Dust Read online

  “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.

  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 h
im.

  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?