The Last Precinct

Chapter 33

MORNING COMES AND HAZE DRIFTS LIKE SMOKE AS we fly low over trees. Lucy and I are alone in her new machine because Jack woke up with aches and chills. He stayed home, and I have a suspicion that his illness is self-induced. I think he is hung over, and I fear that the unbearable stress I have brought upon the office has encouraged bad habits in him. He was perfectly satisfied with his life. Now everything has changed.

The Bell 407 is black with bright stripes. It smells like a new car and moves with the smooth strength of heavy silk as we fly east, eight hundred feet above the ground. I am preoccupied with the sectional map in my lap, trying to match depictions of power lines, roads and railroad tracks with those we pass over. It isn't that we don't know exactly where we are, because Lucy's helicopter has enough navigational equipment to pilot the Concorde. But whenever I feel the way I do right now, I tend to obsess over a task, any task.

"Two antennas about one o'clock." I show her on the map. "Five hundred and thirty feet above sea level. Shouldn't be a factor, but don't see them yet."

"I'm looking," she says.

The antennas will be well below horizon, meaning they aren't a danger even if we get close. But I have a special pho- bia of obstructions, and there are more of them going up all the time in this world of constant communication. Richmond air traffic control comes over the air, telling us radar service is terminated and we can squawk VFR. I change the frequency to twelve hundred on the transponder as I barely make out the antennas several miles ahead. They don't have high-intensity strobes and are nothing more than ghostly, straight pencil lines in thick, gray haze. I point them out.

"Got 'em," Lucy replies. "Hate those things." She pressures the cyclic right, curving well to the north of them, wanting nothing personal with antenna guy wires, for the heavy steel cables are the snipers. They will get you first.

"The governor going to be pissed at you if he finds out you're doing this?" Lucy's question sounds inside my headset.

"He told me to take a vacation from the office," I reply. "I'm out of the office."

"So you'll come to New York with me," she says. "You can stay in my apartment. I'm really glad you're leaving the job, giving up being chief, striking out on your own. Maybe you'll end up in New York working with Teun and me?"

I don't want to hurt her feelings. I don't tell her I am not glad. I want to be here. I want to be in my home and working my job as usual, and that will never be possible. I feel like a fugitive, I tell my niece, whose attention is outside the cockpit, eyes never straying from what she is doing. Talking to someone who is piloting a helicopter is like being on the phone. The person really doesn't see you. There is no gesturing or touching. The sun is getting brighter, the haze thinning the farther east we fly. Below us, creeks glisten like entrails of the earth, and the James River shines white like snow. We get lower and slower, passing over the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery, the full-size replicas of the ships that carried one hundred and four men and boys to Virginia in 1607. In the distance, I make out the obelisk peeking up through the trees of Jamestown Island, where archaeologists are raising the first English settlement in America from the dead. A ferry slowly carries cars across the water toward Surry.

"I see a green silo at nine o'clock," Lucy observes. "Think that's it?"

I follow her eyes to a small farm that backs up to a creek. On the other side of the narrow, muddy lick of water, rooftops and old campers peeking out of thick pines become The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground. Lucy circles the farm at five hundred feet, making sure there are no hazards such as power lines. She sizes up the area and seems satisfied as she lowers the collective and reins us back to sixty knots. We begin our approach to a clearing between woods and the small brick house where Benny White spent his twelve short years. Dead grass storms as Lucy gently sets us down, subtly feeling for the ground, making sure it is level. Mrs. White comes out of the house. She stares at us, a hand shielding her eyes from the sun, and then a tall man in a suit joins her. They stay on the porch while we go through the two-minute shutdown. As we climb out and walk toward the house, I realize that Benny's parents have dressed up for us. They look as if they have just come from church.

"Never thought something like that would land on my farm." Mr. White gazes off at the helicopter, a heavy expression on his face.

"Do come in," Mrs. White says. "Can 1 get you some coffee or something?"

We chat about our flight, make small talk, anxiety thick. The Whites know I am here because I must be entertaining ominous scenarios about what really happened to their son. They seem to assume Lucy is part of the investigation and address both of us whenever they speak. The house is very neat and pleasantly furnished with big comfortable chairs, braided rugs and brass lamps. The floor is wide heart of pine, and wooden walls are whitewashed and hung with watercolors of Civil War scenes. By the fireplace in the living room are shelves that are full of cannonballs, minie balls, a mess kit, old bottles and all sort of artifacts that probably are from the Civil War. When Mr. White notices my interest, he explains that he is a collector. He is a treasure hunter and scours the area with a metal detector when he is not busy at the office.

He is an accountant. His farm is not an active one, but has been in the family for more than a hundred years, he tells Lucy and me.

"I guess I'm just a history nut," he goes on. "I've even found a few buttons from the American Revolution. Just never know what you're going to find around here."

We are in the kitchen and Mrs. White is getting a glass of water for Lucy.

"What about Benny?" I ask. "Was he interested in treasure hunting?"

"Oh, he sure was," his mother replies. "Of course, he was always hoping to find real treasure. Like gold." She has begun to accept his death and speaks of him in the past tense.

"You know, the old story about the Confederates hiding all this gold that's never been found. Well, Benny thought he was going to find it," Mr. White says, holding a glass of water as if he isn't sure what to do with it. He sets it down on the countertop without drinking a drop. "He loved being outside, that one did. I've often thought it was too bad we don't work the farm anymore because I think he would have really liked it."

"Especially animals," Mrs. White adds. "That child loved animals more than anyone I've ever met. Just so tenderhearted." She tears up. "If a bird flew into a window, he'd go running out of the house to try and find it, and then he'd come in just in hysterics if the poor thing broke its neck, which is usually what happens."

Benny's stepfather stares out the window, a pained expression on his face. His mother falls silent. She is fighting to hold herself together.

"Benny had something to eat before he died," I tell them. "I think Dr. Fielding might have asked you about that to see if he possibly was given something to eat at the church."

Mr. White shakes his head, still staring out. "No, ma'am. They don't serve food at the church except at the Wednesday-night suppers. If Benny had something to eat, I sure don't know where."

"He didn't eat here," Mrs. White adds with emphasis. "I fixed a pot roast for Sunday dinner, and well, he never had his dinner. Pot roast was one of his favorites."

"He had popcorn and hotdogs in his stomach," I say. "It appears he ate them not long before he died." I make sure they understand the oddity of this and that it demands an explanation.

Both parents have baffled expressions. Their eyes light up with both fascination and confusion. They say they have no earthly idea where Benny would have gotten hold of junk food, as they call it. Lucy asks about neighbors, if perhaps Benny might have dropped by someone's house before he went into the woods. Again, they can't imagine him doing something like that, not at dinner time, and the neighbors are mostly elderly and would never give Benny a meal or even a snack without calling his parents first to make certain it was all right. "They wouldn't spoil his dinner without asking us." Mrs. White is certain of this.

"Would you mind if I see his bedroom?" I then say. "Sometimes I get a better feel for a patient if I can see where he spent his private time."

The Whites look a little uncertain. "Well, I guess that would be all right," the stepfather decides.

They take us down a hallway to the back of the house, and along the way we pass a bedroom off to the left that looks like a girl's bedroom, with pale pink curtains and a pink bedspread. There are posters of horses on the walls, and Mrs. White explains that this is Lori's bedroom. She is Benny's younger sister and is at her grandmother's house in Williams-burg right now. She hasn't gone back to school yet and won't until after the funeral, which is tomorrow. Although they don't say it, I infer that they didn't think it was a good idea for the child to be here when the medical examiner dropped in out of the sky and started asking questions about her brother's violent death.

Benny's room is a menagerie of stuffed animals: dragons, bears, birds, squirrels, fuzzy and sweet, many of them comical. There are dozens. His parents and Lucy stay outside the doorway while I walk in and pause in the middle of the room, looking around, letting the surroundings speak to me. Taped to the walls are bright pictures done in Magic Marker, again of animals, and they show imagination and a great deal of talent. Benny was an artist. Mr. White tells me from the doorway that Benny loved to take his sketchpad outside and draw trees, birds, whatever he saw. He was always drawing pictures to give people for presents, too. Mr. White talks on while his wife cries silently, tears rolling down her face.

I am looking at a drawing on the wall to the right of the dresser. The colorful, imaginative picture depicts a man in a small boat. He wears a wide-brim hat and is fishing, his rod bent as if he might just be having some luck. Benny has drawn a bright sun and a few clouds, and in the background, on the shore, is a square building with lots of windows and doors. "Is this the creek behind your farm?" I inquire.

"That's right," Mr. White says, hooking an arm around his wife. "It's all right, sugar," he keeps saying to her, swallowing hard, as if he might start crying, too.

"Benny liked to fish?" Lucy's voice sounds from the hallway. "I'm just wondering, because some people who are big animal lovers don't like to fish. Or else they let everything go."

"Interesting point," I say. "All right to look inside his closet?" I ask the Whites.

"Go right ahead," Mr. White says without hesitation. "No, Benny didn't like to catch anything. Truth is, he just liked to go out in the boat or find him a spot on the shore. Most of the time he'd sit there drawing."

"Then this must be you, Mr. White." I look back at the picture of the man in the boat.

"No, I think that would be his daddy," Mr. White answers somberly. "His daddy used to go out in the boat with him. Truth is, I don't go out in the boat." He pauses. "Well, I don't know how to swim, so I just have this uneasiness about being in the water."

"Benny was a little shy about his drawing," Mrs. White says in a shaky voice. "I think he liked to carry his fishing pole around because, well you know, he thought it made him look like other boys. I don't think he even bothered bringing bait. Can't imagine him killing even a worm, much less a fish."

"Bread," Mr. White says. "He'd take bread, like he was going to roll it up in bread balls. I used to tell him he wasn't going to catch anything very big if all he used for bait was bread."

I scan suits, slacks and shirts on hangers, and shoes lined on the floor. The clothing is conservative and looks as if it was picked out by his parents. Leaning against the back of the closet is a Daisy BB gun and Mr. White says Benny would shoot targets and tin cans. No, he never used the BB gun on birds or anything like that. Of course not. He couldn't even bring himself to catch a fish, both parents make that point again.

On the desk is a stack of schoolbooks and a box of Magic Markers. On top of these is a sketchpad and I ask his parents if they have looked through it. They say they have not. Is it okay if I do? And they nod. I stand at the desk. I don't sit or in any way make myself at home in their dead son's room. I am respectful of the sketchpad and turn pages carefully, going through meticulous drawings in pencil. The first one is a horse in a pasture and it is surprisingly good. This is followed by several sketches of a hawk sitting in a bare tree, water in the background. Benny drew an old broken-down fence. He drew several snow scenes. The pad is half filled, and all of the sketches are consistent with each other until I get to the last few. Then the mood and the subject decidedly change. There is a night scene of a cemetery, a full moon behind bare trees softly illuminating tilting headstones. Next I turn to a hand, a muscular hand clenched in a fist, and then I find the dog. She is fat and homely and is baring her teeth, her hackles up, and she cowers, as if threatened.

I look up at the Whites. "Did Benny ever talk about the Kiffins' dog?" I ask them. "A dog named Mr. Peanut?"

The stepfather gets a peculiar expression, and his eyes brighten with tears. He sighs. "Lori's allergic," he says, as if that answers my question.

"He was always complaining about the way they treated that dog," Mrs. White helps out. "Benny wanted to know if we could take Mr. Peanut. He wanted the dog and said he thought the Kiffins would give it up, but we couldn't."

"Because of Lori," I infer.

"It was an old dog, too," Mrs. White adds.

"Was?" I ask.

"Well, it's real sad," she says. "Right after Christmas, Mr. Peanut didn't seem to be feeling well. Benny said the poor dog was shaking and licking itself a lot, like it was in pain, you know. Then maybe a week ago it must have gone off to die. You know how animals will do that. Benny went out looking for Mr. Peanut every day. It just broke my heart. That child sure did love that dog," Mrs. White adds. "I think that's the main reason he'd go over there_to play with Mr. Peanut_and he just searched high and low for her."

"Was this when his behavior started changing?" I suggest. "After Mr. Peanut disappeared?"

"It was about that time," Mr. White replies, and neither parent seems able to bear stepping inside Benny's room. They cling to the doorway as if holding up the walls. "You don't think he did something like that because of a dog, do you?" He is almost pitiful when he asks.

MAYBE FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, LUCY AND I HEAD out to the woods together, leaving the parents at the house. They have not been to the deer stand where Benny was hanged. Mr. White told me he knew about the stand and has seen it many times when he has been out with his metal detector, but neither he nor his wife can bring themselves to go out there right now. I asked them if they thought other people knew the spot where Benny died_I am worried about the cu-rious having tramped around out there, but the parents don't think anybody knows exactly where Benny's body was found. Not unless the detective told people around here, Mr. White adds.

The field where we landed is between the house and the creek, a barren acre that doesn't appear to have seen a plow in many years. To the east are miles of woods, the silo almost at the shore and jutting up rusty and dark like a tired, thick lighthouse that seems to look out across the water at The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground. As I imagine Benny visiting the Kiffins, I wonder how he got there. There is no bridge across the creek, which is about a hundred feet wide and has no outlet. Lucy and I follow the footpath through the woods, scanning everywhere we step. Tangled fishing line is caught in trees close to the water, and I note a few old shotgun shells and soft drink cans. We have walked no more than five minutes when we come upon the deer blind. It looks like a decapitated tree house that someone threw up in a hurry, with wooden rungs nailed up the trunk. A severed yellow nylon rope dangles from a crossbeam and stirs in a light cold breeze that blows off the water and whispers through trees.

We stop and are silent as we look around. I don't see any trash_no bags or popcorn containers or any sign that Benny might have eaten out here. I get closer to the rope. Stanfield cut it about four feet from the ground and since Lucy is more athletic than I am, I suggest that maybe she could climb up into the stand and remove the rope properly. At least we can take a look at the knot on the other end. I take photographs first. We test the rungs nailed into the tree, and they seem sturdy enough. Lucy is bundled in a thick down-filled jacket that doesn't seem to slow her down as she climbs up, and she is careful as she reaches the platform, pushing and tugging boards to make sure they can bear her weight. "Seems pretty sturdy," she lets me know.

I toss up a roll of evidence tape and she opens a Buck Tool. One thing about ATF agents, they all carry their own portable tool kits that include knife blades, screwdrivers, pliers, scissors. It goes back to needing them at fire scenes, if for no other reason, to pull nails out of the soles of your steel-reinforced boots. ATF agents get dirty. They step in all sorts of hazards. Lucy cuts the rope above the knot and tapes the ends back together. "Just a simple double half hitch," she says, dropping the rope and tape down to me. "Just a good ol' Boy Scout knot, and the end's melted. Whoever cut the end melted it so it wouldn't unravel."

That surprises me a little. I wouldn't expect someone to bother with a detail like that if he were cutting off rope so he could hang himself with it. "Atypical," I comment to Lucy when she climbs down. "Tell you what, I'm going to be bold and take a look."

"Just be careful, Aunt Kay. There are a few rusty nails sticking out. And watch out for splinters," she says.

I am wondering if Benny might have adopted this old stand as a tree fort. I grip weathered gray boards one after the other and work my way up, grateful that I wore khakis and ankle boots. Inside the deer blind is a bench seat where the hunter can sit as he waits for an unsuspecting buck to wander into his sights. I test the seat by pushing against it, and it seems fine, so I sit. Benny was only an inch taller than I am, so I now have his view, assuming he came up here. I have a strong feeling that he did. Someone has been up here. Otherwise the floor of the stand would be thick with dead leaves, and it isn't at all. "You notice how neat it is up here?" I call down to Lucy.

"It's probably still being used by hunters," she replies.

"What hunter is going to bother sweeping out leaves at five o'clock in the morning?" From this vantage point, I have a sweeping view of the water and can see the back of the motel and its dark and slimy swimming pool. Smoke curls out the chimney of the Kiffin house. I envision Benny sitting up here and spying on life as he sketched and perhaps escaped the sadness he must have felt since his father's death. I can imagine only too well as I remember my own young life. The deer blind would be a perfect spot for a lonely, creative boy, and just a stone's throw ahead at the water's edge is a tall oak tree wearing kudzu around its trunk like spats. I can picture a red-tailed hawk sitting high up on a branch. "I think he might have drawn that tree over there," I say to Lucy. "And he had a damn good view of the campground."

"Wonder if he saw something," Lucy floats this up to me.

"No kidding," I reply grimly. "And someone might have been looking back," I add. "This time of year with no leaves on the trees, he might have been visible up here. Especially if someone had binoculars and had a reason to be looking over this way." Even as I say this, it occurs to me that someone might be looking at us right now. A chill touches my flesh as I climb back down. "You got your gun in that butt pack, don't you?" I say to Lucy when my feet are on the ground. "I'd like to follow this path and see where it goes."

I pick up the rope, coil it and tuck it inside a plastic bag, which I then shove into a coat pocket. The evidence tape goes inside my satchel. Lucy and I start out on the path. We find more shotgun shells and even an arrow from bow season. Deeper into the woods we walk, the path bending around the creek, no sound but trees groaning when the wind gusts and the snap of twigs beneath our feet. I want to see if the path might take us all the way around to the other side of the creek, and it does. It is a mere fifteen-minute hike to The Fort James Motel, and we end up in woods between the motel and Route 5. Benny certainly could have walked over here after church. There are half a dozen cars in the motel parking lot, some of them rentals, and a big Honda touring motorcycle is near the Coke machine.

Lucy and I walk toward the Kiffin house. I point out the campsite where we found the bed linens and baby carriage, and experience a combination of anger and sadness about Mr. Peanut. I don't trust the story about the dog's supposedly going off to die. I worry that Bev Kiffin did something cruel, maybe even poisoned her, and I intend to ask her what happened along with a number of other questions. I don't care how Bev Kiffin reacts. After today, I am grounded, out of commission, suspended from my profession. I can't know for a fact I will ever practice forensic medicine again. I might be fired and branded for life. Hell, I might end up in prison. I feel eyes on us as we climb the Kiffins' front-porch steps.

"Creepy place," Lucy says under her breath.

A face peeks out from behind curtains and then ducks out of sight when Bev Kiffin's older son catches me looking back at him. I ring the bell and the boy answers the door, the same boy I saw when I was here. He is big and heavy-set and has a cruel face speckled with acne. I can't tell how old he is, but I place him at twelve, maybe fourteen.

"You're the lady who was out here the other day," he says to me with a hard look.

"That's right," I reply. "Can you tell your mother that Dr. Scarpetta is here and I need a word with her?"

He smiles as if he knows a mean secret that he thinks is funny. He stifles a laugh. "She ain't in here right now. She's busy." His eyes get harder and wander in the direction of the motel.

"What's your name?" Lucy asks him.

"Sonny."

"Sonny, what happened to Mr. Peanut?" I casually ask.

"That dumb dog," he says. "All we can figure is somebody stole her."

I find it impossible to believe that anyone would have stolen that old, worn-out dog. In the first place, she wasn't friendly to strangers. If anything, I might have expected her to get hit by a car.

"Oh yeah? That's too bad," Lucy answers Sonny. "What makes you think somebody stole her?"

Sonny gets caught on this. He gets a vapid look in his eyes and starts to tell several lies and keeps interrupting himself. "Uh, some car pulled in at night. I heard it, you know, and a door shut and she was barking, then that was it. She was gone. Zack's all tore up about it."

"She disappeared when?" I want to know.

"Oh, I don't know." A shrug. "Last week."

"Well, Benny was pretty torn up about it, too," I comment, watching for his reaction.

That cold look in his eyes again. "The kids at school called him a sissy. And he was one, too. That's why he killed himself. Everybody says so," Sonny replies with stunning callousness.

"I thought the two of you were friends?" Lucy is getting aggressive with him.

"He bugged me," Sonny answers. "Always coming over here to play with the dang dog. He wasn't my friend. He was Zack and Mr. Peanut's friend. I don't hang out with no sissies."

A motorcycle engine roars and rumbles to life. Zack's face pops up in the window to the right of the front door, and he is crying.

"Did Benny come over here last Sunday?" I come right out and ask Sonny. "After church? Maybe twelve-thirty, one o'clock. Did he eat hotdogs with you?"

Sonny is caught again. He wasn't expecting the detail about hotdogs and now he is in a bind. His curiosity overwhelms his untruthfulness and he says, "How'd you know we had hotdogs?" He frowns as the motorcycle we saw a few minutes ago rumbles and bumps along the dirt path that leads from the motel to the Kiffin house. Whoever is on it heads right toward us, dressed in red-and-black leather, his face obscured by a dark helmet with a tinted face shield. Yet there is something familiar about the person. The realization stuns me. Jay Talley stops and gets off his motorcycle, nimbly swinging a leg over the big saddle seat.

"Sonny, get in the house," Jay orders. "Now." He says this with cool ease, as if he knows the boy very well.

Sonny steps back inside the house and the door shuts. Zack has vanished from the window. Jay takes off his helmet.

"What are you doing out here?" Lucy asks him, and in the distance I spot Bev Kiffin walking this way, carrying a shotgun, coming from the direction of the motel, where I can only assume she has been with Jay. Red flags are popping up all over the place inside my head, and neither Lucy nor I make the connection fast enough. Jay is unzipping his thick leather jacket and almost instantly he has a gun in his hand, a black pistol relaxed by his side.

"Christ," Lucy says. "For God's sake, Jay."

"I really wish you hadn't come here," he says to me in a calm, cold way. "I really wish you hadn't." He motions the gun toward the motel. "Come on. We're going to have a little talk."

Run. But there is no place to run. He might shoot Lucy if I run. He might shoot me in the back. He raises the pistol and points it at Lucy's chest as he unfastens her butt pack. He of all people knows what is in it. He takes my satchel and pats me down, making sure he explores my body intimately, to degrade me, to put me in my place, to enjoy the fury that dances across Lucy's face as she has to watch. "Don't," I quietly say to him. "Jay, you can stop now."

He smiles and dark rage sparks in a face that could be Greek. It could be Italian. It could be French. Bev Kiffin reaches us and her eyes narrow as they fix on me. She wears the same red lumberman's jacket she had on the other week, and her hair is tousled as if she has just gotten out of bed. "Well, well," she says. "Some folks just never get the message they aren't welcome, isn't that right?" Her eyes slide to Jay and linger.

I know without being told that they have been sleeping together, and every word Jay has ever told me turns to fable. Now I understand why Agent Jilison Mclntyre was perplexed when I said that Bev Kiffin's husband was a truck driver for Overland. Mclntyre was undercover. She did the company's books. She would be aware of it if there was an employee named Kiffin. The only connection to that criminal-infested trucking company is Bev Kiffin herself, and the gun and drug smuggling that goes on is connected to the Chandonne cartel. Answers. I have them, and now it is too late.

Lucy walks close to me, her face concrete. She shows no reaction as we are walked at gunpoint past rusty campers that I suspect are unoccupied for a reason. "Drug labs," I say to Jay. "You making designer drugs out here, too? Or maybe just storing assault rifles and other things that end up on the street and kill people?"

"Kay, shut up," he softly says. "Bev, you take care of her." He indicates Lucy. "Find her a nice room and make sure she's comfortable."

Kiffin smiles a little. She taps the back of Lucy's leg with the shotgun. We are at the motel now, and I scan parked cars and find no sign of another human being. Benton flashes in my mind. My heart pounds and the realization roars through my brain. Bonnie and Clyde. We used to refer to Carrie Grethen and Newton Joyce as Bonnie and Clyde. The killing couple. All along we have been so certain they were responsible for Benton's murder. Yet we have never known for a fact who he was meeting that afternoon in Philadelphia. Why did he go off alone and not tell any of us? He was smarter than that. He never would have agreed to meet Carrie Grethen or Newton Joyce or even a stranger with information, because he would never have trusted a stranger with so-called information when he was in a city trying to track down a cunning, evil serial killer like Carrie. I stop in the parking lot as Kiffin opens a door and waits for Lucy to walk ahead of her into one of those rooms. Room 14. Lucy doesn't look back at me, and the door shuts after her and Kiffin.

"You killed Benton, didn't you, Jay." I state it as a fact.

He lays a hand on my back, the pistol pointed and touching me as he pauses behind me and says for me to open the door. We enter room 15, the same room Kiffin showed me when I wanted to see what kind of mattresses and linens she used in this dump. "You and Bray," I say to Jay. "That's why she sent letters from New York, trying to make it seem they were from Carrie, to make Benton assume they were written from up there where she was locked up in Kirby."

Jay shuts the door and waves the gun almost wearily, as if I am tiresome and he is not enjoying this. "Sit down."

My eyes wander up to the ceiling, looking for eyebolts. I wonder where the heat gun is and if it is part of my fate. I keep standing where I am, near the dresser with its Gideon Bible, this one not opened to any special chapter about vanity or anything else. "I just want to know if I slept with the person who killed Benton." I am looking right at Jay. "You're going to kill me? Go ahead. But you already did that when you killed him. So I guess you can kill me twice, Jay." It is odd, I feel no fear,

only resignation. My pain, my anguish is over my niece, and I

wait for the sound of a shotgun to rock these walls. "Can't you just leave her out of it?" I ask anyway, and Jay knows I mean Lucy.

"I didn't kill Benton," he says, and he has the livid face of people who walk up and shoot a president. Pale, no expression, a zombie. "Carrie and her asshole friend did that. I made the call."

"The call?"

"Called him to meet. That wasn't too hard. I'm an agent," he enjoys reminding me. "Carrie handled it from there. Carrie and that whacko scarface she got hooked up with."

"So you set him up," I say, simply. "Probably helped Carrie escape, too."

"She didn't need much help. Just some," he replies with no inflection. "She was like a lot of people in this business. They get into the goods and fuck up an already fucked-up brain. She started doing her own thing. Years ago. If you guys hadn't solved the problem, we would have. She was at the end of her usefulness."

"Involved in the family business, Jay?" My eyes pin his. The gun is by his side and he leans against the door. He has no fear of me. I am like a bowstring wound too tightly, about to snap, waiting, listening for any sound next door. "All these women murdered_how many of them did you sleep with first? Like Susan Pless." I shake my head. "I just want to know if you helped out Chandonne or did he follow you and help himself to what you left behind?"

Jay's eyes focus more sharply on me. I have probed the truth.

"You know, you're much too young to be Jay Talley, whoever he was," I say next. "Jay Talley with no middle name. And you didn't go to Harvard, and I doubt you ever lived in Los Angeles, not as a child. He's your brother, isn't he, Jay? That horrible deformity who calls himself a werewolf? He's your brother, and your DNA is so close that on a routine screening you could be identical twins. Did you know your DNA is the same as his on a routine screening? At a four-probe level, the two of you are exactly the same."

Anger flashes. Vain, beautiful Jay would never want to

think that his DNA was even similar to someone's as ugly and hideous as Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.

"And the body in the cargo container. The one you helped us believe is the brother_Thomas. His DNA had many points in common, too, but not as many as yours does_yours from the seminal fluid you left in Susan Pless's body before she was brutalized. Thomas a relative? Not a brother? What? A cousin? You kill him, too? You drown him in Antwerp or did Jean-Baptiste do that? And then you lure me over to Interpol, not because you need my help with the case, but because you want to see what I know. You want to make sure I don't know what Benton was probably starting to figure out: That you are a Chandonne," I say, and Jay does not react. "You probably mastermind the business for your father and that's why you got into law enforcement, to be an undercover asshole, a spy. God knows how much business you've diverted_knowing everything the good guys are doing and then turning it against them behind their backs." I shake my head. "Let Lucy go," I tell him. "I'll do what you want. Just let her go."

"Can't." He doesn't even begin to argue with what I have said.

Jay glances at the wall, as if he can see through it. I can tell he is wondering what is going on next door, why it is so quiet. My nerves wind tighter. Please God, please God. Please. Or make it quick, at least. Don't let her suffer.

Jay pushes the lock in and fastens the burglar chain. "Take your clothes off," he says, no longer using my name. It is easier to kill people you have depersonalized. "Don't worry," he bizarrely adds. "I'm not going to do anything. I just have to make it look like something else."

I glance up at the ceiling. He knows what I am thinking. He is pale and sweating as he opens a dresser drawer and pulls out several eyebolts and a heat gun, a red heat gun.

"Why?" I ask him. "Why them?" I refer to the two men I now believe Jay murdered.

"You're going to screw these into the ceiling for me," Jay tells me. "Up there in the crossbeam. Now get on the bed and do it and don't try anything."

He places the eyebolts on the bed and nods for me to pick them up and do what he orders. "It's all about what becomes necessary when people get into something they shouldn't." He gets a rag and rope out of the drawer.

I stand where I am, just looking at him. The eyebolts gleam like pewter on the bed.

"Matos came here to find Jean-Baptiste and it took a little coaxing to know exactly what he had in mind and who gave him the order, which wasn't what you think." Jay takes off his leather jacket and drapes it over a chair. "Not the family, but a first lieutenant who doesn't want Jean-Baptiste to start talking and ruin a good thing for a lot of people. One thing about the family…"

"Your family, Jay," I remind him of his family and that I know him by name.

"Yeah." He stares at me. "Fuck yeah, my family. We take care of each other. Doesn't matter what you do, family is family. Jean-Baptiste's a fuck-up, I mean, anybody can look at him and see that, and understand why he's got his problem."

I say nothing.

"Of course we don't approve," Jay goes on as if he is talking about a kid who is shooting out streetlights or drinking too much beer. "But he's blood, our blood, and you don't touch our blood."

"Someone touched Thomas," I reply, and I have not picked up the eyebolts or climbed up on the bed. I have no intention of helping him torment me.

"You want to know the truth? That was an accident. Thomas couldn't swim. He tripped over a rope and fell off the dock, or something like that," Jay tells me. "I wasn't there. He drowned. Jean-Baptiste wanted to get his body a long way from the shipyard, away from other stuff going on there and didn't want him identified."

"Bullshit," 1 reply. "Sorry, but Jean-Baptiste left a note with the body. Bon Voyage Le Loup-Garou. You do that when you don't want to draw attention to something? I don't think so. Maybe you better recheck your brother's story. Maybe your family takes care of family. Maybe Jean-Baptiste's an exception. Sounds like he doesn't take care of family at all."

"Thomas was a cousin." As if that lessens the crime. "Get up and do what I say." Jay indicates the eyebolts, and he is beginning to get angry, very angry.

"No," I refuse. "Do what you're going to do, Jay," and I keep saying his name. I know him. I am not going to let him do this to me without my saying his name and looking him in the eye. "I'm not going to help you kill me, Jay."

A thud sounds next door, as if something has turned over or fallen to the floor, and then an explosion and my heart lurches. Tears choke me and fill my eyes. Jay flinches and then his face is impassive. "Sit down," he tells me. When I don't comply, he comes closer and shoves me down on the bed as I cry. I cry for Lucy.

"You fucking son of a bitch," I exclaim. "You kill that boy, too? You take Benny out and hang him, a goddamn twelve-year-old kid?"

"He shouldn't have come out here. Mitch shouldn't have. I knew Mitch. He saw me. There was nothing I could do." Jay stands over me as if not sure what to do next.

"Then you killed the boy." I wipe my eyes with the backs of both hands.

Confusion flickers in Jay's eyes. He has a problem with the boy. The rest of us don't bother him, but the boy does.

"How could you stand there and watch him hang? A kid? A kid in his Sunday suit."

Jay swings back his hand and slaps me across the face. It happens so fast I don't even feel it at first. My mouth and nose go numb and begin to sting, and something wet drips. Blood drips into my lap. I let it drip as 1 tremble all over and stare up at Jay. Now it is easier for him. He has begun the process. He pushes me down on the bed and straddles me, pinning my arms with his knees, and my healing fractured elbow screams in pain as he forces my hands above my head and struggles to tie them with the rope. All the while he is snarling about Diane Bray. He is mocking me, telling me that she knew Benton, and didn't Benton ever tell me that Bray had a thing for Ben-ton? And if Benton had been a little nicer to her maybe she would have left him alone. Maybe she would have left me alone. My head pounds. I barely comprehend.

Did I really think that Benton had an affair only with me? Was I so stupid to think that Benton would cheat on his wife but never on me? How fucking stupid am I? Jay gets up for the heat gun. What people do is what they do, he says. Benton had something with Bray up in D.C., and then when he dumped her, and he did it pretty quickly, to give him credit, she wasn't going to let that pass. Not Diane Bray. Jay is trying to gag me and I keep jerking my head from side to side. My nose is bleeding. I won't be able to breathe. Bray got Benton good, all right, and this is partly why she wanted to move to Richmond, to make sure she ruined my life, too. "Quite a price to pay for fucking somebody a few times." Jay gets up from the bed again. He is sweating, his face pale.

I struggle to breathe through my nose and my heart is hammering like a machine gun as my entire body begins to panic. I try to will myself to calm down. Hyperventilating will only make it harder for me to get air. Panic. I try to inhale and blood is dripping down the back of my throat and I cough and gag as my heart explodes against my ribs like fists trying to pound down a door. Pounding, pounding, pounding and the room turns grainy and I can't move.