While Galileo Preys (28 page)

“It’s not that simple.”

“It’s always been that simple! Jesus Christ, even with one foot in the grave, I’m still battling Tom Piper for your attention.”

And she slapped him across those adorable soft cheekbones she had caressed only minutes earlier. He winced, but didn’t apologize.

“You’re either one thing or you’re something else. Black or white. You want to make your choice? Make your choice. Right here. Because I can’t keep doing this, Esme. It’s not fair to us and it’s not fair to Sophie.”

She shook her head. She wasn’t upset with him. She was, simply, sad.

Finally, she asked: “Do you love me?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“It’s your favorite kind. It’s black or white. Do you love me?”

“Of course,” he replied.

“Why?”

“What is this? Esme, if I didn’t love you…”

“When we met, what was I doing for a living?”

“Is this a test?”

“Sure. It’s a test. What was my job when we met?”

“You worked for the FBI.”

“Did I enjoy my job?”

“I don’t know….”

“Yes, you do.”

Rafe shrugged. “Yeah, I guess you enjoyed your job.”

“Yes, I did. And then we met and I fell head-over-heels in love with you. I think if you’d asked me to fly to the moon, if you told me that would make you happy, I would have done it. But you didn’t ask me to fly to the moon. You just asked me to quit my job.”

“So we could start a family—which you said you wanted.”

“But here’s what I’m getting at, I guess, Rafe. Here’s what’s bothering me. You knew I loved my job. You knew I was good at it and that it was important. If you care for someone, why would you ask them to give up something like that?”

“Esme, we both made sacrifices….”

“Oh? What have you sacrificed?”

She looked him square in the face. Her brown irises had regained their intimidating potency. His jaw unlatched. Words tumbled down the tip of his tongue—and stayed there.

What had he sacrificed?

“Just because…I mean…it’s not necessary for…”

She cocked an eyebrow, waited.

“You quit your job so we could start a family.”

“There are families in Washington D.C. Good neighborhoods. Dozens of colleges. You could have gotten a teaching job at any of them, but you didn’t even apply. I quit my job because you asked me to. We both know that’s true. So when I tell you, now, that I need to do this, I’m making that decision as a wife, a mother, and an adult, and you need to swallow your pride and shut the fuck up.”

H
enry Booth had gone to ground. That much was obvious.

Twelve hours after the murders at Nassau Firearms, police checkpoints set up along all major highways and bridges across Long Island and New York City had only resulted in a nervous and/or irate civilian population. There was no sign of the killer, but anyone who had followed the case this far wasn’t particularly surprised by this latest lack of development, and a cursory glance at Nassau Firearms’ inventory confirmed their worst suspicions. No weapon was missing, not a rifle, not a shotgun, not even a box of shells, and the Heckler & Koch used to perpetrate these acts had been left on the countertop. Henry Booth didn’t need it anymore. He was finished with his spree, and now, like any good operative at the end of an assignment, he had disappeared into the ether. Henry Booth. Esme insisted on referring to him by that name, not Galileo. Henry Booth was the name of a man, and men were fallible. Men got caught.

Esme dialed up the Clash’s apocalyptic
London Calling
on her iPod and walked the crime scene. Will Clay’s two-story store was made mostly of shaved maple. This created a homey rustic ambience, but it also made the invasion of police tape and chalk outlines that much more disconcerting and garish. Despite the gun paraphernalia on the walls, the magazines, despite everything in the store that pointed innately toward violence, what had happened here felt like a violation.

Esme and the forensics experts had pieced together a chronology, and it went something like this:

1. The chauffeurs paid their bill at the Shoney’s down the road at, according to their receipts, 11:31 a.m. They then sat down to eat, and walked back to the store, arriving there at 12:01 p.m. This was confirmed by the 911 phone records. It was Bella McDeere, one of the chauffeurs, who called it in. The other chauffeur, Gary Swingole, had a thing about blood and had passed out.
   
2. As the chauffeurs claimed in their statements that, on their walk back to Nassau Firearms, they didn’t see anyone drive off, Henry Booth must have shown up around 11:30 a.m., committed the killings, and driven away by 11:55 a.m. at the latest. In the span of twenty-five minutes, he murdered ten people. Aside from Tom, Paul Ridgely was the sole survivor, and he was being kept alive only by a combination of a ventilator,
   a defibrillator and his wife’s philosophical opposition to euthanasia.
   
3. The bodies of Lisa Penny, one of Kellerman’s bodyguards, and Kyle Gooden, a ne’er-do-well passerby who was apparently in the wrong place at the wrong time, were discovered in the back of the store. They appeared to have been carried there, and preliminary lab work showed the presence of fibers on them consistent with the interior of a car. This contrasted with the bodies of two of the other guards, which were found in the parking lot, and the blood spatter was consistent where they were found. Another glaring inconsistency: both Lisa and Kyle were bludgeoned to death, while the two bodyguards in the parking lot and the one inside the store had been shot.
   
4. This suggested to Esme that Lisa and Kyle were struck first and hidden in a car, perhaps the backseat or the trunk. Henry probably used some kind of homemade club to take them out quietly. But why not just pick them off from afar? After all, that was his modus operandi. Why? Because to get from Kansas to New York overnight, he must have flown, and he wouldn’t have been allowed to bring anything even resembling a rifle on the plane.
   

Esme stopped, frowned. Henry had flown. Something was niggling her about that. She filed away her
unfocused suspicions and walked up to the front counter.

• 5. But why stuff their bodies in the car if he was just going to dump them behind the store? The answer stared her in the face. Henry was a control freak. He would want his targets to be exactly where he wanted them when he took aim. He lured them out to the car. Maybe he deliberately left the trunk open to make it look suspicious. The guards approached the car. They found the bodies. And Henry took advantage of their momentary shock to nail them. With one guard left inside, he proceeded into Nassau Firearms, took out the guard, then Will Clay, then his wife, whose body was found by the door to the back room. The wife must have heard the gunshots and come out to investigate. Then Henry had ascended the stairs to the second floor.
  

Esme, too, ascended the stairs to the second floor. The maplewood creaked so loudly underneath her feet that she could hear it over her rock music. But Bob Kellerman and Tom Piper hadn’t heard the gunshots or the creaking stairs. Why? She flicked on the light switch and revealed the obvious. The firing range was soundproofed. She felt the punctuated padding on the walls. Then she saw the two outlines on the floor. The white tape had caked over with dried blood. One of these outlines belonged to Tom. Her eyes flitted from the
outlines to the targets dangling 100 yards away, then back again. The similarities sent a chill down her spine.

• 6. Henry shot Kellerman first. Not only was he closest to the door, but his body didn’t show signs of struggle. Tom’s did. Henry shot Kellerman first, then Tom reacted and the struggle commenced. According to the hospital reports, Tom sustained severe contusions to his left shoulder. He also had some burst capillaries in his hand, but no bruising on his knuckles or his palm. Tom didn’t punch Henry, although he may have kicked him. The burst capillaries suggested that Tom had slapped something hard, perhaps a gun or a wall or even maybe Henry’s skull. Then came the two shots to the chest. One nicked his right coronary artery and the other lodged itself in his aorta. The doctors treated the artery first. When she left the hospital, they had moved on to the aorta. But he wasn’t a young man….
  

Esme sat down on the mat, beside the outline of his body. She pressed Pause on her iPod, and traced the tape with her fingertips. So many victims over so many years. Tom spoke for those who had been silenced and avenged their untimely deaths, and now he’d become one of them. If there was a Heaven, surely he would go there….

But Esme’s own conclusions about the existence of an afterlife were at best mixed. Did she believe in God?
Yes. Some power must have created the universe. Science and math were too beautiful to be an accident. But the existence of, for lack of a better word, God, did not necessitate the existence of an afterlife. The well-spring of Heaven was hope, and hoping, as Esme sorely knew, rarely made anything so.

Plus she had her own abandonment issues to work out, and oh, my, were they in full force today. There were her own parents, of course, but now on top of that there was the probable departure of her surrogate father, Tom Piper, not to mention whatever was going on between her and Rafe. Maybe they needed a vacation, just the two of them. When all this was over, she would use the money the FBI was paying her to surprise him with a trip to Spain or Costa Rica or Easter Island. Anywhere but here, just the two of them. They would get away from it all and talk—really talk. No more barbs or soliloquies but actual conversation. She had her own credit card, so she could book everything online and it would be a surprise and—

Wait.

Her spider-sense, niggling before, went into over-drive. She got up off the floor and bounded down the stairs. Her file was still on the countertop. She flipped through the timeline, then flipped through it again.

There it was.

She took out her cell and placed a call to AD Trumbull and relayed to him the mistake Henry Booth had made—the mistake she’d just now discovered, hidden in plain sight—and how they were going to use it to ensnare him.

It’s not that he had had a choice. Carelessness out of necessity isn’t really carelessness at all. He had been in Kansas and needed to get to New York. He needed to board the next flight into Islip or LaGuardia or wherever and he needed to do it now.

“In the past he probably traveled by car,” said Esme, “but now he had no choice. And airlines only accept credit cards.”

She was making her pitch before Karl Ziegler, bureau chief for the Manhattan field office of the FBI and de facto foreman in charge of the new shootings; despite the fact they occurred in Nassau County, the resident office in Nassau was technically a substation to the Manhattan field office—and Karl Ziegler wasn’t one for acquiescence. And although AD Trumbull had the higher pay grade, this was Ziegler’s jurisdiction, and Esme required his approval before any new operation was employed. Ziegler, however, was busy with the mayor (who was a second cousin) at an evening function, and so she had to schedule an appointment for later that night. This gave Esme time to increase the document density of her file. After paying twenty dollars for a parking spot on Broadway, she carried the now-thick folder close to her chest and met him and the assistant director on the eleventh floor of Jacob Javits Federal Office Building, a skyscraper which resembled nothing less than a giant cheese grater.

Ziegler offered her an egg roll. It was 10:12 p.m., which from the looks of it meant dinnertime to the swarthy man behind the desk.

She handed him the manifest for Midwest Flight 28 out of MCI, the medium-sized airport which served the greater Kansas City region. According to the manifest, Flight 28 had departed MCI on April 12 at 11:11 p.m. and had landed at LGA at 2:23 a.m.

“This was the only flight Henry Booth could have been on for this morning’s chronology to make any sense.”

“How can you be sure?” asked Ziegler, between forkfuls of soy-soaked noodles.

“MCI was the closest airport to where the police found the van, and by the time Henry Booth would have arrived there, Flight 28 was the only available plane left to make the trip to New York City.”

“But how could he have known that? Are you implying that Henry Booth had every flight schedule in the country committed to memory?”

“Among the personal possessions found on him during his arrest in Kansas City was a BlackBerry. None of these possessions were found when the police searched the van last night.”

“So he used the BlackBerry to book the flight.”

Esme brought up page two of the manifest. This was a list of the flight’s eighty-two passengers.

“Henry Booth’s name isn’t there,” the bureau chief chided.

“He’s not a moron,” answered Esme, implying with her tone that the bureau chief was. “Henry Booth wouldn’t use a credit card in his own name. But I promise you—one of these passengers is Henry Booth.”

“Mrs. Stuart,” Ziegler’s voice filled his office, as did the fried tang of his Cantonese cuisine. “While I’ll agree with your hypothesis, I don’t grasp its relevance. Plainly, how can we use this information after the fact?”

Esme glanced over at AD Trumbull, but the old man had retreated to his oxygen. He was here as a courtesy. It was obvious he longed to be anywhere but. Not too long ago he had been a robust, intimidating figure…however, not too long ago she had been a brazen young thing and Trumbull had almost fired her on the spot for, among other things, insubordination had Tom not backed her up and saved her ass.

Tom.

She brought her attention back to her file, and handed Ziegler another page. This was a list of twenty-one names.

“These are the passengers on Flight 28 who rented a car once arriving at the airport. We know because of the fibers found on both Lisa Penny and Kyle Gooden that Henry rented a GM vehicle manufactured after 2001.”

She loaded up another page. Now there were four names, two men and two women. All had rented a GM vehicle the previous night.

“We contacted, verified their stories. All except one.” She pointed to the last name on the list: Daniel Wise. “The phone number he gave when he booked his flight went straight to anonymous voice mail. The phone number attached to his credit card application went straight to anonymous voice mail. Daniel Wise is Henry Booth.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.” Ziegler wiped his chin with a moist towelette. “How is any of this useful?”

“Because,” said Esme, “at 6:12 p.m., about, oh, four hours ago now, ‘Daniel Wise’ bought an SRO ticket for tonight’s performance of
The Phantom of the Opera,
which I believe is in its second act right about now. It’s been a while since I saw it.”

Ziegler’s mouth fell open. So did Trumbull’s—in a triumphant grin. Esme watched them both with granite satisfaction. It felt so good to be right.

“Jesus Christ,” the bureau chief muttered, then turned to the wizened assistant director. “You knew this?”

Trumbull shrugged. “You called turf.”

“You son of a bitch….”

Ziegler went for his phone.

“Nevertheless,” continued Trumbull, “I’ve already taken the liberty of stationing several of our people in the lobby and outside every exit. They’re low profile but they’re there.”

“Do we have a confirmed sighting of Booth himself?”

“It’s SRO, so he could be anywhere in the theater. And he’s more than likely disguised. But he’s there.”

“So he kills almost a dozen people and goes to see a Broadway show?”

“It’s called ‘hiding in plain sight.’ And besides…it’s a very good show.”

She traded glances with Trumbull. She couldn’t tell if he was wheezing or giggling. Possibly both.

Ziegler turned to the AD. “Who’s the agent in charge at the scene?”

“Pamela Gould,” replied Trumbull. “And if you take any of this out on her, Karl, I’ll bury you. She did the right thing following this directive.”

“It should’ve come out of this office.”

“You were busy schmoozing, Karl. Make this right. Do your job.”

Ziegler glared bloody daggers at Trumbull, then picked up the phone and took control of the operation. Soon they were out the door and heading uptown in the back of a Cadillac. Ziegler’s driver was an attractive young agent with platinum-blond hair. Esme wondered if she had lobbied to be the field director’s chauffeur or if this was some kind of punishment she had to endure as a woman in the boys’ club of the FBI.

Nevertheless, it was exciting to be here again, part of the chase, close to the end. If only she’d been able to convey to Rafe the thrill of it all. No, that probably would have backfired. He would have chided her that if it was thrills she was after, Coney Island was just a train ride away. How could she possibly tell him that this wasn’t merely an adrenaline rush? This was emotional and mental and even perhaps spiritual. It was that extraordinary, extraordinarily rare feeling of knowing you’re in the right place at the right time and—