Before Cain Strikes Read online

  He reached for a half-empty bottle on the coffee table. The bottle had stained a purple ring on the cover of one of Esme’s Sudoku books.

  She knew forty-four ways of rendering him unconscious in five seconds.

  “Mr. Kirk,” she said, “if you’ll recall, I did respond to your first phone message. I told you that I wasn’t interested in participating. I told you that my family wasn’t interested in participating.”

  “Your father-in-law seemed very interested.” He offered her the bottle. “How was marriage counseling?”

  The front door opened. It was Rafe. Finally.

  “I… Who’s this?”

  Grover again reached out with his hand and introduced himself.

  “He’s the one who’s writing that book about Henry Booth.”

  “And all associated with what he did,” added Grover. “My book would be incomplete without long passages about you and your wife. Just to be here, in this house, where it all went down, is an honor.”

  Esme gritted her teeth. “He wasn’t Elvis Presley, Mr. Kirk. He was a psychopath and this family is trying to put all of that behind us.”

  “You can’t escape the past, Mrs. Stuart. Surely you of all people know that.”

  She wanted to ask him what he meant, but she really, really wanted to clock him upside the head, and had taken a step forward when they all heard the downstairs toilet flush. There was nothing like that sound to eliminate the tension in a room.

  “Leave,” muttered Rafe. “Now.”

  Grover looked to him, then back to Esme, then finally to his bottle.

  “All right,” he said. “I know when to call it a night. My card’s on the table. I’ll be staying at the Days Inn over in Hicksville. Give my regards to your father-in-law. Lovely fellow.”

  He waited for them to move out of his way.

  They moved out of the way.

  “Be seeing you,” he said, and winked, and left.

  Rafe locked the door.

  “What an ass,” he said.

  “I liked him,” replied Lester, shuffling into the room. “Wait…where’s the bottle of wine he brought?”

  “He took it with him.”

  Lester frowned. “Took it with him? What an ass.”

  His reason for socializing gone, the old man continued on his way to his room. Esme counted the seconds until she heard his door slam shut.

  Then she turned to her husband. He hadn’t moved far from the door.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him.

  “I…”

  She reached out to him.

  But once again: an interruption. This time it was Rafe’s cell phone, vibrating in his pants pocket.

  “If it’s a Florida area code,” said Esme, “don’t answer it.”

  Rafe examined the screen. “Five-one-eight.”

  “Upstate?” asked Esme.

  Rafe nodded and pressed Talk. “Hello?”

  Esme watched him as he listened. His parents, Lester and Eunice, had raised him in upstate New York. It was only luck that Rafe chose a graduate school in Washington, D.C. Otherwise, they would never have met.

  Eight years.

  “Who is it?” Esme whispered.

  Rafe put up a hand to silence her. His face had gone pale. Whatever he was hearing was not good news.

  She had accompanied him a few times to his old house. His childhood in upper-middle-class suburbia had been very different from hers on the streets of Boston. But opposites attracted, right?

  Rafe spoke a bit to the person on the other line, thanked them and then hung up the phone. He looked even more rattled than he had in the car.

  “Rafe, what is it?”

  “Do you…remember that girl you met at my reunion…the one I took to the prom?”

  Esme vaguely recalled the woman in question. She was a sales rep for a vacuum cleaner company. A bit heavy-set. Very pretty blue eyes.

  “Lynette something, right?”

  “Yes. Lynette Robinson. She… Anyway, that was my cousin Randy…on the phone. The police…they just identified the…remains of…Lynette’s body…in the basement of a torched house.”

  3

  The funeral was done in black and white.

  The black, of course, was provided by the mourners. More than a hundred people came out to pay their respects. Half of them didn’t even know the deceased, but had read about the tragedy in the Sullivan County Democrat. The national press was there, too, at the outskirts of the cemetery, and even they had the good sense to wear dark colors.

  The priest wore black, naturally. The grave diggers, who stood a few feet from the crowd, wore long black coats. When the time was right, they would operate the pulleys, which were painted brown to camouflage with the sod, and lower the coffin into the four-by-eight-by-three hole they’d shoveled this morning.

  The weather provided the white, covering the soil and the grass and the hundreds of gravestones scattered about the cemetery. Almost an inch of pale accumulation lay fixed above the cold earth, with more to come.

  Even snowflakes were eager to attend Lynette Robinson’s funeral.

  As the priest, a youthful redheaded tenor, recited scripture, Esme’s mind wandered (as it was wont to do when in the presence of recited scripture). She thought back over the past two days, from Grover Kirk (who had had the audacity to phone her Thursday morning) to Lester’s long list of supplies he wanted them to get while upstate. She and Rafe had arrived at his old house in the early evening. Immediately, they opened all the windows to air out all the dust and mildew off forty-year-old linen upholstery. Lester had kept the kitchen faucet dripping so as to prevent his pipes from freezing, but Rafe descended into the cellar nonetheless to double-check.

  Esme phoned Oyster Bay.

  “Hello,” grumbled Lester on the other end. “Hi, Lester.”

  After exchanging hollow pleasantries, Esme asked if he could put Sophie on the line. And she waited. A breeze wafted in through one of the open windows in the bedroom and tickled at the back of Esme’s neck.

  Then, finally: “Hi, Mom!”

  “Hey, baby. How was school?”

  “Zack Portnoy wet his pants. There was a big puddle under his chair. The janitor had to come and clean it up and everything. It was gross.”

  Esme grimaced. “I’m sure it was, sweetie. Did you learn anything today in class?”

  “To clean up pee, you need to use ammonia.”

  “Did you learn anything else?”

  Silence.

  “Sophie?”

  “I’m thinking, I’m thinking! Oh, yeah—Mrs. Morrow wanted me to remind you that you’re shap…shap…uh…”

  “Chaperoning?”

  “For the science museum trip on Monday.”

  “Are you excited to go see the science museum?”

  “Uh-huh. Will I get to touch the electricity in the crystal ball?”

  “That’s up to Mrs. Morrow. She might have a lot of activities planned.”

  “Okay. Oh, Grandpa Les bought Chinese tonight and I bet him that I could put a whole egg roll in my mouth and I did.”

  “Sweetie, that’s not a good idea,” said Esme, caught between a giggle and a groan. “You could have choked.”

  “Nuh-uh, I had water and also, if I choked, I would just put my arms up and I’d be all better.”

  Rafe stepped into the room, a pair of his father’s worn workman’s gloves in his left hand.

  “Just promise me not to do it again, all right, Sophie?”

  She’d said their daughter’s name to let Rafe know who she was talking to.

  Rafe indicated, a little vehemently, that he wanted to talk to her, too.

  “Okay, Sophie. I’m going to put Daddy on. I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Mommy.”

  As the priest genuflected and stepped away from the podium, Esme’s thoughts returned to the present, and the funeral, and all around her, amid the light snow, a concerto of sobs. She glanced over at her husband. Like many ther
e, he wore dark sunglasses. They’d stopped at a Walgreens on the way to the service to pick them up and had run into Rafe’s cousin Randy, from the ne’er-do-well branch of the Stuart family tree. Randy walked with a cane—not to support any actual injury but to support his claim for disability. He used to work at the Pepsi factory on the outskirts of the city and a case had fallen near his foot, and near his foot became on his foot and there it was. At Walgreens he bought a pair of knock-off Ray-Bans and walked off with a box of M&M’s.

  It was Randy who’d called Rafe and Esme about Lynette. Randy was drinking buddies with one of the deputies in the county sheriff’s office, and rumor, when lubricated with cheap Scotch, traveled easy and fast. Randy had never personally known Lynette, but he was there at the funeral nonetheless, standing a few feet behind Esme and Rafe. He would be at the reception, too, with his cane, and would probably attempt to parlay his “disability” and his “grief” into a one-night stand.

  The two grave diggers winched the coffin into the ground. Lynette’s immediate family was seated up front—both parents, two pairs of grandparents, three brothers and a sister. They had the best view. Not for the first time, Esme longed (in the event of her untimely death) to be cremated.

  The coffin reached its resting place four feet below topsoil. This cued the crowd of mourners to slowly, quietly disperse. Esme followed Rafe back to his Prius. A thin coat of snow outlined the carlike shapes in the cemetery parking lot. Were it not for the chirp of Rafe’s electronic fob, they might have had to go door to door.

  Once inside, Rafe powered up the seat warmers. Esme loved the seat warmers. Esme believed that every chair, couch and bench needed a seat warmer. They idled in the parking lot for several minutes while the windows defrosted the snow. In the rearview they could see the bottleneck of vehicles fighting to be the first to leave. Esme looked away from the mirror and clicked on the radio.

  Rafe clicked it off.

  “Have a little respect,” he said.

  So Esme respectfully sat there in silence as the hybrid’s engine idled and the heat breathed out of the dashboard vents and the melting snow drooled down her window. Only once the parking lot had emptied did Rafe shift into Reverse.

  The GPS navigated them to Lynette’s parents’ cottage, located at the end of a lower-middle-class cul-de-sac just outside the Monticello town square. The street was cramped with cars, so Rafe had to back up and park by the county courthouse. By the time they got out of their car, the flurries had thickened in a snowstorm. If they’d had the radio on, mused Esme, maybe they could have found out how many inches were forecasted. In the meantime, it was trudge-trudge-trudge and hope-hope-hope.

  Esme wanted to be more sympathetic. She really did. Her sense of detachment didn’t have anything to do with the fact that Rafe went to the senior prom with this girl. Lynette had seemed pleasant enough, and what had happened to her was a horror. But ever since that session with Dr. Rosen, ever since she’d pronounced her ultimatum, Esme had felt as if she were a dispassionate spirit, floating outside of her body. The only moment in the past two days she’d felt anything close to actual emotion was that confrontation with Grover Kirk.

  In other words, when it had to do with Galileo.

  Had she become an adrenaline junkie? When she had been full-time with the FBI, she’d known her share of those. The type who only smiled under duress. The type who sought out increasing scenarios of danger (whether picking fights in a D.C. bar or parasailing in South America). The type who, whenever their heart rate dropped below the speed of a Keith Moon drum solo, became inordinately depressed. But, no, that wasn’t her…was it?

  As expected, the Robinson house was wall-to-wall with the same black-clad guests as the cemetery. Lynette’s immediate family was among the last to arrive; the media had dogged them the moment they stepped off the holy ground of the cemetery. Fortunately, some neighbors had volunteered to stay at the house during the service and set everything up. A few faces looked vaguely familiar to Esme, but she was hard-pressed to put a name to any of them.

  Many people knew Rafe. They shook his hand, patted him on the back, told him how glad they were to see him, asked how his father was doing. Each time, Rafe dutifully introduced (or reintroduced) Esme. She could tell that his heart wasn’t in it. He seemed detached, too, but for very different reasons. For the right reasons.

  The local police were in attendance, as well, in uniform and paying their respects. Esme spotted Randy chatting up a freckled deputy. That must have been the drinking buddy. Then Rafe escorted her to the sheriff, a stout man in his sixties standing by a card table with a punch bowl. He had the awkwardness of a wallflower at a junior high school prom, albeit a wallflower with salt-and-pepper hair and a sidearm clipped to his belt. His name tag read Michael Fallon.

  “It’s a pleasure, Sheriff,” said Esme, and shook his hand, which was dry but warm.

  “And how’s your father, Rafe? Still kicking your ass, I assume?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We all heard about that ugliness last spring.” Sheriff Fallon shook his head in sadness. “I’m glad you all emerged in one piece. Are you okay, Rafe?”

  Rafe offered Esme a quick glance, then answered, “As good as could be expected, Sheriff.”

  The man nodded, then took a sip from his punch.

  But Rafe wasn’t finished.

  “So you’re aware, then, of who my wife is? Of what she does?”

  This time Esme shot him a quick glance. Where was he going with this…?

  “Of course,” Fallon replied.

  “Be honest with me, Sheriff, for my father’s sake. This case… How out of your league are you?”

  If Fallon was insulted, he didn’t show it. “We’ve got every man in the county working on it.”

  “I’m willing to bet they’re all working hard, Sheriff, but I’m also willing to bet that none of them have my wife’s mind or her experience.”

  Now Esme was the one who felt like the flower—a shrinking violet. Where was all of this praise coming from? Rafe had never even hinted that he thought about her like this. Even when they were dating, he disapproved of her job, and now this?

  “If we need the FBI, Rafe, if it comes to that, we’ll call them. I promise you.”

  “That’s what I’m saying, sir. You don’t need to call them. They’re already here. Esme is already here. And you’re going to use her, or I’ll tell the media camped outside that you could have but you didn’t. They know who she is. You’re going to put your provincial pride in your back pocket and let her help you solve this case. Are we clear?”

  “What the fuck was that!”

  They had retreated to one of the rooms in the cottage. Rafe motioned for Esme to keep her voice down, and he closed the door behind him. It took Esme a second to realize their dumb luck. This had to be Lynette’s room. An assortment of national flags decorated one of the walls. Esme recognized maybe half of them. From what she knew about Lynette, the woman had never even left New York State. The flags must have represented a dream of hers: to travel the world. On her vanity lay a jewelry box, open. Lynette trusted people. Esme wasn’t a profiler, but some of these conclusions were obvious.

  Lynette probably trusted her assailant, until things turned dark.

  The bedsheets were white and recently laundered. The room smelled sweet. There were lilacs by the window. Esme almost approached them to inhale their scent but then remembered what brought her into this room in the first place. She wheeled toward her husband, who was staring at the contents of the jewelry box.

  “Let’s start simple,” she said.

  He looked at her. His eyes were sad. “Fine.”

  “First, I am not a prostitute and you are not my pimp. Don’t ever, ever offer my services without consulting me.”

  “I thought you’d want to help.”

  “That’s so beside the point!”

  Rafe shrugged. That obnoxious dominance he’d displayed with Sheriff Fallon had been replaced by
a mournful smallness. His gaze shifted back to the jewelry box.

  “Second, since when have you given a damn about what I do? Since when have you done anything but criticize and ridicule my job? Eight years ago, you forced me to quit! Two days ago you accused me of ‘knowingly and willfully killing our family’!”

  “I know what I said.”

  “What’s changed?”

  “Lynette is dead.”

  “Were you close with her? Had you even spoken to her since the reunion?”

  “No.”

  “Then what makes her so special that you’re willing to upturn everything you’ve believed in and argued?”

  “I would think you’d be happy,” replied Rafe. “Your husband finally values what you do. I would think you’d be thrilled.”

  “Thrilled? I’m dumbfounded! I need you to explain this to me, Rafe. I need you to do it now and I need you to do it so I understand, because at this moment I have no idea who you are.”

  “Someone I knew has been murdered. I’m asking you to help find who did it. It’s what you tell me you do, Esme. Why is anything else relevant?”

  “Because it is!” She caught her own reflection in the vanity mirror. The tips of her ears, poking out from her shoulder-length brown hair, were scarlet. As sure a sign as any that she was pissed off. “How can you not see how this has to do with us?”

  Rafe ran a hand over his face and let out a long sigh. Then he reached into the jewelry box and took out a pair of teal earrings.

  “She wore these once,” he said.

  Esme’s brow furrowed. “I don’t understand.”

  “Please don’t make me… It’s not important….”

  “Jesus, Rafe! Were you in love with her?”

  “No! No. I never was in love with her. That’s the… Okay, fine. You want to know the whole truth? You want to know the story? You want to know why this is tearing me up inside?”

  “All I’ve ever wanted is honesty.”

  He chuckled at her for a moment, then proceeded.

  “Honesty. People say they want it, but when they get it, they get it all right. You’re heuristic. You always have been. You trust your instincts. I trust my intellect. But with Lynette Robinson…no, I wasn’t in love with her. But she was in love with me. God knows why. She never told me, of course, but she didn’t make a secret of it, either. The way she looked at me in class. The way she smiled at me whenever I got up to make a presentation. Her face would light up, and her eyes—she had these great eyes. Blue like, I don’t know, a calming swell of the ocean. I liked that she was in love with me. I wasn’t especially popular and some days were pretty brutal, but no matter what, she’d be there with that look of love in those blue eyes and that…helped. And I wish I could have loved her back. But I didn’t.”