Dust

15

“One of them needs to come over here.” Benton’s voice is in my earpiece. “And I need you to listen to me first and listen carefully, Kay.”

I look at him standing up, then moving around in the construction site while he looks at me in the parking lot. I keep an eye on Marino and Machado, making sure they have no idea what’s going on over the phone.

“What I’m about to say must stay with us right now. I can give them guidance but I can’t elaborate. We need to be absolutely sure.” But I can tell he is. “And we don’t know who to trust. That’s the bigger point. One slipup and it’s everything Granby’s been looking for to get me the hell off this case.”

“This case or the others?” I ask.

“All of them. I can’t say for a fact how many, but now there are at least four.”

“There’s an inconsistency, a significant one.” I’m referring to the plastic bags that the three D.C. victims had over their heads.

“Something threw him off this time, that’s the only thing I can think, unless he’s trying to disguise that this one is connected to the others. But I don’t believe that’s it. Cambridge is a familiar hunting ground for him. He’s stalked here before, and I’m not surprised he’s stalking here again, but this victim isn’t random. The first one, Klara Hembree, wasn’t random either. The second and third might have been.”

Benton doesn’t sound excited or frazzled because that’s not who he is. But I know him. I’m sensitive to his every shading, and when he’s getting close to his quarry, his voice is taut as if he’s hooked something big and it’s fighting him. I listen and know what’s coming but there’s something else, the same threat that’s chilling. I feel it with increasing intensity as we talk on the phone a muddy field apart.

Over recent weeks Benton has continued to mention this problem with trust. It’s come up repeatedly since he left for D.C. and he was adamant several nights ago when he’d had a few too many Scotches and said the Capital Murderer case would never be solved. Someone doesn’t want it solved, he said, and I didn’t believe him.

How could I possibly believe such a thing? Three women were brutally slain, and Benton is the FBI and he was implying the FBI didn’t want the killer caught. And now it seems he’s murdered again and Benton has the same worry as with the other ones. Maybe my husband has gotten too close: it enters my mind again. As bad as that would be, what he’s suggesting couldn’t be worse. It’s finally gotten to him. I’ve always worried it could happen.

“The storage locker in the back of a truck has been broken into,” he tells me over the phone. “There’s a tool in the dirt. It’s been rained on but doesn’t appear to have been out here long. It stopped raining completely several hours ago so it was left here before that.”

“What kind of tool?” I inquire.

“A ratcheting cutter of some type, possibly for cutting metal tubing or pipes. It was deliberately left where it is with a rock placed on top of it.”

“A rock?”

“A decent-sized rock that was picked up and placed on top of it.”

“For what reason?”

“Paper, rock, scissors.”

I wait to see if he’s joking. But he’s not.

“Something from a sick, childish mind that was stunted and got even sicker, and now he’s extremely sick and rapidly decompensating, and it seems early for that and I can’t tell you why. But something’s happening to him,” Benton says. “The rock and the tool are an atavistic throwback to a game from his past. It’s a feeling I’ve felt since the first time I saw what he left some distance from the body. You have to think to look for what isn’t obvious and the police usually don’t.”

“But you do.”

“I’m the one who’s found it in each homicide, even as long as two days after the fact, by the time I got there,” he says. “A rock trumps scissors and scissors trump paper and cops are nothing but paper — they’re officials who fill out paperwork, adults who make up rules and are a joke to him. Police aren’t a worthy audience and he places a rock on top of a tool he used to commit his crime, like a rock on top of scissors, to remind the police how unworthy they are compared to him. It’s a rush to him. It’s thrilling and fun.”

“The police are unworthy but not you.”

“He wouldn’t consider me unworthy. He would know I understand what he’s doing as much as it can be understood, far more than he understands himself, which is limited. It always is with offenders like this. They’re morally insane and insanity has very little insight. Maybe none.”

I glance back at Marino digging around the pole, starkly alone with its attached fencing cut free. Already I can foresee him getting very defensive with Benton. Marino has a hair trigger when it comes to him and they will have a real war now that Marino has power again. This will get ugly before it gets easier, and as I stand out here I can’t imagine this getting any better.

I can’t stop thinking about the timing. Benton flies home three days early and the Capital Murderer has struck again here where we live like a tornado suddenly veering off track and slamming right into our house. I continue to think of the person behind the wall, bareheaded in the rain and staring at my back door, and all morning I’ve continued to glance around as if someone is watching.

“Do you think the killer somehow knew you’d be here?” I ask what I don’t want to consider.

“Frankly, it worries me,” Benton says.

Certainly it’s happened before. Violent offenders have left him notes, letters, body parts, photographs, video and audio recordings of their victims being tortured and killed. Vicious reminders, gruesome ones, cooked human flesh, a murdered child’s teddy bear. I’ve seen the grisly threats and heartbreaking taunts and nothing would surprise me anymore except this. I don’t want to believe what Benton is contemplating for a simple reason I can’t get past, maybe because I refuse.

He’s supposed to be in Washington, D.C., until Saturday. Had he not decided to return home early, he wouldn’t be here right now saying these things and finding a tool and a rock.

“How could he possibly know you’d be here, Benton?”

“He’s probably seen me, seen all of us,” he says and I look around at buildings in the sun, at students walking and on bicycles, at light bright on cars in parking lots. “It’s inevitable I’d be here. Maybe not right this minute but as soon as I knew. Hours, a day later, but I’d be here doing what I’m doing right now.”

“Watching is one thing. Knowing you were coming home today is another.”

“He might not have known I was coming home today but he would figure I’d show up soon. I don’t have an answer but I have to consider the possibility, any possibility. What I know for a fact is this scene is like the other three. The tool and the rock are an obvious red flag and the BAU assumes it’s staged, it’s faked. They say it’s like the Beltway Sniper and the tarot card found near a cartridge case where a thirteen-year-old was shot. Ten people killed, a number of the shootings in Virginia around the time you moved from there.”

Around the time I thought you were dead. It enters my mind weirdly, painfully, and for a flash I think of my dream. Then I don’t. Benton begins stalking the construction site near the bright yellow bulldozer. He’s talking uncharacteristically fast and fluently now.

“‘Call me God, do not release to the press’ was written on the tarot card,” he says. “Staged to screw with police, to lead them down the wrong track, to make them think the killer had something to do with magic shops or the occult. It was bullshit, the FBI said, and in those cases maybe it really was bullshit. This is what I’ve been hearing for weeks about the tools and the rocks and the white cloths, the bags from Octopus, all of it, that they’re bullshit. But they aren’t. I promise you they’re not. They mean something to him. A game. He’s showing off. I worry he’s driven by delusions.”

“Including ones about you?”

“He might delude himself into believing he impresses me.” Benton says it easily, the way zookeepers speak of their most dangerous animals. “I can’t possibly know for sure but I believe he’s familiar with my work. He’s narcissistic enough to fantasize that I would admire him.”

“Maybe he struck now for another reason,” I say calmly, sensibly, “and it has nothing to do with you happening to be here. It has nothing to do with you at all.”

“It worries me,” he repeats. “He might have heard something, I don’t know but he has a connection to this area, a powerful one. He left her body here because the location means something to him and I’m not ready to mention this to anyone, not specifically or directly,” he emphasizes. “I will but not yet. There are phone calls I have to make first. The decision isn’t up to me — that’s the way they think — it’s not about the case. It’s about some agenda that is extremely troubling. I have to notify Granby. That’s the protocol and it will be a problem.”

He will brief his boss, the special agent in charge, Ed Granby, who is an obstructionist and can’t stand him, and I know how that will go. As poorly as anything can go.

“I presume Granby will take over this investigation,” I reply.

“We can’t let him, Kay.”

“How could the killer have heard something that might lead him into believing you were coming back to Cambridge now?”

“Exactly. If he did, how could he? It’s possible he’s connected to someone close to the investigation.”

I remember what Carin Hegel said about corruption that reaches into high places, as high up as it gets, and I think of the Department of Justice, the FBI, and then I don’t want to think any of it at all. My thoughts retreat to the safer ground of what Benton told me after climbing out of Lucy’s helicopter several hours ago. He said his coming home a few days early for his birthday was her suggestion.

“Exactly when was the idea of your coming home today first discussed?” I retrieve my field case again.

I move farther away from Marino and Machado so they can’t hear what I’m saying.

“Three days ago,” Benton tells me. “Sunday morning was when the subject first came up. Lucy knew what you’d been through over the weekend in Connecticut. She worried that’s what made you sick.”

“A virus made me sick.”

“She wanted me to come home and I did too and had basically threatened I was going to, but you said it wouldn’t work. I was certain if you knew, you’d say no as you already had — to me at least.”

To hear it stated so starkly reminds me unhappily of other revelations of late. I don’t always show what I feel or say what I want and that’s not fair. It’s hurtful.

“We agreed it had to be a surprise,” he adds.

“Who else knew?”

“Internally it was known.”

He tells me that on Sunday the FBI was aware that he was leaving Washington, D.C., earlier than planned. In fact, his Boston division had to approve his return to Cambridge and Ed Granby was more than happy for Benton to do just that, to get out of Washington. He encouraged it, Benton says, and next I think of the hotel where he was staying.

People working there also would have been aware of what Benton was doing. I imagine he changed his reservation in advance, possibly as early as this past Sunday, the minute he knew. Of course Lucy was in the loop and my thoughts continue drifting back to her. I wonder if she happened to mention the birthday surprise to Gail Shipton and, if so, why and what that might mean.

Lucy had to file a flight plan before she flew out of Massachusetts with the destination of Dulles International Airport. For security reasons, private aircraft aren’t allowed to land in the D.C. area without permission and a filed Federal Aviation Administration flight plan. Hotel and FBI personnel, flight service and air traffic controllers, I ponder those who would have had reason to know details such as times, locations, aircraft type, and even Lucy’s helicopter’s tail number and what equipment she has on board. Who had access to information about what she and Benton were doing and where and when?

It’s possible someone might know personal minutiae about our lives and perhaps passed information on to the wrong person. I can’t rule out that there could be a deranged, cunning killer fixated on Benton and committing deviant, violent acts for his benefit or to best him. Such a thing rarely happens. I’m not sure I know of any instance when a serial killer has developed an erotomaniacal obsession with a forensic psychologist or profiler. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t occurred somewhere. It probably has.

With human behavior anything is possible, and I’ve been witness to sadistic violent gestures that I couldn’t have imagined in a vacuum. There is no outrageous crime I can invent that’s original, nothing new that hasn’t been done, and Benton isn’t just anyone. He’s published books and papers and often is in the news and has been linked publicly to the Capital Murderer cases, with great frequency after the most recent two. If the killer has been following the media, he knows Benton’s been in D.C., that the search there has been intense even as the details of the crimes remain out of sight, tightly wrapped in the FBI’s cloak of secrecy.

It would have been a very good time for the killer to do what Benton has suggested, to move on, and maybe this cunning, cruel individual anticipates what Benton might deduce and intuit next. My husband has believed from the start the Capital Murderer is connected to Cambridge, that it’s a location he knows and a safe harbor for him.

That’s what Benton has said and he’s been saying it since April when Klara Hembree was murdered not even a month after she moved from here. He said she was stalked in Cambridge for a while and her stalker followed her to D.C. and he wouldn’t have done that if he wasn’t comfortable with Cambridge and familiar with the Washington area. He knows his turf, that’s what Benton has continued to believe. The killer is on a whistle-stop murder tour, jumping off where he’s in control, hitting in places we might not know about, and that’s what I’ve been hearing since my husband left before Thanksgiving.

I could understand it if Benton worries he’s being targeted by this killer or any killer he pursues even if it isn’t true. How much can he subject himself to before his barriers begin to break down, before what he does gets under his skin like a parasite, like an infection? The question has lingered for as long as I’ve loved him.

“Obviously I would look over here,” Benton says on his phone a muddy field away from me. “Maybe the police would have gotten around to it. They probably would have even though it’s remote from where her body was.”

“Why would you look?” I ask.

“Because of the truck.”

“The one broken into.” I fix my attention on the black pickup he’s slowly circling as he talks.

“It’s out of place here,” he says. “It’s not related to the construction going on. It’s someone’s personal truck improperly parked here so of course that would get my attention instantly.”

He stands still and stares across the field at me.

“That’s assuming the tool was used on the gate’s lock and chain.” I watch Marino and Machado give up with the shovel and decide on the hacksaw.

“He used this tool,” Benton says. “And he wanted us to find it, and when the labs examine it you’re going to see I’m right. We’re his audience and he wants us to know everything he’s gone to the trouble to do. That’s part of the thrill —”

“‘Gone to the trouble’?” I interrupt him, getting angry because he’s scaring me and for an instant I feel the flare of heated fury that I work so hard to bury.

Then I will myself to feel nothing at all. It’s not helpful to react the way a normal person would. I banish what will interfere with my clinical discipline and reason, I run it off and far away from me. After all these years I’m good at emptying myself out.

I watch Marino rummaging inside his big scene case, what’s actually a portable tool chest. I take a deep breath. Calmer now, Gail Shipton enters my mind again. It would make sense if she’s the link. If so, it would mean she had some connection with her killer even if she didn’t know him, even if they’d never met, as Benton has said.