Before Cain Strikes

by Joshua Corin

  “So you wouldn’t do it for me, but you’d do it for Penelope Sue.”

  “Damn straight.” He grinned, crunched up his paper cup and tossed it into the receptacle. “You’d really like her.”

  “Maybe I’ll come down for Thanksgiving.”

  She forced a teary grin.

  Tom stared at her for a moment, then sighed, then embraced her tightly, paternally.

  “It’ll work out,” he whispered. “Rafe may be a jackass, but he’s not a moron. He’ll come to his senses, realize how lucky he is.”

  Esme wiped at her face. They both started toward the door.

  “So how are you getting home?” he asked.

  “I think I’m going to end up hitching. If you were driving an eighteen-wheeler and you saw me on the side of the road, would you stop?”

  “Hmm.”

  He gave her a scholarly once-over.

  “Well?”

  “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”

  She punched him in the arm.

  He chuckled and reached for the door.

  If he had been a little quicker, maybe they could have escaped what happened next. But he wasn’t, and they didn’t. At that moment, Sheriff Shuster hustled out of her office, a look of panic on her tired face. She spotted the two FBI agents and made a beeline for them.

  “There’s a problem at the Hammond house,” she said.

  12

  Grover Kirk handed the long-haired clerk a twenty for his assortment of magazines (the latest issues of Psychology Today, Newsweek and Barely Legal), told her to keep the change and trundled out of the cigar shop to his vintage wonder: his angel-white 1954 Studebaker Champion Regal Starlight. God, how he loved this car! He was aware of the clichés of men with their automobile fetishes, but he didn’t care what other people thought. He rarely cared about what other people thought. Other people weren’t the proud owners of a white 1954 Studebaker Champion Regal Starlight.

  This car was America.

  He tossed his purchases into the backseat, its smooth vinyl causing the slick magazines to slide from one end of the seat to the other. Grover started up his beauty’s eighty-five-horsepower engine and cruised out of the parking lot and back onto the tree-lined byroads of central Long Island. Although most of this weekend’s snow had melted, he still couldn’t get over how much of it had come down and stayed down. Back in Florida, where he lived, the precipitation didn’t ordinarily solidify. He had been concerned on Saturday morning that the Studebaker wouldn’t start, that he would have to call for a jump—or worse, a tow—but one turn of his key and, oh, how she’d purred.

  He was making good progress on his book.

  On Saturday, he drove out to Nassau Firearms, site of Galileo’s most infamous crime—the assassination of Bob Kellerman, the popular (and populist) governor of Ohio and Democratic candidate for president. Kellerman, to his eventual detriment, had also been a bit of a gun nut, and had stopped at Nassau Firearms on his way from a function on the North Shore the previous night to a meet-and-greet in New York City.

  Esme Stuart had been at the North Shore function, as well.

  After the assassination, the township didn’t know quite what to do with Nassau Firearms. The owner and his wife were dead, and the inconclusiveness of their will turned the property back over to the government. Some had wanted to turn it into a landmark. Others expanded on that idea and saw it as a potential touristy cash cow. Ultimately, though, the decision was made to table a decision, and the two-story structure that Grover found was abandoned and in disrepair. Most of the windows and all of the doors had been boarded over. Such a pathetic testament to such a significant moment. Grover took out his $2,500 Canon EOS and let it do its thing. The resulting photographs would look nice in the book beside a set of “before” shots he had found on Nassau Firearms’ still-running (but hardly operational) website.

  On Sunday Grover stayed in and watched TV in his motel room and typed. He could have afforded a full-featured suite in a four-star hotel, but he had deliberately selected the Days Inn because so much of the Galileo story was blue-collar, and he wanted to stay true to its roots.

  Although he had read countless true-crime books, he had never written one until now. There was just something about the Galileo story that had piqued his interest, ever since that first series of murders in Georgia. By the second series of murders in Texas, Grover was hooked. He had found himself a new hobby. The vineyard practically took care of itself, anyway. After all, wasn’t that what his family paid the foremen for?

  He really had expected the bottle of wine to win Esme over. All of the profiles he had about her, and he had collected and read them all, suggested that she had put the grassroots life of the FBI agent behind her and had become the model of an affluent suburban housewife. To Grover, this was code for alcoholism. But no, her reaction had been less than desirable. The indignant tone she’d displayed on the phone had been nothing compared to the outright rudeness she’d tossed in his face. Why couldn’t she, of all people, appreciate the value of his project? He was single-handedly making sure that she didn’t become like Nassau Firearms—undervalued and unappreciated. His book was going to solidify her well-deserved fame for as long as it was in print. Didn’t she realize that she needed him as much as he needed her?

  So, yes, if this morning he’d shaken up his tactics a bit and went with the hard sell, it was only because she’d left him no choice. Lester, God bless him, had already told him Esme was upstate, and the weather made it impossible for him to track her there, so he did what seemed to him to be the next best thing. He tracked Sophie to the museum, again thanks to Lester’s information. The old man had been so set off by Esme ditching her chaperoning responsibilities that Grover had had trouble to get him to stop talking.

  And now it was Monday afternoon, and he awaited Esme’s call. In fact, as he pulled to a stoplight, on his way back to the Days Inn, he checked his phone to see if he’d missed anything. No, not yet. But that was okay. She probably had her hands full with that investigation. She would get in touch with him, one way or another. He would get his interview. And his opus would be complete.

  Grover even had a title for it: Galileo’s Aim. He loved the double meaning of the word aim, on one hand referring to the killer’s modus operandi (a sniper rifle) and on the other hand referring to his motivation (to have religion in America publicly and permanently denounced). He could imagine the title on the nonfiction bestseller lists. He could see his book on shelves. He could see himself touring the country, sharing his fascination with other hobbyists like him. And he knew he wasn’t alone. The bookstores were stuffed with shelves about Jack the Ripper and he’d been dead for more than a hundred years! Galileo was fresh in people’s memories. Galileo was current events.

  He could see himself on Fox News.

  But he wasn’t glamorizing what Galileo had done. He made sure to dedicate his book to the American men and women who had fallen victim to his spree. It was the first page he typed, and he’d included every single one of their names. It had filled up the whole page. And every time he loaded his word processing file, that first page and those names were what he saw. This book was a labor of labor not just for him, but for them.

  Plus it would finally get his family off his case, and that was perhaps the biggest bonus of them all. All that nagging about getting an education and finding himself a wife and blah, blah, blah… He’d assumed it would have ceased by now—he was in his forties, for Christ’s sake!—but no, his father and his mother and his sisters and his brothers persisted in their noise. But once this book hit it big, they would all finally, inexorably, be silenced.

  He just had one more chapter to go, one vital ingredient left to add to the mix.

  Esme Stuart.

  He pulled the Studebaker into the rear parking lot of the Days Inn, grabbed his magazines from the back and headed for his room, making sure to first set the car’s alarm. Although the vehicle was retro, the alarm system was pure twenty-fir
st century. Onboard door and wheel lock relays, an eight-tone, eighty-decibel siren that also activated his high beams. No one was going to drive off with his baby.

  As he neared his first-floor room, he heard two car doors slam behind him. People needed to treat their vehicles with more respect. He fished in his jacket pocket for his room key and an authoritarian male voice called out to him, “Grover Kirk!” and he turned around to face two lean men in the cheap brown suits.

  “Do I know you?” he asked.

  They each flashed federal badges.

  “Would you come with us, Mr. Kirk?”

  “I think there’s been a mistake.”

  “There’s no mistake, sir.” One of the agents gently clasped Grover’s biceps. “Let’s go.”

  The other agent grabbed his other biceps. “I hear you like little girls,” he murmured.

  “Are you kidding me? Is this a joke? You can’t just grab people off the street. I’m an American citizen! I have rights!”

  Grover searched the parking lot for somebody, anybody, to help him. He saw an elderly couple heading toward their coupe.

  “My name is Grover Kirk!” he called to them. “I’m being taken against my will! My attorney’s down in Florida. His number is—”

  But they had him shoved into their unmarked sedan before he’d had a chance to say any more. All in all, an efficient snatch-and-grab.

  The Hammond house was infested with cops. Sheriff Shuster must have called in every technician, investigator and volunteer deputy on the county payroll—and Ulster was not a small county. On one hand, Esme could understand the sheriff’s desire for overkill. This had the potential to be one of the highest-profile cases the county had ever handled. On the other hand, though, the more people there were on-site, the more likelihood there would be for contamination of evidence.

  One of her deputies, a mountain-man type labeled Carlyle, met them at the front door. His massive hands were encased in overstretched latex gloves. “It’s up here, Sheriff.”

  Tom, Esme and Sheriff Shuster followed Deputy Carlyle up the stairs.

  “Déjà vu,” muttered Tom.

  Unsurprisingly, their destination was Timothy’s bedroom. Another deputy, labeled Nunez—as fresh-faced as Carlyle was furry—stood by the boy’s bed, awaiting their arrival.

  “Sheriff,” he greeted them.

  “What have we got, Nunez?”

  Nunez shared an uneasy glance with Carlyle, and then reached down and lifted Timothy’s mattress (which was rubber, nicely fitting into the serial killer equals bed wetter paradigm). Underneath it lay a manila folder. Sheriff Shuster pulled a pair of latex gloves on and slid the manila folder out from its hiding place.

  Delicately, the sheriff opened the envelope’s flap and reached inside and withdrew a small packet of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch pages. She looked them over, expressionless, and then handed them to Tom and Esme.

  They appeared to be screenshots of a website. The website was organized in a simple frame-and-content structure, with a menu bar at the top of the page listing the website’s various pages: “Tips of the Trade,” “History of the Trade,” “Photographs of the Trade” and “Support Group.” The website’s URL—which between the “www.” and the “.com” was just a long series of apparently random numbers—was visible both in the address bar at the top of each printed page and at the bottom, separate from the screenshot, with a date and time beside it.

  At the top of the website, in clear sans serif type, was its name: “A Handbook for Serial Killers.”

  Esme blinked. “Is this a joke?”

  The two deputies shrugged.

  “Has anyone tried this website?” asked Tom.

  This time, the two deputies deferred to their boss, who crossed to Timothy’s small writing desk and opened up his laptop computer. It took a minute to boot up, and Esme used that time to look over in further detail some of the printed pages.

  The screenshot from “Photographs of the Trade” depicted a collection of black-and-white thumbnails to be clicked on and enlarged. She turned the page. One of the thumbnails had, in fact, been clicked on and enlarged and here was Lynette Robinson, naked, limp, a collar around her neck. Her hands were gone and something metallic appeared to be jammed into her left eye.

  She showed the picture to Tom.

  “Give me one of those pages,” said Sheriff Shuster, and she typed in the website address straight from the printout. A popup window appeared, asking for a user-name and password. “Damn it.”

  “He’s, uh,” rumbled mountain-man Carlyle, “probably still got the website, maybe, stored in his, you know, internet cache. I think.”

  They all stared at him, then stepped aside. Sheepishly, the mountain man shuffled up to the computer and started clicking keys.

  Esme and Tom flipped their handheld pages back to the “Tips of the Trade” and read down the list with rising disgust.

  “‘Vary Your MO.’ ‘The Cleanest Crime Scene Is a Destroyed Crime Scene.’ It’s a how-to for the ambitious psychopath.”

  “That’s why Timothy burned down the house,” noted Tom. “He was just following these suggestions.”

  “This is not good….”

  Deputy Carlyle called them over to the desk.

  “It’s not live,” he explained. “And it won’t be the whole site. His computer just stored bits and pieces of it so it wouldn’t have to reload the whole thing.”

  “But it doesn’t matter, right?” This from Deputy Nunez. “I mean, it’s just something this crazy kid created when he was busy stealing little kids. It’s not like anyone else has been on this website. Look at its address. It’s a bunch of nonsense! No one could find it.”

  Esme, having spent more time than she cared to admit online, stepped forward. She had an idea—and needed to disprove it. “We don’t have a printout of the “Support Group” page. Can you see if he’s got it stored in his cache?”

  Deputy Carlyle double-checked to make sure the laptop was still offline (yes, it was) and clicked the tab in the menu bar. As Esme had expected, the “Support Group” page was little more than a message board broken up into various categories and polls. Most of these links were inactive.

  “Scroll down,” she said.

  Most message boards listed, if not the names, at least the number of its active members. The message board at this website was no different: 2,037 members.

  “Fuck me,” mumbled Esme.

  “There’s, okay, but there’s still no proof he didn’t create this website out of thin air and type all this up himself.” Nunez ran a hand across his smooth chin. “He fixed that contest on his dad’s computer. He’s obviously got skills. And the mom, she said he was homeschooled, so he’s got the time.”

  Esme thought about it. Maybe Nunez was right. What he said made sense, in a desperate, grabbing-at-straws sort of way. There had to be a quick and easy way to prove that not only was this toxic website legitimate but so were its members. That would be the first step.

  The second step would then be to track down 2,036 lunatics.

  The cybercrime boys and girls in D.C. were going to have a field day with this.

  She reviewed the thumbnail photographs again. There had to be dozens of them, and according to the tiny numbers near the top, this was just page one of four. If Nunez was right and this website was simply a fabrication for Timothy’s own strange enjoyment, what were they to make of these grotesque photos? Either the people depicted were real, which meant that the fourteen-year-old boy was an astonishingly prolific and twisted murderer, or the pictures themselves were fakes, which meant that the fourteen-year-old boy was an astonishingly proficient and twisted photo-manipulator.

  Why couldn’t there be a more palatable option C?

  Meanwhile, Carlyle was entering some keywords from the website into various search engines. So far there weren’t any hits. This was good news. It weighed the argument in favor of fabrication.

  But there had to be ways to hide websites
from search engines. When she had served on the task force, she had been privy to any number of websites that must have been hidden due to their confidentiality. Even the websites for ordinary companies had information online that they needed to keep internal.

  Deputy Carlyle must have been reading her mind. “Just because it’s, um, not showing up in these search engines doesn’t, you know, mean anything one way or the other. All he, or whoever, would need to do is insert some code in the server root and it will be like the website’s invisible.”

  “Then no one could find it,” replied Nunez. “Which means this 2,037 number has to be fake.”

  Tom’s frown deepened.

  “What is it?” Esme asked him.

  “Just because no one can find you,” he said, “doesn’t mean you can’t find them.”

  “How? How would this kid find all these people who just happened to share his interests?”

  Sheriff Shuster stepped in. “Nunez, you know how many fucked-up websites there are? We’ve seen them. These days, whatever your fetish, all it takes is a couple of clicks to find a comrade.”

  “And then you go from there,” Esme added. “You sift through enough crime junkies and you eventually find some hard-core fans. There’s a whole floor in the Keeney Building in D.C. dedicated to tracking this kind of crap.”

  “CCIPS. Cybercrime squad. See, Nunez. Big Brother is, in fact, watching you.”

  “Isn’t that, you know, unconstitutional?”

  “In a post-9/11 world, liberty takes a backseat to security. For better or worse.”

  “Usually worse,” mumbled Tom.

  Esme agreed…mostly. As with most Big Subjects, her feelings on the matter were complicated. But high debate would have to wait, because at that moment her phone rang. The ring tone was Bauhaus’s macabre goth track “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”

  “Hello, Karl,” she said.

  “Mrs. Stuart, I just wanted to let you know that we have your guy Grover Kirk in custody. If you want to have a chat with him, you’ve got twelve hours. Then I’m releasing him.”