her. As if she had somersaulted out of Quasimodo’s bell tower and into the bowels of Quantico. Tom Piper. The mentor she never deserved.
“So…” said Esme, quashing her insecurities, “how’s the weather?”
“In Atlanta, you mean?”
“For example.”
“I had a feeling you’d call.”
Esme couldn’t help but smile. Of course he had a feeling. His instincts bordered on psychic. When she started seeing Rafe, when she would come into work after a night of lovemaking that left scratch marks, she always made sure to avoid Tom until at least 10:00 a.m., lest he somehow zero in on her less-than-virginal proclivities. What he thought of her meant the world. But what did he think of his Esmeralda now?
“It’s bad,” he said. “We’ve got maybe six people down here who think they’re in charge, and that’s not counting the mayor, the governor, and the president of the United States, all of whom have weighed in.”
“So the bureaucrats have their tantrums and meanwhile, the adults skulk back into the shadows and actually work the case. Maybe some of the adults even make sure the bureaucrats keep fighting so they don’t suddenly interfere.”
“You make it sound so Machiavellian.”
She chuckled. “Hey, if the ends justify the means…”
“It’s bad, though. The case.”
Esme let go of her knees and reclined into her chair. “Can you talk about it?” She sipped her hot tea.
Tom didn’t reply.
Damn it. She’d gone too far. Fuck. Best to back-pedal, and fast…
“Tom, I’m sorry. I know you can’t…I probably shouldn’t have called. But anyway, so…how are you? How’s Ruth?”
“My sister is still gardening. We even built a little greenhouse for her out back so she doesn’t have to worry about squirrels messing with her daffodils.”
“That’s nice. You built it together?”
“And it took practically a whole month. Neither Ruth nor I are what anyone would call ‘mechanically inclined.’”
“I know.” Esme felt the tension ease out of her shoulders. “I remember that one time your engine wouldn’t start. I can still see you standing there with the hood open in the parking garage. You just stared and stared at that engine block like it was a murder suspect you could make blink.”
Tom chuckled. “We all have our faults and foibles.”
“And some of us even have jumper cables.”
“Ha-ha.”
Esme smiled, stared out the window. Snowflakes tumbled in the moonlight. It was probably balmy down in Hotlanta. She’d been there once, in August. Humidity was a living breathing organism in the South, and Atlantans had no nearby body of water for respite. No wonder their crime stats spiked in the summertime. The heat cooked people’s brains.
But this was January, and fourteen people were dead.
“Are you still there?” he asked.
She held her palm to her forehead and sighed. “I’m sorry, Tom, it’s just…I read about what happened last night and…it’s been almost seven years since I left the Bureau. There have been other high-profile murders. But this one has just…crawled under my skin…and I don’t know why.”
“You don’t?” He sounded surprised. “How do you think I knew you’d call?”
“What do you mean?”
“The homeless man. As soon as I learned about him, how the killer used him as bait, I knew this case was going to stick to you like a bad dream. I almost called you.”
“The homeless man? Why would he…?”
“Because of your parents, Esme.”
Oh.
Esme shrank down in her seat to a little girl.
Her parents.
Who’d lived on and off welfare all their life. Who falsified addresses to get their daughter into the best public schools. Who pushed her every day to rise above their situation and, when she did, when she got that scholarship letter to George Washington University, when she said goodbye to them and went off to start her freshman year…
There was a shelter in the south side, Coleman House. Lead paint on the walls but walls were better than the open air in December in Boston. Eighteen-year-old Esme came home from her first semester in D.C. full of stories but home was no longer there. Coleman House was there, yes, but her parents had gone. All they had left her was two blue ink words—her mother’s careful cursive—on a piece of yellow paper.
BE FREE, it said. BE FREE.
She spent the entire two weeks searching the city for her mom and dad but they didn’t want to be found, and when you didn’t want to be found in the cross-streets of Boston, you might as well have been vapor.
She almost didn’t go back to school, but her friends urged her. They insisted it’s what her parents would have wanted. Still, every break she returned to Coleman House, and the Congress Ave. YMCA, and searched every shelter and underpass in the whole city for her family. Until the day she got into Quantico, when she decided to never go back.
Rafe didn’t know.
Almost all of her friends didn’t know.
Tom knew only because he knew everything.
“The man’s name was Merle Inman,” said Tom. “He grew up in Macon, moved to Atlanta in his twenties to be an architect, fell into drugs…every story’s the same story. He was forty-two years old. We’re going to release his information tomorrow, but, well, there it is.”
Esme realized she was crying, and wiped her cheeks. “Thanks.”
“The guy who did this—he’s something else. Using people as clay pigeons. Fancies himself a gamesman. Thinks he can beat the house. Nobody beats the house. Not my house.”
“Go get that fucker,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
After she hung up, she remembered her musings about whether or not the killer had left a note. But it just didn’t seem as important to her anymore. Maybe what she’d really needed was to talk with Tom. Mentor, profiler, friend, therapist. That she couldn’t have connected the relevance of the case herself—forget about God, it was the human mind that worked in mysterious ways.
Esme prepared a bath. Rafe wouldn’t be home for another hour. Sophie was fast asleep in her bed, perhaps dreaming of the man made out of balloons. That had been a recurring dream of hers for a few days now. The man made out of balloons. All different colors. And tomorrow morning she’d saddle up to the table and declare, “I dreamt about the balloon man again.”
