Dust

14

I watch Benton now, emerging from Simmons Hall. He strides toward us again.

He doesn’t speak to Marino or Machado. He says nothing to me but sets out through the gate again, across the grass and mud again. He heads to where the body had been as if he’s learned or intuited information that has caused him to return yet again to the spot where someone left the dead body of a brilliant young woman whose fatal error may be as random as stepping outside a bar after dark to hear her phone better. Except Benton doesn’t think such a thing. That’s not what his inner voice is telling him. I recognize that much about his behavior, which at the moment is reminiscent of a heat-seeking missile.

I’m vividly reminded of what guides him, a necessary but dangerous programming that comes from tasting the forbidden fruit of original sin. The abuse of power, Benton says. It all comes back to that. We want to be like God. If we can’t create, we’ll destroy, and once we’ve done it, once is not enough. That’s the way it goes, simple and predictable, he believes. He has to understand the cravings without giving in to them. He has to make part of him what he will never allow to overtake him, and while I’ve known this about Benton from the beginning of our time together, when I’m face-to-face with it I’m ambivalent about what I see. I worry about poison eroding the vessel it’s in.

Benton positions himself exactly where the yellow tarp was anchored by evidence flags. He crouches in the red mud and looks around, his forearms resting on his thighs. Then he gets up. He moves a short distance away, where he notices something at the edge of the infield, and he bends down. He crouches and looks. He pulls on a pair of black nitrile gloves.

He touches whatever he’s found and lifts a gloved finger to his nose. Standing up, he looks across the field and meets my eyes. He nods to summon me and I know by his refusal to look at Marino and Machado that he expects me to come alone.

I carry my big case back out into the field, setting it down when I reach Benton. He shows me what looks like petroleum jelly, an irregular translucent glob about the size of a penny.

It shimmers on blades of coarse brown grass at the edge of the red mud, and he shows me a slick of what I presume is the same substance on his glove. He holds it close so I can smell the strong, penetrating odor of menthol.

“Vicks,” he says.

“Or something like it.” I open my black plastic case.

“It’s not water-soluble, which is why it survived the wet conditions.” He scans the soggy playing field. “Even so, a downpour would have pushed it deeper into the grass. We probably wouldn’t have found it.”

I get out a photographic scale and my camera. “You’re concluding it was deposited here after the rain stopped.”

“Or when it had let up considerably. What was it doing around two or three a.m.?”

“Pouring, at least at our house.” I have no idea what he’s getting at.

“Do any of the cops put Vicks up their nose?” Benton watches me take photographs. “Are any of them still into that numbskull trick?” He glances in the direction of Marino and Machado.

The body isn’t decomposing. There was no stench at all, I remind him, and I would have smelled Vicks or some other mentholated ointment. I would detect it a mile away, I add. Certainly Marino didn’t swipe Vicks up his nose. He knows better by now. I corrected him of that bad habit after the first time I saw him do it in the morgue. Now you’ve just trapped all those molecules of putrefaction inside your nose like flies on flypaper, I remember saying to him, and then he didn’t do it anymore.

“I was with Marino from the moment he first got here,” I explain to Benton. “I’ve been in close range of him the entire time and I haven’t seen him carrying Vicks around in twenty years.” I pull on fresh gloves. “And Machado wouldn’t. There’s no way he would. With rare exception, this generation of cops knows better than to do things like that. They’re trained that odors give us information and using any substance at a crime scene, whether it’s petroleum jelly or smoking a cigarette, can introduce contamination.”

“And there was nothing like this on the body.” Benton wants to make sure.

“I noticed a faint scent of perfume and that’s it. I certainly would have smelled Vicks.”

“He didn’t use it on her,” Benton decides as if it might be reasonable to wonder if a killer smeared vapor rub on his victim.

“I didn’t smell menthol and I would have. It’s an overpowering odor pretty hard to miss.”

“Then how the hell did it get here?” He asks a question that sounds ominously rhetorical.

“The police have been on the scene since around four a.m.,” I remind him. “If somebody suspicious was out here in this spot, he would have been very close to the body and certainly would have been seen.”

“What was it doing around that time? The weather?” Benton stares off, deep in thought.

I call Marino. I watch him answer his phone and turn in my direction as I ask him what time it was when the police responded to the scene this morning. He talks to Machado and then gets back to me.

“It was close to four,” he says. “Maybe ten of four when the first cruiser rolled up.”

“How hard was it raining out here in this exact location? I know it was heavy on the other side of Cambridge about the time you came to the house. It was pouring when I took Sock out,” I recall, and he turns to Machado again.

“It was raining on and off, not too bad here on this side of town,” Marino lets me know. “Just the conditions were bad by then. You see how much mud there is.”

I thank him and end the call. I relay to Benton what I was told.

“It probably was left not long before the police got here, could be minutes before they got here,” he deduces, “by which time the rain was light and not a factor.”

“What about the couple, the two students who found the body and called the police?” I point out. “Wouldn’t they have noticed someone hanging around?”

“That’s a good question. But if they did, they wouldn’t have had cause for concern.”

Benton is implying that he knows this killer and it’s someone who blends in or can make himself disappear. He’s suggesting that this person left a mentholated ointment in the grass close to where the body was discovered.

“You’re thinking it was left on purpose?” I return the camera and scale to my field case.

“I’m not sure,” he says.

“This person digs into a jar of a mentholated ointment or squeezes it from a tube and some of it falls off his finger? Or he wipes excess in the grass?” I’m aware of an undercurrent of uneasiness and doubt.

“I don’t know. What’s important is it may have been left by him because using it is part of his MO.”

“You’re considering this because of what you’ve observed in this one case, at this one scene?” I ask because it’s not possible to reach such a conclusion based on so little data. “Or is it because of the other ones?”

“I haven’t seen this in the other ones. But he may have left it this time without knowing he did. I believe he’s losing control.” He repeats what he has said several times now. “Something rather catastrophic is going on with him,” he says as if he knows who and what this killer is, and my misgivings grow.

I fear Benton has gotten too close to the killer and I’ve feared this before. I hope there’s not a legitimate reason his colleagues at the BAU aren’t listening to him.

“He could have gotten the idea about a mentholated vapor rub. It’s not new under the sun,” Benton says.

I bag and label his smeared glove. Separately, I collect the menthol gel and the blades of grass it adheres to as he mentions that horse trainers smear Vicks under the nostrils of their racehorses to keep them focused.

“It’s used on stallions, mainly,” he explains in the same reasonable tone.

He may as well be talking about a movie we just saw or what we should have for dinner. The abnormal has to be normal to him or he’ll never figure it out. He can’t be repelled and repulsed by the demons or they won’t talk. He has to accept them to conjure them up, and witnessing the mode he goes into bothers me again. It bothers me more than it ever has before.

“The odor distracts them from distractions,” he explains. “All they can focus on is running because they can’t smell anything but menthol.”

“In other words, they can’t smell mares.” I snap shut the heavy plastic clasps of my field case.

“They can’t smell anything that would tempt them. But, yes, mostly mares,” he replies. “There’s also the added benefit that the menthol helps the horse’s breathing. Any way you look at it we’re talking about the same thing.”

“Which is what exactly?”

“Performance,” he says. “Winning. Outsmarting everyone and the thrill of it for him.”

I think about it, examining what he said as best I can, trying to figure it out as I return to the parking lot. Racehorses and Vicks.

Such an abstruse bit of trivia in the context of a homicide would seem crazy if it came from anyone else, but Benton has a reason for knowing what he told me. It wasn’t a detail out of the blue. It came from somewhere that’s no place good.

“What did you find?” Machado asks me between loud stabs of the shovel into hard, rocky dirt, what sounds like a grave being dug.

“Is anybody using Vicks out here?” I return my field case to an area of pavement near Marino’s SUV. “I assume not but let’s make sure.”

“Shit no.” Marino rubs the small of his back, scowling as if I accused him of a sin he hasn’t committed since our early years.

“Somebody used it and most likely quite recently,” I reply. “Somebody used Vicks or a similar mentholated ointment.”

“Not that I’m aware of.” Machado looks across the field at Benton stepping through the mud in his big bright rubber boots, headed toward us again. “You’re saying he found Vicks? It was in the grass?”

“Something like it,” I reply.

“Maybe it’s a heat balm, a muscle rub. After all, this is an athletic field.” Machado has stopped shoveling.

He stares at Benton as if he’s unusual, maybe a little unglued. The two of them have worked together before, but as I watch the young detective watching my husband I feel a chill run through my blood. I feel unnerved.

“You got any idea what he’s thinking?” Machado asks me skeptically as if he really does suspect Benton is a human Ouija board and not to be trusted.

“He pretends he’s the one who did it,” Marino says before I have the chance, not that I would have answered the question, certainly not the way he did.

I don’t offer what I imagine Benton is thinking. If I knew, I wouldn’t tell. It’s not my place to say. Often I don’t have a clue and it doesn’t surprise me that he doesn’t belong to a fraternity of male friends, not FBI buddies, cops, other federal agents, or attorneys. He doesn’t hang out with professional peers at local watering holes like Tommy Doyle’s, Grafton Street, or Marino’s favorite, Paddy’s.

Benton is an enigma. Maybe he was born one, a contradiction of soft interiors and hard surfaces perfectly packaged in a tall, lean body and neatly cut hair that has been silver for as long as I’ve known him, and tailored suits, matched socks, and shoes that always look new. He is handsome in a clean angled way that seems a metaphor for the precision of his perceptions, and his aloofness is an air lock that controls his vulnerability to people who pass in and out of his spaces.

“You know he’s got to get into their mind.” Marino flings a shovel full of rocky soil to one side, barely missing Benton as he passes through the gate saying nothing to us.

He is silent. At times like this he seems a peculiar savant, one who is antisocial and off-putting. It’s not uncommon for him to wander about a scene for hours and speak to no one. While he’s always been well respected, he isn’t necessarily liked. He’s often misunderstood. Most people read him completely wrong. They call him cold and odd. They assume someone so contained and controlled has no emotional reaction to the evil he sees. They assume he gives me nothing I need.

I watch him stride out of the parking lot back in the direction of Vassar Street and its silvery dorm.

“He’s got to look through their eyes and pretend he’s the one doing it.” Marino has a smirk on his face, his tone derisive as he continues to describe what he truly knows very little about.

Benton doesn’t simply get inside a violent offender’s mind. It’s much worse than that. He gets in touch with the midnight of his soul, a wretched darkness that allows him to connect with his prey and beat them at their hideous game. Often when he comes home after weeks of working some nightmarish case he’s so spent he’s psychically ill. He takes multiple showers a day. He hardly eats or drinks. He doesn’t touch me.

After several restless sleep-disturbed nights the spell breaks like a fever, and I cook a hearty dish, maybe Sicilian, one of his favorites, like Campanelle Pasta con Salsiccia e Fagioli with a Barolo or a red burgundy, a lot of all of it, and then we go to bed. He drives the monsters out, desperately, aggressively, exorcizing what he had to invite into his mind, into his flesh, and the life force fights hard and I give it back. It goes on until we’re done, and that is what it’s like with us. We aren’t what anyone would think, not reserved and proper the way we appear to be, and we never tire of each other.

I watch my husband now walking along the sidewalk in front of Simmons Hall. He enters its parking lot, where he wanders through a scattering of student cars, taking photographs with his phone. Behind the dorm, he looks up and down railroad tracks before crossing them to an open area of raw dirt and broken concrete crowded with semi-trailers, earth-moving machines, and temporary fabric shelters.

He heads toward a black pickup truck parked near a dumpster filled with construction debris. He peers through the truck’s windows and into the open-top bed as if he’s been given information, and he has. He’s directed by his own mind, by the currents of subconscious thoughts that like computer subroutines move him effortlessly.

He walks over to a bright yellow bulldozer, its blade locked in the raised position like a pugilistic crab. Crouching near the rear claw, the ripper, he looks in my direction at the same time my phone rings.