SEVERAL HOURS LATER, Marino was driving Lucy and me back to Richmond. It was the worst car trip I could remember, with the three of us staring out and saying nothing, an oppressive depression heavy on the air. It did not seem true, and whenever truth struck again, it was with the blow of a heavy fist into my chest. Images of Benton were vivid. I did not know if it were grace or a bigger tragedy that we had not spent our last night together in the same bed.
In a way, I wasn’t sure I could bear the fresh memories of his touch, his breath, the way he felt in my arms. Then I wanted to hold him and make love again. My mind tumbled down different hills into dark spaces where thoughts got caught on the realities of dealing with his possessions at my house, including his clothing.
His remains would have to be shipped to Richmond, and despite all I knew about death, the two of us had never devoted much attention to our own or the funeral service we might want and where we should be buried. We had not wanted to think about our own, and so we hadn’t.
I-95 South was a blur of highway running forever through stopped time. When tears filled my eyes, I turned to my window and hid my face. Lucy was silent in the back seat, her anger, grief, and fear as palpable as a concrete wall.
“I’m going to quit,” she finally said when we passed through Fredericksburg. “This is it for me. I’ll find something somewhere. Maybe in computers.”
“Bullshit,” Marino answered, his eyes on her in the rearview mirror. “That’s just what the bitch wants you to do. Quit law enforcement. Be a loser and a big fuck-up.”
“I am a loser and a fuck-up.”
“Bull fucking shit,” he said.
“She killed him because of me,” she went on in the same heartless monotone.
“She killed him because she wanted to. And we can sit here and have a pity party, or we can figure out what we’re gonna do before she whacks the next one of us.”
But my niece was not to be consoled. Indirectly, she had exposed all of us to Carrie a long time ago.
“Carrie wants you to blame yourself for this,” I said to her.
Lucy did not respond, and I turned around to look at her. She was dressed in dirty BDUs and boots, her hair a mess. She still smelled of fire, because she had not bathed. She had not eaten or slept, as best I knew. Her eyes were flat and hard. They glinted coldly of the decision she had made, and I had seen the look before, when hopelessness and hostility made her self-destructive. A part of her wanted to die, or maybe a part of her already had.
We reached my house at half past five, and the slanted rays of the sun were hot and bright, the sky hazy blue but cloudless. I carried in newspapers from the front steps and was sickened again by this morning’s front-page headline about Benton’s death. Although identification was tentative, it was believed he had died in a fire under very suspicious circumstances while assisting the FBI in the nationwide hunt for the escaped killer Carrie Grethen. Investigators would not say why Benton had been inside the small grocery store that had burned, or if he might have been lured there.
“What do you want to do with this?” Marino asked.
He had opened the car trunk, where three large brown paper bags contained the personal effects collected from Benton’s hotel room. I could not decide.
“Want me to just put them in your office?” he asked. “Or I can go through them if you want, Doc.”
“No, no, just leave them,” I said.
Stiff paper crackled as he carried the bags into the house and down the hall. His footsteps were burdened and slow, and when he returned to the front of the house, I was still standing by the open door.
“I’ll talk to you later,” he said. “And don’t go leaving this door open, you hear me? The alarm stays on and you and Lucy shouldn’t go out anywhere.”
“I don’t think you have a worry.”
Lucy had dropped her luggage in her bedroom near the kitchen and was staring out the window at Marino driving away. I came behind her and gently put my hands on her shoulders.
“Don’t quit,” I said, and I leaned my forehead against the back of her neck.
She did not turn around, and I felt grief shudder through her.
“We’re in this together, Lucy,” I quietly went on. “We’re all that’s left, really. Just you and me. Benton would want us united in this. He wouldn’t want you giving up. Then what will I do, huh? If you give up, you’ll be giving up on me, too.”
She began to sob.
“I need you.” I could barely talk. “More than ever.”
She turned around and clung to me the way she used to when she was a frightened child starved for someone who cared. Her tears wet my neck, and for a while we stood in the middle of a room still packed with computer equipment and school books, and plastered with posters of her adolescent heros.
“It’s my fault, Aunt Kay. It’s all my fault. I killed him!” she cried out.
“No,” I said, holding her tight as my own tears flowed.
“How can you ever forgive me? I took him away from you!”
“That’s not the way it is. You did nothing, Lucy.”
“I can’t live with this.”
“You can and you will. We need to help each other live with this.”
“I loved him, too. Everything he did for me. Getting me started with the Bureau, giving me a chance. Being supportive. About everything.”
“It’s going to be all right,” I said.
She pulled away from me and collapsed on the edge of the bed, wiping her face with the tail of her sooty blue shirt. She rested her elbows on her knees and hung her head, staring at her own tears falling like rain on the hardwood floor.
“I’m telling you, and you’ve got to listen,” she said in a low, hard voice. “I’m not sure I can go on, Aunt Kay. Everybody has a point. Where it begins and ends.” Her breath shook. “Where they can’t go on. I wish she had killed me instead. Maybe she would have done me a favor.”
I watched her with gathering resolve as she willed herself to die before my eyes.
“If I don’t go on, Aunt Kay, you’ve got to understand and not blame yourself or anything,” she muttered, wiping her face with her sleeve.
I went over to her and lifted her chin. She was hot and smoky, her breath and body odor bad.
“You listen to me,” I said with an intensity that would have frightened her in the past. “You get this goddamn notion out of your head right now. You are glad you didn’t die, and you aren’t committing suicide, if that’s what you’re implying, and I believe it is. You know what suicide is all about, Lucy? It’s about anger, about pay-back. It’s the final fuck-you. You will do that to Benton? You will do that to Marino? You will do that to me?”
I held her face in my hands until she looked at me.
“You’re going to let the no-good piece of trash Carrie do that to you?” I demanded. “Where’s that fierce spirit I know?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered with a sigh.
“Yes you do,” I said. “Don’t you dare ruin my life, Lucy. It’s been damaged enough. Don’t you dare make me spend the rest of my days with the echo of a gunshot sounding on and on in my mind. I didn’t think you were a coward.”
“I’m not.”
Her eyes focused on mine.
“Tomorrow we fight back,” I said.
She nodded, swallowing hard.
“Go take a shower,” I said.
I waited until I heard the water in her bathroom running, and then went into the kitchen. We needed to eat, although I doubted either of us felt like it. I thawed chicken breasts and cooked them in stock with whatever fresh vegetables I could find. I was liberal with rosemary, bay leaves, and sherry, but nothing stronger, not even pepper, for we needed to be soothed. Marino called twice while we were eating, to make certain we were all right.
“You can come over,” I said to him. “I’ve made soup, although it might be kind of thin by your standards.”
“I’m okay,” he said, and I knew he did not mean it.
“I’ve got plenty of room, if you’d like to stay the night. I should have thought to ask you earlier.”
“No, Doc. I got things to do.”
“I’m going to the office first thing in the morning,” I said.
“I don’t know how you can,” he replied in a judgmental way, as if my thinking about work meant I wasn’t showing what I should be showing right now.
“I have a plan. And come hell or high water, I’m going to carry it out,” I said.
“I hate it when you start planning things.”
I hung up and collected empty soup bowls from the kitchen table, and the more I thought about what I was going to do, the more manic I got.
“How hard would it be for you to get a helicopter?” I said to my niece.
“What?” She looked amazed.
“You heard me.”
“Do you mind if I ask what for? You know, I can’t just order one like a cab.”
“Call Teun,” I said. “Tell her I’m taking care of business and need all of the cooperation I can get. Tell her if all goes as I’m hoping, I’m going to need her and a team to meet us in Wilmington, North Carolina. I don’t know when yet. Maybe right away. But I need free rein. They’re going to have to trust me.”
Lucy got up and went to the sink to fill her glass with more water.
“This is nuts,” she said.
“Can you get a helicopter or not?”
“If I get permission, then yes. Border Patrol has them. That’s usually what we use. I can probably get one in from D.C.”
“Good,” I said. “Get it as fast as you can. In the morning I’m hitting the labs to confirm what I think I already know. Then we may be going to New York.”
“Why?”
She looked interested but skeptical.
“We’re going to land at Kirby and I intend to get to the bottom of things,” I answered her.
Marino called again at close to ten, and I reassured him one more time that Lucy and I were as fine as could be expected, and that we felt safe inside my house, with its sophisticated alarm system, lighting, and guns. He sounded bleary and thick, and I could tell he had been drinking, his TV turned up loud.
“I need you to meet me at the lab at eight,” I said.
“I know, I know.”
“It’s very important, Marino.”
“It’s not like you need to tell me that, Doc.”
“Get some sleep,” I said.
“Ditto.”
But I couldn’t. I sat at my desk in my study, going through the suspicious fire deaths from ESA. I studied the Venice Beach death, and then the one from Baltimore, struggling to see what, if anything, the cases and victims had in common besides the point of origin and the fact that although arson was suspected, investigators could find no evidence of it. I called the Baltimore police department first, and found someone in the detective division who seemed amenable to talking.
“Johnny Montgomery worked that one,” the detective said, and I could hear him smoking.
“Do you know anything about it?” I asked.
“Best you talk to him. And he probably will need some way of knowing you’re who you say you are.”
“He can call me at my office in the morning for verification.” I gave him the number. “I should be no later than eight. What about e-mail? Does Investigator Montgomery have an address I could send a note to?”
“Now that I can give you.”
I heard him open a drawer, and then he gave me what I needed.
“Seems I’ve heard of you before,” the detective thoughtfully said. “If you’re the ME I’m thinking of. I know it’s a lady. A good-looking one, too, based on what I’ve seen on TV. Hmmm. You ever get up to Baltimore?”
“I went to medical school in your fair city.”
“Well, now I know you’re smart.”
“Austin Hart, the young man who died in the fire, was also a student at Johns Hopkins.” I prodded him.
“He was also a homo. I personally think it was a hate crime.”
“What I need is a photograph of him and anything about his life, his habits, his hobbies.” I took advantage of the detective’s momentary lapse.
“Oh yeah.” He smoked. “One of these pretty boys. I heard he did modeling to pay his way through med school. Calvin Klein underwear ads, that sort of thing. Probably some jealous lover. You come to Baltimore next, Doc, and you got to try Camden Yards. You know about the new stadium, right?”
“Absolutely,” I replied as I excitedly processed what he had just said.
“I can get you tickets if you want.”
“That would be very nice. I’ll get in touch with Investigator Montgomery, and I thank you so much for your help.”
I got off the phone before he could ask me about my favorite baseball team, and I immediately sent Montgomery an e-mail that outlined my needs, although I felt I already had enough. Next I tried the Pacific Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, which covered Venice Beach, and I got lucky. The investigator who had worked Marlene Farber’s case was on evening shift and had just come in. His name was Stuckey, and he did not seem to require much verification from me that I was who I claimed to be.
“Wish somebody would solve this one for me,” he said right off. “Six months and still nothing. Not one tip that’s turned out to be worth anything.”
“What can you tell me about Marlene Farber?” I asked.
“Was on General Hospital now and then. And Northern Exposure. I guess you’ve seen that?”
“I don’t watch much TV. PBS, that’s about it.”
“What else, what else? Oh right. Ellen. No big parts, but who knows how far she might have gone. Prettiest thing you ever saw. Was dating some producer, and we’re pretty sure he had nothing to do with what happened. Only thing that guy really cared about was coke and screwing all the young stars he got parts for. You know, after I got the case, I went through a bunch of tapes of shows she was on. She wasn’t bad. It’s a shame.”
“Anything unusual about the scene?” I asked.
“Everything was unusual about that scene. Don’t have a clue how a fire like that could have started in the master bathroom on the first floor, and ATF couldn’t figure it out, either. There wasn’t anything to burn in there except toilet paper and towels. No sign of forcible entry, either, and the burglar alarm never went off.”
“Investigator Stuckey, were her remains by chance found in the bathtub?”
“That’s another freaky thing, unless she was a suicide. Maybe set the fire and cut her wrists or something. A lot of people cut their wrists in the tub.”
“Any trace evidence to speak of?”
“Ma’am, she was chalk. Looked like she’d been in the crematorium. There was enough left of the torso area for them to ID her through X rays, but beyond that, we’re talking a few teeth, pieces and parts of bones, and some hair.”
“Did she by chance do any modeling?” I then asked.
“That, TV commercials, magazine ads. She made a pretty good living. Drove a black Viper and lived in a damn nice house right on the ocean.”
“I’m wondering if you could e-mail photos and any reports to me.”
“Give me your address, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“I need them fast, Investigator Stuckey,” I said.
I hung up and my mind was whirling. Each victim was physically beautiful and involved in photography or television. It was a common denominator that could not be ignored, and I believed that Marlene Farber, Austin Hart, Claire Rawley, and Kellie Shephard had been selected for a reason that was important to the killer. This was where everything unraveled. The pattern fit that of a serial killer, like Bundy, who selected women with long straight hair who resembled his estranged girlfriend. What didn’t fit was Carrie Grethen. In the first place, she had been locked up in Kirby when the first three deaths had occurred, and her MO had never been anything like this.
I was baffled. Carrie was not there and yet she was. I dozed for a while in my chair, and at six A.M., I came to with a start. My neck burned from being bent in the wrong position, and my back was achy and stiff. I slowly got up and stretched, and knew what I had to do but wasn’t certain I could. Just the thought filled me with terror, and my heart kicked in with violent force. I could feel my pulse pounding like a fist against a door, and I stared at the brown paper bags Marino had placed in front of a bookcase packed with law reviews. They were taped shut and labeled, and I picked them up. I followed the hallway to Benton’s room.
Although we typically had shared my bed, the opposite wing of the house had been his. Here he had worked and stored his day-to-day belongings, for as both of us had gotten older, we had learned that space was our most reliable friend. Our retreats made our battles less bloody, and absences during the day made nights more inviting. His door was open wide, as he had left it. The lights were out, the curtains drawn. Shadows got sharper as I stood, frozen for an instant, staring in. It required all of the courage I had ever demonstrated in my life to turn on the overhead light.
His bed with its bold blue duvet and sheets was neatly made, because Benton was always meticulous, no matter his hurry. He had never waited for me to change his linens or attend to his laundry, and part of this was due to an independence and strong sense of self that never really relented, not even with me. He had to do it his way. In that regard, we were so much alike, I marveled we had ever gotten together. I collected his hairbrush from the dresser, because I knew it might be useful for a DNA comparison, should there be no other avenue for identification. I went to the small cherry bedside table to look at the books and thick file folders stacked there.
He had been reading Cold Mountain, and had used the torn flap of an envelope to mark his place not quite halfway through. Of course, there were the pages of the latest revision of a crime classification manual he was editing, and the sight of his scratchy penmanship crashed me to earth. I tenderly turned manuscript pages and trailed my fingers over the barely legible words he had penned as tears ambushed me again. Then I set the bags on the bed and ripped them open.
Police had hastily rifled through his closet and drawers, and nothing they had packed inside the bags was neatly folded, but rather bunched and rolled. One by one I smoothed open white cotton shirts and bold ties and two pairs of suspenders. He had packed two lightweight suits, and both of them were crinkled like crepe paper. There were dress shoes, and running clothes and socks and jockey shorts, but it was his shaving kit that stopped me.
Methodical hands had rummaged through it, and the screw cap to a bottle of Givenchy III was loose and cologne had leaked. The familiar sharp, masculine scent seized me with emotion. I could feel his smooth shaven cheeks. Suddenly, I saw him behind his desk in his former office at the FBI Academy. I remembered his striking features, his crisp dress and the smell of him, back then when I was already falling in love and did not know it. I neatly folded his clothing in a stack and fumbled, ripping and tearing open another bag. I placed the black leather briefcase on the bed and sprung open the locks.
Noticeably missing inside was the Colt Mustang .380 pistol that he sometimes had strapped to his ankle, and I found it significant that he had taken the pistol with him the night of his death. He always carried his nine-millimeter in its shoulder holster, but the Colt was his backup if he felt a situation to be threatening. This singular act indicated to me that Benton had been on a mission at some point after he had left the Lehigh fire scene. I suspected he had gone to meet someone, and I didn’t understand why he hadn’t let anybody know, unless he had become careless, and this I doubted.
I picked out his brown leather date book and flipped through it in search of any recent appointment that caught my eye. There were a hair cut, dentist appointment, and trips coming up, but nothing penciled in for the day of his death except the birthday of his daughter Michelle, the middle of next week. I imagined she and her sisters were with their mother, Connie, who was Benton’s former wife. I dreaded the idea that eventually I would need to share their sorrow, no matter how they might feel about me.
He had scribbled comments and questions about the profile of Carrie, the monster who soon after had caused his death. The irony of that was inconceivable, as I envisioned him trying to dissect Carrie’s behavior in hopes of anticipating what she might do. I didn’t suppose he had ever entertained the notion that even as he had concentrated on her, she quite likely had been thinking about him, too. She had been planning Lehigh County and the videotape, and by now, most likely, was parading as a member of a production crew.
My eyes stumbled over penned phrases such as offender-victim relationship/fixation, and fusion of identity/erotomania and victim perceived as someone of higher status. On the back of the page, he had jotted patterned life after. How fits Carrie’s victimology? Kirby. What access to Claire Rawley? Seemingly none. Inconsistent. Suggestive of a different offender? Accomplice? Gault. Bonnie and Clyde. Her original MO. May be on to something here. Carrie not alone. W/M 28–45? White helicopter?
Chills lifted my flesh as I realized what Benton had been thinking when he had been standing in the morgue taking notes and watching Gerde and me work. Benton had been contemplating what suddenly seemed so obvious. Carrie was not alone in this. She had somehow allied herself with an evil partner, perhaps while she was incarcerated at Kirby. In fact, I was certain that this allegiance predated her escape, and I wondered if during the five years she was there, she might have met another psychopathic patient who later was released. Perhaps she had corresponded with him as freely and audaciously as she had with the media and me.
It was also significant that Benton’s briefcase had been found inside his hotel room, when I knew it had accompanied him earlier at the morgue. Clearly, he had returned to his room some time after leaving the Lehigh fire scene. Where he had gone after that and why remained an enigma. I read more notes about Kellie Shephard’s murder. Benton had emphasized overkill, frenzied, and disorganized. He had jotted, lost control and victim response not according to plan. Ruination of ritual.Wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Rage. Will kill again soon.
I snapped shut the briefcase and left it on the bed as my heart ached. I walked out of the bedroom, turned off the light, and shut the door, knowing that the next time I entered it would be to clean out Benton’s closet and drawers, and somehow decide to live with his resounding absence. I quietly checked on Lucy, finding her asleep, her pistol on the table by her bed. My restless wanderings took me to the foyer, where I turned off the alarm long enough to snatch the paper off the porch. I went into the kitchen to make coffee. By seven-thirty I was ready to leave for the office, and Lucy had not stirred. I quietly entered her room again, and the sun glowed faintly around the windowshade, touching her face with soft light.
“Lucy?” I softly touched her shoulder.
She jerked awake, sitting half up.
“I’m leaving,” I said.
“I need to get up, too.”
She threw back the covers.
“Want to have a cup of coffee with me?” I asked.
“Sure.”
She lowered her feet to the floor.
“You should eat something,” I said.
She had slept in running shorts and a T-shirt, and she followed me with the silence of a cat.
“How about some cereal?” I said as I got a coffee mug out of a cupboard.
She said nothing but simply watched me as I opened the tin of homemade granola that Benton had eaten most mornings with fresh banana or berries. Just the toasty aroma of it was enough to crush me again, and my throat seemed to close and my stomach furled. I stood helplessly for a long moment, unable to lift out the scoop or reach for a bowl or do the smallest thing.
“Don’t, Aunt Kay,” said Lucy, who knew exactly what was happening. “I’m not hungry anyway.”
My hands trembled as I clamped the top back on the tin.
“I don’t know how you’re going to stay here,” she said.
She poured her own coffee.
“This is where I live, Lucy.”
I opened the refrigerator and handed her the carton of milk.
“Where’s his car?” she asked, whitening her coffee.
“The airport at Hilton Head, I guess. He flew straight to New York from there.”
“What are you going to do about that?”
“I don’t know.”
I got increasingly upset.
“Right now, his car is low on my list. I’ve got all his things in the house,” I told her.
I took a deep breath.
“I can’t make decisions about everything at once,” I said.
“You should clear every bit of it out today.”
Lucy leaned against the counter, drinking coffee and watching me with that same flat look in her eyes.
“I mean it,” she went on in a tone that carried no emotion.
“Well, I’m not touching anything of his until his body has come home.”
“I can help you, if you want.”
She sipped her coffee again. I was getting angry with her.
“I will do this my way, Lucy,” I said as pain seemed to radiate to every cell in me. “For once I’m not going to slam the door on something and run. I’ve done it most of my life, beginning when my father died. Then Tony left and Mark got killed, and I got better and better at vacating each relationship as if it were an old house. Walking off as if I had never lived there. And guess what? It doesn’t work.”
She was staring down at her bare feet.
“Have you talked to Janet?” I asked.
“She knows. Now she’s all bent out of shape because I don’t want to see her. I don’t want to see anybody.”
“The harder you run, the more you stay in one place,” I said. “If you’ve learned nothing else from me, Lucy, at least learn that. Don’t wait until half your life has passed.”
“I’ve learned a lot of things from you,” my niece said as windows caught the morning and brightened my kitchen. “More than you think.”
For a long moment she stared at the empty doorway leading into the great room.
“I keep thinking he’s going to walk in,” she muttered.
“I know,” I said. “I keep thinking it, too.”
“I’ll call Teun. As soon as I know something, I’ll page you,” she said.
The sun was strong to the east and other people heading to work squinted in the glare of what promised to be a clear, hot day. I was carried in the flow of traffic on Ninth Street past the wrought-iron-enclosed Capitol Square, with its Jeffersonian pristine white buildings and monuments to Stonewall Jackson and George Washington. I thought of Kenneth Sparkes, of his political influence. I remembered my fear and fascination when he would call with demands and complaints. I felt terribly sorry for him now.
All that had happened of late had not cleared his name of suspicion for the simple reason that even those of us who knew we might be dealing with serial murders were not at liberty to release such information to the news. I was certain that Sparkes did not know. I desperately wanted to talk to him, to somehow ease his mind, as if perhaps in doing so I might ease my own. Depression crushed my chest with cold, iron hands, and when I turned off Jackson Street into the bay of my building, the sight of a hearse unloading a black pouched body jolted me in a way it had not before.
I tried not to imagine Benton’s remains enveloped so, or the darkness of his cold, steel space at the shutting of the cooler door. It was awful to know all that I did. Death was not an abstraction, and I could envision every procedure, every sound and smell in a place where there was no loving touch, only a clinical objective and a crime to be solved. I was climbing out of my car when Marino rolled up.
“Mind if I stick my car in here?” he asked, even though he knew the bay parking was not for cops.
Marino was forever breaking rules.
“Go ahead,” I replied. “One of the vans is in the shop. Or at least I think it is. You’re not going to be here long.”
“How the hell do you know?”
He locked his car door and flicked an ash. Marino was his rude self again, and I found this incredibly reassuring.
“You going to your office first?” he asked, as we followed a ramp to doors that led inside the morgue.
“No. Straight upstairs.”
“Then I’ll tell you what’s probably already on your desk,” he said. “We got a positive I.D. for Claire Rawley. From hair in her brush.”
I wasn’t surprised, but the confirmation weighed me down with sadness again.
“Thanks,” I told him. “At least we know.”