While Galileo Preys
If there were a God, he would have stopped me.That's the message discovered atop an elementary school in downtown Atlanta. Across the street are the bodies of fourteen people, each quickly and cleanly murdered. The sniper Galileo is on the loose. He can end a life from hundreds of yards away. And he is just getting started.Where others see puzzles, Esme Stuart sees patterns. These outside-the-box inductive skills made her one of the FBI's top field operatives. But she turned her back on all that eight years ago to start a family and live a normal life. She now has a husband, a daughter and a Long Island home to call her own, far removed from the bloody streets of Atlanta.But Galileo's murders escalate and her old boss needs the help of his former protege. But how can she turn her back on her well-earned quiet life? How would she be able to justify such a choice to her husband? To her daughter?And what will happen when Galileo turns his scope on them?
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Look for Joshua Corinâs next novel
BEFORE CAIN STRIKES
available April 2011
from MIRA Books
To my nephew Benji
(for when he is much, much older)
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Acknowledgments
1
T he bum wore pink. A prom dress, really. Torso to kneecaps swathed in bubble-gum taffeta. His spidery limbs, black with grime and hair, jutted out in wrong angles. The bum was facedown in the basin of a puddle in the middle of MLK Drive, and lay undiscovered until 3:16 a.m.
Andre Banks (age twenty-eight) and his pug Moira (age three) were out for a stroll. Andre was walking off his insomnia. His parents were coming to visit and that never ever boded well. Andre and Moira normally kept only to Lincoln Street, the dimly-lit cul-de-sac in which they lived, but the young man had a lot more anxiety than usual to walk off. Moira made sure to baptize every hydrant on their path, and was christening her eleventh when Andre spotted the bum in the road.
Even in Atlanta, January meant freezing temperatures. The cityâs homeless did not nap out in the middle of MLK Drive in January, certainly not in brand-new prom dresses. The bum was almost perfectly centered inside the milky oval of a nearby streetlightâs humming glow. Andre stared through the fog of his breath at the man in the road and then Moira, finished with her ritual, saw him too, and barked.
Prodded by his loud little dog, Andre left the sidewalk and approached the facedown man. He didnât bother checking for traffic because A. It was 3:16 in the morning. B. This stretch of MLK Drive was cordoned at either end by wooden barricades due to (unapparent) DOT construction.
Moira skittered a few feet ahead of him, tensing at her leash, impatient to reach the mysterious pink shape. She barked again, and hopped up, giddy. The shape didnât budge. As they entered the circle of electric-powered light, Andre wondered what circumstances led the bum to end up here, (and dressed like that!). Had the man once been successful? Did he have a family? Had his family kicked him out? Maybe the prom dress was his daughterâs and she was dead and wearing it helped the man remember her. Maybe the bum was a transvestite, and thatâs why his family had kicked him out. The sins of a stubborn family, mused Andre, never forgetting that his own parents, bastions of disappointment, would be landing at Hartsfield-Jackson in ten hours andâ
Moira pounced on top of the bumâs taffeta back and licked at his neck.
âHey!â Andre tugged on the leather leash. âBad dog.â
With a petulant whine, Moira fought back. She lapped again at the bumâs neck, savoring the salt mine sheâd discovered. Andre yanked his pug off the man, and then realized the bum in the road hadnât reacted, hadnât even groaned, hadnât even breathed.
âFuck,â Andre concluded, and at 3:18 a.m. (according to his cell phone) he dialed the police.
They didnât arrive for twenty minutes. This cordoned-off stretch of MLK Drive was not popular. The strip malls and chain stores which populated MLK down by the Georgia Dome tapered off west of Techwood, and Andreâs neighborhood was far, far west of Techwood. The grass in the local park, fifty feet from the bumâs corpse, was rusted, as if neglect had soured it to old metal. One hundred feet away, bordering the park, loomed a three-story mortar slab called Hosea Williams Elementary School. Its windows were shingled with iron bars. Andre taught physical education at Hosea Williams. His parents didnât approve of the job, and they certainly didnât approve of the area. No one did.
Since the police didnât arrive for twenty minutes, Andre finished walking his dog. He knew heâd have time, and Moira was restless. He led her down the block, past the Atlanta Food Shop (boarded shut) and the redbrick Holy Life Baptist Church (gated shut). But by then Andre heard the siren. He reached the dead body around the same time the squad car circumvented the construction barricade.
Two cops emerged, eau de French fries. They clicked off their siren but left on their red-and-blues to sweep and bounce in careful rhythm over the block. To Moira, essentially color-blind, the lights were meaningless, but to Andre, the colored lights painted his neighborhood at 3:40 a.m. into a party-hearty discotheque. That just reminded him of his age, and his misbegotten teenage years, and how much his life had changed in so short aâ
âYou called it in?â asked Officer Appleby, arms crossed. He was the black one. Officer Harper, the white one, knelt beside the body. The cops who served this neighborhood always showed up in this demographic: one black, one white. In fact, some of Andreâs more clever students referred to them not as pigs but zebras. Yo, zebras on patrol today, watch out.
