Joshua Corin - Before Cain Strikes

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…