by Joshua Corin
The cop’s name was Ray Milton. He’d served on the Amarillo Police Department for eleven years. He worked in Property/Evidence and had known two of the slain firefighters personally. He bummed a Marlboro off her an hour before the memorial service.
Five minutes into the conversation, he was bitching about how the feds had stolen the case. Ten minutes into their conversation, they’d agreed to a quid pro quo: Ray would supply her with the leverage she needed to infiltrate the task force (namely, the bit about the shoe boxes). In return, once on the inside, she would funnel back to him updates on the case’s status. If the Amarillo P.D. was going to be benched, it at least was going to get to watch the game.
And so, upon learning from a very gabby receptionist in city hall about Esme Stuart’s impending arrival (11:45 a.m. tomorrow morning), Lilly phoned Ray. She zipped her VW to the meeting spot she designated, the abandoned parking garage, and so, here they were, at 11:45 p.m., in Ray’s twenty-year-old metallic gold Crown Victoria.
Which smelled like cinnamon.
This confused Lilly to no end. She’d expected the familiar tang of slow sweet death she inhaled every time she lit up, but no. Cinnamon. Then she noticed the red cardboard leaf dangling from Ray’s rearview mirror. Ah. Cinnamon. The man probably had kids and didn’t want to reek up the car pool on the way to Little League. Had he mentioned kids? After the memorial service, Lilly had done a background check on her informant just to verify his details, badge number, etc. One could never be too careful. But the data she’d accumulated had made no mention of kids. Whatever.
“So what’s your big news?” he asked.
His brown eyes bulged with eagerness.
Down boy, she mused.
“Yeah, I see you hustled right over here,” she replied. Waiting an hour in the middle of February in a nowhere-to-go-nothing-to-do city had been less than fun. “If you got here any faster, we could’ve had breakfast.”
“Sorry. Had an errand to run. Didn’t expect you to call so soon.”
“What can I say, Ray? I missed your sweet Texas charm.”
He scowled, charmingly.
She held up her hands. “Okay, okay. Jeez. So here’s the scoop—your pals at the FBI have got a ringer flying in from New York.”
“A ringer?”
“Her name’s Esmeralda Stuart. And you should’ve seen Special Agent Piper when he told his crew the news. It was like he was talking about the Second Coming. Apparently she’s some kind of savant. I don’t know.”
Lilly was lying. She did know. As soon as Tom Piper had made the announcement, she’d beelined for her Hello Kitty laptop and gleaned as much information on Esme Stuart as was available. But Ray Milton didn’t need to know that. Ray Milton needed to know what she decided he needed to know. Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and baby, that boy won’t need you no more.
Ray studied his steering wheel for a moment. Then: “When is she arriving?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Thank you.” He smiled at her. His teeth were eggshell white. He must spray them or something—no smoker has teeth like that. “Maybe the FBI knows what they’re doing after all.”
“Nobody knows what they’re doing, Ray. That’s what makes it all so much fun.”
She saluted the middle-aged cop and exited the cinnamon cloud of his vehicle. She felt him watch her go. She couldn’t blame him. When she wore the right outfit, her curves could cause whiplash in the most modest of spectators. So what if she liked women? That didn’t mean she couldn’t appreciate being ogled now and again by the lesser of the species…
Sigh.
Spending Valentine’s Day outside of her hometown really blew.
Lilly meandered her way back to Motel 6. She hoped some of her friends would be online to distract her. She wrote her best journalism when she was distracted, and she didn’t want to squander this opportunity. Her articles on the task force had the potential to be front page, above the fold. The public loved to peek behind the curtain and see the wizard at play, and this time there was the sexy bonus of a serial killer. If she played to her strengths and created the rock-solid re-portage she knew she could produce, these articles would follow her portfolio until the day she died, when some other journalist would mention them at the top of her obit.
Her sixteenth (but not last) Marlboro of the day accompanied her on the short walk from the parking lot to her room. She passed a vending machine on her way, considered buying a bag of pork rinds, but continued on her way. The only thing worse than being stuck in Texas would be getting fat in Texas. It’s not that she was biased against the entire state. Austin, for example, was a wonderfully progressive city, and she had some friends who swore that the arts scene in Houston was thriving. However, most of the folk she had met, at least here in Amarillo, had been of Ray Milton’s ilk: a Bible in one hand and a shotgun in the other. Her lifestyle—hell, her very appearance (when she wore all her piercings and left her tattoos uncovered)—was diametrically opposed to everything these people held dear. She knew it. To them, she was the demon spawn. Worse yet, she was California. Not everyone here felt this way, of course, but the majority did, and in America, the majority ruled.
Whatever.
Back in her motel room, Lilly returned her Hello Kitty laptop from hibernation mode, instant-messaged with some friends for an hour, and wrote 500 words for her piece. Her editor Ben Blackman at the Chronicle wanted pages? He was going to get them.
She didn’t include anything which compromised the task force’s capability. She was a responsible journalist…and had only landed her plum source very recently. Still, as an exposé on one of this nation’s top crime-fighting units, her story had the potential to sizzle. It had colorful personalities. It had turf wars among different branches of government. It even had a hateful villain. Forget about Pulitzer—this could be her ticket to network television.
Lilly Toro nodded off around 1:00 a.m.; still in her black boots, stockings, the whole nine yards.
At 4:43 a.m., she awoke. Looked around, befuddled. Why the hell am I awake at—
BAM! BAM! BAM!
Someone was at the door.
BAM! BAM! BAM!
Someone not very happy.
Lilly padded over to the peephole.
BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
“I’m coming.”
She peered through the peephole. Who the fuck would be banging on her door at 4:43 a.m.?
Lo and behold: it was Special Agent Tom Piper.
Even more confused, Lilly took a moment to straighten her hair, and then she pulled open the door.
“Special Agent Piper. What a semi-pleasant surprise.”
He stared at her for a full thirty seconds. Thirty seconds of nothing but his eyes on hers. He was trying to peer into her soul. She could feel it. She was terrified of what he wouldn’t find.
After thirty seconds, he reached some kind of conclusion. “Okay,” he said.
Then she noticed the blood on his palms.
What the hell?
He noticed her noticing.
“It’s Darcy Parr’s,” he said. “He shot her a few hours ago at Walmart.”
Darcy Parr was dead? Jesus Christ. Wait—Walmart? Where had she seen…?
“The license plate of the guy you met tonight? It’s registered to a Pablo Marx out of Lubbock. Pablo Marx—”
“Wait…”
“Pablo Marx was reported missing ten days ago.”
“How do you know I—”
“How do you think?”
Lilly shouldn’t have been surprised, but she was. Of course they would tail her. They knew she had an informant. Of course they would want to find out his identity.
“His name is Ray Milton,” she told him. “He’s a cop with the Amarillo Police Department.”
“Ms. Toro, all due respect, but I guarantee you the man you’ve been speaking to is neither named Ray Milton nor he has ever, ever, worked with the Amarillo P.D. We’re goi
ng to need you to come with us. Right now.”
Lilly nodded, reached for her coat. Her mind was spinning (and the lateness of the hour didn’t help).
“Am I going to look at mug shots?” she asked.
“No, Ms. Toro. You’re going to help us trap the son of a bitch.”
8
Esme had three days to solve the case.
She solved it in nine hours.
While the rest of the task force was prepping Lilly Toro for the sting operation, Esme sequestered herself in a conference room, set her iPod to random selection, and through careful analysis of the case files and aggressive prodding of the FBI computer database, was able to deduce not only Galileo’s next likely target, but also his endgame.
This is how she did it:
Tom met her at the airport. The new lines on his long face weren’t just from age. It was obvious he hadn’t slept. Nevertheless, he put in the effort to smile.
“Esmeralda,” he said. “You look good.”
“So do you,” she lied. His left arm hung useless in a mauve sling. Oh, Tom.
They hugged, two old friends, and waited beside the baggage carousel for Esme’s two Louis Vuitton suitcases to emerge. Outside the bright Texas sun foretold a day luminescent with possibilities.
“Do you have any new photos of Sophie?” asked Tom. “She has to be, what, in grad school by now, right?”
Esme smirked. “Practically. Don’t worry, I’ve got a whole bunch of pictures in my digital camera. I’ll show them to you later.”
“Great.”
“How’s your family? Is your cousin still married to what’s-her-name with the Komodo dragon?”
“They’ve added a second pet to the household.”
“A unicorn?”
“A sea otter.”
“Oh, God.”
“It lives in their swimming pool in the backyard.”
“Of course it does.”
Her baggage arrived, intact and unblemished.
As they lugged it outside, Esme wondered how it all would fit on his Harley. To her surprise, a black sedan pulled to the curb and its trunk popped open. Behind the wheel sat 242 pounds of Norm Petrosky.
“The prodigal returns,” he said. Norm was one of the task force’s expert profilers.
Tom took the passenger seat and Esme sat in back. It felt odd to Esme, being chauffeured like that, but times had changed…
“How was your flight?” asked Norm.
“It didn’t crash.”
“Oh, well. Maybe next time.”
They accelerated onto the highway. Esme had never been to Amarillo. It looked modest, wholesome, which made what had happened here all the more insidious. Tom filled Esme in on Darcy Parr’s murder.
“You would have liked her,” he said. “She reminded me of you at her age.”
Then I probably wouldn’t have liked her, decided Esme.
By the time they pulled up to city hall, the perfect blue sky had faded to a tin hue. Esme followed the men into the building. By way of explanation, Tom told her that Mayor Lumley had insisted the task force operate out of city hall rather than out of the police department, as was customary in a city without its own federal field office.
“She wants our successes to be associated solely with her,” said Tom. “She sees this tragedy as her ticket to the state house.”
“If our killer knew he was responsible for that,” added Norm, “he’d turn himself in today.”
Their offices were limited to the second floor. They had an entire bullpen and its adjoining four offices to themselves. According to the signage, this area was regularly used by the Community Relations Office. The Community Relations Office workers had been displaced somewhere else. Perhaps to the police department.
Tom led Esme into the conference room. On the large cherrywood table—all the furniture in the entire building being made of 33-year-old cherry—were stacks and stacks of crime scene reports, lab analyses, evidentiary samples, etc. Almost the entire surface of the table was covered.
“Do you need anything? Juice? Danish?”
Esme shook her head.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said.
He closed the door.
She started with the shoe boxes. They were bright orange. The police had conscientiously stuffed each in a plastic bag. She picked up the one labeled Atlanta, placed it on her lap, and carefully removed its contents. Inside the box was the note Tom had e-mailed:
IF THERE WAS STILL A GOD, HE WOULD HAVE STOPPED ME.
—GALILEO
The paper was standard twenty-pound bond, the kind you’d find at any office supply store. No foolscap, no insignia. The typeface was standard too: Courier New. The list of possible suspects narrowed down to anyone who had access to a PC and a printer.
Great.
It was the contents of the note that were revelatory. Esme already had several nascent theories, but she needed more data. She put the first shoe box aside and grabbed the second one. This was the unknown. With anxious anticipation, she un-bagged the orange box and opened its lid.
Inside was a flash drive.
“Tom!” she called. “I need a computer!”
In the bullpen, the FBI task force was working what few leads they had. Norm was updating the psych profile, adding the latest murders to his mix of educated conjecture and professional supposition. Daryl Hewes handled logistics; thanks to his wizardry at obfuscation, the task force always covered its ass both fiscally and legally. Anna and Hector Jackson (no relation) were reviewing for the sixth time the videotape from Walmart. Others were at the police station with Lilly Toro, getting her fitted for a bulletproof vest.
Tom was on the phone with Darcy Parr’s mother.
“Your daughter, Mrs. Parr, was a tremendous young woman.” He gazed out the tinted window. Amarillo city hall overlooked an oblong fountain. Right now the water appeared clear, and even from the second floor Tom could peer through its surface to its ceramic base, which was dotted with pennies. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Tom felt someone’s shadow on the back of his neck. He turned to look. It was Esme. She offered his shoulder a sympathetic squeeze. He nodded. She walked over to Daryl.
“One minute,” he said. He typed up another clause on his laptop, perused it, deleted it, then gazed up at Esme through thick black glasses. “I’m just working on your per diem forms and your liability documents. You would think we’d have basic boilerplate language I could adjust to suit these circumstances but it seems the suits continue to lack any semblance of foresight.” He scratched at his curly blond pouf, retyped the clause he deleted, and gazed back up at Esme. “Was there something you needed in the interim?”
It took Daryl five minutes to work his magic and find Esme a laptop of her own, five more to link it into their network. She didn’t ask where he’d acquired the computer. She didn’t want to know. She just thanked him, signed his per diem and the liability documents, and then kindly asked him to close the door on his way out.
Then she plugged in the sniper’s flash drive. It contained one file. A movie. Two minutes and twenty-four seconds long.
She pressed Play.
First: a black screen. Underneath it: a scratching noise, the sound of a needle tracking across an old record. Esme upped the volume on the laptop.
White letters slowly bloomed to life out of the black backdrop:
The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. A Galileo could no more be elected President of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of soft illusion.
—H. L. Mencken
Then, just as slowly, the letters faded back into the darkness. The scratching noise ceased. For a few seconds, silence, then:
Smash cut to MLK Drive. 3:00 a.m. Under a streetligh
t stand Andre Banks and the two cops, Appleby and Harper. All from the vantage point of the roof of the elementary school.
Suddenly there’s music.
Kate Smith, booming “God Bless America.” Esme jumped a bit, startled by the loud sound.
Kate’s Smith’s voice soars as—
Harper goes down.
Appleby goes down.
Andre Banks, panicking, tries for shelter behind the squad car.
The music continues.
Andre Banks goes down.
Smash cut now to an hour later. The local cops are swarming the scene. Pennington, O’Daye. Perry Roman. All ten of them familiar faces now, from the news reports, from what’s about to happen.
The first victim is Perry Roman. He drops down like a bag of cement.
The detectives search for their attacker, but it’s all in vain. They’ve already been snared, and marked for slaughter. One by one they collapse.
Officer O’Daye is the last one standing. She is struggling to pull her partner’s body out of the line of fire. She’s the last to die.
The music suddenly halts.
Cut to black.
Esme didn’t realize she was crying until the soundtrack stopped, and she heard sobs, and knew they were her own.
Around midday, Esme took a break from her work to call her neighbor Holly McKinley. Surely Holly had remembered to pick Sophie up from school, right? Esme flipped photographs of the Amarillo crime scene upside down and waited through one, two, three rings before Holly picked up.
“Well, if it isn’t my favorite crime-fighter,” chirped Holly, probably between swigs of Evian. “How is life down in the Lone Star State?”
“It’s okay. How’s the weather up there? I heard it was supposed to snow.”
They small-talked for a few minutes more, and finally Esme asked to speak with her daughter.
Holly hesitated.
“Oh…she can’t come to the phone right now…”
Esme swallowed hard. “Why’s that?” Her mind became flooded with images of Sophie stranded on the steps of the schoolhouse, Sophie in tears, Sophie all alone.