Читать книгу Before Cain Strikes - Joshua Corin - Страница 10

After the reception, Lynette’s boyfriend, Charlie Weyngold, was brought to the county sheriff’s office for questioning. He came willingly. Rafe and Esme, with the sheriff’s reluctant permission, accompanied them on the trek through the snow, almost three inches now and rising by the hour. On their way out the door at the Robinson cottage, Esme overheard two women mention one to two feet. She hoped they were talking about the size of their toddlers.

The interview was conducted not in a windowless cell with a dangling lightbulb but in the sheriff’s cozy corner office. This was where Sheriff Fallon had interviewed Lynette’s parents and siblings the day before. He passed the file to Esme as soon as she took her seat on a couch in the office. Sheriff Fallon sat behind his desk. The boyfriend, Charlie, took the room’s other chair, a low-back folding number that couldn’t have been comfortable even in the best of circumstances.

Rafe was to wait outside, kept company by those deputies and officers not out on the streets earning double-time behind the wheel of a county snowplow. He sipped herbal tea. He thought about high school.

Charlie Weyngold thought about his necktie. He didn’t like it. It felt constricting around his collar, around his throat. He wanted to loosen it, but didn’t. That would have been disrespectful to Lynette. For her, he kept his necktie tight. For her, he would have done anything, and so he thought about his necktie to keep from thinking about her, to keep from bawling like an infant right there in the sheriff’s office. He had, however, taken off his suit coat. The button-down he wore underneath had short sleeves, which displayed the artful manga tattoos scrawling up and down each arm. He and Lynette were going to go to Tokyo next year. He and Lynette had plans. He and Lynette—

“You need a Kleenex, Charlie?”

Charlie looked up at the sheriff and shook his head.

Sheriff Fallon made a noncommittal grunt and glanced over at Esme Stuart, sitting there on his couch, perusing his case file. Some people in his position could be territorial, and loathed the FBI and any other intrusion from the federal government. Mike Fallon wasn’t territorial. He welcomed assistance. He could stop and ask for directions without feeling the slightest bit less masculine. His wife, Vicky, had trained him well. No, Mike Fallon appreciated help when offered. But nobody appreciated having it stuffed down their throat, no matter how necessary it was. So a small part of him—the very small, selfish, spiteful part that sometimes kept him company late at night after a few too many Coors—hoped Esme Stuart found nothing, hoped this case made her stumble and fall, and publicly. Meanwhile, it was time to question the boyfriend, Charlie Weyngold, who probably had nothing new to add, and who probably was minutes away from a grief-induced nervous breakdown, but sometimes this was the job.

“Charlie, this is the timeline we have so far regarding Tuesday. Correct me if any of this sounds false to you, okay, son?”

“Yes, sir.”

The sheriff peeked at his notepad, and then proceeded. “We’ve got the victim arriving at her office around nine in the morning. She took a coffee break at ten-thirty with a coworker of hers by the name of Lois Feinstein. Around ten forty-five, she left the office to make her daily rounds about town. Her first—and only—stop that day was the public library.”

“She always stopped there right before lunch,” said Charlie. “Sometimes I’d meet her there and we’d hop on to the internet and look at the websites for countries. She especially liked the ones that were untranslated. She’d try to figure out what it said, and then she’d use this program to translate the website to English and see how well she did. She…”

“Are you all right, son?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Charlie, why don’t you tell me about your relationship with the victim?”

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…

Rafe emptied two cans of chili into a pot and set it to boil.

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

“The twenty-first century,” she replied, checking inside handmade cabinets and hutches.

“You’re not going to find that here.”

She returned to the kitchen, an exaggerated pout on her lips. Rafe shrugged and started to stir the chili. Esme joined him at the gas stove, hip-checking him to make room, and cooked the contents of a box of white rice on an adjacent burner.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, Rafe turned to her and said, “So do you think it was the boyfriend?”

She lowered the temperature on Rafe’s burner.

“He had an alibi at the time of the fire.”

“Alibis can be falsified.”

She smirked at him. “Since when did you become a criminologist?”

“Everyone who watches prime-time TV is an amateur criminologist.” He grabbed some basil off the spice rack and sprinkled a few dashes into the chili. “I just want to make sure no stone goes unturned.”

There was that melancholy again, quavering the timbre of his voice. Esme noticed the steam from the pots was misting up his glasses. He did nothing to remedy the situation. She waited. He continued to stir, his vision undoubtedly getting foggier and foggier. Christ, the man could be stubborn.

She handed him a dishrag.

“What’s this for?”

“Just give me your glasses.”

He did. She wiped them. He poured the boiled rice into the chili and stirred them together.

“The man who killed her took her hands.”

Esme regretted saying it the moment the words came out. In fact, she had no honest idea why she’d shared with him this information, which was both grisly and confidential. He had no need to know. He had no need to ever know.

But now he knew.

He stared at her, his turquoise eyes so small, so vulnerable, without his glasses on. At that moment he didn’t look like a sociology professor or the father of a seven-year-old girl. He looked like a boy, a broken-hearted little boy.

“I’m sorry…” said Esme. “I—”

He began to pace the kitchen, thinking, thinking. Then he wheeled on her, fists clenched. “Why would someone do that?”

Esme shrugged. “Any number of reasons. What’s important is—”

“There are reasons? There is more than one reason why someone would…?”

“Rafe—”

“This is your world, isn’t it? This is what you deal with, willfully.”

Willfully. That word harkened back to their argument in Dr. Rosen’s office. How he’d accused her of knowingly and willfully killing their family with her selfish behavior. Goddamn it, couldn’t they have made it through one day without this shit coming back up between them?

She handed him his clean glasses.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Really, I am.”

He accepted the glasses from her hands, peered through the lenses and donned them.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome.”

They ate dinner.

They talked about the weather.

And then, while washing the pots and dishes, it all began again….

“What are these number of reasons?”

“Rafe, it’s not important—”

“You know that’s bullshit. The reason someone does a thing is an essential ingredient in… I mean, come on. What causes a person to decide, ‘Oh, you know what? I think I need to lop off a person’s hands’?”

“What you’re talking about is profiling,” replied Esme. She was avoiding his stare, but could still feel it. “That’s not really my area.”

“Then how do you expect to catch this guy when a major aspect of the work is not really your area?”

“I’m not the only person working this case, Rafe. I’m not even officially working this case at all. I’m consulting, off the books, as per your whatever. I’m sure the police have their own experts who can—”

“We’re talking about a woman’s life here!”

“Please stop yelling at me.”

“You want me to stop yelling at you? Okay. Here’s me not yelling.”

That’s when Rafe threw the pot against the wall. A stain of dirty dishwater, dotted with bits of chili, drooled down the white paint and to the linoleum floor below, where the pot had loudly clanged to its resting place, but not before soaking both of them in sodden crap.

They both stared at the mess on the wall. Then at themselves. Then back at the wall.

A minute passed.

“Did I mention,” muttered Rafe, “that everybody who watches prime-time TV is also an amateur melodramatist?”

“That would explain the crescendo of violins I just heard.”

Rafe nodded.

They continued to stare at the mess.

“I’ll clean this up,” he finally said. “Why don’t you go take a shower?”

Esme nodded and walked to the bathroom. She could feel rice in her hair. Oh, how nuptial. She quickly got undressed and turned on the shower. The water would take a minute or two to heat up.

The funny thing was, she knew Rafe was right. This case was bigger than her. There was a sinister psychology at play, and she lacked the skills to analyze it. She needed an expert, but this wasn’t an official FBI case….

Turning off the water, she wrapped herself in an oversize towel, and reached for her cell phone to call Tom Piper.