“What’s wrong?”
“I think I just discovered what it means when something reaches critical mass.”
“What’s the matter?” he asks.
“Everything.”
12
Please shut the door.” It occurs to me I’m starting to act like Lucy. “I don’t know where to begin, so many things are the matter.”
Benton closes the door, and I notice the simple platinum band on his left ring finger. Sometimes I’m still caught by surprise that we’re married, so much of our lives consumed by each other whether we’ve been together or apart, and we always agreed we didn’t have to do it, to be official and formal, because we’re not like other people, and then we did it anyway. The ceremony was a small, simple one, not a celebration as much as a swearing in, because we really meant it when we said until death do us part. After all we’d been through, for us to say it was more than words, more like an oath of office or an ordination or perhaps a summary of what we’d already lived. And I wonder if he ever regrets it. For example, right now does he wish he could go back to how it was? I wouldn’t blame him if he thinks about what he’s given up and what he misses, and there are so many complications because of me.
He sold his family brownstone, an elegant nineteenth-century mansion on the Boston Common, and he can’t have loved some places we’ve lived or stayed in because of my unusual profession and preoccupations, what is a chaotic and costly existence despite my best intentions. While his forensic psychology practice has remained stable, my career has been in flux these past three years, with the shutting down of a private practice in Charleston, South Carolina, then my office in Watertown closing because of the economy, and I was in New York and then Washington and Dover, and now this, the CFC.
“What the hell is going on in this place?” I ask him as if he knows and I don’t understand why he would. But I feel he does, or maybe I’m just wishing it because I’m beginning to experience desperation, that panicky sensation of falling and flailing for something to grab hold of.
“Black and extra-bold.” He sits back down and slides the mug of coffee closer. “And not hazelnut. Even though you have quite a stash of it, I hear.”
“Jack’s still not shown up, and no one has heard from him, I assume.”
“He’s definitely not here. I think you’re as safe in his office as he’s been in yours.” Benton says it as if he means more than one thing, and I notice how he’s dressed.
Earlier he had on his winter coat and in the x-ray room was covered in a disposable gown before heading upstairs to Lucy’s lab. I didn’t really notice what he was wearing underneath his layers. Black tactical boots, black tactical pants, a dark red flannel shirt, a rubber waterproof watch with a luminescent dial. As if he’s anticipating being out in the weather or some place that might be hard on his clothes.
“So Lucy told you it appears he’s been using my office,” I say. “For what purpose I don’t know. But maybe you do.”
“Nobody’s needed to tell me there’s a looting mentality at what is it Marino calls this place? CENTCOM? Or does that just refer to the inner sanctum or what’s supposed to be the inner sanctum, your office. No captain of the ship, and you know what happens. The Jolly Roger flag goes up, the inmates run the asylum, the drunks manage the bar, if you’ll excuse me for mixing metaphors.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I don’t work at the CFC. Or for it. Just an invited guest on occasion,” he says.
“That’s not an answer, and you know it. Why wouldn’t you protect me?”
“You mean in the manner you think I should,” he says, because it’s silly to suggest he wouldn’t protect me.
“What has been going on around here? Maybe if you tell me, I can figure out what needs to be done,” I then say. “I know Lucy’s been catching you up. It would be nice if someone would catch me up. In detail, and with openness and full disclosure.”
“I’m sorry you’re angry. I’m sorry you’ve come home to a situation that is upsetting. Your homecoming should have been joyful.”
“Joyful. What the hell is joyful?”
“A word, a theoretical concept. Like full disclosure. I can tell you what I’ve witnessed firsthand, what happened when I met here several times. Case discussions. There have been two that involved me.” He stares off. “The first was the BC football player from last fall, not long after the CFC took over the Commonwealth’s forensic cases.”
Wally Jamison, age twenty, Boston College’s star quarterback. Found floating in the Boston Harbor on November 1 at dawn. Cause of death exsanguination due to blunt-force trauma and multiple cutting injuries. Tom Booker’s case, one of my other MEs.
“Jack didn’t do that one,” I remind him.
“Well, if you ask him, you might get a different impression,” Benton informs me. “Jack reviewed the Wally Jamison case as if it was his. Dr. Booker wasn’t present. This was last week.”
“Why last week? I don’t know anything about it.”
“New information, and we wanted to talk to Jack, and he seemed eager to cooperate, to offer a wealth of information.”
“‘We’?”
Benton lifts his coffee, then changes his mind and sets it back down on Fielding’s sloppy desk with all its collectibles that are all about him. “I think Jack’s attitude is he may not have done the autopsy, but that’s just a technicality. An NFL draft was right up the alley of your ironman freak of a deputy chief.”
“‘Ironman freak’?”
“But I suppose it was his bad luck to be out of town when Wally Jamison got beaten and hacked to death. Wally’s luck was a little worse.”
Believed to have been abducted and murdered on Halloween. Crime scene unknown. No suspect. No motive or credible theory. Just the speculation of a satanic cult initiation. Target a star athlete. Hold him hostage in some clandestine place and kill him savagely. Chatter on the Internet and on the news. Gossip that’s become gospel.
“I don’t give a shit what Jack’s feeling is or what’s right up his goddamn alley,” says a hard part of me that’s old and scarred over, a part of me that is completely fed up with Jack Fielding.
I realize I’m enraged by him. I’m suddenly aware that at the core of my unhealthy relationship with him is molten fury.
“And Mark Bishop, also last week. Wednesday was the football player. Thursday was the boy,” Benton says.
“A boy whose murder might be related to some initiation. A gang, a cult,” I interject. “A similar speculation about Wally Jamison.”
“Speculation being the operative word. Whose speculation?”
“Not mine.” I think angrily of Fielding. “I don’t speculate unless it’s behind closed doors with someone I trust. I know better than to put something out there, and then the police run with it, then the media runs with it. Next thing I know, a jury believes it, too.”
“Patterns and parallels.”
“You’re connecting Mark Bishop and Wally Jamison.” It seems incredible. “I fail to see what they might have in common besides speculation.”
“I was here last week for both case consults.” Benton’s eyes are steady on me. “Where was Jack last Halloween? Do you know for a fact?”
“I know where I was, that’s about the only fact I know. While I’ve been at Dover, that’s all I’ve known and all I was supposed to know. I didn’t hire him so I could goddamn babysit him. I don’t know where the hell he was on Halloween. I guess you’re going to tell me he wasn’t out somewhere taking his kids trick-or-treating.”
“He was in Salem. But not with his kids.”
“I wouldn’t know that and don’t know why you do or why it’s important.”
“It wasn’t important until very recently,” Benton says.
I stare at his boots again, then at his dark pants with their flannel lining and cargo and rear slash pockets for gun magazines and flashlights, the type of pants he wears when he’s working in the field, when he goes to crime scenes or
is out on the firing or explosive-ordnance-disposal ranges with cops, with the FBI.
“Where were you before you picked me up at Hanscom?” I ask him. “What were you doing?”
“We have a lot to deal with, Kay. I’m afraid more than I thought.”
“Were you dressed in field clothes when you picked me up at the airport?” It occurs to me that he might not have been. He’s changed his clothes. Maybe he hasn’t done anything yet but is about to.
“I keep a bag in my car. As you know,” Benton says. “Since I never know when I might get called.”
“To go where? You’ve been called to go somewhere?”
He looks at me, then out the window at the chalky skyline of Boston in the snowy dark.
“Lucy says you’ve been on the phone.” I continue to prod him for information I can tell I’m not going to get right now.
“I’m afraid nonstop. I’m afraid there’s more than I thought,” and then he doesn’t continue. That’s all he’s going to say about it. He’s headed out somewhere, has someplace to go. It’s not a good place. He’s been talking to people and not about anything good and he’s not going to inform me right now. Full disclosure and joy. When there is such a thing, it is only a taste, a hint of what we don’t have the rest of the time.
“You met on Wednesday and then on Thursday. Discussing the Wally Jamison and Mark Bishop cases here at the CFC.” I go back to that. “And I assume Jack was in on the Mark Bishop discussion as well. He was involved in both discussions. And you didn’t mention this a little while ago when we were talking in the car.”
“Not such a little while ago. More than five hours ago. And a lot has happened. There have been developments since we were in the car, as you know. Not the least of which is what we now realize is another murder. Number three.”
“You’re linking the man from Norton’s Woods to Mark Bishop and Wally Jamison.”
“Very possibly. In fact, I’d say yes.”
“What about the meetings last week? With Jack? He was there,” I push.
“Yes. Last Wednesday and Thursday. In your office.”
“What do you mean my office? This building? This floor?”
“Your personal office.” Benton indicates my office next door.
“In my office. Jack conducted meetings in my office. I see.”
“He conducted both meetings in your office. At your conference-room table in there.”
“He has his own conference table.” I look at the black lacquered oval table with six ergonomic chairs that I got at a government auction.
Benton doesn’t respond. He knows as well as I do that Fielding’s inappropriate decision to use my personal office has nothing to do with the furniture. I think of what Lucy mentioned about sweeping my office for covert surveillance devices, although she never directly said who might be doing the spying or if anyone was. The most likely candidate for the sort of individual who might bug my office and get away with it is my niece. Maybe motivated by the knowledge that Fielding was helping himself to what isn’t rightfully his. I wonder if what’s been going on in my private space during my absence has been secretly recorded.
“And you never mentioned this to me at that time,” I continue. “You could have told me when it happened. You could have fully disclosed to me that he was using my damn office as if he’s the damn chief and director of this goddamn place.”
“The first I knew of it was last week when I met with him. I’m not saying I hadn’t heard things about the CFC and about him.”
“It would have been helpful if I’d known these things you were hearing.”
“Rumors. Gossip. I didn’t know certain things for a fact.”
“Then you should have told me a week ago when you knew it for a fact. On the Wednesday you had your first meeting and discovered it was in my office, in an office Jack didn’t have permission to use. What else haven’t you told me? What new developments?”
“I’m telling you as much as I can and when I can. I know you understand.”
“I don’t understand. You should have been telling me things all along. Lucy should have. Marino should have.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Betrayal is very simple.”
“No one is betraying you. Marino and Lucy aren’t. I’m certainly not.”
“Implying that somebody is. Just not the three of you.”
He is quiet.
“You and I talk every day, Benton. You should have told me,” I then say.
“Let’s see when I might have overwhelmed you with all this, overwhelmed you with a lot of things while you’ve been at Dover. When you’d call at five a.m. before you’d head over to Port Mortuary to take care of our fallen heroes? Or at midnight when you’d finally log out of your computer or quit studying for your boards?”
He doesn’t say it defensively or unkindly, but I get his not-so-subtle point, and it’s justified. I’m being unfair. I’m being hypocritical. Whose idea was it that when we have virtually no time for each other we shouldn’t dwell on work or domestic minutiae or they will be all that’s left? Like cancer, I’m quick to offer my clever medical analogies and brilliant insights when he’s the psychologist, he’s the one who used to head the FBI’s profiling unit at Quantico, he’s the one on the faculty of Harvard’s Department of Psychiatry. But it’s me with all the wisdom, all the profound examples, comparing work and niggling domestic details and emotional injuries to cancers, to scarring, to necrosis, and my prognostications that if we’re not careful, one day there’s no healthy tissue left and death will follow. I feel embarrassed. I feel shallow.
“No, I didn’t approach certain subjects until we were driving here, and now I’m telling you more, telling you what I can,” Benton says to me with stoical calm, as if we are in a session of his and any moment he will simply announce we have to stop.
I won’t stop until I know what I must. Some things he must tell me. It’s not just fairness, it’s about survival, and I realize I’m feeling unsure of Benton as if I don’t quite know him anymore. He’s my husband, and I’m touched by a perception that something has been altered, a new ingredient has been added to the house special.
What is it?
I study what I’m intuiting as if I can taste what has changed.
“I mentioned my concern that Jack’s interpretation of Mark Bishop’s injuries is problematic,” Benton goes on, and he’s guarded. He’s calculating every word he says as if someone else is listening or he will be reporting our conversation to others. “Well, based on what you’ve described about the hammer marks on the little boy’s head, Jack’s interpretation is just damn wrong, couldn’t be more wrong, and I suspected it at the time when he was going over the case with us. I suspected he was lying.”
“‘Us’?”
“I told you I’ve heard things, but I honestly haven’t been around Jack.”
“Why do you say ‘honestly’? As opposed to dishonestly, Benton?”
“I’m always honest with you, Kay.”
“Of course you aren’t, but now is not the time to go into it.”
“Now isn’t. I know you understand.” And he holds my stare for a long moment. He’s telling me to please let it go.
“All right. I’m sorry.” I will let it go, but I don’t want to.
“I hadn’t seen him for months, and what I saw for myself was… Well, it was pretty obvious during those discussions last week that something’s off with him, severely off,” Benton resumes. “He looked bad. His thoughts were racing all over the map. He was hyperfluent, grandiose, hypomanic, aggressive, and red-faced, as if he might explode. I certainly felt he wasn’t being truthful, that he was deliberately misleading us.”
“What do you mean ‘us’?” And it begins to occur to me what I’m picking up.
“Has he ever been in a psychiatric hospital, been in treatment, maybe been diagnosed with a mood disorder? He ever mentioned anything like that to you?” Benton questions me in a way that I find
unexpected and unnerving, and I’m reminded of what I sensed in the car when we were driving here. Only now it’s more pronounced, more recognizable.
He is acting the way he used to when he was still an agent, when he was empowered by the federal government to enforce the law. I detect an authority and confidence he hasn’t manifested in years, a sure-footedness he lacked after his reemergence from protective deep cover. He came back feeling lost, weak, like nothing more than an academician, he often complained. Emasculated, he would say. The FBI eats its young, and they’ve eaten me, he would say. That’s my reward for going after an organized-crime cartel. I finally get my life back and don’t want what’s left of it, he would say. It’s a husk. I’m a husk. I love you, but please understand I’m not what I was.
“He ever been delusional or violent?” Benton is asking me, and it isn’t just a clinician talking.
I’m feeling interrogated.
“He had to expect you would tell me he’s been using my office as if it’s his. Or that I’d find out.” I think of Lucy again, of spying and covert recordings.
“I know he has a temper,” Benton says, “but I’m talking about physical violence possibly accompanied by dissociative fugue, disappearing for hours, days, weeks, with little or no recall. What we’re seeing with some of these men and women who return from war, disappearances and amnesia triggered by severe trauma and often confused with malingering. The same thing Johnny Donahue is supposedly suffering from, only I’m not sure how much of it has been suggested to that poor damn kid. I wonder where the idea came from, if someone’s suggested it to him.”
He says it as if he really doesn’t wonder it.
“Jack’s certainly famous for coming across as a malingerer, of avoiding his responsibilities going back to the beginning of time,” Benton then says.
I created Fielding.
“What haven’t you told me about him?” Benton goes on.
I made Fielding what he is. He is my monster.
“A psychiatric history?” Benton says. “Off-limits even to me, even to the FBI. I could find out, but I won’t violate that boundary.”