by Joshua Corin
Meanwhile, Rafe contributed to Team Sophie by finishing up the cards. Before departing for her bedroom, Sophie gave him strict instructions. As he attempted to follow them, he also attempted to recollect his elementary school valentines. He couldn’t even recall the names of his instructors. He would be forty years old this July. This fact, unfortunately, he never seemed to forget.
Esme joined him back at the table.
“Sophie’s brushing her hair,” she said. “She wants privacy.”
“Well, sure.”
They kissed. Briefly—but briefly then lasted a minute. Two minutes. Hands touched cheeks. Mussed hair. Three minutes.
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” whispered Rafe.
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” whispered Esme.
Sophie marched into the kitchen. “I’m ready!”
At 10:00 a.m., Esme texted their babysitter, Chelsea, reminding the slightly scatterbrained but quite responsible teenager to come by the house no later than six o’clock. Rafe and Esme had strict dinner reservations at 6:30 p.m. at Il Forno.
As soon as Esme returned her cell phone to the counter, it buzzed. Was that Chelsea already, sneaking a text message back to her from some high school classroom? Esme checked the screen.
Tom Piper.
Her phone buzzed again.
Like most Americans, she had read about the attacks in Amarillo. The 24-hour news channels were still filled, three days later, with footage and interviews and expert opinions, not the mention rampant speculation. Was this attack related to the one in Atlanta? Was there a serial killer on the loose? It made for compulsive TV.
Except for Esme. After her initial obsession about the Atlanta shootings, after Tom Piper had deconstructed her obsession into simple displacement, her interest in the story quickly faded. One might even say she became just as obsessively uninterested. Instead, Esme concentrated her days on her Sudoku puzzles, her books (she’d moved on from the Elvis Costello biography to a schmaltzy novel her reading club had selected), and her ever-surprising daughter. She’d even started paying attention to the presidential elections. It was unavoidable, really. Amy Lieb was roping all of Oyster Bay into her campaign for Bob Kellerman and now that it looked like he’d be the nominee, her efforts (in her mind) had ascended to Great Importance. To not be involved would be un-American. So Esme found herself volunteering on weekends with the other housewives at Oyster Bay’s KELLERMAN FOR PRESIDENT campaign headquarters (i.e. Amy’s mini-mansion). She licked envelopes, cut decals and traded gossip with everyone else.
Bzzzzzzzzzzz!
Tom Piper, calling to snatch her from the jaws of mediocrity.
Bzzzzzzzzzz!
“Let it go to voice mail,” she muttered. She was content, damn it.
Bzzzzzzzzzz!
There were men and women at the Bureau far more in the loop than thirty-eight-year-old Esme Stuart from Oyster Bay, Long Island. Tom had no right to call her, really. The responsible thing for him to do would be to go to his own people. Yes, she’d called him last month, but as Tom himself had pointed out, that had been a moment of temporary lunacy. She was retired now. She was a housewife.
Bzzzzzzzzz!
“Just go to voice mail!” she growled. How many times did it have to ring before—
It stopped. Finally. She felt her shoulders slacken, and ambled to the stereo and pondered a distraction. Joy Division? Too morose for right now. Pavement? Too loud.
The Kinks. Ideal for any mood and setting. She popped in the CD. Bless you, Ray Davies.
And her phone buzzed again.
“Jesus, what the hell?”
She stomped back to the counter and checked the screen. It was just a note from her voice mail. One new message.
One new message.
Damn it, Tom.
It was Valentine’s Day, for fuck’s sake.
Esme slipped her phone into the utensils drawer (out of sight, out of mind) and lay down on the sofa with her water-damaged paperback. “Lola” strummed in the background. She thought about lighting some peppermint incense, decided against it, and forced herself into the book.
Six people had died in Amarillo…
No. No. People die every day. Read the book.
Fourteen in Atlanta, six in Amarillo. Someone had to speak for those victims.
And they would. Why her? She had done her bit for king and country, hadn’t she?
More would die. This sniper had a purpose.
He must have left a note.
Esme closed her novel.
“Fuck,” she concluded.
She dialed down the volume on her stereo, went in the kitchen, and retrieved her phone. Didn’t bother listening to Tom’s message. Just dialed him direct.
“This is Tom.”
“Hi, Tom.”
“I just called you.”
“I was in the shower.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“How are you?”
“Busy.”
“I can imagine.”
“I know you can. That’s why I called.”
“For my imagination?”
“Have you been following the case?”
“I’ve actually been a little busy.”
“Oh?”
“I’m campaigning for Bob Kellerman.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“I’ve become very civic.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“How can I help you, Tom?”
“You don’t seem as enthusiastic as you were before.”
“What can I say? Love fades.”
“He’s going to kill again.”
Esme closed her eyes, then opened them.
“I’m sure you and your team are more than capable of stopping him. Our tax dollars at work, right?”
“He left a note in Atlanta.”
The cell phone trembled in her hand. No—it was her hand that was trembling.
“What did the note say?”
“I thought you weren’t interested.”
“What did the note say, Tom?”
“He left it in a shoe box. We found the shoe box on the roof of the school. It was just lying there. We also found the spent shells from his rifle. Sixteen shells.”
Sixteen shells. Fifteen dead in Atlanta, including the dog, plus the squad car’s red-and-blues, which were the first target. Sixteen shells. The sniper hadn’t missed, not once.
“We opened the shoe box and found the note.”
“What did the note say?”
“I just scanned it and e-mailed it to you. Call me back after you’ve read it.”
Click.
Esme introduced the phone to her middle finger, then clomped to her computer and turned it on. The Kinks segued into “Waterloo Sunset,” one of the sweetest rock and rolls songs ever recorded. Esme didn’t notice.
Windows took two minutes to boot up.
Fuck you, Bill Gates. Esme plopped down in her seat and clicked on her e-mail client. Another thirty seconds for that to boot up. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.
And what did it matter if she read the note, anyway? Why was she making such a big deal out of this? She could read it, give Tom her two cents over the phone, and be done with it. What was the big deal?
Finally. Three new messages. One from Amy Lieb, one from Hallmark (Rafe must have opened one of the e-cards she’d sent him), and one from [email protected].
Esme double-clicked on the message. The note the sniper had left in Atlanta loaded in the body of the e-mail:
IF THERE WAS STILL A GOD, HE WOULD HAVE STOPPED ME.
—GALILEO
Esme felt her adrenaline turn to ice. This was not the rambling, incoherent manifesto she expected. In her time at the Bureau, she had encountered more than her share of rambling, incoherent manifestos. But this—this was just a direct statement. Yes, he chose a colorful moniker like so many of the other lunatics, but what insight could she possibly…
He had to have left another note in Amarillo.
Bzzzzzzzzzz!
“What was in the second shoe box?” she asked.
“What shoe box?” Rafe replied.
Esme swallowed hard. She suddenly felt like she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “What shoe box?” she echoed innocently.
“You said something about a shoe box.”
“What’s up?”
“I just read your Hallmark card. The one you sent me online.”
Esme tapped her fingers on the countertop. “Did you like it?”
“It made me laugh.”
“Good.”
“I’ll see you tonight at six. Wear something slinky.”
“How risqué.”
“Love you.”
Rafe hung up.
Esme sat down on the floor. Why did she feel so guilty? When she got pregnant, they’d agreed her lifestyle—shuttling about the country working on violent crimes—was not conducive to raising a family. She’d made a pact with Rafe to leave the Bureau and move to Long Island. Gloria Steinem might not have approved, but Esme savored the time she got to spend with her daughter while the other mothers had to hire nannies or ship their children to day care. Surely a few phone calls with her old boss wasn’t a betrayal of her family. It wasn’t as if Tom was asking her to fly down to Amarillo….
But he would.
She knew it even before she’d answered the phone. Whatever he was dealing with was too much for him to handle. There was only so much help one could offer from Oyster Bay, Long Island. Elect a president—perhaps. Catch a sniper—you’ve got to be kidding. No, to really help, she’d have to walk the crime scene and examine the evidence. Not scanned images of the note, but the note itself. What paper had he used? What typeface? What kind of shoe box was it? What was the pattern the shell casings made when they left his rifle and landed on the rooftop asphalt? Any of these could be clues to locating the guy, but they couldn’t be judged from a thousand miles away. If she walked the crime scene and examined the evidence…who knows?
All modesty aside, she had been very, very good at her job. Where others saw randomness, she recognized patterns, and patterns always led back to the perpetrator. Tom Piper could read anybody, even over the phone line. She read patterns. They were, so to speak, life’s intelligent design. She just filled in the blanks (thus her affinity for Sudoku puzzles). Even the entropy of madness, given the proper data, could be divined. Effect always followed cause. All actions carried context.
She knew there had to have been a second shoe box, one in Amarillo. It fit the pattern. And if she only knew what was inside it…
She stared at her cell phone. Tom was waiting for her call.
He was counting on her.
But so were Rafe and Sophie.
5
Six deaths meant six separate funerals, but Amarillo, like Atlanta, held one memorial service to honor them all. There was much debate over where the service should be held. The Amarillo metropolitan area boasted over 1,000 churches, and almost all of them jockeyed for the opportunity to host the service. Mayor Deidre Lumley, however, insisted the memorial service remain non-denominational (although many of Amarillo’s more prominent clergymen were assured seats on the dais).
The memorial service in Atlanta had been held at the 4,500-seat Fox Theatre and every seat had been filled. Amarillo had Dick Bivins Stadium, which seated 15,000, but Mayor Lumley A) didn’t want to associate tragedy with sports, and B) didn’t expect 15,000 people to show up. All those empty seats would look very bad on national TV. After much deliberation, many pots of coffee, and a quid pro quo from the editor-in-chief of the local newspaper, Mayor Lumley and her staff decided upon the Globe-News Center. It was relatively new, seated over 1,000 quite comfortably, and was very media-friendly (as it was named, after the local newspaper, the Amarillo Globe-News).
By the time Tom Piper arrived at the Center, about an hour before the service was scheduled to begin, there already were 5,000 people milling in the parking lot. Law enforcement did their best to conduct the traffic, but sheer numbers forced new arrivals to turn back; park their cars three, four, five miles away, and walk. Children and elders were dropped off, and with a half hour to go the crowd had surpassed 6,000.
Some carried candles. Some carried billboards with the names of the fallen handwritten on them in Magic Marker. All carried grief—in their hearts, in their eyes. Their community had been attacked. A demon had singled them out. Six of their heroes had died trying to protect them. And there was no closure—the demon was still at large.
He might even be one of the 6,000 here at the service.
Tom Piper surveyed the men and women. Despite what he considered frankly outlandish claims about his ability to decipher minds, he knew the probability of his detecting an irregularity, especially in a mass of people this enormous, was astronomically low. Detection was the justification he’d offered his team (while they remained behind and worked the evidence—what little of it there was) for his attendance here today, but this was bullshit.
The truth was far simpler and quainter: He was here out of a sense of duty.
He secured his helmet and protective leggings to his Harley, adjusted the feeling of his baggy black leather coat on his slim shoulders, and joined the throng. Tom wanted to maintain his anonymity here, in this vigil, but that was the easy road. Twenty people were dead. He hadn’t yet earned the easy road.
He displayed his badge.
The questions came almost immediately:
“Do you have any leads?” “Who could have done this?” “What are you doing to keep this from happening again?” “How did you let this happen at all?”
The questions pelted him, pricked at him. He felt every one. The sight of his badge, though, forced everyone, friendly or not, to let him pass. He silently made his way to the red sandstone building, showed his badge to the cops at the gate, and entered.
Inside the auditorium, Tom identified the four distinct cliques. The family members, mostly culled from Amarillo’s lower middle class, wore black polyester. They all knew each other, and chatted freely amongst themselves. Tom picked out the genetic resemblances—these giants over here must be kin to Cole the night watchman, those fair-skinned redhead variations over there must belong to Daniel and Brian McIvey. Among the firefighters in attendance, the genetics varied wildly, but as a group they were easily distinguished by their Class A’s, the black-and-gold uniform each wore in honor of their fallen brethren. The third pocket of attendees, smaller than the first two, was the politicians. Here were the $2,000 suits and the once-a-week haircuts. Tom recognized the state’s congressmen and senators.
The fourth, final, least significant clique was the press. They sat in the rear, set up their cameras. Here was the widest variety of humanity. They carried on their faces bleary evidence of two-hour naps in tiny motel rooms, and their clothes looked shopworn. Some attended funerals for a living. It was part of their job.
Tom took a seat in the back, with the press. After all, he identified most with the press. He too, it seemed, attended funerals for a living.
The service was scheduled to begin in five minutes.
Six large black-and-white photographs hung like flags from a pipe above the stage, as if to remind the attendees the reason they were here. As if anyone needed reminding. Underneath the photographs were eight black chairs and a miked podium. Tom wondered if Mayor Lumley and the other seven distinguished guests (which included Catch’s pal Lt. Governor Jed Danvers) were milling in the green room, eating cubes of cheese.
Tom fixated on the photographs.
Cole Kingman.
Bobby Vega.
Lou Hopper.
Daniel McIvey.
Brian McIvey.
Roscoe Coffey.
Names forever added to his memory. Names, like the fourteen in Atlanta, forever associated to a madman with a gun.
And Esme still hadn’t called him back.
He’d sent her the e-mail around 10:00 a.m. EST. It
was almost 12:30 p.m. now in Amarillo, which meant it was almost 1:30 p.m. in Oyster Bay. She hadn’t e-mailed him back—he had his BlackBerry set to notify him when he received new messages at his work account. What was she doing? Surely she wanted to help out…right?
Perhaps the seven years had changed her more than he’d expected. Perhaps he didn’t know her anymore at all.
And yet she’d called him…
The speakers took the stage. Gradually, the attendees settled, and sat. Mayor Lumley approached the podium. The shoulder pads in her dark blue pantsuit made her look like a transvestite.
“Good afternoon,” she began…and then Tom tuned her out. He’d met the woman the previous night at city hall, and she’d seemed to possess the trait of being both ignorant and condescending at the same time. It was a trait most commonly found in politicians and actor-activists, and there actually was a psychological term for it. The Dunning-Kruger effect: the dumber you are, the smarter you think you are. Tom’s father, a lawman in Jasper, Kentucky, had a better phrase to describe them: “arrogant fuckwits.” As in: “there’s that arrogant fuckwit on TV again, vomiting at the mouth.”
Tom pursed his lips in a small grin.
“Special Agent Piper,” whispered the young Asian woman to his left, “what’s so funny?”
She was an itty-bitty thing, with spiky faux-black hair. Twenty-two years old, if that. Her dark V-neck cardigan went down to her knees. Her right nostril was pierced. Who is she, thought Tom, and how does she know my name?
As if psychic, she held out her hand. “Lilly Toro. San Francisco Chronicle.” She had the body of a child but the croak of a chain-smoking octogenarian.
Tom shook her hand, didn’t notice nicotine on her fingertip. “You’re a long way from home, Ms. Toro.”
“So are you, Special Agent Piper.”
They spoke in hushed tones, so as not to disturb those around them, who were apparently enraptured in the mayor’s oratory.
“I sat next to you on purpose,” she said.
“Are you asking me out on a date, Ms. Toro?”
“Not unless you’re hiding a vagina.” Her breath smelled of spearmint and menthol. “And call me Lilly.”
