Before Cain Strikes

“I never understood what spine-tingling meant until I read this book.”

—San Francisco Book Review

“Joshua Corin is a new name to watch in crime fiction. Fearless, inventive and intuitive, his writing is incredibly self-assured.”

—J.T. Ellison, bestselling author of The Cold Room

“Enjoyable thriller [with] faultless action scenes.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Corin has created a quirky, savvy profiler in Esme Stuart and a first-rate antagonist in the sniper. Readers are going to hope Corin has a whole series of books planned for Esme.”

—RT Book Reviews

“For suspense/thriller fans like me, author Joshua Corin is a dream come true. The intensity levels were insanely high throughout this book from beginning to end. I couldn’t get enough.”

—Manic Readers

“An excellent, bone-chilling tale. The plot is tightly woven, and the action doesn’t stop until the last page. I look forward to seeing more of Mr. Corin’s work. This is a must read.”

—Romance Reviews Today

Before Cain Strikes

Joshua Corin

www.mirabooks.co.uk

To my niece Abby (for when she is much, much, much older)

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Acknowledgments

Prologue

We are a nation of outlaws. It’s in our history.

It’s in our blood.

Our first colony in Massachusetts was settled as a sanctuary and refuge for those souls brave enough to defy the Anglican Church. These men and women were the first American heroes and they were rebels one and all. That their ancestors should rise up one hundred and fifty years later and throw off the shackles of British tyranny was inevitable. What was the Civil War, really, but a re-creation of the Revolution from a Southern point of view?

We are not a people who respond well to authority.

Is it any wonder, then, where our sympathies lie? Of course the chroniclers of the Wild West preferred Billy the Kid to Pat Garrett. Of course we all know the legend of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but how many of us can mention—or even care about—the Pinkerton detectives who were on their trail?

Look at our literature. Look at our theater. Time and again, our fascination sides with the felon, the ne’er-do-well, the desperado.

By sales alone, who is the most popular American comic book character of the twentieth century? Not that “over-grown Boy Scout” Superman. Not “guilt-ridden” Spider-Man. According to industry experts, the most popular comic book character of the twentieth century was the shadow-dwelling vigilante Batman. Of course he was.

It’s no surprise that we as a nation have become so fascinated by serial killers. As an ever-growing government has euthanized our convictions and emasculated our passions, we recognize in the serial killer a figure of unabashed liberty, and we are attracted.

Let there be no misunderstanding: murder is reprehensible. The thesis of this text will be an analysis of the recent series of murders committed by Henry “Galileo” Booth in the context of the outlaw mystique. If you are looking for a championing of men such as him, look elsewhere. There is a vital line between attraction and acceptance.

John Dillinger is much more appealing from afar.

Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil wrote that when we gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into us. Hold my hand. Take a breath. The abyss we are about to study in its dark geography is at the very core of America and its honesty cleanses with acid.

Are you ready?

Let’s begin.

1

Timothy’s first pet was a yellow-haired hamster named Dwight. Dwight came with his own glass container and his own wheel and Timothy’s parents placed it all on a folding table by a window in Timothy’s bedroom. Timothy was six years old. Dwight was his birthday gift. The next morning, after he and his mother fed Dwight his breakfast (a lettuce leaf), Timothy’s mother left her son alone in his room with the creature. Timothy sat cross-legged in the center of his mint-green carpet and held Dwight in his hands and ran his fingers along the rodent’s spine. The vertebrae reminded Timothy of a pipe cleaner. In nursery school, he built a man and a woman out of pipe cleaners. Timothy bent the hamster’s spine this way and that way. Through it all, the animal kicked and kicked, so Timothy held him firm with his left hand and ran the fingertips of his right hand along the thin yellow fur and the ridges of Dwight’s spine, which, again like a pipe cleaner, was so bendable, but just how bendable was it? Timothy grabbed Dwight’s hindquarters and twisted. Dwight’s feet kicked and kicked and kicked and kicked and then stopped kicking altogether and Timothy had his answer.

He opened the window in his bedroom and tossed the corpse out and told his parents in between sobs that Dwight had fallen. They consoled him. His father, a travel agent, helped Dwight bury the animal and took his son out for ice cream. Three weeks later, his mother, a veterinarian, got him a tabby. Timothy named the cat Boots. Boots, to her credit, lasted many months longer than Dwight, until Timothy was able to finally reach his father’s tools, which were kept on a wall in the garage. Dwight chose the claw hammer, which proved doubly useful because he was able to later use it as a shovel to bury Boots in their neighbor’s yard.

So his parents bought him another cat.

Then another.

Then a puppy.

Then a parakeet.

Then a pair of goldfish in a sealed aquarium.

The goldfish he poisoned with Drano. By then he was nine years old. The goldfish were his last pets for a long, long time.

Until today.

And today was a very special day not only because he had a new pet on a new birthday but because he had acquired her all by himself. No one else knew about her, which was fine by him. Pets were personal. And she was his.

Her name was Lynette. She had yellow hair—much like Dwight, actually—and a pair of eyes so blue they reminded Timothy of wrist veins. His were prominent. He used to wonder if he had the same number of skin layers as everyone else, but a simple dissection with a straight razor (from his dad’s shaving kit) and a microscope (from his old grammar school) solved that mystery.

Lynette’s limbs were meaty. Her whole body was, really. Whoever had owned her before him had fed her well. Catching her had been easy but transporting her had been a challenge. Timothy ended up stuffing her in a heavy-duty duffel bag he bought at an army surplus store and dragging her. No one asked questions. Why would they? By the time he brought her down the wooden steps of the unfinished basement and deposited her in the corner, his heart was pounding a cocaine rhythm and his vision had become misty with exhaustion. He left her zipped in the bag, climbed the stairs to the kitchen and poured himself a tall glass of ice water. That did the trick.

Then he returned to the basement and unzipped the bag. Lynette was still unconscious. Her bare chest—as amorphously plump as the rest of her—languidly crested and troughed. He looked to see if there were any scorch marks on her neck where he had Tasered her. That was when he noticed the dime-size mole at the bend of her left clavicle. He fingered its spongy texture. Hmm. He might have to take her to see a doctor. The mole could be cancerous. He filed that thought in the back of his mind and secured the leather collar around her thick throat and gathered the almost-empty duffel bag from under her and brought it with him to the wooden stairs. He had made it halfway up when Lynette made a noise.

Was it a conscious moan? Timothy wasn’t sure. He remained fixed on that middle step and watched her. She lay fifteen feet away and, yes, she was beginning to awaken. Good. Good. He gently placed the duffel bag on an upper step, all the while keeping his gaze firmly on her body. Forearms twitched. Legs stretched. Eyes opened. Those eyes as blue as wrist veins. They belonged to him now. She belonged to him now. It was time for introductions.

“Hi,” he said. The timbre of his voice quavered. Was he nervous? Of course he was. Lynette was the first pet that was truly his. “I’m Timothy. Today is my birthday. Welcome to your new home.”

Her blue eyes widened. She saw him, standing there. Her mouth formed words. Her brow formed confusion. Those eyes flickered from Timothy on the stairs to the cement walls around her, to the eleven feet of heavy chain attached from her collar to a rafter ten feet above her, and then to her own bare thighs and breasts and finally to her arms, which used to conclude with long lovely hands but now ended only with…

Well, he’d declawed her.

Oh, how she screamed. And screamed. And screamed.

“Poor thing,” muttered Timothy. “You’re going to need to be housebroken.”

She rushed forward. The chain yanked her back. She rushed again. She bared her teeth. She cried out something like “What have you done to me?” but Timothy wasn’t paying attention. By then he’d reached the top of the stairs and shut the basement door.

It was lunchtime.

If there was any surefire way to domesticate an animal, it was with food. Wasn’t that how his parents had tried to domesticate him? Timothy removed the remaining items from the duffel bag and then tossed it aside. Most of the items were, of course, Lynette’s clothes. Those might come in handy later, but for now, they were useless, so he folded them up, just as he’d been taught, and placed them on top of the discarded bag. He had never folded a bra before. That proved the trickiest. He ended up doubling it over, cup onto cup. That seemed to be the thing to do. Then he returned to the kitchen and picked up the other items from the bag and placed them on the counter.

This wasn’t his house, so he had to search for a pan and utensils. He finally found what he needed and set the pan on top of the gas stove and almost activated the burner when he realized he was skipping a very important step. His mother would have been very angry with him. Before cooking the meat, he needed to debone it.

That took some time, not because he was inexpert at what he was doing but because there seemed to be so many tiny bones to take away. Gradually, the garbage bin underneath the sink filled up with inches and inches of slender joints and ligaments, and all the while, from below, Lynette screamed. A bread-box-size TV hung below one of the kitchen cabinets and Timothy clicked it on. Lynette’s voice, which was quickly hoarsening, was drowned out by a rerun of Law & Order. By the time the court case had begun, he had vegetable oil and soy sauce sizzling in the frying pan. By the time the shocking verdict was reached, he had fried the sliced boneless meat to a handsome brown.

The kitchen smelled like summertime.

Excited, Timothy switched off the burner. He forked several slices onto a green ceramic plate, sprinkled on some herbs he’d found in the cabinet above the TV and carried the meal, along with some eating utensils, to the basement door. Lynette had to be hungry and the fried flesh had a savory aroma that even a vegan couldn’t resist. Not that Lynette, by all appearances, was a vegan. Timothy opened the basement door and descended into her home.

She was crouched on the floor in the corner. Her long blond hair was moist with sweat and clung to her face like fresh-spun silk. Through the silky yellow, though, peered those blue eyes. He saw hatred in those eyes. That would change.

“I’ve brought you lunch,” he said. “Doesn’t it smell good?”

“Let…me…go,” she rasped. All that screaming had really done a number on her vocal cords. Timothy regretted not carrying down a glass of water to accompany the meal. So thoughtless! He promised to reprimand himself later.

“Don’t you want some nice steak, Lynette? I made it all for you.”

“How…do you know…my name?”

“Why wouldn’t I know your name? You’re mine.” He smiled at her. “And I also went through your wallet.”

Her eyes briefly went to the meat, then back to his face.

“Why are you…doing this?”

Timothy’s smile turned upside down. Had he chosen poorly? When he first spotted her in the library, those blue eyes so intent on the words in that thick paperback, he’d assumed she was intelligent. The last thing he wanted was a dumb pet.

“Please,” he said. “Have something to eat. The food’s not poisoned, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He speared a slice with the fork and slid the thin wet flesh into his mouth. It was gamey, but the soy sauce and the herbs really added flavor. He chewed, swallowed, smiled. “See?”

Did her throat swell with a bated gulp? With that leather leash bound so tight, it was so difficult to tell. Timothy took a step forward. He speared another slice and held it out to her, mere inches from her nostrils.

She stared at it.

Timothy was certain Lynette had an appetite. It had nothing to do with her size. She had been through an ordeal, and animals dealt with stress via sex and/or food. He was just trying to make her comfortable. He wanted this relationship to work. After Dwight and the puppy and—

She reached forward and with her teeth she sucked the meat off the fork. Timothy wanted to clap, but that would have meant putting down the plate. Instead, he took another step forward. Now maybe fourteen inches away from her.

“Thank you,” she muttered. Her lips gleamed with steak blood. “What is it?”

“You should know, silly. It’s your left hand. Silly, silly pet. Want some more?”

With his left hand, he loaded another slice onto the fork and brought it to her mouth. He almost made an airplane noise.

Briefly, their breaths intermingled. This, finally, was intimacy. Timothy felt warm inside. This was true love, an owner to his pet.

And then she forcefully chomped down on his left wrist. Timothy recoiled, but her jaw held fast. Her incisors pierced his paper-thin flesh and dug deep into his plump antebrachial vein. Blood squirted into her throat and almost made her gag but she held fast and squeezed tighter with her jaw. She wanted to hear his bones snap. She heard something shatter but that was just the ceramic plate with the pieces of her hand, her hand, her hand…

She opened her mouth briefly for air—she needed to breathe, she needed to throw up!—and that’s when Timothy stabbed the fork into one of those blue eyes that had attracted him so, stabbed her all the way into the soft tissue of her frontal lobe. Blue ran red. Blue ran red.

Timothy took a step back. He held his gnawed wrist to his chest. He would need a tourniquet. But first he took one last, long, disappointed look at Lynette. What a bad, bad pet she had turned out to be.

He found a first aid kit upstairs, in a bathroom attached to the master bedroom, and after dousing his wrist in fiery iodine, wrapped it tightly in toilet paper and then Ace bandages. It was a temporary solution, but it would have to suffice. While upstairs, Timothy wandered the halls. This wasn’t his house, but he knew the occupants wouldn’t be back for another twelve days (according to the information he’d gleaned at his father’s travel agency). He tested each of the three beds. The king-size in the master bedroom was the most comfortable—firm but not too stiff. Timothy wanted to take a nap. His left hand felt…well, felt nothing at all, and he knew that was not a good sign. Begrudgingly, he roused himself from the king-size bed and made his way back downstairs to the kitchen. It was time to go.

But first, the photographs.

He slid out an iPhone from his jeans pocket. Taking pictures was not his cup of tea, but Cain42 had posted strict requirements, and Timothy intended to meet them all. Of course, he hadn’t intended to meet them today—he’d hoped to have a lot more time with his pet—but c’est la vie. He ambled down the wooden stairs into the basement and aimed his smartphone’s camera at his expet. She lay crumpled in the corner. Her head lolled to the side like an infant’s. Timothy quickly snapped off a series of pictures and reviewed them on the camera’s LCD screen. They weren’t the most original photographs in the world—for one, the sixty-watt lighting in the basement dispersed in uneven patches and cast some unfortunate shadows across Lynette’s corpse—but they would have to do. Timothy slid his iPhone back into his jeans pocket, waved goodbye with his good hand to the one-eyed blonde in the corner and returned to the kitchen. Now it was time to go.

He dialed the gas stove. It activated with a hiss. He then opened the nearby microwave door, snagged six cans of Campbell’s soup from the pantry shelves and hefted them one by one onto the microwave’s glass plate. The microwave door closed with an agreeable click. Hiss, click. Such pleasant sounds a kitchen made. He set the timer for thirty minutes and hightailed it for the back door. He had no idea how long the metal cans would take to spark and ignite, and he didn’t want to take any chances.

As it turned out, he was able to make it all the way to the end of the residential block before the kitchen exploded. One of Cain42’s cardinal rules: the cleanest crime scene is a destroyed crime scene. Glass splattered onto the front lawn. Flames licked through the open windows at the house’s placid green exterior. Green became black. Soon everything on that plot of land—the master bedroom, the grass, the remains of Timothy’s pet—would be black.

Fire always painted in monochrome.

Timothy inconspicuously joined the gathering crowd come to watch the fireworks. There weren’t many people, really. Most of the suburban neighborhood’s occupants were at work. But there were enough to blend in, at least until the M7 bus arrived and Timothy was whisked far away from the blaze. The bus left the curb as the first of the fire engines showed up. Timothy hoped none of the firefighters got injured. Good people, firefighters.

He unrolled his earbuds, plugged them into his iPhone and listened to an album of Brahms lullabies as the Sullivan County bus traveled into the next town over. Once there, he transferred to a Trailways bus, which deposited him a few dozen miles east to New Paltz. By then it was dusk, dusk on his birthday. From the New Paltz terminal, Timothy used some cash from Lynette’s wallet, which he had in his other pocket, to pay for a cab home.

Another of Cain42’s rules: always hunt far from where you sleep.

Timothy’s house was not far from historic Huguenot Street, a minivillage of Colonial America located in the heart of New Paltz. When he was much younger, sometime between the cats and the goldfish, Timothy’s parents took him to Huguenot Street to tour rustic Locust Lawn and the nearby spacious Ellis House, with its spooky Queen Anne interior. All the while, folks dressed up in colonial drapery mingled to and fro. Many of them were students at the local university looking to earn a few extra bucks. Even at that young age, Timothy found the whole affair to be delightfully weird. He longed to live in the Ellis House, and often wondered how difficult it would be to break in, and steal a nap on that small, square, starched bed.

Timothy apparently had a thing for other people’s beds.

His own bed lay in a two-story American foursquare on a street lined with two-story American foursquares. All were squat, with faces made of brick and stucco. Most had cookie-cutter porticos bookending their front doors, which were various shades of white. Timothy only recognized his by rote. He offered the cabdriver a modest tip and hopped out onto the well-trimmed front lawn. Old, knee-high bushes bracketed the two short steps that led from lawn to landing. Timothy had several pets buried in the soil behind those bushes. He thought of them with fondness every time he opened his front door.

“There he is!” he heard his mother say, and this kept him from bounding up the stairs to his bedroom. Instead, he made his way into the den. Mother sat in her chair, predictably engrossed in her needlepoint. Today’s project was embroidering the smiley face of Christ Jesus onto a mauve cushion. She donated all of her needlepoint to the local Salvation Army, where she volunteered every Saturday from ten to two.

He stood in the middle of the den. She didn’t look up from her needlepoint. “Your father and I weren’t sure if you were going to come home. And on your birthday, no less.”

Timothy noted that she didn’t ask him where he’d been or what he’d been doing. Both she and his father stopped asking him that a long time ago.

The Ace bandages swathing his left wrist were becoming caked with blood. “I got bit by a dog,” he said.

At this she raised her eyes from her work. “Oh, Timothy, come here.” There was no concern in her voice, only disappointment.

He approached. Carefully, Timothy’s mother unwrapped his bandages and examined the wound.

“Did you disinfect it?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She sniffed the iodine and nodded. “Good boy. Nevertheless, you’re going to need stitches.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She peered at his face, trying to read it. What could she see? What did she know? It didn’t really matter, because at that moment the garage door roared open. Father was home.

Quickly, she brought Timothy to the first-floor bathroom, rinsed his wrist under the faucet and reached down for her emergency supplies below the sink. She had an ample stock: antiseptics, gauze, a suture kit, etc. She got a discount through her veterinary practice. Timothy had a habit of getting cut up.

“Hello!” bellowed Father. “I’m home!”

“One minute!” she replied. Although much of the skin on her son’s thin forearm had darkened a nasty purple, the broken vein itself had already clotted nicely. The sutures could wait until after dinner. She rewrapped his wrist in gauze, sealed the bandages with a metal clip and brought Timothy back out to the den.

Father was holding a large box.

“Happy birthday!” he declared.

“Thank you, sir.”

While the box was placed on the dining room table, Mother sifted into the sideboard for candles, and then quickly went upstairs for the matches. She kept them hidden.

“Did you have a good day, sport?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good, good.”

Their gazes never met. If Timothy’s father had noticed the bandages, he hadn’t reacted. Timothy didn’t expect him to.

As Mother returned with the matches, the rectangular cake was removed from its box. German chocolate cake with genuine coconut pecan frosting. His favorite. Mother haphazardly arranged the pinky-size birthday candles across the cake’s surface, lit one and used it to light the others.

“Make a wish, sport.”

Timothy closed his eyes. He thought about Lynette. He thought about what went wrong. He thought about her blue eyes. He thought about Cain42. He couldn’t wait to send him the pictures.

He thought about his next pet.

There were so many possibilities.

With a deep breath, Timothy blew out his candles in one gust, all fourteen of them. Happy birthday to him.