Before Cain Strikes Page 18

  Thinking about ovens reminded him of Timothy, and thus his obligations. Oh, yes, he had to best the FBI, not only out of spite but vengeance. But what was the solution? What was the plan?

  Maybe the answer lay in Aisle 3.

  Or maybe not. Aisle 3 was gardening supplies, and Cain42 loathed gardening so much that he’d never even buried a body, not one, not even for the experience. There probably was some psychological source for his aversion to gardening, but Cain42, for the life of him, couldn’t pinpoint it. To be sure, Aisle 3 did have its gems. Lost among the noise of seed packets and miracle-grow sprays and aerosol insect repellants were a pair of un-boxed pruning snips that he just had to take off the shelf and hold in his hands. The snips were almost as dainty as sewing scissors but could just as easily cut through a stubborn twig or a human pinkie. And here, at the end of the aisle, were the long arms of gardening: the rakes and shovels and hoes. Cain42 once monitored a lively debate on the message board about the merits of a shovel versus the merits of a hoe. In the end, the two connoisseurs agreed to disagree. All the while, Cain42 had hoped someone would chime in a word or two in defense of a weeder or a rake, but, alas, no.

  Would any of these tools be of use in his retaliation against the FBI? It didn’t seem likely. Aside from the appropriate metaphor—the Feds were very much weeds in his garden—nothing here jumped out at him as being especially apropos, although he did keep the pruning snips in his hand as he turned the corner to Aisle 4.

  Hunting supplies.

  Here Cain42 pored over the usual assortment of jackets—all in bright colors so you don’t accidentally get mistaken for a deer, ha-ha—and snares and traps. An old man, even more skeletal than the punk-haired clerk up front, stood planted in this aisle and appeared to be entranced by a packet of multicolored smoke bombs. A thin clear tube trailed down from his nostrils, snaked around his left arm, and found its destination in an oxygen tank, one of those small portable ones on wheels. For all his imagination, Cain42 couldn’t guess what use this man might have for a packet of multicolored smoke bombs. Perhaps the old man had no idea what he was seeing. Perhaps dementia was pilfering his eyesight, just as whatever evil had so obviously stolen off with his lungs.

  And yet euthanasia was verboten. Cain42 glanced down at the pruning snips held tightly in his right hand and then shook his head in disgust. Would he end up someday in the aisle of a store, drooling whatever saliva he had left in his bony craw? Men like him, if they were lucky, if they managed to be tried during a left-leaning election year and capital punishment was kept off the table, were nearly guaranteed to spend their autumn years behind bars. But this was before the website. This was before he began teaching amateurs around the country—around the world, even—how to avoid capture. What kind of legacy would be left if he himself ended up in prison? No, better to be trapped inside the prison of one’s own body, like this pitiful old man and his pet oxygen tank, than spend a day inside a cell. And if, in his old age, in his senility, Cain42 slipped up and revealed to some hospice nurse an example of his darker deeds, well, so what? The government wasn’t about to lock up an octogenarian. The way Cain42 saw it, if he adhered to the rules of safety he had established, he had a good forty years left of healthy mayhem.

  Just as soon as he took care of this niggling problem of the FBI.

  He didn’t even have to peer into Aisle 5 to know what it held. It had to be the miscellaneous tools, the hammers and handsaws and screwdrivers and chisels and drills and levels and rulers and knives and wrenches and mauls and perhaps even an ax or two. Well, look—a stack of single-bit axes balanced on a pair of nails, well above the reach of a child but easily within reach of Cain42’s fingers. How he loved employing bladed death. His favorite weapon, his handy survival knife, was tucked into its leather sheath under the back of his shirt, but who could argue with the efficacy of an ax? So simple in design and yet so mighty in action! With the proper aim, he could cleave that punk-haired bitch up front from scalp to hip and then watch each half of her body part and then fall its separate way. Or did that only happen in cartoons? Hmm. Experimentation would be required.

  But not right now. His priorities were fixed. He was not here for fun. He was here to contemplate, to muse, to…

  Wait.

  With a curious smirk, Cain42 stepped back into Aisle 4. The old man hadn’t budged. He and his oxygen tank remained statuelike in front of the smoke bombs. And thus the wheels in Cain42’s mind began to whir…

  As he headed toward the old man, Cain42 tried to remember the last time he’d been to New York. No matter. He was sure the subways hadn’t changed that much.

  Oh, his friends were going to love this.

  On Thursday, November 18, exactly one week before Thanksgiving, Tom Piper cracked the Hoboken case. Sort of. This came after a splendid night on the town with his lady love. They shared a corned-beef-on-rye sandwich that must have weighed more than a pound and saw, at Penelope Sue’s behest, Mamma Mia, which Tom made fun of so effusively the rest of the evening that it was clear he’d actually enjoyed it. They shared a slice of chocolate cheesecake for dessert, which also must have weighed more than a pound, and returned to their hotel room for an enthusiastic round of midnight nookie.

  Before heading out to Hoboken that following morning to (unbeknownst to him at the time) crack the case (sort of), he made his daily stop at the Federal Building to check on the status of Mineola’s hard work.

  Including the shot of Lynette Robinson and the shot of the three human-headed mannequins, there were forty thumbnails on that cached website page. The last time he’d called in, she’d identified twelve of them. On that Thursday morning, November 18, a good two hours before Tom cracked the Hoboken case (sort of), Mineola, bleary-eyed and caffeine-jittery, led him into a conference room, one wall of which had been converted to a gigantic blowout of the web page, with locations and dates and the names of victims scribbled beside now nineteen of the crime scene snapshots.

  “Well done,” he said.

  “Google is a wonderful thing,” she replied, and crushed her latest can of Mountain Dew in her right fist. “Ziegler’s got teams tracking down every one of these leads.”

  “But not you.”

  “I’m a homegirl, Piper. I belong indoors and seated.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  They strolled back to her workstation.

  “Mineola, what are you afraid is going to happen if you go out in the field?”

  She crossed her arms and pouted. “You really want to get into this with me?”

  “I’m curious.”

  “Can’t you be satisfied with ‘it’s not my job’? I don’t have some deep dark fear of the big bad world or anything. I’m just a fiber-optics kind of girl.”

  “That sounds so…”

  “Twenty-first century?”

  Tom shrugged.

  “Hey, it’s not a competition. You do your thing and I do my thing. I’m not looking to make you obsolete.”

  Tom frowned. Was that why he kept pushing the issue with her? Did he feel threatened? He didn’t think so, but she had to be reacting to something. Maybe she was looking to make him obsolete and felt guilty about it. He mused the permutations as he headed up to Penn Station and across the river to Hoboken.

  Briggs and Vitucci picked him up in their Crown Vic and together they drove back to Hot Cotour. The two detectives had, um, “encouraged” Mrs. Carolyn Harbinger, former owner of the boutique, to meet them there with her set of keys. As Briggs pulled up to the curb (leaving a good foot for breathing room), there she stood, staring with forlorn nostalgia at the emptiness of her former life. She wore a gray pea coat and a pair of black pumps that matched perfectly her short dark hair, which was topped with the only touch of color in her ensemble, a small kelly-green beret. Carolyn Harbinger was beautiful, and so beautifully sad.

  “I bet she’s a monster in bed,” Briggs muttered, and tossed his brown cigarette toward the incoming traffic. The three men joined her in front
of the vacant glass windows. The other four restaurants and shops were quiet. It was, after all, a weekday morning.

  “Mrs. Harbinger,” said Vitucci, “thanks for coming down. It’s good to see you again.”

  Hands were shaken. Then Tom introduced himself.

  “The FBI?” Her brow furrowed, but only slightly due to Botox. “I wasn’t aware…”

  “It could be related to another case, ma’am.”

  She nodded, and took out a large key ring from her pocket book, which, like Tom’s jacket, was stitched black leather (although hers came from a decidedly younger cow). She inserted the wrong key into the lock, and then the right one, and then lifted up the rolling security door. Vitucci assisted her in raising it above the level of the front door, which she then proceeded to unlock. The three detectives followed her inside.

  Why had she inserted the wrong key? Tom puzzled this quandary. This was her store. Unlocking the rolling security door should have been, at this point, muscle memory. Was she nervous? Did the presence of the FBI rattle her? Her demeanor remained calm, but actions always betrayed their facades.

  “This is it,” she said. “Help yourselves. I’m going to go back outside.”

  She handed her key ring to Tom and went outside.

  Briggs and Vitucci walked the crime scene for the umpteenth time. The blond carpet was clean, save for some dust and a few paint chips. The store consisted of the main showroom and a smaller stockroom in the back, accessible through a door locked with a punch code. The stockroom, which had an exposed wooden floor, led to the rear door, and the rear door led, as Tom knew, to an alleyway. He strolled back out to the alley, accidentally scaring off a feral cat who had been napping in a shadow. It was as it had been before. Dumpster. Access from the street. Six doors leading back into the building.

  Six doors…but only five storefronts…

  Tom returned inside. Briggs and Vitucci were in the stockroom. If the women had been slain in there, perhaps the killer had covered the walls with plastic sheeting to contain the blood spatter. But, no, that still didn’t explain the traces of carpet fibers at the bases of their necks.

  Look for the bodies, Esme had suggested. And it made sense. What had the killer done with the three bodies? The men walked across the floorboards of the empty stockroom.

  “I’ll be right back,” said Tom, and he joined Carolyn Harbinger outside. The day already had taken a nasty turn, with bruised clouds and a galloping wind moving in from the east. She stood erect on the sidewalk, a cigarette in one hand (suck, puff) and the other placidly resting on a hip. She looked like a 1970s ad for Virginia Slims.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to her.

  “Thank you.” Suck, puff. “I appreciate your sympathy.”

  “Were you close with the three girls?”

  “I liked to think of my employees as an extension of my family, so, yes, I was close with them.”

  “They were recommended to you by another of your employees, right? Sandra Washington.”

  “Yes.” Suck, puff. “Sandy went to school with them. I trusted her judgment. They were good girls, all of them.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, Mrs. Harbinger, why did you suddenly need to hire three employees?”

  Again, her brow attempted to furrow. She was trying to concoct a lie. Tom made another mental note and waited for that lie to come, which it did, a half second later.

  “Business was booming. I needed to expand my sales force to keep my customers satisfied.”

  “And so by October your sales force included the three girls, Sandy Washington and your cousin Jefferson.”

  She nodded. Suck, puff. She ashed into the street, careful to leave the sidewalk in front of her store clean. Old habits died hard.

  “And your family owns this block of shops and apartments?”

  “Yes. We bought it before the downtown revitalization. Now the property’s worth twenty times as much as we paid. Not that we’re going to sell. I’d never let that happen. I owe it to Summer, Lydia and Rosalind, don’t you think?”

  Briggs and Vitucci sauntered out to meet them.

  “I thought you wanted to check the place out,” Briggs said to Tom.

  “I did,” Tom replied.

  Suck, puff.

  Briggs grunted and, perhaps inspired by Carolyn Harbinger, lit up another brown cigarette.

  “Mrs. Harbinger,” asked Tom, “would it be all right if we kept these keys for a few days and continued our investigation inside your store?”

  She shrugged. “Whatever will help.”

  “Thank you.”

  Soon, they were escorting her back to her tiny Porsche (the same green hue as her beret) and, shortly after that, she was so much dust in the ever-chilling breeze.

  Tom took out his cell phone to call Esme. Once again, as he started to dial her number, she called him.

  “I was about to call you. Again.”

  “I just like to beat you to the punch.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “I swing, you duck, I goose, you…”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “You go first this time, Tom.”

  He stepped away from the cops, who had recommenced their Punch-and-Judy act. “I think I’ve solved the Hoboken case.”

  “Was it the bodies?”

  “It was, in fact, the bodies, yes. What’s your news?”

  “Grover Kirk just got his acceptance letter from Cain42.” Her voice brimmed with giddiness. “We’re in.”

  19

  As teams of agents, using Grover Kirk’s newly acquired password, scoured and combed Cain42’s robust website for information, as Mineola Wu converted the home page to HTML and perused the code as if it were some kind of poetry for programmers, as Tom Piper shuttled back to the Federal Building to lend his insight and expertise, Esme Stuart remained in suburban Long Island, trying to kick out a houseguest who had long-long-long since overstayed his welcome.

  The previous night, after they’d all returned from the strip club and Lester had gone out to join his son and granddaughter at the lighthouse, Esme had retired to bed and closed her eyes and clicked her heels three times, muttering, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.” Only she was home and it was her family who had been whisked away to Oz. She fell asleep before the tears on her pillow had dried…and was awoken at two o’clock in the morning by a shift in weight on the bed. Rafe had come home. Rafe had missed her. Rafe had left Sophie in the care of Grandpa Les and the twin fires of love and hope still flickered somewhere in the universe. She opened her eyes to stare into his, and Grover Kirk stared back at her.

  “I’m lonely,” he said.

  The normal reaction would have been to scream, and perhaps retreat into the bathroom, but Esme was a graduate of Quantico. Esme had wrestled madmen and thieves. An oversize Floridian with a head shaped like a penis was not much of a threat.

  She curled her fingers so that the knuckles of their joints formed a solid weapon, with her index finger knuckle as the tip, and she lashed out with snakelike speed at the hollow behind Grover’s ear. The hard knuckle of her index finger flattened his auricular artery and, predictably, sent poor Grover rolling off the bed in agony and confusion. He paced around Rafe’s side of the bedroom with the aimlessness of Frankenstein’s monster, all the while rubbing and rubbing at his wounded ear.

  “I can’t hear!” he cried. “I can’t hear!”

  She sat up calmly. “What? What was that? You’ll have to speak up.”

  “I can’t hear! What did you do to me?”

  “I used some rudimentary karate to knock out one of your mastoidal pressure points!” she replied, her volume raised, but her body still serene. Perhaps more serene than she had felt in days…

  He opened and closed his jaw, with obvious pain, and stumbled into the wall.

  “Yeah, you should probably go see a specialist about that!” she said. “Common side effects include blurred vision, tinnitus a
nd an unhinged jaw!”

  Grover stumbled again into a wall, bounced off it, lost his balance, fell on his ass and began to drool. Loss of consciousness soon followed. Esme considered calling 9-1-1, but a quick check of his pulse didn’t indicate any cause for alarm. From the smell of it, though, Grover had soiled his Fruit of the Looms. Lovely.

  So Esme spent the remainder of the evening in her daughter’s bedroom, curled up with the few dolls Sophie hadn’t brought with her to the lighthouse. They were the newer acquisitions, the Purple Princess and the Disney penguin in the top hat and posable raven-haired Amazon Queen (with her removable girdle of strength), and they just hadn’t made it yet into Sophie’s pantheon of required bedside companions and, God, how Esme missed her little girl! Meanwhile, she had to babysit that dickhead in the other room and therefore had to stay away from her daughter.

  But providence arrived the very next morning, around the same time Tom Piper got off the train in Hoboken to meet Carolyn Harbinger. Esme woke up, peeked in on Grover (who hadn’t moved from the bedroom floor) and then padded into the living room to check his laptop and, lo and behold, earlier that morning an email had arrived from Cain42.

  Grover’s application for membership had been accepted. A user ID and password were provided.

  They were in.

  Esme pumped her fists in joy. Success! She forwarded the missive, ran back to the bedroom to grab her cell phone, where it lay in its charger, and immediately dialed Karl Ziegler.

  “Check your email,” she said.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Stuart.”

  “Check your email,” she repeated.