Before Cain Strikes

by Joshua Corin

  He sighed. “One moment, please.”

  Silence, then: “Well.”

  “You sure as hell can say that again.”

  “This is quite encouraging. Thank you.”

  “So now I can kick him out, right? I mean, he doesn’t need protection anymore.”

  “Mrs. Stuart, we just obtained inside access to what essentially is a major criminal organization. Are you telling me that your bigger concern is that your guest is using up all your clean sheets?”

  Esme clenched her teeth to keep from yelling, took a breath and asked as tranquilly as she could, “Is Grover free to go or not?”

  “Tell him to stay local.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Click.

  Esme sighed. Why did all the men in her life turn out to be utter jackasses? Well, not all. She dialed Tom and informed him of the good news, and he shared his, as well. They agreed to meet up this afternoon at the Federal Building and compare notes.

  In the meantime, she had a houseguest to extricate.

  Esme nudged him in the cheek with her big toe.

  No response.

  So she nudged him again, a little more forcefully.

  Still nothing. And now she was beginning to smell the mess he’d left in his briefs. Ugh. Time for expediency.

  She grabbed Grover’s thick wrists and began the arduous task of dragging the large, limp man into the bathroom, all the while keeping an eye on the carpet to make sure nothing in his underwear left its mark. She was reminded of her college days, and her first roommate, Roberta, who often drank well beyond the tolerance level of her four-foot-eleven, ninety-two-pound frame. According to the alumni newsletter, Roberta was now a successful pediatrician in Cleveland. Esme made a mental note never to bring Sophie to Cleveland and tugged Grover onto the cold tiles of the bathroom floor.

  With Roberta, the trick was to escort her into the shower and then blast her face with cold water. Well, by the time Esme reached the bathtub, she reconsidered that option for Grover Kirk. One, his body was a lot more cumbersome than Roberta’s ever was. Two, the porcelain wall of the bathtub was a good two feet in height, and Esme just didn’t feel like hefting Grover’s body up and over that high a barrier.

  So she did the next best thing.

  She dunked his head in the toilet bowl.

  In movies, the bullies and thugs who did this often punctuated their action with a flush, but the rush of water immersion awoke Grover almost immediately. His arms flailed blindly against her, so she just stepped away and watched as he launched his head out of the toilet bowl, spraying the wallpaper behind him with a swarm of droplets, and gazing around the bathroom in muddled unawareness.

  Then he spotted Esme, and it all sunk in.

  “How’s your hearing?” she asked.

  He reflexively put a hand to his ear. “Ringing.”

  “That could be from the water.”

  He scowled at her.

  “I’ll go get you a change of clothes,” she added. “You dumped a load in your shorts.”

  At which his scowl dribbled into horror and embarrassment, and it was that look of stone-etched shame on his face, this man who had forcibly inserted himself in her family’s life, that made it all worthwhile.

  By noon, she kicked him to the curb, or at least to his Studebaker. He informed her that, per Ziegler’s wishes, he would be returning to the Days Inn, and drove off. Esme took a long shower, scrubbing extrahard to remove all those Grover-cooties, and drove out to New York. On the way, she stopped at the college to visit her husband.

  The department secretary, a wispy man named Hector, informed her that Rafe was currently teaching in Lecture Hall B. Esme thanked him, followed the signs to the lecture halls and snuck into the back of the fivehundred-seat indoor amphitheater. Her husband paced the stage, a microphone bud clipped to the lapel of his blue sports jacket. She bought him that jacket one year for Christmas. On the dry-erase board, in Rafe’s semi-legible script, was a quote from Ovid: “Nature in her genius had imitated art.”

  “But who is to blame?” he said. Many of the four-hundred-plus freshmen and sophomores in the room’s cheap plastic chairs were actively taking notes. Some weren’t. A few were asleep. But it was their loss. Rafe had been nominated twice by the student body as Professor of the Year. “The easy target is the media. The first target is the media. The violence is their fault. Violence in movies and TV propagates violence in the streets. Life imitates art. But the cinema and television are inventions of the twentieth century, and violence surely existed before the twentieth century. So what does that leave us? Books? Who reads books? No, seriously, raise your hand if you’ve read a book, for pleasure, in the past two months.”

  About a third of the class raised their hands.

  “If we as a society don’t read, we can’t very well blame our ills on literature. But we do. The Harry Potter novels are still banned in some American communities. So is Huck Finn. All out of fear of influence. And this is what we’re talking about. Fear of influence. Art doesn’t inspire bad behavior but it can shape it. It can point it in a certain direction. After the tragedy at Columbine, Stephen King had a novel he wrote about a school shooting taken out of print. In 1989, cinemas across the country refused to show Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, because they believed it would incite violence. Fear of influence. D. H. Lawrence had to go to court to defend the publication of his novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Critics were sure it would plant seeds of sin into the minds of children. Fear of influence. A Clockwork Orange was filmed in England but wasn’t allowed to be shown there for thirty years. And I’m sure you all remember the anarchy and gang violence that ensued after that film’s eventual London release. No? There was no anarchy, you say? Life didn’t imitate art?

  “Well, then, that puts us in a tough position, because if we can’t blame art for our woes, we as a society have run out of scapegoats, and if history teaches us anything, it’s that we react very poorly when the onus of blame falls on us.”

  Esme watched his eyes quickly dart to the clock on the wall—and they found her. He hesitated, but only for a moment, and only she, of all the people in the room, noticed.

  “Okay, for Tuesday, please read the chapter on ‘Hot and Cool Media.’ There…hint-hint…may be a quiz… hint-hint. Have good weekends.”

  She remained in her seat while the students dispersed. A few lined up at Rafe’s podium to discuss with him today’s lecture or their grades or perhaps just to leave an impression with the prof. She waited out these stragglers, as well.

  And then she and he were alone in the cavernous lecture hall.

  “Where’s your ward?” he asked, filing his notes back into his valise.

  “I set him free.” She remained in her seat in the back row. “Do you really believe what you said? That what we see or read has no effect on how we behave?”

  “I didn’t say that at all,” he replied.

  “What about The Anarchist’s Cookbook?”

  “Two kinds of people read The Anarchist’s Cookbook,” said Rafe. “There are those who read it to satiate their own curiosity and there are those who read it to learn how to weaponize C-4. The former are not going to get inspired by the book to blow up city hall and the latter are already predisposed to violence before reading page one. Fear of influence, Esme. But my lecture was about the assignment of blame in a media-based global village. Maybe you should audit my course.”

  She bit her tongue. She hadn’t come here to argue with him.

  “I’m going to be in the city this afternoon,” she said, “but I’ll be home for dinner. We should eat out. As a family. Maybe Little Romeo’s or Michelangelo’s. What do you say?”

  “I say that you’re a funny woman.”

  Esme knew it wasn’t going to be good, but she had to ask. “How so?”

  “You’ll make a special trip home so we can then immediately leave said home and go out. And where would that home even be, exactly? Because it sure as hell isn’t
the house you spent the past few nights sleeping in. That hasn’t been a home ever since that monster violated it six months ago, and we’ve been fools pretending otherwise. I’ve said it before, Esme. The only way we’re going to repair this family is through change. Change of venue or change of vocation. Either one. You want to go out to dinner tonight? That’s fine. I’m sure Sophie would enjoy that. I know she misses you.” He looked away. “I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too, Rafe.” She wanted to stand. She wanted to run down the aisle and into his arms. She wanted there to be violins. She also wanted to be ten years younger and have firmer boobs, but she didn’t move from her seat, not at all, paralyzed by her own insecurities.

  A student walked in. Of course a student walked in. There was undoubtedly another class set to meet in the lecture hall. So now Esme rose from her seat, and now Rafe climbed the aisle steps to the wall of doors at the aft of the wood-and-plastic cavern. They walked out together, but nobody would have known from their disparate body language that they were emotionally close, much less husband and wife.

  “The lighthouse?” he said. “Around seven?”

  “Okay,” she replied.

  They parted. End of conversation.

  Esme returned to her Prius, cranked up the melodic snarl-rock of the Jam, and shouted along with Paul Weller all the way across the George Washington Bridge, down into the Bronx and onto the many-fingered island of Manhattan. The Federal Building had its own parking garage, thank God, but it still took her a good half hour to navigate the avenues. The other cars didn’t make her as nervous as all the pedestrians rushing from street corner to street corner or simply milling so inconsiderately in the crosswalk with their strollers and their dogs. But finally she arrived, and parked, and passed security checkpoint after security checkpoint until the elevator emptied her out onto the high-altitude level of the TriBeCa skyscraper.

  The briefing had already begun in the conference room. Karl Ziegler himself was addressing the twenty or so underpaid federal agents who crowded the chairs and along the available wall space. Esme snuck in beside Tom, who conveniently stood near the door.

  “Miss me?” she asked, sotto voce.

  “Who are you again?” he whispered back.

  Esme ran her gaze along the dozens of annotated photographs on the walls, recognizing some of them from the cached website, but not recognizing most. These must have been the older ones culled today from the live site, which they could access with Grover’s password, which they had because of her. A little pride never hurt anyone.

  “—and through examination of the message boards,” Ziegler intoned, “we’ve been able to associate and verify the information you see here. We have the names of the victims. We have in many cases the locations where their bodies were discovered. We have detailed confessions from their murderers, identified here with their user names. And we are compiling profiles on each of these user names, based on the murders they committed and on any messages they may have posted.”

  Someone raised a hand. “Can you trace the user names to the computers they used to post the messages?”

  Mineola Wu, who stood off to the side, answered that one. “No. The website is a closed system. What we need right now is to access its servers.”

  “And where’s that?”

  She hesitated. “Switzerland.”

  “We’ve already been in touch with the Swiss government,” said Ziegler. “And we’re coordinating with the Agency and the State Department in trying to seize the servers.”

  “Good luck with that,” Esme murmured. The Swiss were notoriously unforthcoming when it came to access. Any assets stored within their ever-neutral borders were secure and private. Housing the servers there had been a stroke of genius.

  Another hand went up. “Why don’t we just shut the website down?”

  “We could restrict it in the United States, but that would just alert Cain42 to burrow underground and any initiative we’d have gained here would be lost. We need to remember, our goal, ladies and gentlemen, is to track down the people who committed the vicious crimes you see on these walls. This has to proceed like any other undercover operation, and that means allowing them to continue what they’re doing for a little while longer. Every minute that passes, every post that’s made, we learn more information and we get closer to shutting down a national crime syndicate. This is progress, people. Now I have your individual assignments here. Let’s do this thing.”

  The agents gathered around Ziegler.

  “‘Let’s do this thing’?” echoed Esme.

  Tom shrugged.

  Mineola weaved through the crowd. “There’s something I need to show you,” she said, and led Tom and Esme to her workstation.

  “This came right before the meeting.” She went to the message-board page and clicked on the “News” header. “We’re still trying to decide what to make of it.”

  It was a post from Cain42, dated an hour ago.

  As Thanksgiving approaches, it occurs to me that we should celebrate this gluttonous day in our own lovably gluttonous way. So I propose a Great Hunt. The rules are simple. From 12:01 a.m. Saturday morning until 11:59 p.m. Sunday evening, I urge you all to do as our ancestors did in Plymouth and to hunt, only I imagine your quarry will be much more satisfying than theirs. Make sure to upload pictures of your kills. Whosoever has accumulated the most kills by 11:59 p.m. Sunday evening will be rewarded with the grand prize, and I will personally hand-deliver this prize to the winner before Thanksgiving Day. Remember: this contest is not an excuse for rushed or haphazard behavior. Stick to the Rules of the Trade. Be smart and be safe. And happy hunting.

  20

  “Well,” said Esme, “this is the best bad news I think I’ve ever seen.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Best?” Mineola looked at them both in bewilderment. “He’s riling two thousand people to go on a killing spree!”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  The tall Asian threw up her hands. “Are you both out of your minds?”

  “Should I explain?” Esme asked Tom.

  “You explain,” Tom told Esme.

  Esme explained.

  “He’s forcing his followers to act under a deadline, which means, despite his warnings to the contrary, they’ll get sloppy. They’ll be easier to catch, and our rat-catchers are going to be on alert this weekend, you better believe it. Finally, we’re on the proactive side of the game, rather than the reactive side.”

  “But that’s not even the best part,” added Tom.

  “No, it’s not. The best part is the grand prize. Personally delivered by Cain42. Which means when Grover Kirk wins the prize, we get to meet the man himself, and cart off his sorry ass to ADX Florence for the rest of his hopefully miserable life.”

  “So all we have to do is kill the most people by Sunday night.”

  Both Esme and Tom nodded.

  “Allow me then to backtrack for a second to a previous question.”

  “All right.”

  “Are you both out of your minds?”

  Both Esme and Tom smiled.

  “We’re not going to really kill anyone,” said Tom.

  “We’re going to fake it,” said Esme.

  “How?”

  “Why do you want to know?” Tom replied. “I thought fieldwork wasn’t your thing.”

  “I’m not allowed to be curious?”

  “Of course you are.” Esme smiled at her. “That’s what makes it a magic trick.”

  “Let’s go talk to Ziegler,” said Tom.

  “Do we have to?”

  They ambled back to the conference room, where Karl Ziegler was handing out the last of the assignments to the last of the agents. Tom and Esme waited until those agents left before they entered the room.

  “Piper, what’s the status of the Hoboken operation?”

  “Our suspect will be back in town on Sunday. That’s when we’re bringing them in.”

  “Thank you.” Karl
collected his papers, then looked up quizzically at Esme. “Mrs. Stuart, why are you still here?”

  So it was going to be like that. Okay.

  “We know about the Great Hunt.”

  Karl Ziegler shrugged. “It’s not your concern.”

  “It’s not my…? Is that stick so far up your—”

  “Karl,” Tom interrupted, “I feel so sorry for you.”

  “Excuse me?” He raised an eyebrow. “And why’s that?”

  “Every G15 in the Bureau must be salivating over this case. I can’t imagine the pressure you’re under. I’ll bet right now the director himself is angling to get this entire case moved to Washington.”

  Karl didn’t reply.

  “All these careers that hang in the balance…all these lives at stake…easy for the fat cats to lose sight of what’s important, isn’t it, Karl? But you and I know what matters, and it’s got nothing to do with politics or ambition. Because that’s what separates us from the bureaucrats, and you’re not a bureaucrat, are you, Karl?”

  “I happen to admire bureaucracy, Piper. It’s the engine that powers the machine.”

  “You can admire an engine without having to become a mechanic.”

  Karl frowned.

  Esme stepped in. “Look, we’re not here to steal away any of your thunder. We’re just here to help and fade back into the shadows. You want us to say the countermove was yours? We’ll sign whatever you want.”

  “Which countermove would that be?”

  They told him.

  He ruminated.

  Finally: “It’ll work.”

  “Yes. It will.”

  “It’s not going to be cheap,” he added.

  “Neither is the promotion you’ll get for clearing a case like this, Karl.”

  Karl eyeballed the two of them, and then nodded. “Do it.”

  “Thank you,” said Esme, and she and Tom headed for the door.

  “Mrs. Stuart? May I have a moment with you, please?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  Tom waited outside the conference room.

  Karl closed the door.

  “What’s up?” she asked.