigned to Juneau?”

  “You don’t have the pull you think you have, Mrs. Stuart.”

  “Are you kidding? Do you think Grover Kirk is the only person who knows who I am? Galileo turned me into a semicelebrity. I’m one of the highest-profile employees the Bureau’s got. So tell me again that you’re going to ignore this request. Please. I would love to send you your Christmas present via sled dog.”

  Silence, as Karl Ziegler mulled over her words. It made her sick just to speak them, to feign such unbridled arrogance. It just wasn’t who she was. But bullies like Karl Ziegler only responded to bullying, and so that was the tactic she had to take.

  Nevertheless, Tom was sitting back in his chair and staring at her with a look of complete astonishment. Whether his reaction was to her news or to her behavior, she cringed for his benefit.

  Ziegler’s breathing returned to the phone. “Do you happen to know where this Grover Kirk may be at the moment?”

  Shit. Where was he staying? He’d told her. He’d given her his card. Damn it. It was on the tip of her—

  “The Days Inn in Hicksville,” she blurted.

  “Fine. I’ll keep you posted. Now with your permission, Mrs. Stuart, may I continue to speak with Special Agent Piper?”

  Esme grinned and handed the phone back to Tom.

  “You’re my hero,” he muttered, and resumed his after-action report.

  Feeling much better, she gave Tom some privacy and wandered back out through the sheriff’s department, which remained abuzz with the Timothy Hammond case. At this moment, forensics would be combing through his bedroom. Detectives would be interviewing his peers, his teachers, everyone who might have ever known him. The case wouldn’t really be closed until they had accumulated everything they might—and answered every question they could—about this very troubled fourteen-year-old.

  By now, Lynette’s family must have been told. Esme hoped it was Sheriff Fallon who had imparted the news. She had seen him here, briefly, but he must have trucked on back to his home territory to the west. He was a good man, and she felt bad about the way Rafe had pushed him into letting her work the case, although had that been any different at all from the way she had just pushed Ziegler into nabbing Grover Kirk…?

  She needed to give her husband a call.

  He picked up on the second ring. “Professor Stuart.”

  “Rafe,” she said, “it’s over.”

  There was a pause, and Es
me instantly realized why.

  Her statement could refer to so many things right now in their life.

  So she elaborated, and one thing led to another, and soon she and Rafe were actually having a chat. It was so easy to fall back into the old rhythms. Once they’d finished discussing the case, their conversation didn’t really consist of anything substantial, but it was peaceful. No hidden accusations. No verbal sparring. They just talked.

  And that made it all the more painful, because Esme knew it was fleeting. By the time Esme said her goodbyes and their peaceful conversation had reached its peaceful end (due in part to her convenient omission of Sophie’s encounter with Grover Kirk), she was near tears. It wasn’t fair. They had been so happy once. It was obvious they could be happy again. If only…

  If only what? If only she quit her job as a consultant with the Bureau? That was not an option. And why should the onus be on her, anyway, to make the sacrifices? Because she was the woman? Just thinking about that notion made her tense up again—and such began, she realized with a sigh, the cycle anew. Hell, even Dr. Rosen had all but given up on them. They had nine days to repair their marriage, and she was going to spend most of it on a train from New Paltz to Oyster Bay—Christ, if such a train even existed. If not, she was in for the most expensive cab ride of her life.

  Tom trundled out of the empty office. Esme met him by the water cooler and filled up a cup for him. He accepted it graciously and cleansed the bureaucracy from his palate.

  “Listen,” she began.

  He held up a hand. “Thank Penelope Sue. She’s the one who kicked me in the ass to come up here.”