The Piper (CASMIRC Book 2)

by Ben Miller

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. It’s cool. I like it.”

  Corinne shrugged. “Have you ever noticed that we always end up at a bar? Or lounge? Or pub?”

  “I think we once went to a grille,” Reilly joked.

  “Liar.” Corinne smiled. “Seriously. We’ve never been to a restaurant. You know: cloth napkins; forks of different sizes; waiters who wear uniforms that don’t contain buttons, referee’s stripes, or cartoon mascots?”

  Reilly laughed. “I guess I never really thought about it.”

  “Bullshit. You think about everything.”

  “No, really. You usually pick the places we go.”

  “That is true. Shooting holes in my conspiracy theory here, Reilly.” Corinne tilted back her beer, finishing her first bottle before the appetizers arrived, per usual. “You picked that first place, though. In Front Royal. What was it called?”

  “Oh, man.” Reilly scratched his head, again feigning a poor memory. He wondered if it meant anything that he remembered all these seemingly minor details in their relationship, but Corinne did not. He didn’t want it to bear any significance, so he told himself it didn’t. That should keep his self-doubts at bay for a little while. “Trendsetters?”

  Corinne curled her lips. “Was it? That doesn’t sound right?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.” He knew so. Why doesn’t she remember? Or is she just messing with me? As much as he liked Corinne, sometimes her mental games wore thin on him.

  Instead of belaboring the point, Corinne changed the subject. “So what’s going on up in Boston?”

  “We’re flying up in the morning. Jack, me, Camilla, and Amanda. I’m on crime scene duty.”

  “So you’re going?”

  This question took Reilly by surprise. “Well, yeah. Why wouldn’t I go? It’s my job.”

  Corinne took a drink from her ice water. “I know it’s your job. But, after this morning, I thought you would consider saying ‘no.’ Given how you said you never wanted to go back to Boston.”

  “I didn’t say I never wanted to go back; I just said I never had been back,” Reilly retorted.

  “Semantics. Whatever.”

  “Aren’t you a reporter? Shouldn’t details like that be, I don’t know, important to you?” Reilly’s tone revealed he wasn’t entirely joking.

  “They are. And I remember what you actually said, but I also remember that it wasn’t what you really meant.”

  “Oh, you know what I meant?” All humor had left his tone.

  Corinne leaned forward and put her hand on his. While it was a welcomed gesture, it seemed out of character for her—the second such one today. “Sorry, babe, I don’t mean to upset you. It just seemed to me that you have been through a lot up there, and going back might stir up memories you didn’t need to deal with. I thought maybe you shouldn’t go.”

  Reilly dropped his skepticism, took his free hand, and put it on top of hers. “I appreciate that, I do. But it’s just work. I do a lot of shitty things in this job, and going back to Boston for this investigation won’t rank in the top ten.”

  “You’re just in a good place right now. We’re in a good place right now. I don’t want you to lose that, or us to lose this.”

  Reilly couldn’t believe she put herself out like this. These words embodied more sentiment than he had ever seen from Corinne. “We’ll be good. Trust me. I’m just going up for a few days. We’ll probably come back on Sunday, anyway, because Jack has to be here for Randall Franklin’s trial.”

  Corinne nodded and sat back, slowly sliding her hand out of his and across the table in an inimitably sensual manner. “OK.” Her bottom jaw stuck out and she pursed her lips. “What if I come with you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, not with you, on the FBI jet. But I could catch a commercial flight to get up there. I’ve been looking at some pieces on these cases, and it might make for a good national story. I could use a little focus on something other than the Playground Predator stuff for a few days, too. Especially with the trial coming up.” Corinne had been working with Jackson Byrne on writing the nonfiction book about the Playground Predator case. Most of the book was finished, but they decided to devote the penultimate chapter to the trial. They wouldn’t submit it to Jack’s publisher until after they had completed their chronicle of the courtroom portion of the drama.

  Before Reilly could respond, Corinne pulled out her cell phone. “It’s just after nine. Bo will still be up.” Bo Edelstein was her editor and would have to approve any such travel and its related expenses. She scrolled through a couple of menus until she got to his contact information. “What do you say?”

  Reilly couldn’t think of a downside, likely blinded by the prospect of two more nights of sex with Corinne. “Sure. Sounds great.”

  “Great.” She smiled as she tapped the call button.

  10

  Clyde weaved back and forth in front of his favorite tree, a crooked maple that never seemed to make it out of the sapling phase, sniffing it out for previous visitors—his typical ritual before lifting his leg and relieving himself all over the trunk and surrounding brown grass. He kept ducking his head under the leash connected to his collar, as to not get tangled up.

  While his eyes followed the path of his collie/pit bull mix, Stanton Newkirk’s mind drifted, as it usually did. He had bought Clyde for Kim after her first miscarriage. She initially loved Clyde, and Stanton fulfilled his mission of taking her mind off all the other troubles in their lives. Now, eight years, another miscarriage, and countless injections of futile fertility drugs later, Stanton realized it had been a mistake, despite his best intentions. In the past several years, Kim wanted nothing to do with the dog. His presence seemed to serve simply as a constant reminder of that first lost baby and of her inability to conceive.

  Babies, babies, babies.

  Her obsession had become his as well. Images of cooing little infants permeated his every thought. He began to have difficulty concentrating at work. He provided voice-overs for TV programs and commercials, most notably for a cable station known as “The Worldwide Leader in Sports.” After requiring five takes to read a simple advertisement for a segue leading into their main news program, he suspected that his employers had begun to notice.

  After their last horrible experience, he had sworn that he was done. Done thinking and worrying about bringing a newborn into their home. (Or newborns, plural. When he and Kim went through their attempts—also plural—at in vitro fertilization, they had fantasized together about bringing home multiple babies, as many families seem to do.) He decided he could just will the aching void away. Instead, following a few weeks of nearly overwhelming rage, his yearning only intensified, amplified by the increasing sadness and withdrawal of his beloved Kim. He still saw flashes of that spry girl he had met on the neighboring treadmill at the gym fourteen years ago, but too often she got pushed into the shadows, the darkness of Kim’s infertility.

  Clyde dropped his leg, satisfied with the level of saturation of the small maple. He began trotting forward again, yanking Stanton along with him. Stanton snapped back into the moment, but the ideation of babies didn’t fade. It never did anymore.

  11

  Randall leaned against the concrete wall and stared up at the concrete ceiling, his mind tingling. The vibrations travelled down his spine, out to the tips of his fingers and toes. He hadn’t felt this awake, this alive, this on since completing his Work in that high school swimming pool several months ago. They made him take all of his meds since incarcerating him, and, while he would admit he could think clearly more consistently, he had felt dulled. Until now.

  Jackson Byrne’s naiveté surprised him. Randall had spent over half a year preparing his Work, and he completed it almost without a hitch. He intended to end up here, in this cell, all along.

  Well, maybe not this cell. He had imagined something different. These sixty square feet had not one iota of comfort. It seemed as though the warden an
d his cohorts strategized about how to increase the inmates’ hardships down to every detail: each square inch of the mattress contained some kind of lump; prickly bristles from his toothbrush would somehow oscillate between scraping roughly against his gums and removing themselves from the brush to get stuck between his teeth; the water from his sink was either excruciatingly hot or unbelievably cold, never tolerably tepid; and the smell. He still couldn’t place it, couldn’t even find the appropriate words to describe it, but he also couldn’t escape it. After the first day here, he had expected he would get used to the smell. By day three it would be imperceptible, he had told himself. Yet four months later he sometimes had trouble focusing on anything other than the unpleasant-yet-not-quite-repugnant odor permeating through the halls.

  Jack knew how meticulously Randall had planned his Work; he had to understand this in order to find him and grasp the entire body of it. So why did Jack think he could pass off old cases on him, pretending they were fresh cases coming into CASMIRC? Randall studied Jack and his exploits for months. Prior to his arrest, he had familiarized himself with nearly every case Jack had encountered in his time at CASMIRC. He thought Jack might pull something like this, offering up cases in order for Randall to prove his worth as a resource to their team.

  Randall concluded, though, that these case files came to sit on his lap due more to his genius than to Jack’s gullibility. The real brilliance in the whole scheme was how Randall almost got every case right. Though he knew the outcome, he took care to never hit the proverbial nail on its proverbial head. The conclusion he offered Jack approximated the true solution enough to appear as though Randall could influence an investigation in a helpful manner.

  Clearly he had succeeded. He held the proof in his hands right now.

  He had read through the files three times this evening. He felt positive he could recite just about every detail, if asked. Several elements stuck out to him, and he had taken mental notes—he wasn’t allowed a pen or pencil. He had asked for a laptop or tablet and was denied. (He could see how they wouldn’t want to give an accused murderer a sharp object like a writing utensil, but an iPad? That just seemed stingy.)

  He assumed Jack and his team—and maybe even the local cops—had picked up on most of the salient points in his notes. He kept coming back to one peculiarity, one he couldn’t quite make sense of. In each case, the mothers recalled the perpetrator yelling out to them. “Hey,” he had said. Both times.

  Why?

  He ended up attacking both of them from behind anyway. It’s not like he needed them to turn around and face him to stick the Taser into their flanks. Their reports suggest he was heavily disguised, so it probably didn’t matter if the women saw his face or not. Shouting only allowed them to later identify his voice. It didn’t seem to serve any purpose. Yet, as he did it both times, it must.

  Randall needed to get in touch with Jack. He felt certain he had discovered an important factor, and equally certain this fact had eluded the authorities’ efforts to this point.

  DAY THREE:

  FRIDAY

  12

  Jack flopped his empty suitcase on top of the bed. Vicki leaned against the headboard on the other end, sipping creamy coffee from her favorite mug. Jack thought she looked brighter than she had in months. He had expected a rough morning, especially with his leaving for Boston for the weekend. Instead she seemed chipper.

  “Who are you taking? Who all is going?” she asked.

  Jack opened his mouth to answer, but caught himself. He recognized she asked that question in her signature, redundant fashion. A quirk he had grown to love, then forgot about for years. It had been conspicuously absent from her speech in the last four months, and Jack now welcomed its return. He decided not to make a big deal about it, but he kept an internal, optimistic note.

  “Just four of us: Heath, Camilla, Amanda, and I. The Boston Bureau branch has been active in the case for a while, so we should have a lot of local support too.” He laid a navy blue suit in his suitcase on top of another suit, midnight blue; the difference between the two hues was almost imperceptible.

  “Are you sure you guys will be OK?” he asked her.

  She finished her sip of coffee and nodded. “I’m sure. Jonah, Mom, and I are going to the mall today.” Jack raised his eyebrows, a gesture she noticed. “I feel better,” Vicki continued. “I think this new mix of meds is starting to work well.”

  “Do you think you’ll take the Xanax like Dr. Inkler recommended?”

  “I haven’t decided. I don’t really want to. I want to do it on my own.”

  Jack tossed a couple of white dress shirts inside the suitcase and sat down on the side of the bed, placing a tender hand on her ankle. “I know. And I know you can. What she said does make sense, though, don’t you think? Taking something to keep your physiologic responses in check?”

  “It does. And it doesn’t. I don’t want to become dependent on meds just to go out in public. Anti-depressants are one thing, but Xanax is different. It can be habit forming— I read about it.”

  “Well—” Jack began.

  “Hey, look.” Vicki interrupted, pointing at Good Morning, America on the TV. Jack’s photo appeared beside Randall’s, both floating behind the anchor’s head. Vicki grabbed the remote and turned the volume up.

  Robin Roberts’ voice gradually came into the bedroom. “…Trial starts Monday. With us this morning are the parents of two of the victims, Stephanie McBurney and Danielle Coulter.” The images changed to the school photos two young girls, Randall’s first and third victims.

  The show switched cameras to reveal a warm, living room setting. Two cream-colored love seats faced the anchor, each populated by one set of parents. Though Jack knew much about them, he had never met any of them.

  “Jennifer and Mario Cugino, Stephanie’s mother and step-father…” The show cut to a close-up on both of them, sitting on the love seat to the right, nearest Robin. Both were well dressed in finely tailored, stylish suits. Jennifer nodded and smiled politely, while Mario pushed his lips together as if trying to constrain words within his mouth. She seemed genuinely happy to be there, despite her immense sadness. He seemed pissed at the world.

  “…And Danielle’s parents, Amy and Carl Coulter.” The view switched to a camera focused on the other love seat. If not for the previous establishing shot, and the matching love seats, Jack would have surmised that these two couples sat on opposite sides of the country. Amy wore a top cut too low, a skirt hemmed too high, and too much make-up; none of which she needed for her natural beauty to make a positive first impression. She smiled and gazed into the camera. Carl, looking down at the floor, sported an off-the-rack blue corduroy coat over a worn, off-white shirt and a plain blue tie. Jack sensed that all three were the only of their kind he owned, purchased as a multi-purpose outfit for funerals, weddings, and, evidently, appearances on Good Morning, America.

  “Thanks for having us, Robin. It’s a real pleasure to be here,” Amy Coulter said unctuously.

  “Oh, thank you all for being here. First, I’m sure everyone wants to know, how are you doing?” Robin asked.

  Amy Coulter began speaking first, beating out the Cuginos; Carl Coulter did not seem to be in the running. “Well, Robin…” She took a deep breath and looked directly into the camera. “It’s been so hard. We…” Her bottom lip began trembling in large amplitudes. Jack found it perhaps more exaggerated than an involuntary quiver. “…miss our Danielle so much. Every day.” She looked at Carl as she reached over and squeezed his hand, resting on his knee. He looked at her from the corner of his eye, surprised.

  “I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through,” Robin empathized. “Jennifer, Mario?”

  The camera cut to the Cuginos. Jennifer began speaking in a melancholic but controlled tone. In the bedroom Vicki talked over her. “Mario there—” She pointed to the TV. “Accent or no accent?”

  Back when they were dating, Jack and Vicki shared an inside joke, a game
they called “Accent or No Accent.” At any point one of them could challenge the other to guess if someone would have an accent prior to hearing that person speak. Any accent would suffice, from horribly broken English to a subtle Southern drawl. They even developed a shorthand following a vacation to southern Florida: “Si or No,” which allowed for simply a one-syllable answer. While it always brought levity to a situation, the degree of difficulty had a wide range, from the formidable—such as an erudite-looking librarian with wire-rimmed glasses—to the obvious—the New York City cabbie with more Zs and Gs in his name than vowels.

  Jack couldn’t remember the last time they had played “Accent or No Accent.” Years, probably. He looked at Vicki and smiled. A remnant from her old persona, the pre-Randall era, had surfaced. She was on her way back.

  After briefly meeting his eyes and sharing a smile, she looked at the TV, widening her eyes and raising her eyebrows with a sense of urgency.

  Jack looked at the TV. Jennifer Cugino neared the end of her surely heartfelt response, and Mario sat anxiously, waiting to talk. Jack surveyed his faintly olive skin, the wavy head of dark hair. “Uh… Accent!”

  Before Mario could say anything, Robin offered her next question. “I understand you all plan on attending the trial. After going through as much as you all have gone through in the past several months, how do you gear up for that?”

  “It’s tough, Robin. It’s tough,” Amy Coulter said.

  “We’re blessed to have such supportive friends and family,” Jennifer Cugino said. “And our faith. Our faith keeps us going.”

  Robin nodded, affirming her belief in the power of faith.

  “Justice.” Mario Cugino uttered emphatically, in perfectly unbroken English.

  “Ooooh…” Jack said, feigning disappointment.