by Joshua Corin
And so left-wing Democrats like Bob Kellerman could with a clear conscience attend the Unity’s sponsored events, such as a charity football game held in November of last year at the Georgia Dome (not far from MLK Drive), and a benefit one month later at the Amarillo Aquarium. The Unity’s promotion of non-specific family values allowed Governor Kellerman to accept donations from their eleven million subscribers, appear on their list of Contemporary American Saints, and not upset his liberal base.
Well, it had upset someone, and he had a gun.
The Unity for a Better Tomorrow had co-sponsored several other events in the Kellerman campaign, one in Santa Fe, one in Kansas City, and one in Nashville, Tennessee. These would almost definitely be the sniper’s next targets.
Esme had him.
With a grin on her lips, she tugged out her iPod earbuds and rifled through her pocketbook for her phone. It was almost 10:00 p.m. She had expected Tom to call by now—
But her phone was dead. Ah. Well, it stood to reason. She hadn’t recharged it since leaving Long Island. She had been too busy with other things, like solving a multi-state murder spree. What foolish priorities.
She sifted through the clutter of papers against the wall until she found an outlet, and she plugged in her phone. The display lit up, as did the icon for voice mail. She dialed the requisite number and listened:
“You have…three…new messages.
“Message one…received at…6:11 p.m.
“Esme, hi.” It was Rafe. “I…I’m sure you saw my name and are screening my call. I…I don’t blame you. I think back on the way I behaved last night…the way I acted…Esme, I’m so sorry. Just…just please call me back. I miss you terribly.”
Esme sighed. Oh, Rafe. Truth be told, she missed him, too. She could do without his now-and-again spates of self-righteousness, but his intentions were pure. He was only possessive because he cared so much. He never laid a hand on her in anger (and if he ever did, she would jujitsu him into instant regret) and, unlike her parents, he was reliable. He wasn’t going to abandon her, not ever.
She listened to the message again. Had he been crying? She wanted to take him in her arms and hold him close to her breast. Everything was going to be all right. She had solved the case. Soon she would be home with Rafe and Sophie. Spring break was just around the corner. They would go on a vacation. Rafe had an uncle and aunt who lived outside of Glasgow. Sophie would adore Scotland.
“Next message…received at…9:04 p.m.…”
This had to be Tom.
“Hello, Esme!”
Nope. It was Amy Lieb. Couldn’t that busybody leave her in peace for a day? For a single day?
“Today was the Get Out the Vote assembly at the high school. It just wasn’t the same without you here! Your spunky attitude is simply vital to this campaign!”
Esme groaned, and pulled herself into a chair, which caused her to groan even louder. Sitting on the floor for hours on end was not something her thirtysomething body seemed to enjoy.
“Anyway, Esme, I’m calling because who did I run into at the assembly but an old pal from Wellesley who now writes for Newsday and I told her all about you and guess who she wants to interview for this Sunday’s edition? You you you! She’s especially interested in how you made the transition from working for Uncle Sam to a Long Island housewife like the rest of us! She’s big on transitions. I did mention to her how integral a part of the Kellerman campaign here in Oyster Bay you are, so make sure you name-drop us, okay? I hope you have a pen ready. Here’s her digits.”
Esme reached down for her pen, which she’d left on the carpet floor, and thus narrowly dodged the .50 caliber bullet which entered through the conference room’s open doorway and careened with hot purpose toward her skull.
It left a fist-sized gorge in the drywall behind her.
Esme dropped her phone and slipped off her chair. Doing so, she matched gazes with steely-eyed Galileo, who stood twenty feet away in the dimly-lit bullpen, and she watched helplessly as he took aim for a second mortal shot.
10
Esme scrambled to the conference room door and slammed it shut just as the sniper again fired his M107. BAM! The bullet drilled through the door. It missed her face by centimeters; her cheek was sprayed with sawdust. Through the eyeball-sized bullet hole in the door, she spied the sandy-haired man slowly advance toward the room.
Think! She locked the door and searched the room for something defensive, a weapon, anything. But her options were limited to paper. Reams and reams of paper, all of which pointed to the conclusion the man outside the door wouldn’t be deterred for long by a simple lock.
He was here to kill her.
Esme grabbed the conference room table, put all of her weight into her back, and pulled with every ounce of strength inside her body. It inched slowly across the carpet. She would have to drag this massive mahogany table five feet for it to function as a viable barricade at the door. There was no way she’d be able to do that in time. Galileo was already kicking at the door from the other side.
Think, Esme! You were an FBI agent, for Christ’s sake! She once again scoped the room for possibilities. No windows, one door (which shook as the 175+ lbs. of psychosis pounded against it). Undoubtedly the only reason he didn’t just shoot off the lock was fear of a bullet shard ricocheting off the metal and back at him. The laws of physics bought Esme perhaps two minutes.
So she went up. She climbed atop the table and punched up one of the ceiling tiles. People did this in movies all the time. Rectangular panels made of cheap cardboard would support her weight. Wouldn’t they?
She had no time to second-guess. Without a moment to spare, Esme hoisted herself up into the ceiling. Muscles she hadn’t used since high school gym shouted at her to cease and desist, but still she pulled. She weighed, on a good day, 116 lbs. She moderated her breathing and ignored the beads of sweat sliding from her forehead down her eyelids. Lift! Lift!
To her left, the door frame cracked.
Lift!
She managed to get one leg over the wooden plank, then used the plank itself to provide support for her to swing the rest of her body into the ceiling crawlspace. She considered placing the tile back to cover her tracks, but decided against it. Stealth right now was secondary to speed.
The crawlspace was at most two feet high, so “crawlspace” was a bit of a misnomer. Esme slithered from tile to tile through a fog of noxious white dust. From down below she heard the conference room door smack against its jamb. She had no idea where she was in relation to that, but hoped her slithering across old pinewood and thin cardboard was as loud and creaky to the sniper as it was to—
BAM!
A bullet passed between her legs.
She slithered faster than she thought possible. She had no sense of direction and even less a sense of balance, but none of that mattered. Her lizard brain transmitted only one thought: move.
Physics, however, which had been such a pal minutes earlier, chose that moment to switch teams, and mere feet into her mad slithering dash across the crawlspace Esme crashed through a cardboard panel and fell twelve feet down and onto a cherrywood chair in the bullpen. It was Daryl Hewes’s cherrywood chair, and it shattered underneath the weight of her fall.
Something was on her abdomen, pressing against its right side.
Had a piece of the ceiling fallen down with her? She lifted her head a few inches off the floor to see what was causing this strange sensation and beheld a three-inch shard of wood, wet and jagged, protruding from her right abdomen at a thirty-degree angle.
Tears of pain tracked lines down Esme’s dust-coated cheeks. Through a blurry mist, she could make out the shape of a man approaching her. In his hands was a short rifle. Her eyelids fluttered and shut. It was too taxing to keep them open. She felt the hot tip of the gun barrel press against her scalp. He wasn’t taking any chances. He wasn’t going to miss.
She retreated in her mind to her happy place. She retreated in her mind to the
first time she met Tom Piper.
This was before the existence of the task force. Tom was just a decorated field agent, and he and his partner, the irascible Bobby Fink, were on the tail of a loony-tune from Cape Cod who had a habit of kidnapping tourists, bathing them in chum, and tossing them into Buzzards Bay for the sharks to gobble up. Local, county and state officials were quarreling over jurisdiction, so the FBI came in to clean up the mess. But on a boat in Buzzards Bay is not where Esme met Tom. Nor was it at the crime lab in Boston, where intrepid technicians were piecing the McGonquin family together from the stomach contents of a well-fed blue shark. Esme met Tom one week later at Quantico. The Buzzards Bay Butcher had eleven victims to his tally. Tom was outside Assistant Director Trumbull’s office at Quantico waiting to meet with some profilers. Esme was outside AD Trumbull’s office waiting to get fired.
Propped up on Daryl’s desk in the middle of the bullpen, impaled on a sliver of old wood, her breathing ragged, her eyes shut—this was how Esme was going to die. But no bullet, not yet, so her mind flitted from AD Trumbull’s office to the delivery room at LIJ in New Hyde Park, Long Island, seven years ago.
Rafe stood beside her. Rafe held her hand. She had been in labor for eight hours. Rafe hadn’t sat down, not even for a moment, and he hadn’t let go of her hand, not once.
“I love you,” he told her. He wore a beige Oxford shirt. He had come here from work. The sides of his shirt were soiled with perspiration. “I love you too,” she replied. Then the pain came again, her billionth contraction of the day, and she let out a throaty moan, and Rafe squeezed her hand, and their OBGYN spoke and she looked down at him, through a haze of dope and fatigue, and he was smiling, the doctor was smiling, what shiny white teeth he had, and he was standing up from a crouch and there was something in his hands, and Esme thought: oh, it’s a loaf of bread—but that was silly because why would the doctor bring a loaf of bread in the delivery room…maybe it was for her husband, Rafe had to be hungry, but wait, no, no, it wasn’t a loaf of bread at all, because bread didn’t cry, oh, Sophie—
Esme opened her eyes, and was confused. Where was the OBGYN? Where was Rafe? Then the daggers of pain resumed their attack, and with them came the reality of the moment: she was in Amarillo, TX. She was in city hall. She was lying on the remains of Daryl’s computer and she was dead….
Except she wasn’t dead. She hadn’t been shot. She couldn’t move her head but she could shift her eyes, and her eyes took in the room and the sniper wasn’t there. Where had he gone? Why hadn’t he shot her? Had he left her for dead? No, that didn’t make sense. That didn’t fit his methodology. She’d watched him approach her. He intended to kill. He had pressed the barrel of his gun to her scalp. Why hadn’t he pulled the trigger? Why—
But Esme’s mind switched off before she could ask any more reasonable questions.
After Tom aborted the sting, it took the task force and the police fourteen minutes to converge on city hall. Fourteen minutes. Anything could happen in fourteen minutes. And Esme still wasn’t answering her cell phone.
Tom was out of the Mini-Coop before Lilly turned off its engine. He raced up the stone steps. Most everyone else was still coming down from rooftops, but the team in the surveillance van—including the chief of police and Norm Petrosky—met Tom at the front door.
Although city hall closed to the public at six o’clock, an armed guard manned the vestibule 24/7. As Tom and the others marched in, the guard—a forty-three-year-old cowboy named Lyle Costas—stood up from his chair. He recognized the chief of police.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Is it the mayor?”
The chief recognized him too. “Lyle, has anyone been here in the last hour or so?”
“Just that FBI agent on Two. And Officer Milton.”
Tom’s blood froze. “Officer Milton?”
“Sure. He signed in and everything. I even wrote down his badge number.”
As Lyle reached for his clipboard, Tom raced past his desk and toward the marble stairs. He instinctively reached for his gun with his left hand—but his sling held fast and in the confusion almost lost balance on the third step. By then Norm had caught up. His pistol was already drawn. Together, Tom and Norm ascended to the second floor.
Their offices were down the south corridor. Low wattage lighting poured out from the bullpen’s open door. Slowly, the FBI agents approached.
Twenty feet.
Fifteen feet.
Ten feet.
Tom wore boots. Norm wore hard-soled shoes. It wasn’t easy for either of them to tread unheard across the hallway’s ceramic tiles. They made the effort. They were professionals. One of their own was in danger.
Five feet.
I’m going in first, indicated Tom. He held his .45 in his off-hand.
Norm shook his head. Don’t be an idiot, he mouthed.
They didn’t have time to argue. Tom acquiesced.
Norm took the fore. He led with his gun. Tom followed. They could almost peer into the bullpen.
All was quiet.
What if Esme was dead? Try as he might, Tom couldn’t banish the nightmarish possibility from his mind. He had put her in harm’s way before. He put all of his team in harm’s way. It was part of the job. They knew the risks when they joined the FBI. But Esme had left. Esme had gone and become a civilian. He had knowingly, willingly, and selfishly endangered the life of an innocent woman, of a close friend, and for what? He swallowed deep.
Norm turned the corner, and stepped into the room.
“Shit,” he said.
Panicking, Tom joined him in the bullpen. Norm was standing beside Esme’s body. She lay sprawled across Daryl’s chair. The wound in her right side had begun to drip to the floor. A thinner line of blood tracked down the side of her lips.
Norm had his fingers on her jugular.
Despite it all, Tom did his job. His gaze swept across the room for any sign of the killer.
“She’s got a pulse,” said Norm.
Tom headed toward the conference room. It looked like the door had been forced open. Was he deliberately avoiding the sight of Esme, so frail and helpless, so broken? Perhaps he was. He stepped into the conference room, saw the bullet hole in the wall and the ceiling panel out of place. It didn’t take long to piece together the narrative.
But the villain was gone.
Where had he gone? He couldn’t have made it out the front. How many entrances and exits did this building have?
Norm was on the radio. He was calling for an ambulance for Esme. Once he was finished, Tom got on and ordered everyone to sweep the building. Their quarry had to be somewhere. As the Amarillo Police Department swarmed into city hall, Tom considered joining them. It would be yet another excuse not to be near Esme…
No. Enough was enough. Be a man.
He walked toward her body. Her chestnut-brown hair was scattered across her forehead and cheeks. Tom tucked a few loose strands behind one of her ears.
“She has a strong pulse,” said Norm.
Tom nodded. He held her hand.
The EMTs soon came. Carefully, they secured her head in a brace, strapped her into a gurney, and rolled her into the corridor. Tom shadowed them the entire way, and accompanied them into the elevator. Not a word was spoken.
In the vestibule, Tom was stopped by the chief of police.
“There’s a window open,” he said, “in a reception room on the first floor. Looks like that’s how he got out.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“He left this.” The police chief showed Tom a shoe box. Inside the shoe box was Ray Milton’s badge.
The EMTs were halfway to the ambulance. Tom had to hurry if he wanted to catch up.
“Where are you going?” the police chief asked. “You need to stay here.”
The cop was right. Tom’s responsibilities were here. This was now a crime scene, and he the lead investigator. To leave now would be negligent. There was nothing he could do for Esme.
But T
om put Norm in charge and left anyway.
He reached the ambulance just as the medics were about to shut the doors. They knew who he was. They let him in.
Esme remained unconscious.
Unconscious was good, decided Tom. That meant she wasn’t aware of any pain. Maybe she was even dreaming. Again he held her hand. She was like a daughter to him, and she was unconscious.
His mind retreated into memory, to the first time they met.
He was back at AD Trumbull’s office at Quantico to enlist help in profiling the Buzzards Bays Butcher. He smiled at the young woman listening to her Discman and waiting in the Trumbull’s sparse anteroom, and he took a seat. He had the red case file on his lap. According to the secretary, Trumbull was on the phone with the deputy director. It was more than likely.
The young woman removed her headphones.
“So,” she said, “you’re Tom Piper.”
“I am.”
“And you’re here about the Buzzards Bay Butcher.”
“Yes.”
“Me, too.”
Tom frowned. “Do I know you?”
She held out her hand. “Esme Shepherd. GS-10.”
GS-10 was the lowest pay grade for a Bureau agent to have. This woman was either a recent graduate or a tremendous fool.
“Special Agent Shepherd, I’m curious. In what way are you connected to the case?”
“I read the file.”
Again, Tom frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“You sent a copy here by courier for the assistant director to peruse.”
“Mmm-hmm…”
“Well…I read it.”
“Is your name on the case?”
“No, sir.”
“Then how did you get a copy?”
“You sent it by courier for—”
“How did you get to read it?”
“I intercepted the copy.”
Tom was no longer on the fence re: recent graduate/absolute fool. “Why did you do that?”