Before Cain Strikes

by Joshua Corin

  Tom hesitated. The door didn’t have a peephole.

  The stab wounds, bullet wounds, punctures from a staple gun and the multiple gashes from multiple box cutters had made him a wee bit paranoid.

  He still had his Glock. It was in his shoulder holster, hanging with his black leather jacket in the sliding-door closet to his right. He could have it in his hands and ready in seconds, and cause some hapless bellhop to wet himself. Because although the local clerks were undoubtedly used to all variations of undress, nobody, no matter how seasoned, reacted well to the sight of a gun.

  “Tom?” called Penelope Sue’s voice from the phone. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “Just a second.”

  He held the Glock behind his back with his right hand and with his left hand, still holding the phone, he reached for the knob. The door was heavy, thick. Practically soundproof. Great.

  He took a breath to steady himself.

  “Okay, Tom,” continued her voice, “in the meantime, let me tell you about this client. He’s kind and sweet…”

  He opened the door.

  “…and as handsome as can be,” she finished, staring him straight in the eye.

  He blinked.

  “Hello, sexy,” she said, and leaned forward to kiss him full on the mouth. Her arms smoothly wrapped themselves around his body.

  He remained awkwardly unresponsive.

  She stepped away from him, confused. Was he not happy to see her?

  “I…” he replied, and then, “One second.”

  He shut the door in her face and quickly returned the Glock to its holster. By the time he’d reopened the door, any semblance of seductiveness or gleeful surprise had vanished from her face. Penelope Sue appeared ticked off.

  “Are you kidding me?” she asked.

  “It’s not like that. I didn’t know it was you.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Were you expecting someone else?”

  “I didn’t know who it could be! It’s almost one o’clock in the morning!”

  “I know. I’ve been on a plane for two hours.”

  “And that’s wonderful! And I am so glad to see you! Come here.”

  He held out his arms.

  She didn’t budge.

  “Please?”

  She budged. And, finally, they embraced, both of them, chest against chest, lips against lips. They parted, but only an inch, and stared into each other’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “With the day I had, and being back in New York for the first time since… I was just…jittery.”

  “I know.” She held her hand against his heart. She could feel its rhythm echo into her palm, and let its music fill her. “That’s why I’m here. Let Penelope Sue take care of you.”

  He nodded, and she led the way to the bed. The heavy door shut by itself.

  The following morning, after a lengthy shared shower (which both of them required for a variety of reasons), Tom took Penelope Sue to a bagel shop he knew down the block from the hotel. In true New York fashion, though, the bagel shop had become a Starbucks. After a momentary grousing, Tom and Penelope Sue then did what any other New Yorker would have done if faced with this disappointment—they tossed away their plans and went inside the Starbucks for some coffee, pastries and Enya. Halfway through their scones, their conversation took its inevitable detour from idle to serious.

  “I’ve got to head to the office soon,” he said.

  She nodded, sipping on her hot apple spice cider.

  “I feel bad about it,” he added, “leaving you alone after you came all this way.”

  “Tom Piper, will you please get over yourself? No woman with a charge card is alone in New York City.”

  “You’re going to rent a male escort?”

  That she didn’t expect him to say. As the laughter spilled out of her body, the hot cider spilled out of her mouth and nose. She reached for a napkin to clean herself up, but for whatever reason, that just made her laugh harder and louder. This being New York City, nobody paid her much attention, except Tom, who nearly swooned at the sight. He was so head over heels in love with this goofy woman.

  They made plans to meet up for lunch and went their separate ways, he to the bureaucracy of the Federal Building and she to the cash registers of Macy’s. The line at the security checkpoint snaked all the way across most of the lobby floor, and Tom patiently waited his turn. Most of these people, he knew, were here for their visas. New York’s USCIS was by far the busiest in the country. In many ways, it had become the new Ellis Island.

  Once at the head of the long, multicultural line, Tom showed his credentials to one of the security guards, passed his firearm and wallet onto the conveyor belt and stepped through the metal detector. He then approached a second guard, showed his badge and was allowed to proceed to the elevator bank. His destination lay almost a hundred yards skyward, on the building’s twenty-third floor.

  Judging by the empties stacked in her borrowed workspace, Mineola Wu was already on her sixth can of Mountain Dew. She waved him over. Cain42’s website, or at least the cached version they’d acquired off Timothy, lay open on her desktop computer.

  “So I’ve been feeding the details from these photographs through VICAP, Google, whatever, hoping to get a hit…and I got a hit.”

  “Show me.”

  She showed him by blowing up one of the thumbnails off the “Photographs” page. It featured a storefront window with three mannequins, each draped in a froufrou autumnal sweater-pants ensemble. In place of their three plastic heads, though, were three human heads—three blondes, all with their eyes open in horror. A good amount of blood ran down from their open throats and over the froufrou autumnal sweater-pants ensembles.

  Mineola clicked another button, which brought up an AP news article from October 31. An early-morning jogger named Marie McConnell, age twenty-six, spotted the display in the window of Hot Cotour, a local high-end clothing store for women. Police were called to the scene, and quickly cordoned off the area. The remains were identified as belonging to Summer Sholes, age nineteen; Lydia Patel, age twenty-two; and Rosalind Becker, age twenty-four. All three had been employees of the store. There were no suspects at this time. The location of the incident: Hoboken, New Jersey, just over the river from the island of Manhattan.

  “Let’s go,” said Tom.

  Mineola downed some Mountain Dew. “You have fun there, chief.”

  “We need to coordinate with the Hoboken P.D., maybe shed some light on their investigation.”

  “Maybe, but I’m staying planted right where I am.”

  “You don’t want to come?”

  “Do I look like a field agent to you?”

  He gave her high heels and geek-chic attire a once-over.

  “Have fun in Hoboken,” she said. “Give my regards to Ol’ Blue Eyes.”

  Tom opened his mouth to retort, perhaps convince her to come along, but changed his mind. He could have done it, too. He had a good idea which buttons he needed to push to get her out of that chair. Instead, he asked her to call ahead to Hoboken to give them a heads-up, and he headed back toward the elevators. Technically, he was supposed to clear this trip with Karl Ziegler, but in the half second Tom spent looking around, he just couldn’t spot him. Oh, well.

  New Jersey meant the PATH trains, and the PATH trains meant Penn Station, which was practically across the street from Macy’s. He could pop into the department store and surprise Penelope Sue. It would take only a few minutes out of his already-flexible schedule.

  No, he’d do it when he returned. Take care of Hoboken, get that out of the way and then spend as much time with Penelope Sue as they wanted, with nowhere they needed to be and nothing they needed to do.

  Eight cities had a Pennsylvania Station, leftover hubs from nineteenth-century America’s vital railroad network. There were three in Pennsylvania itself (Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Pittsburgh), one in Baltimore, o
ne in Cleveland, one in Cincinnati, one in Newark, and the oldest, busiest of them all: New York’s Penn Station, occupying more than ten acres of commercial real estate underneath the west side of Manhattan. Tom joined the steady mob as it flowed underground, purchased his ticket from one of the many electronic kiosks and boarded his train.

  Fifteen minutes later, he was in Hoboken, New Jersey, birthplace of baseball, soft-serve ice cream and, yes, Ol’ Blue Eyes himself, Francis Albert Sinatra. Tom had never been to Hoboken before, and wasn’t quite sure what to expect. He also didn’t know where the city’s police departments were located, but he was sure one of the many uniformed cops patrolling this end of the PATH line could be of service.

  Apparently, One Police Plaza was just a short walk west on Hudson Place and then a brief stroll north along Hudson Street. It was a much more scenic trip than Tom had anticipated. Years of old jokes at Hoboken’s expense—not to mention endless reruns of On the Waterfront—had given him a lopsided and by all accounts incorrect opinion of the place. The view of Manhattan on this clear cool day was nothing short of majestic, and the shops he passed along the way to his destination possessed an ethnic charm he associated more with Brooklyn than New Jersey. He even spotted a red phone booth. He thought of Penelope Sue. In addition to Star Trek, she also loved Doctor Who.

  Once he’d arrived at One Police Plaza, he produced his badge, explained his business and shortly thereafter was introduced to detectives Paolo Briggs and Antwone Vitucci, keepers of the murder book for a certain triplet of Halloween decapitations. They signed out an unmarked car (a Crown Victoria, to match the stereotype) and drove out to the crime scene.

  “Yeah, we got the email from what’s-her-name,” said Briggs. He was behind the wheel, and alternating each sentence with a drag off a brown cigarette. “Don’t know how it’ll elucidate our dead end.”

  Vitucci made a show of fanning the smoke out of his face. “There was no sign of forced entry so we assumed it was an inside job. That narrowed it down to the owner and manager, a Mrs. Carolyn Harbinger; the assistant manager, her nephew Jefferson—”

  “Fag,” Briggs noted.

  “You know, Briggs, you got a hateful streak in you that’s almost as ugly as your face.”

  Briggs shrugged, ashed out the window and commenced a five-minute attempt at parallel parking.

  “Anyway,” Vitucci continued, “the only other employee was this girl Sandra Washington. She and the dead girls all went to school together at the technical college. She was the one who got them the jobs at the store.”

  “And the alibis?”

  “All solid. Carolyn Harbinger and her nephew—”

  “The fag.”

  “—were at some… Jesus Christ, Briggs, how many bumpers you trying to hit? They were at this swank family Halloween party at night, lots of guests, and Sandra Washington was palling around SoHo with some artist types, after which she crashed at a friend’s place.”

  Briggs shifted into Park, apparently satisfied with being three feet from the curb. The three of them left the vehicle and walked half a block to the former location of Hot Cotour, now an empty pair of windows and a rolling security door with a For Lease sign taped to it. The contact information still listed Carolyn Harbinger as the owner. The other four shops and restaurants on the block were up and running as if nothing had happened here, as if the hideous deaths of three girls had been just one of those things.

  “They had a camera running inside but the thing was conveniently switched off the night of the incident. Another indication of an inside job.”

  “Motives?” asked Tom.

  “You tell us, Dixie,” Briggs replied. “I mean, if this is the work of one of those website psychos, maybe we need to start interviewing the neighborhood dogs, see if one of them told our guy to do it.”

  “Okay, Briggs.”

  “You know, like the Son of Sam.”

  “We got it, Briggs. Anyway, to answer your question, Special Agent Piper, there were no motives we could find. I mean, one of the dead girls had an ex-boyfriend who was a little on the angry side, but his alibi checked out, too, and besides, it’s a big leap to go from angry ex to Son of Sam.”

  Tom frowned. On one hand, the ritualistic element fit in with the website’s glamorization of serial murder. On the other hand, as Vitucci noted, the evidence did suggest an inside job. The psychologist inside of him pondered the nature of the crime. Multiple beheadings were one thing, but putting those trophies on display, on top of mannequins, for all the world to see? Was the killer making a statement or was he just having a sick Halloween laugh?

  “Were the bodies ever found?” he asked.

  “No,” answered Vitucci.

  The three men stared in silence at the empty storefront window, and at the ghosts of three dead girls waiting to be avenged. For Tom Piper, Hoboken’s charm had begun to wane a bit. And something about this case gnawed at him. If he could only get into a room with the man (or woman) responsible for these murders…

  “Do you mind if I look over your case notes?” he asked.

  “You can have the whole thing for all we care,” replied Briggs. “You think we want an unsolved next to our names?”

  “We’ll talk to our L.T.,” Vitucci added.

  Briggs and Vitucci led Tom around an alleyway in back of the block and showed him Hot Cotour’s rear door. The only other features of the narrow, filthy alley were the six rear doors, presumably to the block’s other restaurants and stores, and an overfull Dumpster. The second, third, fourth and fifth stories were residential apartments. The Harbinger family owned the entire block.

  Just for kicks, Tom tugged on Hot Cotour’s alleyway door. It was locked, of course. He sighed and followed the two detectives back out to the street.

  He needed Esme.

  As he took out his cell phone to dial her number, it began to ring—and it was Esme calling him. Eerie.

  “Hello, Esmeralda,” he said. “I was just about to give you a call.”

  “Looks like I beat you to the punch, old man.”

  “Do you have news or just quips?”

  “Can’t I have both?”

  Tom grinned. “Talk to me.”

  “Cain42 just responded to a thread that I had Grover post last night about the Lynette Robinson murder on a website called ‘Blood Read.’”

  “What did Cain42 have to say?”

  “And I quote: ‘Dear Galileofan, I completely agree with your analysis here. What we need now is not a retreat from authority but a call to arms. Open-minded and intuitive people like us exist in this country to provide leadership, and I look forward to our next discourse.’ He’s so hitting on him, right?”

  “Sounds like our fish has begun to take the bait,” said Tom.

  “So what were you going to call me about?”

  “Actually, it’s a tangential case. I’d like your opinion. Here are the details…”

  17

  Cain42’s invitation arrived on Wednesday at 12:55 p.m. Esme read it, showed it to Grover and then promptly forwarded it to Mineola (who immediately ran a back trace on it, which led absolutely nowhere), Tom (whose reply was “!”), Karl Ziegler (who immediately instructed her to accept the invitation, which she did), and even forwarded the invitation to herself. And then she read it again. And then she frowned.

  This was all too easy. Here was a man (probably a man) who had not only outsmarted two government agents but had also managed to collect the uncollectible—society’s loners, malcontents and crazies—into a working group. Cain42 was clever, and it would be foolish to believe they had so easily bested him.

  Underestimating Henry Booth had cost many good people their lives.

  Esme sighed. Why couldn’t she get the dumb criminals? Most career felons, statistically, were of lesser-than-average intelligence. But no, the cases she got involved in always seem to revolve around some monomaniacal polymath. Then again, stupidity offered less of a puzzle to solve. Stupidity was stupidity. Had Cain42 b
een some run-of-the-mill whack job, her interest level in the case might have been, well, lower. Scary but true. Then again, had Cain42 been some run-of-the-mill whack job, he wouldn’t have been able to supply Timothy Hammond and countless others with the tools and know-how to murder.

  And the wheel spins around and around.

  “You going to be on the computer for long?” Lester hovered over her shoulder, encroaching on her personal space and obviously attempting to spy on her activity. “I need to check my email.”

  Behind them, on the living room sofa, Grover Kirk was taking a midday nap. The man slept more than a newborn kitten, or at least pretended to sleep. Working with him on these message board posts had proven as thrilling as she’d expected. Every suggestion she offered him somehow got twisted around into a question about Henry Booth. Grover was relentless. He was also about to complete the first draft of his book, and wanted her to be the first to read it. It would be an honor, he said.

  Part of her considered how easy it would be to “accidentally” delete the Word document containing his book. But no, as much as she loathed the man, that would have been vicious. This was America. He was entitled to write whatever he liked, and she was entitled to hate it. Free speech, of course, only went so far. The anarchic, potentially deadly advice Cain42 doled out on his website crossed the line.

  “If you’re just going to sit there, Esme, sit somewhere else. Some of us have work to do.”

  Esme sighed. Her father-in-law: as treasonous to the law and order of her marriage as Cain42 was to the law and order of this country. An exaggeration? Maybe, but not by much. And she could tell by the old man’s recent boost of energy that his subversive behavior was winning.