Before Cain Strikes (18 page)

Grover opened his mouth to rebut, to defend Esme or at least declaim Lester for, well,
spouting out classified information,
but the looks of sympathy from the men at the table silenced all protest. These men—these strangers, really—actually cared about his plight. They were friends. And it wasn’t as if Lester had lied. The FBI had, for lack of a better word, conscripted him. Only they didn’t send him overseas to fight the Vietcong. They sent him to Long Island.

Nolan flipped the turn card. Nine of hearts. Grover now had four of a kind. The hand was his to win. He slow-played it at first, tossing in the minimum bet, but Lester swallowed down a finger of Scotch and raised him. The other three gentlemen at the table still in the hand matched the raise. The pot was getting sizable, and there was still another card to go, and no one at the table could possibly have a hand better than Grover’s. Life was good.

It was time to step out of the shadows.

He added twenty dollars to Lester’s raise, leaned back in his chair and let the four other players fight among themselves. By the time the river card—an ace of clubs—was revealed, only Lester remained in the hand with him.

Grover Kirk knocked.

Lester, perhaps sensing weakness, splashed all of his chips into the pot. Grover, sensing victory, casually moved his own stacks to the center of the table. Lester flipped over his ace-high flush. Grover flipped over his four of a kind. The gentlemen erupted in shock and applause. Grover leaned back in his chair, basking in their adoration. Had Esme spotted his act of glory? He hoped so. And if not, one of these comely waitresses must have…

Nolan Worth collected the cards and passed them clockwise to the man to his left. “Nice hand,” he said, and flashed Grover a child-eating grin. But the writer was too busy trading verbal jabs with poor, humiliated Lester. Ah, well. Nolan excused himself from the table, shuffled off to the men’s room to relieve himself of the quart of Guinness he’d consumed since arriving, and while at the urinal activated his BlackBerry to locate the email he needed. Cain42 had sent out a bulletin to all members in the New York City area to check out the veracity of a prospective member’s application. Nolan, who first connected with Cain42 on, of all places, a bed-and-breakfast listserv, certainly hadn’t expected Grover Kirk to fall into his lap so neatly, but when Lester had started gabbing the other night at the lighthouse about his new houseguest and how poor Sophie had been forced to spend the week before Thanksgiving at their bastion tower, well…was it possible this was the same Grover Kirk? Apparently, it was.

Nolan whistled as he washed his hands, and then emailed back with the news of his discovery. Cain42 was going to be so proud of him. Maybe he’d be selected to do the deed. What an honor that would be for his first kill. He’d do Grover, then that blowhard Lester and his
bitch of a daughter-in-law, and then maybe spend some quality time with that cute brown-haired granddaughter of his, Sophie, before doing her, too. The thought of his claw hammer crashing into Sophie’s wrinkle-free prepubescent forehead made him hard, and he tried to think about bunny rabbits and dandelions before he could return to the table, but decided the hell with it—they were at a strip club, for Christ’s sake—and sauntered back to his friends, his cock, as always, leading his way.

W
hat to do, what to do.

It’s not that Cain42 was overly surprised by Nolan’s information. The FBI had already tried to plant two moles into his organization. Perhaps they’d assumed the third time would be the charm.

Perhaps it would be.

The surest way to trump one’s enemy was to give them what they wanted, and Cain42 had been so negligent of late in catering to the FBI’s egos. No, it was time to boost their confidence. Instill the G-men with a little pride. Make them think they’d bested him. The closer they got, the easier it would be for him to cut out their overinquisitive brains.

Cain42 needed to think. So he went to the nearest hardware store.

Oh, how he loved hardware stores! Even as a little child, barely able to reach above the shelf, the sheer variety on display held him rapturous. He could spend hours simply peering into a plastic container of nails. Like people, they came in all shapes and sizes. Like people, they served a purpose. Like people, they could gouge and cut.

Cain42 preferred local hardware stores to the big box chains, and in this particular town, he found a dandy of a place right on the main street, nestled between a barber and a pharmacy. The barber even had the vertical-striped pole out in front of its screen door. These modern-day salons, the kind one often found inside cavernous malls, never displayed a barber’s pole. This country was in danger of losing its history. The red stripe in the barber’s pole symbolized blood. Up until quite recently, barbers used to perform surgeries. After all, they had the tools for the job.

How appropriate, then, to find a barber’s shop next to a hardware store.

This hardware store was called Mitch’s, but the punk-haired teenager behind the counter most certainly was not Mitch. She wore a red apron and little else, not that there was much else to see given her anorexic frame. Nevertheless, Cain42 flashed her an all-American how-do-you-do grin. She responded with an all-adolescent leave-me-alone glare.

So he made his way to Aisle 1 (of 5), momentarily distracted by the thought of crushing the glasslike bones of her clavicles with the balls of his thumbs. The sight and smell of fresh-cut lumber carried him back to reality. Here, arrayed by length and width, were long strips of pine and cherry and oak, each sanded as smooth as a human cheek. Cain42 ran his fingertips along these, the carved bones of forests, and his mind swooned in memory of porches built in backyards and of cages built in basements. Historians demarcated ancient civilization into ages of Stone and Bronze and Iron, but wood—wood was mankind’s oldest earthborn friend. On his website, Cain42 posted instructions on how to manufacture a longbow and arrows out of hardwood ash. Longbows
were excellent for long-range, silent kills. Cain42 preferred intimacy in murder, but he was aware that some of his online friends were shy, and so he did what he could to accommodate them—accommodate
all
types, really.

As webmaster, he did not tolerate discrimination.

Aisle 2 housed plumbing supplies. As Cain42 ogled the curlicues of pipes and a dangling assembly of toilet seats beside them, and a wall of faucets in every style from simple steel to stenciled gold, he reminded himself that he was here to ruminate on a problem. But it was so easy to become distracted! He marveled at the creativity of it all. So much in this aisle, once installed, became the stuff behind the walls, out of sight, ignored—and yet look at how much time and effort had been spent in making even these drains and traps and washers not only functional but beautiful. Indoor plumbing was taken for granted, but the era of chamber pots and bedpans was not too long ago. Cain42 once put an elderly woman’s head in her own bedpan and then put the bedpan in the woman’s gas oven. He didn’t turn the oven on, of course. That would have been overkill.

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.