Chaos

CHAPTER 37

ROGER MAHANT IS THE assistant special agent in charge, the ASAC of the FBI’s Boston division.

He’s driving the black Tahoe. Benton’s riding shotgun, and I’m in the backseat sitting next to a man I’ve never met before. He could be FBI but acts more like the CIA, quiet, unreadable, self-contained. I don’t trust him or anyone at the moment, not even my husband, not professionally. He has to take their side in here. He has to be one of them.

So Benton can’t tell me everything that’s going on-not in front of them. He can’t act like my husband or much of a friend. It’s nothing new but feels more lonely than usual as he sits in the front seat, his back to me, saying little or nothing, in his sponge mode. You forget he’s there while he soaks in everything around him, and I can tell when he’s doing it.

“Something else to drink?” Mahant’s brooding dark eyes look at me in the rearview mirror.

“I’m fine for now.” I have my messenger-bag briefcase in my lap, and my arms are wrapped around it as if someone might try to take it.

Mahant saw me polish off a Fiji water and just now set the empty bottle on the floor like a litterbug. He looks at me constantly when he should keep his eyes on the road. I don’t like it when he and Benton talk to each other in low quiet tones. It reminds me that my husband is part of a collective, a group, a tribe. I’m careful and observant as I sit quietly in back, out of my element and not in charge. The ride is a favor I didn’t want but couldn’t refuse, and any second they’re going to pick my brain. They’ll get every drop out of me before they finish what I’ve started-or they think they will.

In the few short minutes I’ve been inside the Tahoe I haven’t asked questions. But I’ve gathered that the man in the backseat with me is from Washington, D.C., or that area. He might be from Quantico or Langley. I don’t know what he does but it seems it was fortuitous that he was in Boston this week. I also don’t know his name. He may have told it to me when I first climbed in but I don’t think he did. I’m almost certain he didn’t say a word as I buckled up.

The inside of the SUV smells like french fries, and the radio is on just loud enough for me to recognize Howard Stern bantering with his cohost Robin Quivers. I can’t tell which taped segment it is. But I didn’t realize Mahant is a fan of the show, and wouldn’t have expected it. I almost like him better. But I don’t. Even if I could it wouldn’t be smart.

Don’t let your guard down.

In his fifties, bald with thick-framed glasses, he has one hand on the wheel, and in the other he holds a Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee he sips quietly, politely, through a straw. He’s cordial enough whenever I’ve been around him, usually at professional receptions, holiday gatherings, that sort of thing. But we don’t socialize. I try not to with the FBI.

Briggs warned me from day one not to trust the Feds. I always found that amusing since he is the Feds-or he was.

Work and play with them but never show your underbelly, he would say. And for God’s sake keep your knickers on, Kay, or you’ll find out the hard way it’s a man’s world.

It doesn’t matter that it’s unfair, he’d declare with a pointed finger. If life were fair, people like us would be unemployed, and in my head I hear his resonating voice. It demanded attention no matter what he was saying or to whom. But keeping my knickers on wasn’t in the cards, and Briggs wasn’t solely motivated by his strong moral sensibilities, no matter what he claimed.

He had feelings that went back to our very earliest days. We both did, and it took but one kiss, one protest that we should stop, and then we didn’t. I remember the sounds of our breathing, the pattering rain. I’ll never forget when he turned the headlights off as we sat in his ruby-red Karmann Ghia in front of the shabby stucco building where I lived with a toxicologist. Her name was Lola, which is Spanish for Dolores. It means sorrows, and that suited her to a T.

We were so young and inexperienced, recent hires at the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office, where Briggs was my supervisor, and Lola was never happy, especially with me. I disappointed and annoyed her constantly and didn’t understand it then. No doubt it was out of spite that she wouldn’t always tell me when she was coming or going, as if she might make me jealous. But that rainy windy night I knew she wasn’t home and probably wouldn’t be for a while.

Ironically she’d made sure to rub it in as if to imply that she had quite the life and I didn’t. Briggs asked me about her because he found her peculiar and abrasive. What was it like living together? Did I worry she might poison my cereal? When would she be coming home, and then the heavens opened. We laughed at the deafening drum roll overhead, at the flooded glass, and he turned the wipers off. Surrounded by a deluge, we fogged up the glass, wiping it off to steal glances up at the second floor, at the empty unlighted window of the cracker-box apartment I had to share because that was what I could afford.

It was obvious no one was home, obvious why Briggs wanted to walk me up with the umbrella and see me in safely. He wasn’t being a gentleman, and I was no lady. It was a perfect storm of circumstances and had been from the start when my rattletrap car with its worn-out clutch happened to break down on Dixie Highway after dark.

Lola happened to be out with an ex, she made sure I knew. My sister Dorothy happened not to answer the phone, and neither did my mother. Briggs happened to be the only person I could reach after I’d hiked along the shoulder of the highway to a gas station pay phone. He happened to drive me home, and afterward he happened never to tell Ruthie the truth.

She’d already decided I was a home wrecker even before I was one. Why let her know she was a psychic or a prophet? Why tell her she was right?

Why give her one more reason to shun you, Kay? I can hear Briggs arguing with me.

Confessing to his wife would have been an apocalyptic ending to my relationship with him. We wouldn’t have worked together again. My days with the AFMES would have ended before they began because she was overly sensitive, fragile and possessive, and at the time she had a powerful father at the Pentagon. This was according to Briggs, his rationale for why he needed to keep certain things from her. It was for her good and mine. It was for the best. Those are the sorts of things he’d say. I always knew he was kidding himself, and it might have been the only time I would have called him a coward.

“You doing all right?” Benton turns around and looks at me in the backseat, and truth be told, he’s a bigger man than Briggs ever could be.

My husband doesn’t run from what he wants or pick something because it’s safe. He doesn’t lie about what he loves. He may be deliberate and take his time. But he won’t give up or settle for less, and we don’t keep secrets from each other. Not the kind that would fray the bond between us.

I INTRODUCE MYSELF TO the man sitting next to me as the Tahoe turns onto Memorial Drive. Then I feel silly.

He must know who I am and why the FBI picked me up. In a few minutes they’ll leave me at the CFC because I’m not as cooperative as they’d like me to be, and I begin watching for my titanium-skinned biotech building. I stare out at the dark early morning as we follow the river, and I realize how tired I am. I feel defeated and guilty. It’s true what they say about your sins finding you out.

Only in my case it’s more appropriate to say that my sins tend to find me, period. There are consequences to everything. But when Briggs and I had our moment it couldn’t have occurred to me that this day would come. I couldn’t have imagined I’d be called upon by the government to assist in his autopsy but would have to recuse myself for reasons I won’t discuss. Even if I weren’t up to my ears in the Vandersteel case, I wouldn’t go to Baltimore tonight. It wouldn’t be right.

“… So I was just wondering what people call you.”

I realize the man next to me is asking a question as he offers a packet of tissues, gently nudging it against my wrist. I take it from his strong smooth hand, opening the little cellophane tab.

“Thank you.” I wipe my nose, my eyes. “You were saying?”

“I’m sorry about General Briggs. I’ve actually said it a couple of times. I understand he trained you.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Then I was asking how you’re doing, since rumor has it you were in pretty bad shape out there, got heat exhaustion.”

“I’m fine.”

“And after that I was curious about what people call you. Kay or Doctor Scarpetta? And can we get you anything? Food? Something else to drink?”

“No thank you.”

“To which question?” He’s being flirty right in front of my husband.

Or literally behind his back.

“I don’t need anything,” I say to whoever the man is, and I don’t want to look at him.

And I don’t want him looking at me as I see myself the way he must. Wilted, my makeup gone and forgotten, my hair out of control. My deodorant stopped working hours ago, and the only scrubs I could find inside the trailer are too big. Not dressed but draped, I constantly find myself tugging at the V-neck of my salty sweat-stained shirt because if my bra strap doesn’t show, cleavage does. And while I’m used to Marino staring, I’m not so forgiving to a perfect stranger.

“Tell me your name again.” He hasn’t told me at all, and when he answers I think he’s kidding at first.

“Andrew Wyeth,” he repeats, and then I wonder if he’s making a nonsensical joke or a snide allusion to my husband’s wealthy late father, an art investor.

There were Andrew Wyeth watercolors in the Wesley house when Benton was growing up. I stare at the back of his head as he looks down at his phone, and he has no reaction to what the man next to me is saying. Benton is ignoring him. He’s ignoring all of us even as he follows our every word and intonation with the keenness of a hawk. I know it for a fact because that’s what he does.

“Just think of the painter and it’s not me,” Special Agent Wyeth says as he shakes my hand a little too long, a little too tenderly, and his humor doesn’t penetrate my smoldering mood.

I don’t want to be in this car. I don’t want to be with them, and it’s not easy when Benton has to act this way. When we’re forced to pretend we have something different with each other than we really do, it makes me feel cheated and dishonest. As if we’re having an affair again. As if I’m a home wrecker again.

Sometimes our little games make me feel alone and unsupported, convinced nothing will be handled properly unless I do it myself. That’s the way I feel now. I’m on my own.

“Were you named for the artist?” I’m blandly polite and barely listening as I think of all I’ve got to do quickly, stealthily, without showing my hand.

“No, ma’am. My father was,” Wyeth reminds me how much I hate to be called “ma’am.”

Thirty at most but more likely in his twenties, he must be a wunderkind to be keeping such important company. While I can’t see him very well in the dark backseat I don’t need to. He’s very nice-looking and has a soothing voice that inspires trust I don’t intend to offer. Muscles bulge from the short sleeves of his polo shirt and strain against the khaki fabric of his cargo pants.

Veins rope, and he has so little body fat it’s as if he’s been shrink-wrapped in his own skin. I can’t imagine how much time he must spend in the gym or what he eats. Very little. Protein. Juices. Kale. Healthy things like that, I imagine, and he smells good. A subtle woodsy manly fragrance with a touch of citrus and musk.

Calvin Klein.

“… You’ll be in the very capable hands of Boston’s finest, ASAC Roger Mahant, who you know.” Andrew Wyeth is winding up his pitch about what I’m in for. “I believe you’ve seen him throw back a few at festive gatherings, so you know how entertaining he can be.”

“Hey, I’m sitting right here. I can hear you,” Mahant jokes in the mirror while Benton continues to ignore us as he does something with his phone.

“He’ll be spending some time with you, Doctor Scarpetta, mostly for observational purposes so we can be up to speed on what’s going on in the Vandersteel case,” and Wyeth must be with the Bureau to go on like this as if he runs the place.

“We’ll need accommodations for a few of us,” and it’s Mahant talking now. “A fairly large office with a couple of desks, a table and chairs,” he says impertinently. “We also need private access to at least one restroom, and of course parking,” he adds outrageously as I decide, What a prick.