While Galileo Preys

by Joshua Corin

  What if he saw her? What if he had spotted her up there, on the steps, by the door? She had seen him. It stood to reason that he could have seen her. He could even have followed her here into this isolated restroom…

  No. That’s the anxiety talking. He hadn’t seen her. His attention had been fixed on Kellerman. She was okay. Well, no, she wasn’t, she was far from okay, her brain had initiated a code-red for her heart, lungs, stomach and limbs, but it would pass. Eventually.

  And pass it did. Three hours later. By then, her legs were painfully cramped from crouching and her head swam with oxygen overload. She pulled herself to her feet and exited the stall. Sproul Hall had returned to its regularly scheduled programming of undergrads, junk food and laughter. Lilly walked outside into the sun, and the tranquil blue sky. It was hard to believe this day had begun with rain and lightning. But so much had changed since she’d woken up. She wondered about the cat on the porch.

  She wondered who she should call.

  Her gut instinct was to phone her boss at the Chronicle. She had spotted a serial killer at a rally in Berkeley. If ever there was news, this was it, and it would certainly be an exclusive. She could parlay this tidbit into a suspension of her suspension. It was a far more palatable and dignified pathway than the gambit of the Outrageous Question. And in this instance, her goings-on in Amarillo, her face-to-face with Galileo, added credibility rather than subtracted it. The irony was delicious.

  Or she could call Tom Piper. She could alert him to what she saw. His task force needed to know this information, didn’t they? Although she was positive that if she did call Tom and relay what she’d witnessed, he would demand she not tell anyone else, especially the Chronicle.

  So which would it be? The lady or the tiger? The paper or the feds?

  She took out her phone, made her decision and dialed the number.

  14

  Esme awoke to an empty house. Once again her painkillers had caused her to oversleep and miss breakfast. Sophie was long gone by now, and so was Rafe. Even Lester appeared to be gone, probably off on one of his errands. What the old man did with his time was a mystery.

  What Esme did with her time was obsess about Galileo.

  She had already filled up the margins of her Sudoku books with her theories and hypotheses. She even included the conjectures made by all those pop psychologists which CNN and MSNBC and Fox seemed to stock in endless supply. But no matter how much mileage she gained from their hypotheses (“Galileo is lashing out at authority figures because he was abused as a child,” “Galileo uses a sniper rifle because he is afraid of confrontation,” etc.), it all, for her, came back to one unaddressed, unanswered question: why had she been spared?

  She turned on the TV and caught up on the latest non-news the networks had to report, but she couldn’t stomach any punditry right now. With considerable effort, she roused herself from the sofa—a long-taloned finger jabbed at the small of her back. Oh, God. But this was typical now, with every morning, and she reflexively reached for the amber vial of Percocet on the coffee table. She already had a half-empty glass of water next to it, ready to help chase down the 325mg white pills. Two of those little guys and the jabbing finger of death would go far, far away…for at least six to seven hours.

  Ah, the easy road.

  So little was easy these days, why not take advantage? The doctor wouldn’t have prescribed them if he didn’t think they were necessary. Esme was a big fan of progress. If modern medicine could make pain optional, so be it. She held the pills in one hand and the glass of water in another…

  The front door opened, and Lester stomped indoors. The old man wore hiking boots, jeans, and a plaid shirt—every day that Esme had known him. All he needed was an ax slung over his shoulder and a pet blue ox by his side.

  “Morning,” he said. “Just get up? Sophie tried to wake you up earlier to say hi, but I guess you must’ve been having a nice dream.”

  Esme put down the glass and pills. The talon poked and poked at her back. So be it. “Good morning, Lester.”

  He wandered into the kitchen. “It’s almost noon, so I’m going to fix myself a sandwich. Want me to make you some flapjacks or something?”

  “I’m fine. Thank you.”

  “Well, if you want to go back to sleep, you can. Your therapist’s appointment’s not ’til four. I gassed up the Caddie while I was out. Wouldn’t believe how much more expensive it is down here on the Island.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If you’re running low on pills, we can refill your prescription while we’re out.”

  She watched him slap some ham between two slices of wheat bread. He lathered on some mustard too. Her stomach keened, but she suppressed it. She was not going to share a meal with her father-in-law, not if she could help it.

  Her cell phone sat on the coffee table, next to the pills and water. She unhooked it from its recharger and checked for messages.

  Tom still hadn’t called her back.

  Well, she reasoned, he probably was busy. For all she knew, he was in a hotbox right now with Galileo, interrogating a full confession out of the madman. Tom could do it. It had been good to see him again, to work with him, albeit briefly. It had felt so right, and now everything felt so wrong.

  From the kitchen came a belch, which meant Lester had finished his sandwich. How considerate of him to announce his satisfaction after every meal. Sophie sure got a kick out of it.

  Sophie.

  It was the thought of her daughter that got Esme, finally, to her feet. She baby-stepped to the bathroom, contemplated emptying the pills down the toilet, decided that was a tad too dramatic and instead just tossed the vial into the trash.

  “If you need me,” called Lester, “I’ll be in my room.”

  She listened to him clomp down the hall and waited until she heard the door to the guest bedroom shut before she baby-stepped back out into the living room, and slowly, very slowly, made her way to the kitchen. It was just part of the process, as her therapist reminded her. She had to retrain her muscles, and these things took time. Perhaps weeks. Perhaps months. Perhaps longer.

  She spent the first few minutes in the kitchen searching for her strawberry Nutri-Grain breakfast bars. One of Lester’s habits, one of many, was rearranging the contents of the pantry. Esme finally found her box buried behind the chunky peanut butter. She took out two bars, poured herself a glass of orange juice, and ate standing up. Sitting in a chair apparently put too much pressure on her back. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d just sat without excruciating pain. This made operating her PC nigh impossible. It sat unused on her desk, growing a hat of dust.

  Fuck it.

  She limped over to her computer and depressed its sunken On button. The motor hummed to life. In a few minutes, she would be able to escape the confines of her invalidity and soar (or at least surf). And she’d also be able to learn what the blogosphere was speculating about Galileo. Any clues—no matter how half-baked—fed her obsession. The Windows welcome screen appeared and she leaned down to sit in her chair—every neuron along her right side exploded at once. Her entire body flooded with pain, drowned in it. She missed the seat entirely and landed on the carpet and arched back as far as her brace would allow, mouth open in a silent scream. She couldn’t move, couldn’t shift her body into a better position, couldn’t imagine a better position, couldn’t imagine anything but the complete and total searing which engulfed her.

  She stayed there on the carpet, twisted up, for minutes. She became aware of her fingertips on the carpet and concentrated on that tactile sensation. Her legs slowly kicked, as if she were climbing a ladder. She reminded herself to breathe. It was just like giving birth, except without the birth and with all the pain. The world came into focus. The computer screen came into focus. All the little icons on her desktop came into focus. They were so close, yet so far away.

  Biting down on her lower lip, she used the chair to pull herself up. That seemed to enrage her neurons even m
ore, if possible. But she mustered every ounce of positive energy left in the niches of her being to make her way across the ocean of her living room and to her bathroom. With great concentration, she managed to bend her knees, reach into the wastepaper basket, and rescue her vial of pills. The glass of water was still on the coffee table, miles and miles away. She didn’t need it. She emptied four pills into her palm and swallowed them dry. She placed the vial next to the bathroom sink, closed the door for privacy, and laid herself down on the cold tile floor. Oh, those angry neurons relaxed at the touch of the cold tiles, and soon the Percocet took effect and they simply fell asleep. And so did she.

  This was not the first time Esme had suffered a major injury. When she was five years old, she’d shattered three bones in her left hand. She had no recollection of this, but her parents had held on to the little plaster cast—which was signed by everyone at the shelter they were staying at the time—and when she turned eleven and broke a collarbone falling off the jungle gym at school, her parents stayed with her all night in the hospital and brought the little plaster cast with them and showed it to her—and to anyone within eyesight—and regaled her with stories of her childhood and their childhood until she’d forgotten about the pain in her collarbone, and then until she fell asleep.

  When she was sixteen, she broke the same collarbone when she fell down a flight of stairs. In her defense, the stairs had just been waxed and the custodian had forgotten to put out a sign. Again she found herself laid up in the hospital, and again her parents brought out the little hand cast from when she was five. They held the cast to her teenage hand and marveled at the size difference.

  Then she turned eighteen and went off to college and her parents disappeared, and with them went the little plaster cast. So it’s no wonder that as she lay on the bathroom floor of her house in Long Island, as she lay still in a hazy stupor after a brief drug-induced nap, her mind went back to that cast. Not a day passed when Esme didn’t think about her parents, but she hadn’t thought about that little cast in years. She could visualize it now, though, and the dozens of illegible messages scrawled across it in black ink and blue ink and red ink by her parents’ friends (though none by her friends—for at five years old she’d had no friends to speak of—she’d been too shy). She imagined the messages to be tattoos, and the cast to be an old skin she had slinked out of by the time she was six. How she longed to slide back into that skin now…

  But self-pity was pointless. She wiped at her eyes, trying to scrub away the blurry Percocet haze. What she needed was to get out of this house. No overexertions. Everything in moderation. Baby steps. The sooner she recovered, the sooner she could put all this behind her. The sooner her father-in-law could hightail it back upstate. The sooner she could really get back on the case.

  But first, she had to get off the floor.

  Easier said than done. Her muscles were jelly, and jelly didn’t respond well to motivation. She slapped her thighs to wake them up. They replied with a sheepish smirk and went back to ignoring their mistress.

  “Damn it,” she mumbled. Even her words sounded cloudy. Could words evaporate? As she pondered this thought, her eyelids started to flutter and shut. Maybe a few more winks of slumber wouldn’t hurt. She could be proactive tomorrow. There was no law that said she had to—

  Stop. Don’t be a lazy twit. Think of Sophie. Think of Rafe. Get your narcoleptic ass in gear. Open those eyes. Open them. Good. Now reach for the sink and pull yourself up. Pull yourself—okay, maybe reach for the doorknob instead. Baby steps. Good. Now pull. Pull. Lift with your arms, stupid, not your back. Good.

  Now for some positive reinforcement.

  She teetered out of the bathroom and past the couch—which looked so soft and welcoming—and made her way to the desk. The computer monitor displayed the old school screensaver she’d downloaded a few months ago: dozens of toaster ovens, winged, flying from left to right. She reached for the top of her CPU, where her iPod was synched to her computer. She hadn’t listened to it since Amarillo. The TV commentators had provided soundtrack enough.

  She fished the earbuds out and tucked each into an ear. Her thumb scrolled through the player’s many albums. Whatever music she selected had to be upbeat. No Joy Division, no Smiths. Baby steps.

  ABBA. “Waterloo.”

  Perfect on so many levels.

  She pressed Play, and let the Swedes’ goofy, over-dubbed, three-minute pop masterpiece saturate and awaken every fiber inside her. She let each muscle group yawn and smile. Time to get back in the game, folks. The clock by the computer read 12:56 p.m. Perfect. The mail usually arrived by now.

  Overexertion had recently landed her supine and in pain—so she patiently inched toward the front door. Her feet were bare, her pajamas were sweat-stained, her bandage made her look like she’d been gored by a Pamplona bull, but what did it matter? So what if any of her neighbors saw her? They all knew what had happened down in Amarillo. The entire country knew what had happened in Amarillo. In the first few weeks, the media had tried to make a story of it, but then some Hollywood starlet was caught in flagrante delicto with a quarterback for UCLA and that was a much, much juicier steak to chew.

  “Waterloo” segued into “Take a Chance on Me”—a song even more vibrant and sunny—and Esme wanted to pet her iPod. Good boy. Instead, she opened the front door. It was a cool, cloudy day, perfect for a nap…but no matter. The mail waited. One foot and then the other…

  The front steps were made of cement. Cold cement. Esme felt a shiver travel up her spine, which meant her neurons were beginning to reawaken. Terrific. She left the front door open and padded down the steps to her grassy lawn. The blades tickled with each step. She tried to walk in beat with ABBA but their tempo was too fast, and her tempo was too restricted. So be it.

  The mailbox was fifteen feet away. Esme focused on every step. The late winter breeze fluttered through her cotton pajamas. She should have put on a coat. No matter. The mail waited. One foot and then the other…

  Maybe Rafe was right.

  Wait—where did that come from? Maybe Rafe was right? Right about what? Esme paused in her journey, and her subconscious realization crystallized into substance. Rafe had chastened and chastised her about Amarillo. He had been a brute. But if anyone was entitled to crow “I told you so,” it was him, and he hadn’t. Not to her, at least.

  Maybe he was right all along. Maybe she shouldn’t have gone to Amarillo. Maybe her place was here, and now, and the universe was punishing her for not letting go of the past. After all, it was when she’d gone to the computer, when her curiosity had propelled her to act beyond her limits, that she’d fallen. The universe was telling her something and she needed to listen.

  And besides, Esme concluded, it was obvious her margin-crammed theories about Galileo were flawed. Perhaps the killer just liked cities that began with the letter A. It was as solid (and silly) an hypothesis, wasn’t it? No wonder Tom wasn’t returning her calls. Best to shrug it all off. Take that weight and let it tumbleweed away. She didn’t need it anymore. She recommenced her journey, as the cascading pianos of “Dancing Queen” washed her clean.

  Despite the cool temperature outside, by the time she reached the mailbox her forehead was beaded with sweat. It didn’t matter. It was time for her reward. She hinged the squeaky lid, reached inside, and found…

  …one letter. That was it. One stinking letter. Better be a good one. Better be from Ed McMahon announcing she’s just won…but no. It was from Amy Lieb. It was an invitation to a party she was having next month, a fundraiser for her idol, Bob Kellerman. Esme weighed her likelihood of attendance: somewhere between a snowball’s chance in hell and when pigs would…

  Wait.

  She read the invitation again, searching the fine print, and there it was, right at the bottom: “co-sponsored by the League of Women Voters, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Democratic Party of Long Island, and the Unity for a Better Tomorrow.”

  Just like Atlan
ta and Amarillo.

  She pushed through her pain and trekked back to the house. She hoped her phone had fully charged, because she had a lot of calls to make.

  15

  “So,” said Tom, “what do we know?”

  “Not a lot,” replied Norm. He was navigating the wide streets of downtown Omaha, Nebraska, in their rental, a white Geo minivan. According to the dashboard GPS-navigation, they were five minutes (and two left turns) away from their destination.

  “Let’s go through the list.”

  “It’s not really a list.”

  The rest of the task force was in Santa Fe, working with the New Mexico state police in setting up a dragnet for the at-large sniper. It all tied back to Esme’s insight linking the crime scenes to rallies held by the Unity for a Better Tomorrow, which was headquartered in…Omaha, Nebraska. It had taken Tom the better part of two weeks to arrange a meeting with Donald Chappell, the Unity’s co-founder and erstwhile spiritual leader. Apparently, they were not fond of federal inquiries.

  In the meantime, he was dodging calls from Esme. It’s not that he felt threatened by Rafe or believed those accusations of selfish disregard had been accurate…but still…in the realm of the conscious, and the conscience, especially Tom’s, sometimes possibility outweighed probability.

  “I’ll start with the facts,” said Norm.

  “Good place as any.”

  “He’s a trained sharpshooter. Where did he acquire his training? Is he ex-army? We don’t know. According to ballistics, he uses an M107. Organizations which employ the M107 include the NYPD, the U.S. Coast Guard, and IRA. So what we’re looking for is a seafaring Irish ex-cop.”