Point of Origin Page 25

  I removed the towel and washed her hand with bottled water. A thick flap of skin on her thumb was almost avulsed, and I swabbed it profusely with betadine, the iodine odor piercing my sinuses as all that I had just seen became a bad dream. It was not true.

  “She needs stitches,” McGovern said.

  It had not happened. A dream.

  “We should go to the hospital so she can get stitches.”

  But I already had out the steri-strips and benzoin glue, because I knew that stitches would not work with a wound like this. Tears were streaming down my face as I topped off my work with a thick layer of gauze. When I looked up and out the window, I realized Marino was standing by my door. His face was distorted by pain and rage. He looked like he might vomit. I got out of the Explorer.

  “Lucy, you need to come on with me,” I said, taking her arm. I had always been able to function better when I was taking care of someone else. “Come on.”

  Emergency lights flashed in our faces, the night and the people in it disconnected and strange. Marino drove away with us as the medical examiner’s van pulled up. There would be X rays, dental charts, maybe even DNA used to confirm the identification. The process most likely would take a while, but it did not matter. I already knew. Benton was dead.

  17

  AS BEST ANYONE could reconstruct events at this time, Benton had been lured to his dreadful death. We had no clue as to what had drawn him to the small grocery store on Walnut Street, or if, perhaps, he simply had been abducted somewhere else and then forced up a ladder into the plenum of that small building in its bad part of town. We believed he had been handcuffed at some point, and the continuing search had also turned up wire twisted into a figure eight that most likely had restrained the ankles that had burned away.

  His car keys and wallet were recovered, but not his Sig Sauer nine-millimeter pistol or gold signet ring. He had left several changes of clothing in his hotel room, and his briefcase, which had been searched and turned over to me. I stayed the night in Teun McGovern’s house. She had posted agents on the property, because Carrie was still out there somewhere, and it was only a matter of time.

  She would finish what she had started, and the important question, really, was who would be next and if she would succeed. Marino had moved into Lucy’s tiny apartment and was keeping watch from her couch. The three of us had nothing to say to each other because there was nothing to say, really. What was done was done.

  McGovern had tried to get through to me. Several times the previous night she had brought tea or food into my room with its blue-curtained window overlooking the old brick and brass lanterns of the row houses in Society Hill. She was wise enough not to force anything, and I was too ruined to do anything but sleep. I continued to wake up feeling sick and then remember why.

  I did not remember my dreams. I wept until my eyes were almost swollen shut. Late Thursday morning, I took a long shower and walked into McGovern’s kitchen. She was wearing a Prussian blue suit, drinking coffee and reading the paper.

  “Good morning,” she said, surprised and pleased that I had ventured out from behind my closed door. “How are you doing?”

  “Tell me what’s happening,” I said.

  I sat across from her. She set her coffee cup on the table and pushed back her chair.

  “Let me get you coffee,” she said.

  “Tell me what is going on,” I repeated. “I want to know, Teun. Have they found out anything yet? At the morgue, I mean?”

  She was at a loss for a moment, staring out the window at an old magnolia tree heavy with blossoms that were limp and brown.

  “They’re still working on him,” she finally spoke. “But based on indications so far, it appears his throat may have been cut. There were cuts to the bones of his face. Here and here.”

  She pointed to her left jaw and space between the eyes.

  “There was no soot or burns in his trachea, and no CO. So he was already dead when the fire was set,” she said to me. “I’m sorry, Kay. I . . . Well, I don’t know what to say.”

  “How can it be that no one saw him enter the building?” I asked as if I had not comprehended the horror of what she had just said. “Someone forces him inside at gunpoint, maybe, and no one saw a thing?”

  “The store closed at five P.M.,” she answered. “There’s no sign of forcible entry and for some reason the burglar alarm hadn’t been set, so it didn’t go off. We’ve had trouble with these places being torched for insurance money. Same Pakistani family always involved one way or another.”

  She sipped her coffee.

  “Same MO,” she went on. “Small inventory, the fire starts shortly after business hours, and no one in the neighborhood saw a thing.”

  “This has nothing to do with insurance money!” I said with sudden rage.

  “Of course, it doesn’t,” she quietly answered. “Or at least not directly. But if you want to hear my theory, I’ll tell you.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Maybe Carrie was the torch . . .”

  “Of course!”

  “I’m saying she might have conspired with the owner to torch the place for him. He may have even paid her to do it, not having any idea what her real agenda was. Granted, this would have taken some planning.”

  “She’s had nothing to do for years but plan.”

  My chest tightened again and tears formed a lump in my throat and filled my eyes.

  “I’m going home,” I told her. “I’ve got to do something. I can’t stay here.”

  “I think you are better off . . .” she started to protest.

  “I’ve got to figure out what she will do next,” I said, as if this were possible. “I’ve got to figure out how she’s doing what she’s doing. There’s some master plan, some routine, something more to all this. Did they find any metal shavings?”

  “There wasn’t much left. He was in the plenum, the point of origin. There was some kind of big fuel load up there, but we don’t know what, except there were a lot of Styrofoam peanuts floating around. And those things will really burn. No accelerants detected, so far.”

  “Teun, the metal shavings from the Shephard case. Let us take them to Richmond so we can compare them with what we’ve got. Your investigators can receipt them to Marino.”

  She looked at me with eyes that were skeptical, tired, and sad.

  “You need to deal with this, Kay,” she said. “Let us do the rest of it.”

  “I am dealing with it, Teun.”

  I got up from my chair and looked down at her.

  “The only way I can,” I said. “Please.”

  “You really should not be on this case anymore. And I’m placing Lucy on administrative leave for at least a week.”

  “You won’t pull me off this case,” I told her. “Not in this life.”

  “You’re not in a position to be objective.”

  “And what would you do if you were me?” I demanded. “Would you go home and do nothing?”

  “But I’m not you.”

  “Answer me,” I said.

  “No one could stop me from working the case. I would be obsessed. I would do just what you’re doing,” she said, getting up, too. “I’ll do what I can to help.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank God for you, Teun.”

  She studied me for a while, leaning against the counter, her hands in the pockets of her slacks.

  “Kay, don’t blame yourself for this,” she said.

  “I blame Carrie,” I replied with a sudden flow of bitter tears. “That’s exactly who I blame.”

  18

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER, Marino was driving Lucy and me back to Richmond. It was the worst car trip I could remember, with the three of us staring out and saying nothing, an oppressive depression heavy on the air. It did not seem true, and whenever truth struck again, it was with the blow of a heavy fist into my chest. Images of Benton were vivid. I did not know if it were grace or a bigger tragedy that we had not spent our last night to
gether in the same bed.

  In a way, I wasn’t sure I could bear the fresh memories of his touch, his breath, the way he felt in my arms. Then I wanted to hold him and make love again. My mind tumbled down different hills into dark spaces where thoughts got caught on the realities of dealing with his possessions at my house, including his clothing.

  His remains would have to be shipped to Richmond, and despite all I knew about death, the two of us had never devoted much attention to our own or the funeral service we might want and where we should be buried. We had not wanted to think about our own, and so we hadn’t.

  I-95 South was a blur of highway running forever through stopped time. When tears filled my eyes, I turned to my window and hid my face. Lucy was silent in the back seat, her anger, grief, and fear as palpable as a concrete wall.

  “I’m going to quit,” she finally said when we passed through Fredericksburg. “This is it for me. I’ll find something somewhere. Maybe in computers.”

  “Bullshit,” Marino answered, his eyes on her in the rearview mirror. “That’s just what the bitch wants you to do. Quit law enforcement. Be a loser and a big fuck-up.”

  “I am a loser and a fuck-up.”

  “Bull fucking shit,” he said.

  “She killed him because of me,” she went on in the same heartless monotone.

  “She killed him because she wanted to. And we can sit here and have a pity party, or we can figure out what we’re gonna do before she whacks the next one of us.”

  But my niece was not to be consoled. Indirectly, she had exposed all of us to Carrie a long time ago.

  “Carrie wants you to blame yourself for this,” I said to her.

  Lucy did not respond, and I turned around to look at her. She was dressed in dirty BDUs and boots, her hair a mess. She still smelled of fire, because she had not bathed. She had not eaten or slept, as best I knew. Her eyes were flat and hard. They glinted coldly of the decision she had made, and I had seen the look before, when hopelessness and hostility made her self-destructive. A part of her wanted to die, or maybe a part of her already had.

  We reached my house at half past five, and the slanted rays of the sun were hot and bright, the sky hazy blue but cloudless. I carried in newspapers from the front steps and was sickened again by this morning’s front-page headline about Benton’s death. Although identification was tentative, it was believed he had died in a fire under very suspicious circumstances while assisting the FBI in the nationwide hunt for the escaped killer Carrie Grethen. Investigators would not say why Benton had been inside the small grocery store that had burned, or if he might have been lured there.

  “What do you want to do with this?” Marino asked.

  He had opened the car trunk, where three large brown paper bags contained the personal effects collected from Benton’s hotel room. I could not decide.

  “Want me to just put them in your office?” he asked. “Or I can go through them if you want, Doc.”

  “No, no, just leave them,” I said.

  Stiff paper crackled as he carried the bags into the house and down the hall. His footsteps were burdened and slow, and when he returned to the front of the house, I was still standing by the open door.

  “I’ll talk to you later,” he said. “And don’t go leaving this door open, you hear me? The alarm stays on and you and Lucy shouldn’t go out anywhere.”

  “I don’t think you have a worry.”

  Lucy had dropped her luggage in her bedroom near the kitchen and was staring out the window at Marino driving away. I came behind her and gently put my hands on her shoulders.

  “Don’t quit,” I said, and I leaned my forehead against the back of her neck.

  She did not turn around, and I felt grief shudder through her.

  “We’re in this together, Lucy,” I quietly went on. “We’re all that’s left, really. Just you and me. Benton would want us united in this. He wouldn’t want you giving up. Then what will I do, huh? If you give up, you’ll be giving up on me, too.”

  She began to sob.

  “I need you.” I could barely talk. “More than ever.”

  She turned around and clung to me the way she used to when she was a frightened child starved for someone who cared. Her tears wet my neck, and for a while we stood in the middle of a room still packed with computer equipment and school books, and plastered with posters of her adolescent heros.

  “It’s my fault, Aunt Kay. It’s all my fault. I killed him!” she cried out.

  “No,” I said, holding her tight as my own tears flowed.

  “How can you ever forgive me? I took him away from you!”

  “That’s not the way it is. You did nothing, Lucy.”

  “I can’t live with this.”

  “You can and you will. We need to help each other live with this.”

  “I loved him, too. Everything he did for me. Getting me started with the Bureau, giving me a chance. Being supportive. About everything.”

  “It’s going to be all right,” I said.

  She pulled away from me and collapsed on the edge of the bed, wiping her face with the tail of her sooty blue shirt. She rested her elbows on her knees and hung her head, staring at her own tears falling like rain on the hardwood floor.

  “I’m telling you, and you’ve got to listen,” she said in a low, hard voice. “I’m not sure I can go on, Aunt Kay. Everybody has a point. Where it begins and ends.” Her breath shook. “Where they can’t go on. I wish she had killed me instead. Maybe she would have done me a favor.”

  I watched her with gathering resolve as she willed herself to die before my eyes.

  “If I don’t go on, Aunt Kay, you’ve got to understand and not blame yourself or anything,” she muttered, wiping her face with her sleeve.

  I went over to her and lifted her chin. She was hot and smoky, her breath and body odor bad.

  “You listen to me,” I said with an intensity that would have frightened her in the past. “You get this goddamn notion out of your head right now. You are glad you didn’t die, and you aren’t committing suicide, if that’s what you’re implying, and I believe it is. You know what suicide is all about, Lucy? It’s about anger, about pay-back. It’s the final fuck-you. You will do that to Benton? You will do that to Marino? You will do that to me?”

  I held her face in my hands until she looked at me.

  “You’re going to let the no-good piece of trash Carrie do that to you?” I demanded. “Where’s that fierce spirit I know?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered with a sigh.

  “Yes you do,” I said. “Don’t you dare ruin my life, Lucy. It’s been damaged enough. Don’t you dare make me spend the rest of my days with the echo of a gunshot sounding on and on in my mind. I didn’t think you were a coward.”

  “I’m not.”

  Her eyes focused on mine.

  “Tomorrow we fight back,” I said.

  She nodded, swallowing hard.

  “Go take a shower,” I said.

  I waited until I heard the water in her bathroom running, and then went into the kitchen. We needed to eat, although I doubted either of us felt like it. I thawed chicken breasts and cooked them in stock with whatever fresh vegetables I could find. I was liberal with rosemary, bay leaves, and sherry, but nothing stronger, not even pepper, for we needed to be soothed. Marino called twice while we were eating, to make certain we were all right.

  “You can come over,” I said to him. “I’ve made soup, although it might be kind of thin by your standards.”

  “I’m okay,” he said, and I knew he did not mean it.

  “I’ve got plenty of room, if you’d like to stay the night. I should have thought to ask you earlier.”

  “No, Doc. I got things to do.”

  “I’m going to the office first thing in the morning,” I said.

  “I don’t know how you can,” he replied in a judgmental way, as if my thinking about work meant I wasn’t showing what I should be showing right now.
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  “I have a plan. And come hell or high water, I’m going to carry it out,” I said.

  “I hate it when you start planning things.”

  I hung up and collected empty soup bowls from the kitchen table, and the more I thought about what I was going to do, the more manic I got.

  “How hard would it be for you to get a helicopter?” I said to my niece.

  “What?” She looked amazed.

  “You heard me.”

  “Do you mind if I ask what for? You know, I can’t just order one like a cab.”

  “Call Teun,” I said. “Tell her I’m taking care of business and need all of the cooperation I can get. Tell her if all goes as I’m hoping, I’m going to need her and a team to meet us in Wilmington, North Carolina. I don’t know when yet. Maybe right away. But I need free rein. They’re going to have to trust me.”

  Lucy got up and went to the sink to fill her glass with more water.

  “This is nuts,” she said.

  “Can you get a helicopter or not?”

  “If I get permission, then yes. Border Patrol has them. That’s usually what we use. I can probably get one in from D.C.”

  “Good,” I said. “Get it as fast as you can. In the morning I’m hitting the labs to confirm what I think I already know. Then we may be going to New York.”

  “Why?”

  She looked interested but skeptical.

  “We’re going to land at Kirby and I intend to get to the bottom of things,” I answered her.

  Marino called again at close to ten, and I reassured him one more time that Lucy and I were as fine as could be expected, and that we felt safe inside my house, with its sophisticated alarm system, lighting, and guns. He sounded bleary and thick, and I could tell he had been drinking, his TV turned up loud.

  “I need you to meet me at the lab at eight,” I said.

  “I know, I know.”

  “It’s very important, Marino.”

  “It’s not like you need to tell me that, Doc.”

  “Get some sleep,” I said.

  “Ditto.”

  But I couldn’t. I sat at my desk in my study, going through the suspicious fire deaths from ESA. I studied the Venice Beach death, and then the one from Baltimore, struggling to see what, if anything, the cases and victims had in common besides the point of origin and the fact that although arson was suspected, investigators could find no evidence of it. I called the Baltimore police department first, and found someone in the detective division who seemed amenable to talking.