Blow Fly

55

AT THE CORNER OF 83RD and Lexington, a delivery truck struck. a pedestrian-an elderly woman.

Benton Wesley overhears excited talk in the gawking crowd as emergency lights flash, the block cordoned off in yellow crime-scene tape. The fatal accident occurred less than an hour earlier, and Benton has seen enough gore in his life to walk swiftly past and respectfully avert his eyes from the body trapped under one of the trucks back tires.

He catches the words brains and decapitated, and something about dentures lying on the street. If the public had its way, every death scene would be pay-per-view: Five dollars for a ticket, and you can stare at blood and guts to your hearts content. When he used to arrive at crime scenes and all the cops would move out of the way to allow his expert eye to take in every detail, he had the right to order unauthorized people to leave. He could vent his disgust as he pleased-sometimes calmly, sometimes not.

He surveys the area from behind his dark glasses, his lean body moving along the crowded sidewalk, cutting in and out with the agility of a lynx. A plain black baseball cap covers his shaved head, and he backtracks toward Lucy's headquarters, having gotten out of a taxi ten blocks north instead of directly in front of her building or even near it. Benton probably could walk right past Lucy and say "excuse me," and she would not recognize him. Six years it has been since he has seen or talked to her, and he is desperate to know what she looks like, sounds like, acts like. Anxiety presses him onward at his determined pace until he nears the modern polished granite building on 75th Street. A doorman stands in front, hands behind his back. He is hot in his gray uniform and shifts his weight from leg to leg, indicating that his feet hurt.

"I'm looking for The Last Precinct," Benton says to him.

"The what?" The doorman looks at him as if he's crazy.

Benton repeats himself.

"You talking about some kind of police precinct?" The doorman scrutinizes him, and homeless and wacko register on his jaded Irish face. "Maybe you mean the precinct on Sixty-ninth."

"Twenty-first floor, suite twenty-one-oh-three," Benton replies.

"Yeah, now I know what you're talking about, but it ain't called The Last Precinct. Twenty-one-oh-three's a software company-you know, computer stuff." You sure?

"Hell, I work here, don't I?" The doorman is getting impatient, and he glares at a woman whose dog is sniffing too close to the planter in front of the building. "Hey," he says to her. "No dogs doing their business in the hedge."

"She's just sniffing," the woman indignantly replies, jerking the leash, tugging her hapless toy poodle back to the middle of the sidewalk.

Having asserted himself, the doorman ignores the woman and her dog. Benton digs in a pocket of his faded jeans and pulls out a folded piece of paper. He smooths it open and glances at an address and phone number that have nothing to do with Lucy or her building or the office that really is called The Last Precinct, despite what the doorman thinks. If the doorman happens to relay to her, perhaps in jest, that some weirdo stopped by asking for The Last Precinct, she will go on the alert, get very worried. Marino believes that Jean-Baptiste knows Lucy's company by that name. Benton wants Marino and Lucy on the alert and worried.

"Says here, twenty-one-oh-three," Benton tells the doorman, shoving the piece of paper back in his pocket. "What's the name of the company? Maybe the information I was given is wrong."

The doorman steps inside and picks up a clipboard. Running his finger down a page, he replies, "Okay, okay, twenty-one-oh-three. Like I said, some computer outfit. Infosearch Solutions. You want to go up, I gotta call 'em and see an ID."

An ID, yes, but calling isn't necessary, and Benton is amused. The doorman is openly rude and prejudiced toward the scruffy stranger before him, no longer mindful-as many New Yorkers aren't-that the city's greatest virtue in the past was to welcome scruffy strangers, desperately poor immigrants who barely spoke English. Benton speaks English exquisitely when he chooses, and he isn't poor, although his funds are regulated.

He reaches inside his jacket for his wallet and produces a driver's license: Steven Leonard Glover, age forty-four, born in Ithaca, New York, no longer Tom Haviland because Marino knows him by that alias. Whenever Benton has to change his identity, which he does whenever needed, he suffers a period of depression and meaninglessness, finding himself once again angrier than is necessary and all the more determined to prevail without burning with hate.

Hate destroys the vessel that holds it. To hate is to lose clarity of mind and vision. Throughout his life he has resisted hate, and it would be all too easy and appropriate to hate the hate-filled sadistic and unremorseful offenders he has relentlessly tracked and trapped beyond what was appropriate while he was with the FBI. Benton's gift at evasion and imperviousness would not be possible if he hated or gave in to any extreme of emotion.

He became Scarpetta's lover while he was still married, and perhaps that is his only sin he won't forgive. He can't bear to imagine the anguish Connie and their daughters suffered when they believed he was murdered. At times he considers his exile punishment for what he did to his family, because he was weak and gave in to an extreme of an emotion that he still feels. Scarpetta has that effect on him, and he would commit the same sin again-he knows it-were he to go back in time to when they first realized what they were feeling for each other. His only excuse-a weak one, he knows-is that their lust and falling in love wasn't premeditated by either one of them. It happened. It simply happened.

"I'll call 'em up for you," the doorman says, returning the fraudulent ID to Benton.

"Thank you… what is your name?" Jim.

"Thank you, Jim, but that won't be necessary."

Benton walks off, ignoring a Don't Walk sign, crossing 75th Street and becoming part of the anonymous flow of pedestrians along Lexington Avenue. Swerving under scaffolding, he pulls his cap lower, but behind his dark glasses, his eyes miss nothing. Were any of the same oblivious people to pass him again on another block, he would recognize their faces, always aware and on guard. Three times, and he will tail whoever it is and capture him or her on his pocket-size video camera. He has amassed hundreds of tapes in the past six years, and so far they mean nothing beyond demonstrating that he lives in a very small world, no matter how big the city.

Cops have an obvious presence in New York, sitting in their cruisers, talking to one another on sidewalks and street corners. Benton passes them, stoically looking straight ahead, his pistol strapped around his ankle, a violation so serious he would probably be tackled or slammed against a building, were a cop to spot the gun. He would be handcuffed, stuffed inside a police car, interrogated, run through the FBI computer system, fingerprinted and arraigned in court, all to no avail, really. When he worked crime scenes, his prints were stored in AFIS, the automated fingerprint identification system. After his alleged death, his prints-including his ten-print card in cold storage-were altered, swapped with a man who had died of natural causes and was surreptitiously fingerprinted in the embalming room of a Philadelphia funeral home. Benton's DNA profile is in no automated system anywhere on Earth.

He steps into a doorway and dials directory assistance on a cell phone that has the billing address of a phone number at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Programming the billing address was not so difficult. Benton has had years to become adept on the computer, using and violating cyberspace to his advantage. An occasional collect call added to the Texas penitentiary's telephone bills is likely to escape notice and could not be traced to anyone, certainly never to him.

Benton knows that when he makes his call to Lucy's office, the Texas penitentiary's name and number will show up on whatever sophisticated security system she has. Of course, all calls are taped. Of course, Lucy will have her own forensic voice analysis computer system. Of course, Benton has Jean-Baptiste's voice on tape and has had it for years, reaching back to the very dangerous days of an undercover operation that did not bring down the Chandonne cartel, but instead annihilated Bentons identity and life. For this, Benton has not yet forgiven himself. He doesn't believe he will ever be able to give up his guilt and humiliation. He underestimated those whose trust was synonymous with his life.

As a child, Benton and his magic ring made mistakes in his fantasy investigations. As an adult, he and his gold FBI ring have also made mistakes, errors in judgment, and flat-out wrong psychological assessments of murderers. But the one time in his career when he needed his acumen and wits the most, he slipped, and the thought of it still enrages him, sickens him, fills him with self-recrimination.

He tells himself during his most despondent moments, No one else is to blame. Not even the Chandonnes and their minions are to blame. You dug your pit, and now you must get out of it.