Read Before Cain Strikes for Free Online Page A

so she could get a matching dress and I didn’t even know what a cummerbund was, but I learned. And on the night of the prom, I wore a black tuxedo with a teal cummerbund and I showed up at that front door and there she was, beautiful, wearing these earrings. They matched her dress so perfectly. And we left.
    “We went to the prom. We had a good time. We ate, we danced. We laughed. We always got along okay. And it was obvious she was still into me. And you’d think that maybe, just maybe, with the dress and these earrings and the magical occasion, that I’d fall for her, and I knew that’s what Lynette hoped. I could see it in her blue eyes. But I felt…nothing. And as the night wore on, I knew that this was not going to be a happy ending, but there was nothing I could do short of faking an illness, and that’s more my cousin Randy’s thing, anyway.
    “So I ate and danced and laughed and then it was time to go home. And I drove her home. I walked her to the front door. This was the moment. It would have been so easy to just lean in and kiss her good-night. Even if it were just on the cheek, it would have been the right thing to do. But I knew how she felt and I didn’t want to lead her on. We stood on her front stoop and she looked up at me with those blue eyes and I…shook her hand. And then I left.”
    “Oh, Rafe…”
    He wiped his eyes. “We saw each other in class the next day, and the day after that, and we said hi to each other in the hallway, but that spark I used to see in herwas gone. I’d extinguished it. I’d killed it. And now another monster has come along and I need you to find him and I need you to put him down because, you see, maybe if I do this for her, maybe…I don’t know…she’ll forgive me. And if she can forgive me…maybe someday you can, too.”

4
    A fter 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