by Joshua Corin
Even when she slept, her face was clenched in pain.
Rafe was halfway to the stairs when she called out his name.
“Hi,” he said. “I thought you were asleep.”
“What time is it?” she yawned.
“It’s late. Go back to sleep.”
They stared at each other through abject darkness, their faces painted with shadows.
“Lilly Toro died.”
“I saw. Did you know her?”
“Kellerman’s coming to Oyster Bay.”
“It’s all the buzz at the college,” Rafe replied. “It’s heartening to see some of the undergrads showing some enthusiasm for a change.”
His drooping eyelids betrayed his own enthusiasm, but those faithful shadows fortunately concealed his tipsy exhaustion from his wife.
“No, you don’t understand.” She tried to sit up, despite the obvious pain that entailed. “Kellerman is linked to Galileo. We’re practically inviting a serial killer to our home. For Christ’s sake, he was a janitor at an elementary school in Atlanta! Sophie… God…”
He took a step forward, out of the safety of the shadows and toward the woman on the couch. She needed comforting. He reached for her hands. “Esme, our daughter’s not in danger. We’re not in danger. Maybe you should discuss this with your therapist. I’m sure—”
“How can you be willing to take that chance?” Esme slapped his hands away. “Don’t you care?”
“You’re asking me if I care? Honey, I’m not the one who turned my back on my family and went gallivanting off to Texas. I think the last thing you have the right to accuse me of at this moment is where my priorities are.”
“Which is why you spent tonight at a bar, instead of home with your—”
Rafe held up his hands and walked away. He was done with this conversation. But first, he made sure to stop in on Sophie. His little angel. How dare Esme accuse him of not caring? When she was pregnant, he had had his doubts about his abilities as a father. He knew he could provide financially, but what about emotionally? So many men seemed to instinctually know how to do the right thing for their children—would he? And when he saw her in the delivery room, all 7 lbs. 8 oz., when he saw his eyes staring back at him from that tiny perfect face, all doubt vanished from his core, and he suddenly knew that he would die for this being, who was only one minute old, he would die for her. How dare Esme accuse him of not caring. As he carefully, quietly, shut Sophie’s door and passed down the hall into his own room, he was glad, maybe for the first time in his marriage, that he wouldn’t be sharing his bed with his wife.
17
After removing Tom Piper and his task force from the case, the Powers That Be unilaterally rejected Esme’s theory and shifted their manpower from Santa Fe to San Francisco. By March 14 the Bay Area was teeming with federal agents. Someone must have seen something useful, even if the FBI had to question, as AD Trumbull had so tritely put it, “every Chin in Chinatown.” The FBI had abandoned Santa Fe for San Francisco, and that was a shame because Galileo had abandoned San Francisco for Santa Fe, and on March 18 he struck.
Andy Longtree, superintendent of the Santa Fe Public Schools, had the not-so-intelligent idea of holding the spring faculty development (mandatory attendance) on the morning after St. Patrick’s Day. While the city’s students got the day off, the city’s teachers had to rouse themselves out of their hangovers and down to Peralta High School’s auditorium. As they filed in, some gazed bleary-eyed at the banners on the gym’s walls, boasting the achievements of SFHS’s mighty Demons. They staggered down the aisles and sat in the soft red seats, coffee in hand, profanity in check.
Andy Longtree stood by the doors, welcoming by name those he recognized, waving at those he didn’t. Peralta High School was the gem in his crown, the city’s first new high school in thirty years and built on his prodding and under his watch. Santa Fe was not a wealthy city by any means, but its increasingly diverse population required increasingly more space, and their children deserved an education. Sacrifices were made, teacher raises were put on hold, donations from questionable sources were accepted, animosities rose to epic levels, but Peralta High School was built, damn it, and it was mighty fine. Sometimes, late at night, he fantasized that, after his death, the city would rename Peralta High School after him. Right now it was named after a Spanish governor from the seventeenth century. Andrew Longtree High School—now that had a much better ring to it, didn’t it?
Andy knew his faculty had spent the previous night drinking, but he didn’t drink, so he didn’t care. March 18 fell squarely in the middle of the second half of the school year, and therefore made for an excellent date for their state-mandated faculty development. If anyone wanted to complain, he was more than happy to listen. It wouldn’t change his mind, but he was astute enough to know that an administrator with the illusion of flexibility was much easier to swallow than one with no outward flexibility at all.
Nine o’clock inched closer and closer, so Andy began his stroll to the stage. In the enclosed lighting booth to the rear of the auditorium, two students readied the lighting cues. Since the computer did most of the work, it really was a one-student job, but Gwen didn’t want to be lonely, so she asked her friend Ric to tag along. They both sat on stools. A long keyboard operated the computer, which displayed a series of numbers on a small square screen. These numbers indicated levels of light. Gwen joined the AV club so she could get out of phys ed. Ric tagged along with her so he could get laid. Both the dimness and the isolation of the lighting booth were in his favor. Now if only he could convince Gwen to take their relationship to the next step.
The superintendent took the stage. The house lights lowered, and then so did the audience chatter. All very Pavlovian, thought Andy. He had been a psych major in college, oh, so many moons ago. It was the love of a woman that sent him through grad school for his education degree. Marlene’s family didn’t abide “headshrinkers” but they were fond of teachers, being that they all taught at the city schools, and Andy was fond of Marlene, so he did his additional two years at the University of New Mexico, got a posting at Santa Fe High School, and much to his surprise found he liked it.
Marlene ran off to Seattle with a stockbroker. Andy still ate Sunday dinner with her family. He dated occasionally, but never found anyone to replace Marlene. No one ever could. He worked his way up from science teacher to department chair, let the city pay him to get a Ph.D., and was principal of SFHS by the time he was forty. It was Marlene’s family, tenured and well-connected as they were, who got him anointed superintendent. Marlene still lived in Seattle. She was divorced, had two kids and ran a Starbucks. They exchanged Christmas cards.
Andy stepped up to the lectern. It always felt like the first day of school when he began one of these events. He surveyed the crowd of 200-plus public school teachers. Because the lights were on him and not them, he couldn’t make out any of the faces. All the better—most of them were probably scowling.
He began:
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’d like to take this opportunity to…”
Back in the lighting booth, Gwen was setting up the film. According to the schedule she had been given, in fifteen minutes the superintendent would leave the stage. That was her cue to lower the movie screen and start the projector.
“So,” whispered Ric, “what do you want to do for fifteen minutes?”
Gwen slid a chunky textbook out of her bookbag. “Can you help me with my econ homework?”
Ric helped her with her econ homework. He was a nice guy. He should have known better than to expect paradise. Nice guys were admired for their sympathetic smiles and for their cry-worthy shoulders. Any body part lower than the shoulders never even registered with members of the opposite sex.
Back onstage, Andy Longtree had entered the difficult middle portion of his address. This was where he deviated from the pleasantries and dealt out the hard truths. Yes, curricula would continue to be tailored (in other words:
lowered) to meet federal guidelines. No, there wouldn’t be any new hires. Yes, average classroom sizes would remain at thirty-five students. No, there wouldn’t be any new desks. He seeded his conclusion with the obligatory optimism:
“One of the first settlers of this great land, William Bradford, once said that ‘all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties.’ You are the settlers of the future and your students’ minds are your fields. Plant well. Plant integrity. Plant ambition. Plant knowledge. Raise a good crop, ladies and gentlemen, and the harvest will feed the world. This is your mandate. This is your gift. Thank you.”
The applause was halfhearted, but Andy didn’t mind. He wasn’t saying anything the good ones didn’t already know and the bad ones didn’t already ignore. C’est la vie.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen, for the next item on our agenda. Due to recent events in Albuquerque which will remain un-discussed, the state has required all public school instructors to watch a twenty-minute video on sexual harassment.”
Groan, moan, hiss.
“After the video, there will be a short recess, and then we will commence with our 11:00 a.m. sessions, as detailed in your packets.”
Andy strolled to the wings of the stage. In the lighting booth, Gwen flicked a switch and a large white movie screen whirred down, almost touching the lectern the superintendent had been using moments ago. She dimmed the rest of the lights, pressed a button, and the projector beamed “Sexual Harassment and You” above the heads of the crowd, through the dust of the auditorium, and onto the large white screen.
A pair of plastic windows peeked out from the lighting booth to the auditorium. One of them was closed, but one was still open. Ric used this opportunity to shut the open window. Now he and Gwen had total privacy. The lights were as low as they were going to get. Only one door led into or out of the booth and it was closed. A video about sex (sort of) was flickering in the background. If this was not the perfect setting for romance, he didn’t know what was.
“Gwen,” he said, “why don’t we take a break from econ?”
She looked up at him. Her eyes were hazel. Ric dreamt about those eyes. He once wrote a poem about those eyes.
“A break?” she asked, and he leaned forward and—
The only door that led into the booth opened, and a middle-aged man rolled in with a plastic trash bin.
“Oh, sorry,” he muttered, “I didn’t realize anyone was in here.”
“It’s okay,” replied Gwen. “Don’t mind us.”
He offered them a short, shy smile, and went about his duties.
Gwen glanced back at Ric.
“What were we talking about again?”
Ric shifted on his stool. He couldn’t do this with the custodian in the room! He glared over at the gray man and watched him reach into the gray bin. The man’s eyes flitted up and met Ric’s. There was sadness in the man’s eyes. Ric immediately felt sorry for him, but then the man removed his hands from the bin and they held a shoe box and Ric wondered why he had a shoe box in his bin, wasn’t that funny, and the man placed the shoe box next to the sound system, gently, the way one lays an injured bird back in its nest.
“What’s in the shoe box?” asked Ric.
Gwen, whose attention had wandered back to her econ textbook, looked to see what Ric was talking about, and was just in time to see the custodian reach back into his bin for his next surprise.
With respectful care, Galileo laid the teenagers’ bodies side by side on the floor, and then he perched up on one of the stools. He slid open one of the plastic windows and spied out on the oblivious crowd. His rifle was loaded. He was ready.
On the screen, a fat man in a brown blazer was flirting with a young woman. The young woman was dressed in a conservative pantsuit. They were twenty feet tall, which made their bad acting and stilted dialogue loom large. A few of the teachers, those who were actually paying attention, snickered at the silliness. The vast majority of the audience, though, was ignoring the visual antics and was using the time—and ambient light provided by the movie—to grade papers. There was no shame in this; after all, it wasn’t like they were playing hooky. They were using school time to do schoolwork.
As in any group, there were cliques. The largest classification was by school. Santa Fe had twenty elementary schools, four middle schools, and three high schools. In these large pockets were further subdivisions by race, gender and even style. The preppies hung out with the preppies. The hippies hung out with the hippies. The newbies congregated away from the veterans. The history teachers kept to themselves, and the science teachers kept to themselves. And, as in any group, there were the outsiders, who kept to themselves because they were left to themselves. They either dressed different or looked different or smelled different…it was an old story and it didn’t just change when one graduated from one side of the desk to the other. Naturally, these outsiders filled the seats along the walls of the auditorium, a protective aisle demarcating them from the rest of humanity. They were unseen, even amongst themselves.
Their deaths went as unnoticed as their lives. That’s why they were the first targets. When Joffrey Davis, a forty-year-old physics instructor with bad dandruff in his receding hair, suddenly slumped over, no one thought twice about it. When Linda Perelman, a twenty-two-year-old substitute teacher whose terminal shyness only went into remission when she was around little children, when her gradebook slid out of her hands and slapped against the auditorium floor, when she subsequently joined it on the floor, no one even cared. The few who saw her on the floor chalked it up to that weird new teacher deciding to take a nap. It was the morning after St. Patrick’s Day.
Although how could anyone sleep with a movie this loud? Andy Longtree, still standing in the wings, concluded that the incompetent A/V students must have set the volume too high, and he exited through the side door to confront them in the lighting booth. It was Galileo, of course, who had raised the volume. Eventually his actions would be discovered—that was part of his plan too—but he wanted to delay that inevitability for as long as he could.
That turned out to be twenty more seconds. Sanjay Patel, a middle school art teacher, was Victim #9. Patty Rice taught at the same middle school as Sanjay and thus sat near him—in her case, in front of him—and suddenly noticed that the back of her neck was moist. She ran her fingers across it and in the shimmering glow provided by the film she could tell the moisture was dark, and that it was blood. She turned around in her seat and found herself face-to-face with the top of Sanjay’s scalp. Blood snaked out from his forehead to the floor in one thin, steady drip.
Patty screamed, and then her brains shuttled out the back of her head, but enough people nearby had heard her screams before they were abbreviated and therefore saw her get shot and that was the ball game. More screams now in the darkened theater, the sound passing from person to person like contagion. Some stood and ran. Others crashed to the floor to hide. Others still froze in their seats.
They were ducks in a shooting gallery, and they fell one by one. Keith Henshaw pushed a pregnant colleague aside only to get a bullet between the eyes. Ingrid Yolen tried to push Keith Henshaw out of harm’s way, but when he died his large bulk fell to her, and in keeping his body from toppling undignified to the ground, she was stuck in place long enough to fall into the crosshairs herself. Department chairs rounded up the teachers in their employ and directed them to the exits in the rear. In crises, those accustomed to lead did what was most familiar.
Nancy Pasternak, who worked here at Peralta High, saw the congestion at the rear of the auditorium, and decided to be smart. She knew that the rear exits were not the only way out. There also were the doors off stage left. She ran against the flow of the crowd and climbed on to the stage to make her rapid departure. Up there on the stage, in front of the movie screen, she made the perfect target, and Galileo took her down easily, and decided to call it a day. Expediently, he turned around to leave—just as the door to the ligh
ting booth opened.
During Andy Longtree’s stroll here from backstage, as he readied himself to abrade the volume-happy A/V crew, he had heard the screams. He had no idea what was going on, but suspected to find something amiss in here, not necessarily two students dead and a janitor with a rifle, but he was prepared for anything. He always was prepared for anything. So when the janitor raised his gun and took aim, Andy grabbed a nearby wrench and threw it at the gunman. It clattered against Galileo’s right hand, and the rifle rolled out to the floor. He glared at the superintendent. Andy’s hands balled into fists. The fight was on.
But it didn’t last long. Andy threw the first punch, and Galileo ably dodged out of the way. He used his opponent’s momentum against him, and shoved him into the lighting board. Before Andy could turn around, Galileo was sending jabs to his lower back, knuckles aimed squarely at the superintendent’s kidneys. Andy’s hands found Gwen’s econ textbook, left open on the table, and gripped it for dear life. With all the strength and fierceness he could muster, he spun around with the textbook. Luck was on his side. He walloped Galileo in the nose.
The gunman began to bleed.
Andy readied a second blow, but Galileo just reached down to his ankle, removed the Beretta he’d used to kill Darcy Parr, and shoved its barrel against his rival’s chin.
That’s not fair, thought Andy, and then he didn’t think at all.
Galileo holstered his pistol and picked up his rifle. His right hand throbbed and his nose was oozing plasma. It was time to go. He tossed the rifle back into the garbage bin and rolled it toward the door.
By now, almost everyone had made their way to the parking lot. The police were on their way. Some cried. Some searched for friends and acquaintances. Where was Nancy Pasternak? Had anyone seen Nancy Pasternak? Some just stared back at the school, horror-stricken.