Before Cain Strikes
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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.”
“We can’t choose who we love,” said Esme.
“But why?” He looked at her. “Human society is based on our ability to exert free will over ourselves and in our interactions with others. I’m a sociology professor, for Christ’s sake, and I still don’t know what makes love so exceptional. I know it is exceptional, and I know I love you, very much, but I also know it has very little to do with my brain, and that’s a little scary. So, back in high school, I asked myself, Why can’t I love her back? Why couldn’t I choose to think about her the same way she thought about me? And I followed the course of thought to its logical conclusion and decided that it was because of her weight.”
“You were a typical, superficial, pigheaded—excuse the expression—teenage boy.”
“No, I wasn’t. Typical teenage boys don’t score 1600 on the PSATs. Typical teenage boys aren’t beaten by their fathers when they score A-’s instead of A’s. But that’s getting off track, because I’d reached what I felt was a logical conclusion and that left me sort of…satisfied. So I went to school the next day determined to speak to Lynette and share with her my realization.”
“Oh, Rafe, tell me you didn’t.”
“Oh, I did. I thought I owed it to her. I wanted her to understand that it wasn’t her fault. I wanted her to understand that I was, in fact, superficial, and it was my problem and there was nothing she could do about it. Esme, I thought I was carrying out an errand of mercy. I wanted to stop leading her on.”
“That poor girl.”
Again, Rafe chuckled. “You obviously didn’t know her very well. Because I told her this, between home-room and first period, and she didn’t slap me or cry or yell or do any of the things that in retrospect she had every right to do. She just smiled at me with those blue eyes and thanked me and that was that. And nothing changed.”
“I’ll bet she came home that night and cried herself to sleep.” Esme looked around the room. This was her home. This was her bed. This was where Lynette had retreated that night.
“The next day, tickets for the senior prom went on sale. I had no one to ask. There were a few girls I had crushes on—don’t give me that look—but they were either unavailable or very much out of my league. But as silly as it sounds, I really wanted to go to the prom. It was a rite of passage. I was a sociologist even then. The senior prom was something I needed to experience. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to go stag.”
“So you asked Lynette.”
“Yes. I made it clear to her that we were just going as friends—which must have been just another stab in the gut—but she acted cool about it and asked me the color of my cummerbund so she could get a matching dress and I didn’t even know what a cummerbund was, but I learned. And on the night of the prom, I wore a black tuxedo with a teal cummerbund and I showed up at that front door and there she was, beautiful, wearing these earrings. They matched her dress so perfectly. And we left.
“We went to the prom. We had a good time. We ate, we danced. We laughed. We always got along okay. And it was obvious she was still into me. And you’d think that maybe, just maybe, with the dress and these earrings and the magical occasion, that I’d fall for her, and I knew that’s what Lynette hoped. I could see it in her blue eyes. But I felt…nothing. And as the night wore on, I knew that this was not going to be a happy ending, but there was nothing I could do short of faking an illness, and that’s more my cousin Randy’s thing, anyway.
“So I ate and danced and laughed and then it was time to go home. And I drove her home. I walked her to the front door. This was the moment. It would have been so easy to just lean in and kiss her good-night. Even if it were just on the cheek, it would have been the right thing to do. But I knew how she felt and I didn’t want to lead her on. We stood on her front stoop and she looked up at me with those blue eyes and I…shook her hand. And then I left.”
“Oh, Rafe…”
He wiped his eyes. “We saw each other in class the next day, and the day after that, and we said hi to each other in the hallway, but that spark I used to see in her was gone. I’d extinguished it. I’d killed it. And now another monster has come along and I need you to find him and I need you to put him down because, you see, maybe if I do this for her, maybe…I don’t know…she’ll forgive me. And if she can forgive me…maybe someday you can, too.”
4
After the reception, Lynette’s boyfriend, Charlie Weyngold, was brought to the county sheriff’s office for questioning. He came willingly. Rafe and Esme, with the sheriff’s reluctant permission, accompanied them on the trek through the snow, almost three inches now and rising by the hour. On their way out the door at the Robinson cottage, Esme overheard two women mention one to two feet. She hoped they were talking about the size of their toddlers.
The interview was conducted not in a windowless cell with a dangling lightbulb but in the sheriff’s cozy corner office. This was where Sheriff Fallon had interviewed Lynette’s parents and siblings the day before. He passed the file to Esme as soon as she took her seat on a couch in the office. Sheriff Fallon sat behind his desk. The boyfriend, Charlie, took the room’s other chair, a low-back folding number that couldn’t have been comfortable even in the best of circumstances.
Rafe was to wait outside, kept company by those deputies and officers not out on the streets earning double-time behind the wheel of a county snowplow. He sipped herbal tea. He thought about high school.
Charlie Weyngold thought about his necktie. He didn’t like it. It felt constricting around his collar, around his throat. He wanted to loosen it, but didn’t. That would have been disrespectful to Lynette. For her, he kept his necktie tight. For her, he would have done anything, and so he thought about his necktie to keep from thinking about her, to keep from bawling like an infant right there in the sheriff’s office. He had, however, taken off his suit coat. The button-down he wore underneath had short sleeves, which displayed the artful manga tattoos scrawling up and down each arm. He and Lynette were going to go to Tokyo next year. He and Lynette had plans. He and Lynette—
“You need a Kleenex, Charlie?”
Charlie looked up at the sheriff and shook his head.
Sheriff Fallon made a noncommittal grunt and glanced over at Esme Stuart, sitting there on his couch, perusing his case file. Some people in his position could be territorial, and loathed the FBI and any other intrusion from the federal government. Mike Fallon wasn’t territorial. He welcomed assistance. He could stop and ask for directions without feeling the slightest bit less masculine. His wife, Vicky, had trained him well. No, Mike Fallon appreciated help when offered. But nobody appreciated having it stuffed down their throat, no matter how necessary it was. So a small part of him—the very small, selfish, spiteful part that sometimes kept him company late at night after a few too many Coors—hoped Esme Stuart found nothing, hoped this case made her stumble and fall, and publicly. Meanwhile, it was time to question the boyfriend, Charlie Weyngold, who probably had nothing new to add, and who probably was minutes away from a grief-induced nervous breakdown, but sometimes this was the job.
“Charlie, this is the timeline we have so far regarding Tuesday. Correct me if any of this sounds false to you, okay, son?”
“Yes, sir.”
The sheriff peeked at his notepad, and then proceeded. “We’ve got the victim arriving at her office around nine in the morning. She took a coffee break at ten-thirty with a coworker of hers by the name of Lois Feinstein. Around ten forty-five, she left the office to make her daily rounds about town. Her first—and only—stop that day was the public library.”
“She always stopped there right before lunch,” said Charlie. “Sometimes I’d meet her there and we’d hop on to the internet and look at the websites for countries. She especially liked the ones that were untranslated. She’d try to figure out what it said, and then she’d use this program to translate the website to English and see how well she did. She…”
“Are you all right, son?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Charlie, why don’t you tell me about your relationship with the victim?”
Esme looked up from the file. The sheriff had twice now deliberately avoided using Lynette’s name. Good. Keep it impersonal. Keep it objective. High emotion often obscured important truths, as with her and Rafe…
But that was for later. Now: the case. She returned to the file.
Sheriff Fallon’s notes were comprehensive, informative and almost entirely unhelpful. The general facts were these.
11/09, 4:12 p.m.: Members of the Monticello fire department responded to reports of a fire at 18 Value Street. They were able to extinguish the blaze, but the fire had destroyed most of the furniture and a considerable portion of the superstructure. Sections of the second floor had caved into the first, and sections of the first floor had caved into the basement.
11/10, 9:32 p.m.: Careful investigation by the arson team, coordinating with both the local police and the Sullivan County sheriff’s department, determined the source of the fire was the first-floor kitchen and that the origin was electrical in nature. It was at this point, approximately 9:00 p.m., that volunteer fireman Bradley Langer uncovered human remains in the basement of the house. A leather collar attached to a length of industrial chain was found around the neck and—
Esme blinked. Leather collar? Was this some S and M game gone awry? She read on.
11/10, 10:55 p.m.: Forensics finished their documentation of the crime scene and the remains were delivered to the county coroner’s office for determination of cause of death.
11/10, 11:13 p.m.: Sheriff Michael Fallon reached Todd and Louise Weiner, the owners of the Value Street property, by telephone. They are on a two-week vacation in Bermuda with their four children. All accounted for. The Weiners promptly agreed to return home.
11/11, 9:00 a.m.: First reports filed from canvassing. Neighbors are unable to identify anyone entering or exiting the house. The Weiner family is described as “friendly.”
11/11, 11:16 a.m.: Dental records identify human remains as Lynette Robinson. Cause of death impossible to determine due to the deterioration of the body. Note: the hands of the deceased are missing.
Esme frowned. The hands of the deceased are missing? That pretty much nixed the S and M idea, unless dismemberment was a subfetish that she (gratefully) didn’t know about. But she rather doubted it. Unless the hands got misplaced in the transfer from the crime scene to the lab, which was nigh unlikely, they almost definitely had to have been removed from the body by the unsub (unknown subject of the investigation, henceforth known as Sick Son of a Bitch).
“Was there a relationship between Lynette Robinson and the Weiners?” she asked the sheriff.
Sheriff Fallon answered with a red-hot glare.
Ah, right. He was interviewing the boyfriend. She had forgotten. When she fell into investigation mode, the outside world sometimes became an afterthought. This was a necessary part of the routine, although it did little to ingratiate herself with, well, most anybody else. And she usually amplified this distance even further with the aid of her iPod and some kickass British rock, but her iPod was back at her father-in-law’s house. She made a mental note to retrieve it.
“I never heard of them,” replied the boyfriend to her question. “I don’t think Lynette knew them, either. I mean, I knew most everybody she knew. Maybe she sold them a vacuum. That’s what she did. That’s how we met. She sold me a vacuum. She… Excuse me, I need to get some air….”
Charlie got up from his seat and left the room.
Sheriff Fallon’s glare became incendiary.
“Sorry,” said Esme. “Sorry.”
“Are you through with the file? The Weiners should be arriving at the airport in about a half hour and I’d like to meet them there, if you don’t mind.”
“You really think they’ll be able to land in this weather?”
Fallon glanced out his window. His already-caustic mood soured.
Esme considered how to play this. The man was a hornet’s nest. She decided on a little reverse psychology. “It’s not a big deal. They probably won’t have any information that can help you. They’re almost definitely incidental to the crime….”
“Is that so? A couple hundred thousand dollars in property damage begs to differ.”
“The neighbors said they didn’t see anyone enter or exit the house,” Esme explained, “but they weren’t really watching the house until it started burning. So we know the arsonist left before the fire and we know that Lynette Robinson was already in the house by then, as well. She was brought there. Why?”
“With all due respect, ma’am, that’s what I plan on finding out from the Weiners.”
“Who knew they were going to be out of town?”
“Friends, family, coworkers. The usual assortment, I’d assume.”
“That’s who you need to interview.”
“Is that an order?”
“It’s a suggestion….” Her harmless little exercise in reverse psychology complete, Esme handed him back the file. “Do you have a snack machine in this building?”
One to two feet proved accurate. Rafe and Esme wrangled a deputy to help them dig out the Prius, and they drove back to Lester’s house at a steady, safe three miles per hour. The windshield wipers did little to keep the fist-size snowflakes from clotting up the front view. God was emptying his vat of Wite-Out over upstate New York.
If there was a God, thought Esme.
Henry Booth—her erstwhile Galileo—didn’t think so. Henry Booth’s atheism—and his anger at religion in general—had helped fuel his murder spree. Henry Booth had forced Esme to reconsider her own faith. She and Rafe never attended church, aside from the secular functions held there. She owned a copy of the King James Bible, but it was a relic from a lit course she took as an undergrad.
Henry Booth had targeted policemen, firemen, teachers. Mothers, fathers. Good people. In one of his notes, he wrote that if there were in fact a God, these violent crimes would not have been allowed to occur. If there were a God, divine intervention would have ended his massacre.
But God didn’t stop him. Esme did.
And now someone had gone and chained Lynette Robinson, by all accounts a nice woman, in the basement of a house and cut off her hands. Where was God’s hand in that?
More questions, no answers. She looked to her husband. His eyes seemed busy, full of concentration. Rafe.
Talk about questions without answers.
“What do you want for dinner?” she asked him.
“Whatever Dad’s got in the house. Probably canned soup.”
“I’m sure there’s a restaurant between here and there.”
Rafe squeezed the steering wheel. “We stop, we get out, and an hour later we have to shovel out the car. Again. And by then it’ll be nighttime. Unless it’s already nighttime. I can’t see a goddamn thing.”
“You can see me,” she said.
His busy eyes zipped in her direction. She crossed her eyes, wiggled her ears, pulled back her lips with her fingers and stuck out her tongue.
Rafe grinned. He couldn’t help it. He wanted to remain serious, stoic, but when his wife whipped out the funny face, all hope was lost.
He murmured, “My beautiful bride.”
“You better believe it.”
They held hands the rest of the ride home.
By the time they pulled into the carport, it was indeed nighttime. The lights on the street gave each of the falling snowflakes an angelic aura. Esme was reminded of fairies, and then her mind went to Lynette Robinson’s hands, and then each of the snowflakes became a woman’s severed hand, falling, falling.
“Awful early in the season for a blizzard,” noted Rafe as they entered the house.
Esme just nodded and tried to rid her imagination of dark thoughts. What she needed was her music. She quickly grabbed her iPod from her suitcase and searched around for a pair of speakers to plug it in. Surely Lester had something in this house that was compatible…
Rafe emptied two cans of chili into a pot and set it to boil.
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
“The twenty-first century,” she replied, checking inside handmade cabinets and hutches.
“You’re not going to find that here.”
She returned to the kitchen, an exaggerated pout on her lips. Rafe shrugged and started to stir the chili. Esme joined him at the gas stove, hip-checking him to make room, and cooked the contents of a box of white rice on an adjacent burner.
Apropos of absolutely nothing, Rafe turned to her and said, “So do you think it was the boyfriend?”
She lowered the temperature on Rafe’s burner.
“He had an alibi at the time of the fire.”
“Alibis can be falsified.”
She smirked at him. “Since when did you become a criminologist?”
“Everyone who watches prime-time TV is an amateur criminologist.” He grabbed some basil off the spice rack and sprinkled a few dashes into the chili. “I just want to make sure no stone goes unturned.”
There was that melancholy again, quavering the timbre of his voice. Esme noticed the steam from the pots was misting up his glasses. He did nothing to remedy the situation. She waited. He continued to stir, his vision undoubtedly getting foggier and foggier. Christ, the man could be stubborn.