by Joshua Corin
Police sirens cut off Rafe’s train of thought. He heard them before he saw the police cruiser in his rearview. Jesus, how long had the bastard been tailing him? Rafe checked his speed. Seventy-two miles per hour. So much for a casual fifteen over. He eased off the gas pedal and curbed to the side of the forest-lined road. The cruiser had his spotlight on now, despite the fact that the afternoon sun provided more than enough illumination.
“Well,” Rafe said to himself, “at least now I’ll have a valid excuse for running late.”
His valid excuse cost him $300, and he made a point of waving it out the window to Esme the moment he pulled into the parking lot of the federal building. She was sitting on the front steps, took one look at his speeding ticket, and shrugged apathetically.
“I tried to get here as fast as I could,” Rafe told her. “The cop just wasn’t sympathetic.”
She climbed into the passenger seat and fastened her safety belt. Her mascara had smeared a bit around her eyes. Had she been crying? The FBI had shot down her request and now she was crying? This had gone too far….
“I was right,” she whispered. Her voice sounded miles away. “I was right and Tom was right and no one listened.”
“What are you—”
“He struck again. Galileo. He shot up a school in Santa Fe. A school. Children were there. What could I have done differently? There had to be something I could have done differently. I was right.”
But she didn’t sound vindicated. She just sounded far, far away.
Rafe drove back to Oyster Bay in silence. He obeyed the speed limit, and occasionally offered Esme a comforting glance. She didn’t notice. She just stared out the window at the foliage as it went on by.
When they pulled into the driveway, Sophie raced out of the house to greet them. She must have been sitting by the window.
“Did college get cancelled?” she asked her father.
“I wish,” he replied, and scooped her up in his arms.
Inside, Lester was watching a news report about the shootings, with one hand in a bag of mustard-flavored pretzels.
“There she is,” he said between bites. “I thought maybe you forgot you had a house.”
Esme glared at her father-in-law. “You left early.”
“If you say so.”
Rafe, sensing an argument brewing, leaned down to his daughter. “If you finish your homework in your bedroom, we can go out tonight to Burger King.”
“Yay!” replied Sophie, and she galloped up the stairs.
Lester clicked off the TV, popped one more pretzel in his mouth, and stood up.
“Your wife was so busy gabbing with the feds,” he said to Rafe, “that she forgot we had to pick her daughter up from school.”
“I was ‘gabbing with the feds’ to try and protect my daughter, you addle-minded son-of-a—”
Lester returned the pretzels to the pantry. “It’s not the first time it’s happened. I held my tongue when she was stuck in the couch, but if she’s healthy enough to go running off to Melville, I don’t see why I have to keep picking up her slack when it comes to Sophie.”
“Galileo’s killed more people! He’s going to come here!”
“Ask her, Rafe. Ask her which she would choose. Ask her which is more important right now. Taking care of her girl or hunting down this Galileo character. Go ahead.”
Rafe looked from his father to his wife.
“That’s not even a fair choice,” she replied. “He’s killing dozens of people. He needs to be stopped.”
“But where’s your duty? Is it there or is it here?”
Esme opened her mouth to reply…but didn’t. Couldn’t.
Lester wiped clean his hands. “I rest my case.” He sauntered toward the bathroom.
Rafe and Esme were alone in the den.
“I was right,” she whispered. “I can stop him.”
Just as softly, her husband answered her: “You don’t belong in that world anymore.”
They matched stares. The air became charged with memories, and longing.
“They need my help….”
“Sophie needs her mother. I need my wife. I miss her.”
He took a step forward.
“Come back to us,” he said. “Please.”
Her cell phone rang. It was Tom Piper’s ringtone.
Her cell phone rang again.
Her cell phone rang again.
She answered it: “Hi, Tom.”
Rafe took a deep breath.
“Yes, Tom, I saw. It’s horrible.”
He noticed her hands were trembling.
“No, I’m glad they’re reinstating the task force, Tom. They never should have mistrusted you.”
He watched her listen to her mentor’s voice. He’d denied it, perhaps, but he’d known, deep down, that someday it would come to this. He chastised himself for thinking otherwise. How foolish he had been.
“Yes, Tom. I know. And there’s another Kellerman fundraiser scheduled next month right here on Long Island. I’ve been trying to round up support, but…”
His gaze drifted to the floor, and he sat down on the arm of the sofa. How could he hate her? Was it even really a choice? Galileo had murdered dozens of innocent people, and threatened the lives of countless more. They all had families too. How could he and Sophie ever counterbalance that? How could—
“Tom, I need to stop you there.”
Rafe looked back up at his wife.
“No, Tom. I can’t go to Santa Fe. I’m sorry.”
Can’t go to Santa Fe? Rafe’s fingers dug into a sofa cushion…
“I have every confidence you’ll find him, but my place is here now, Tom. I quit, remember?” Esme smiled through tears at her husband. “I made my choice seven years ago. Keep us safe, Tom. Please. Goodbye, Tom.”
Darcy Parr’s vacant position on the task force as forensics overseer fell to Daryl Hewes. On March 19, Daryl was installed in a small office in the Santa Fe crime lab. By March 20, he was reviewing documentation of hair samples, soil samples, blood spatter analyses, and ballistics analyses. His geek-mind was in a state of bliss, but his poet-heart wished Darcy was still here, beside him, so they could be sifting through the facts and graphs and charts together.
Unlike his task force colleagues, Daryl had enjoyed his protective custody. He viewed it as a vacation, and used the time, isolated in a ramshackle walk-up somewhere in the state of Nevada, to disassemble his laptop. He had always wanted to disassemble his laptop, not so much to study its intricate circuitry but to see if he could reassemble it without the aid of a book. With only a spoon and his fingers as tools, the task took him two days, but he did it. He showed off his accomplishment to his handlers. That night, they all celebrated with three large Hawaiian pizzas and a twelve-pack of Red Bull. Daryl enjoyed his protective custody. It felt like college. So when Tom phoned him up to relay the news about Santa Fe and about the task force’s reinstatement, Daryl was a little disappointed. So were his handlers. The drive to the airport was solemn. They exchanged e-mail addresses. They promised to write.
But now the joy was back. Daryl was lost in a forest of data and loving it. He lacked Darcy’s scientific acumen, though, so he had the head of the crime lab, Dr. Steve Wu, aid him in parsing the results. Tom already had Anna and Hector Jackson (no relation) shoring up the defenses in Kansas City, and Norm was coordinating activity at the crime scene, so the lab was 100% Daryl’s domain.
“These are from the light booth,” said Steve, indicating the most recent pile of papers.
Daryl read along with him. The technicians had found footprints in the carpet which were inconsistent with either of the students or the superintendent, so they may have come from the perp, or they may have come from anyone else who’d frequented the lighting booth that morning. They had no way of knowing with any certainty if anyone else had visited Gwen while she was setting up the projector, and the trace elements found in the footprints were inconclusive. So Daryl added the results to the M
aybe pile. Something was better than nothing.
Next came ballistics. Unsurprisingly, the shell casings matched the ones from Amarillo and Atlanta. If there had been any doubt before that this was the same killer, or at least the same gun, that doubt was eliminated here. Ever since Atlanta, Tom had had Daryl check all available dealers of M107 .50 caliber sniper rifles. It retailed for almost $9,000 and could be purchased from over 9,000 gun shops in forty-three states (seven state legislatures had seen fit to ban it). For those who could afford it, and legally purchase it, the M107 was a popular weapon. The company which manufactured them, Barrett Firearms, boasted that it was their bestselling product.
However, the ability to purchase a sniper rifle did not equal the ability to use a sniper rifle, and this particular sniper, Galileo, was a master sharpshooter. There were no bullet holes in the walls, floor, or ceiling of the auditorium. There were no bullet holes in the stage. There were some bullet holes in the seats, but they were traced back, through blood analysis, to fragments from bullets which had already passed through brain matter. In other words, Galileo had never missed, not once. Yes, there might be thousands of owners of M107s, but how many of them fired with that degree of accuracy?
Now they were wading into Norm’s territory—profiling—so Daryl made a note to discuss the matter with his colleague, placed the ballistics reports aside, and moved on to fingerprints. Going on the assumption that Galileo gained entry into the school as a custodian, as he had at that elementary school in Atlanta and at the aquarium in Amarillo, Daryl wasn’t surprised to discover that fingerprints on file for Amos Rodman, Peralta High School’s recently hired, mysteriously vanished janitor, were nowhere to be found in the lighting booth. Daryl suspected that the fingerprints on file for Amos Rodman would be nowhere to be found anywhere in the school.
“How do you suppose he did it?” asked Dr. Wu.
“Did what?”
“Forged his fingerprints. He did the same in the other cities too, right? I mean, in order to get hired he had to go through a background check. How do you suppose he set it all up?”
Daryl shrugged his shoulders, but knew instinctively that, for a man like Galileo, setting up these false identities couldn’t have been difficult. Thinking about it some more, he realized that he too could probably fake his way through a background check. All one needed, really, was someone with a clean record (and no prints already on file) to volunteer (or better yet, be paid) to go through the motions at the local sheriff’s office. With advances in color printing and ten minutes on Adobe Photoshop, forging the documentation (recommendations, IDs) would be the easiest part of all.
If he wanted to, Daryl could drop everything, disappear off the face of the earth, and become someone else. He considered the option. It wasn’t wholly unattractive. He liked his job, sure, but there were other jobs. And he had never been to New Zealand. New Zealand looked so appealing in the movies. Did they have good WiFi access in New Zealand? Daryl made a mental note to do some research, after the case was over.
“What’s next?” he asked.
“Serology,” replied Dr. Wu.
Ah, yes. Blood.
When combined with the ballistics reports, the blood spatter analyses told the story of Ric and Gwen. They each were facing the door when they were shot. Had Galileo surprised them? Ric wasn’t even on the A/V squad. Why was he even there? Daryl had been on his high school’s A/V squad. Did he ever invite friends into the lighting booth at his high school? Of course not.
Ric and Gwen were facing the door and Galileo shot them each at close range in the forehead. The opening at the back of Ric’s skull matched the spatter on the window, while Gwen’s matched the spatter on the wall. This made sense. She would have been sitting closest to the lighting board. But according to the crime scene photographs, Ric and Gwen had been found on the floor, side by side, like a pair of sleeping siblings. They couldn’t have fallen like that. This meant Galileo had placed them there. Why? It was another psychological question for Norm Petrosky.
The data about Superintendent Longtree was, to Daryl, the most interesting. Unlike every other victim at the crime scene, unlike any other victim at any of the crime scenes save Darcy Parr, the superintendent had been shot with a Beretta. A) Why was the superintendent in the lighting booth? Was he there to evict Ric? B) Why would Galileo shoot the two students with a rifle but then switch to a pistol for Longtree? It didn’t make sense…until Daryl read page thirty-eight of the report.
“I need to call Tom,” he said, and fumbled for his phone.
“What is it?” asked Dr. Wu.
Daryl handed him page thirty-eight.
Dr. Wu studied it, frowned. “This doesn’t necessarily indicate…”
“It does,” Daryl replied. Tom’s voice mail clicked on. “Tom, it’s Daryl Hewes. The two students in the lighting booth were Type O. The superintendent was Type A1. But there’s fresh blood on a textbook in the lighting booth that’s Type A2. The superintendent was shot with a Beretta at point-blank range. I think there was a struggle. I think the superintendent hit Galileo with the textbook, maybe knocked the rifle out of his hands. I think the blood on the textbook belongs to Galileo. Tom, I think we’ve got him.”
20
They finally got lucky. It was the law of averages, really. How many times could Galileo elude them? He had to make a mistake sometime. He wasn’t supernatural. He was just a man, after all, a man who bled.
In the early ’90s, the Justice Department launched a pilot program which married the burgeoning fields of computers and genetics. They labeled this program the Combined DNA-Index System, or CODIS, and by the turn of the century it contained records on over 100,000 known felons, just in the United States. In five years, the database passed 500,000. By 2005, though, CODIS had, in the spirit of Big Brother, expanded its jurisdiction to include federal employees. Tom’s DNA was in CODIS. The president’s DNA was in CODIS.
And Galileo’s DNA was there too.
“Or, should we say, Henry Booth.”
The technician handed Tom the printout. Twenty-two long hours later, after working the phones, calling in interdepartmental favors, and working every angle he knew, Tom had gotten what he needed and was on a train to Baltimore, home to Booth’s last known place of business, a private security company that called itself Bellum Velum. Tom would have taken his bike, but he couldn’t ride with his arm, and he wanted to use the time to review all the data extant on Henry Booth. He sat by the window. To his left, the East Coast in bloom. He paid it no attention. His gaze was fixed on the file in his hands, his mind working overtime to compartmentalize the past, and the future.
Henry Booth was ex-CIA. He’d joined the Agency after completing ROTC at the University of Maryland and got enmeshed in various wetworks activities in the Middle East. All CIA operatives go through rigorous psych screenings, but no amount of Freudian guesswork can predict the effect that combat will have on a person. Henry Booth had a strong religious upbringing. He loved God and his country, in that order. He was in the Middle East for fourteen years. Whatever it is he saw there, whatever it is he did, took its toll. When his handler recommended he return to the states, he didn’t argue. He didn’t say much of anything. He turned in his letter of resignation and for five years he disappeared off the face of the earth. Eventually, he found his way to Bellum Velum, or they found their way to him, and tax forms were filed and suddenly Henry Booth was back on the grid. Any reservations that the CIA had about Mr. Booth were apparently not shared by Bellum Velum.
“Yes, Henry’s been with us for nine years,” said the woman on the phone. She said her name was Roberta Watson, and she was the head of PR for the company. No one else was available. “He’s an excellent employee.”
“What exactly is it he does for you?”
“We are a private security firm serving North America, Europe and Asia.”
“Mmm-hmm. And what exactly is it he does for you?”
“Security.”
Tom didn’t feel like dancing with this woman, especially not on the phone, especially not with forty people dead. He made an appointment to come up to their main office in Baltimore.
He had a file on them too.
Once the train docked at the city’s neo-classicist Penn Station on North Charles Street, Tom flagged down a yellow cab and gave the driver Bellum Velum’s address—which turned out to be a skyscraper two blocks away. The private security company occupied the building’s top two floors. Mercenary work indeed paid well.
Tom looked both ways down either end of the sidewalk, saw what he wanted to see, then passed through the revolving door into the lobby and obstacle course of construction scaffolding. From the looks of it, the building was being renovated, although islands of burgundy carpeting were scattered throughout the exposed floor. Somewhere in this maze of tarps and orange signs, someone was drilling, by the sound of it, to the center of the earth. The security guard at the desk was wearing earplugs, and had to remove them when Tom approached.
“Tom Piper for Roberta Watson, Bellum Velum.”
He didn’t bother with his badge. The guard cupped one hand over his left ear, and phoned up. “She’ll be right down,” he said. But Roberta Watson took her time. Tom lingered in the cacophonous lobby for a good ten minutes before she showed. By then the noise had gifted him with a headache, deposited right behind his eyes.
“Agent Piper, good afternoon.”
Roberta Watson held out her hand. Tom shook it. He noticed two things: A) the woman was all smiles B) almost ninety percent of those smiles were genuine. She had a dark complexion that contrasted strikingly with her ice-white pantsuit.
“It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Agent Piper,” she said. “I hope you haven’t come all this way for nothing. I’m afraid that Mr. Yolen, our CEO, is away on business and Mr. Yates, our CFO, is out with the flu. I probably should have told you that on the phone.”
