Before Cain Strikes (14 page)

“I…”

Esme left the table and strolled toward the door. She reached for the knob and stopped, turned.

“Tell me, Grover. What nickname did you use when you posted on these killer-friendly message boards?”

He whispered his reply.

“What was that?”

He repeated it, louder now, though swathed in embarrassment and guilt. “Galileofan.”

“Thank you, Grover.”

She left the room.

Karl Ziegler stood there, loudly sucking on what had to be another breath mint.

Tom was there, as well, now, along with Mineola Wu, who was perusing her laptop. Esme had been on the phone with her family while Mineola had exposed Tom to the world of Cain42, and then received a summary of the case from Tom himself.

All this had happened
before
she went in to interview Grover Kirk.

“Well?” Esme asked Mineola. Had they gotten what they needed?

Mineola looked up from her computer. “It checks out.”

Esme turned to Tom. It was Karl’s decision, but she needed Tom’s approval.

“Let’s use him,” he said.

Esme nodded and turned back to the one-way mirror and stared at Grover Kirk, looking so pathetic and small in that chair. Somehow, Cain42 had seen through the DOJ’s cover identities, so to successfully infiltrate the website, they needed someone who didn’t have a cover identity. They needed an actual civilian who already had a history on these various violent-crime message boards.

Grover “Galileofan” Kirk had just become their bait to catch Cain42.

“W
e sleep, we eat, we fuck, we kill. Everything else is decoration.”

He had them both bolted to the chairs, not unlike how Esme had fastened Grover Kirk. Only Cain42 used duct tape. It was so much cheaper and leaps and bounds more reliable than handcuffs. He had their wrists duct-taped to the arms of the chairs and their ankles duct-taped to the legs of the chairs. It was a trite setup, used in countless B-movies, but it did the job.

He had the newlyweds, both stripped down to their underwear, facing each other. The wife’s cheeks were stained with teary mascara. The husband had a small scar on his upper lip, perhaps from a chicken bone he’d accidentally bitten into as a child.

“Why do we sleep? We sleep to conquer exhaustion, one of two necessary by-products our active lives incur. Sleep is our fail-safe, our daily retreat to the womb of infancy. We curl up, hook our umbilical cords into the subconscious and sustain ourselves with dreams.”

Cain42 was preening for them, and he knew it. It was the small excess and revelry he allowed himself
in these moments at work. And he took his work very seriously.

“Why do we eat? We eat to conquer hunger, the other necessary by-product our active lives incur. With food, though, we seek more than replenishment. We seek sensation. We seek sweetness, bitterness, texture, pleasure. Too much pleasure and we gorge. Too little and we waste away until we wear our skeletons as our clothes.”

They were in a spacious meat locker, not far from the loading dock where the meat trucks would come in the morning to pick up the slaughtered cattle. Hundreds of gutted cows dangled from thick steel hooks. Cain weaved among them as he spoke. The acoustics in here were wonderful. Maybe it was the high ceiling.

The newlyweds in their chairs were positioned near the center of the meat locker. Their lips had begun to turn blue. Their ears were red with blood. Every so often his walking path brought him back to them, audibly shivering in their restraints of duct tape.

Oh, the meat locker. Cain42 was nothing if not a traditionalist.

“Why do we fuck? We fuck to conquer the future. We create generations with our loins. As with food, it serves a practical purpose and yet we quest beyond the utilitarian for the hedonistic and, unlike with food, over-abundance is not a vice. A surfeit of food and we twaddle toward obesity. A surfeit of sex and we race toward athleticism and the physical ideal.”

He wore a ski jacket and gloves to combat the cold. In all honesty, the temperature wasn’t much warmer outside. He also wore a black wool hat, which warmed the top halves of his ears and concealed most of his hair. He was not fond of his hair. It never seemed to comb straight. On some days, he considered shaving it off, but
he was scared of what he would find underneath, of what might be irrevocably exposed. So he wore hats.

“And, finally, why do we kill? If sleep and food conquer exhaustion and sex conquers time itself, what does murdering conquer other than the life force of other men? What value can be gained from the creation of corpses? And yet, although technologies exist which allow for better sleep and produce better food and enable more pleasurable sex, our scientific efforts as a species have undoubtedly been poured into the refinement of murder. Abortions. Capital punishment. War. Our priorities are obvious. One might say that when we kill, we are fulfilling our historical imperative.”

He faced them now, his hands tucked into the pockets of his ski jacket.

“Who shall I kill first? I’ll leave the choice to you.”

Both the husband and the wife turned their heads to look at him. They waited for him to continue.

He didn’t.

Instead, Cain42 grabbed another chair and sat down, a few feet from them, and waited for them to continue. He had all night. He was relatively warm. He had the music of his thoughts to keep him occupied and an inhaler in his pocket in case the dry air rattled his asthma.

The wife wore a pink silk negligee. It showcased her slim, dark figure. She probably bought it especially for their honeymoon. The husband wore a simple pair of cotton boxers, white with blue dots on them. His physique was solid. Cain42 could have traced the man’s abdominals with the tip of his hunting knife.

Hmm. Perhaps he would.

Seconds passed. Minutes passed. Ten minutes passed. Thirty minutes passed. The husband and wife simply refused to play his game. He had a tremendous amount of
patience, but the first shift at the slaughterhouse would be arriving in a few hours. So it was time to speed things up. He grabbed a nearby meat apron and donned it.

“Okay,” he said, and drew out his hunting knife. “This is stainless steel. It can cut through a tin can as easily as it can cut through a tomato. Do you see the serrated edge? That means it’s going to hurt going in, and it’s going to hurt even more as it goes out. It’s especially designed to cut through tissue. Let me give you an example.”

He then proceeded to saw off one of the husband’s nipples. He probably could have lopped it off, but sawing took longer and caused more pain. And, oh, how the husband screamed and screamed.

Cain42 flicked the nipple into the distance.

“In case you haven’t yet figured it out, I’m a bit of a sadist. That means I want to cause you as much pain as possible. It’s a psychosexual thing. You don’t need me to get into it. But I’m going to put my offer on the table one last time, and now it comes with a twist. One of you I’m going to kill quick, and the other I’m going to kill slow. If you don’t choose in the next two minutes, I’ll make sure you both suffer. Now, are you sure you want your loved one to undergo that kind of torture? Choose, please.”

That got them talking.

Etc., etc.

Cain42 watched the second hand tick past two minutes on his wristwatch and stepped in between the weeping lovebirds.

“Time’s up,” he said. “So, who gets to leave class early?”

“He does,” the wife replied.

The husband opened his mouth to protest, so Cain42 thrust all six inches of his steel blade into that open gap. He tugged upward, and then pulled back, tracking bits of reddish palate along with it, and finally, with some effort, withdrew the knife through the man’s nose. The husband gagged, twitched in the chair and died, just as promised.

The wife was sobbing.

“Don’t cry for his fate,” replied Cain42. “Cry for yours.”

And he went to work.

Seventy-two minutes later, he was both exhilarated and exhausted. What remained in her chair more resembled one of the hook-laden cows than a human being. Cain42 photographed the crime scene, splashed both corpses with a gallon of refrigerant (the cleanest crime scene is a destroyed crime scene) and left them to be discovered by the morning crew.

It was one of his acolytes from the website who had provided the address of the slaughterhouse. They’d assured him that the nighttime security was lax, and so it was. He ambled back to his silver Camry (bought for its ubiquity) and drove off without one rent-a-cop asking for his ID.

The meat apron (which he’d left behind) had absorbed
most of the blood, but not all of it. He would need both a new coat and a new pair of jeans. Ah, well. Such were the sacrifices he made for a job he loved.

Sunrise was still an hour or so away. The poets called this the magic hour, when the demons of the night were still awake and the darlings of the day were stirring from their beds. A melting pot of good and evil for one blessed, cursed span of minutes. Cain42 didn’t wonder which side of the spectrum he was on. As far as he was concerned, moral relativism was for patsies. He considered stopping for a late-night snack, maybe a doughnut or a cup of soup, but his exhaustion dictated otherwise, and he headed for his motel.

As he idled at a stoplight, he noticed a homeless woman trundle toward the sidewalk. She walked rigidly, as if the joints in her knees had fused solid, and kept her head down. Most of her face was concealed by her shaggy gray mane. Her body was concealed by a shaggy gray coat. She shuffled up to the curb. Cain42’s light turned green. He didn’t drive forward. She glanced up at him, one green eye peeking through that fuzzy amoeba she called hair. No one else was in sight. Just the woman, the man and the hour of magic. He waved her forward. She nodded to him and stepped into the crosswalk, clopping forward in that steely gait of hers. She passed in front of his Camry.

He floored the accelerator and collided with the woman at a steady clip of twenty miles per hour. Most car accident victims toppled up, and Cain42 had braced himself for her impact on his windshield, but this homeless woman toppled down. Maybe the stiff joints in her legs were to blame. Either way, she went down and under the carriage of the one-ton-plus vehicle. Cain42 felt his car roll over her body, as if it were a speed bump near
a church, and continued on his way. A quick check in the rearview mirror—and her arms were still in motion, swatting at imaginary flies, the rest of her body impossibly twisted up under that shapeless gray coat she wore. Was she still alive or were those frantic arm motions simply the impulses of a dying nervous system?

Hmm. Maybe he could go for a cup of soup, after all.

He stopped at an all-night coffee shop conveniently located near his bed-and-breakfast, changed into his other pair of jeans, left his bloody coat in the car. He checked the front of his Camry for any victim debris, flirted with the waitress and spoon-fed on a pint of piping-hot chicken broth. A few errant vegetables floated in the yellow sea, but their presence seemed more a culinary afterthought than an essential ingredient.
Eh, it’s 6:00 a.m., let’s toss some leftover shit in the guy’s soup.
Cain42 enjoyed his meal, flirted again with the waitress on the way out, regulated his breath with a hit from his asthma inhaler and left a sizable cash tip.

His B and B was called the Shellmont Inn and, as far as he could tell, its entire staff consisted of an old gay couple named Lou and Norm. The Shellmont Inn had seven rooms available, each named after a heavenly virtue. Cain42 stayed in Temperance. Above the head-board of his bed was a framed print of Luca Giordano’s Baroque masterpiece
Temperantia.

Cain42 loved B and Bs. He subscribed to “B and B

USA,” an online newsletter that highlighted the best inns, cottages and guest homes in the continental fortyeight states. Since he was always on the road, knowing the best local place to receive room and board with a personal touch came in quite handy.

Lou was already awake, rounding up the morning’s eggs from the chicken coop. He and Cain42 shared a
wave. He trudged up the steps to Temperance. He so desperately wanted to just fall into that lovely queen-size bed the Shellmont Inn provided, but first he had one final bit of business to attend.

His MacBook rested on his pillows like an oversize mint. Cain42 unlocked it and brought it out of sleep mode. He could have used the Shellmont’s wi-fi, but preferred his own 802.11n modem, already plugged into a USB port. It offered both higher speeds and better security, and he needed both if he was going to properly maintain his website.

And he treasured his website.

Delightfully, the thread he’d introduced earlier in the day under “Announcements and News” had received even more responses. Members were openly sharing their grief—and anger—over the death of one of their own.

It was one of the bylaws of their brotherhood. Cain42 would hold their identities a secret—even from fellow members of his ersatz “killers labor union”—unless and until the event of their deaths. Then, in a heartfelt obituary, he would lift the veil of secrecy.

He had had to do it too many times as of late.

More often than not, a union member got himself killed by ignoring the valuable tips Cain42 himself offered right there on the home page of the website. They
weren’t difficult to follow, but some people just couldn’t be relied on to follow any rules, and some people, at the end of the day, were just plain lazy.

Mothman had been neither. Mothman had been a child prodigy. He had only yet begun to actualize his potential. When Cain42 heard about the events in Ulster County—from another member, who had speculated openly whether Timothy Hammond had been one of them—he had been brought to tears. To be taken from the world at so young an age. So sad.

But it was a danger of the trade. This line of business had a history of unhappy endings. This labor union sought to diminish those odds, but nothing could stand in the way of human nature and human error. Steelworkers and coal miners still died, and so did his men and women (mostly men, but as a proponent of both women’s rights and affirmative action, he was actively pursuing more female and minority recruits).

To get his mind off Mothman’s tragic demise, Cain42 clicked on another thread on the message board and started up one of his silly polls.

What is your favorite murder weapon?

The last three made him grin.

He sifted through his in-box, sorting the significant from the banal. Most of the private emails he received were complaints, one member sounding off about another’s foolish and/or insensitive remarks in some thread. Some of the members, even though they didn’t know one another’s IRL, had developed grudges and rivalries. Publicly, Cain42 denounced such disputes as petty and unbecoming, but privately, he knew that anything that bolstered competitiveness had to be an asset.