"Fine. I don't have a problem with that."
We fell silent for a moment.
"What was she like?" I asked, clearing my throat.
"As I said, I met her only once. But she was memorable. Dynamic, witty, attractive, dressed in white. A fabulous winter-white suit. I'd also describe her as rather distant. She kept a lot of secrets. There was a depth to her no one was ever going to reach. And she drank a lot, at least she did that day at lunch-had three cocktails, which struck me as rather excessive considering it was the middle of the day. It may not have been in character, though. She was nervous, upset, tense. Her reason for coming to Orndorff amp; Berger wasn't a happy one. I'm sure all this business about Harper had to be upsetting her."
"What did she drink?"
"Pardon?"
"The three cocktails. What were they?" asked.
He frowned, staring off across the kitchen. "Hell, I don't know, Kay. What difference does it make?"
"I'm not sure it makes a difference," I said, recalling her liquor cabinet. "Did she talk about the threats she'd been getting? In your presence, I mean?"
"Yes. And Sparacino's mentioned them. All I know is she started receiving phone calls that were very specific in nature. Always the same voice, wasn't somebody she knew, or at least this is what she said. There were other strange events. I can't remember the details-it was a long time ago."
"Was she keeping a record of these events?" asked.
"I don't know."
"And she had no idea who was doing this or why?"
"That's the impression she gave." He scooted back his chair. It was getting close to midnight. As I led him to the front door, something suddenly occurred to me.
"Sparacino," I said. "What's his first name?"
"Robert," he replied.
"He doesn't go by the initial M, does he?"
"No," he said, looking curiously at me.
There was a tense pause.
"Drive carefully."
"Good night, Kay," he said, hesitating.
Maybe it was my imagination, but for an instant I thought he was going to kiss me. Then he walked briskly down the steps, and I was back inside my house when I heard him drive off.
The following morning was typically frantic. Fielding informed us in staff meeting that we had five autopsies, including a "floater," or decomposed body from the river, a prospect that never failed to make everybody groan. Richmond had sent in its two latest shootings, one of which I managed to post before dashing off to the John Marshall Court House to testify in another homicidal shooting, and afterwards to the Medical College to have lunch with one of my student advisees. All the while, I was working hard at pushing Mark's visit completely from my mind. The more I tried not to think about him, the more I thought about him. He was cautious. He was stubborn. It was out of character for him to contact me after more than a decade of silence.
It wasn't until early afternoon that I gave in and called Marino.
"Was just about to ring you up," he launched in before I had barely said two words. "On my way out. Can you meet at Benton's office in an hour, hour and a half?"
"What's this about?" I hadn't even told him why I was calling.
"Got my hands on Beryl's reports. Thought you'd wanna be there."
He hung up as he always did, without saying good-bye.
At the appointed time, I drove along East Grace Street and parked in the first metered space I could find within a reasonable walk of my destination. The modem ten-story office building was a lighthouse watching over a depressing shore of junk shops parading as antique stores and small ethnic restaurants whose "specials" weren't. Street people drifted along cracked sidewalks.
Identifying myself at the guard station inside the lobby, I took the elevator to the fifth floor. At the end of the hall was an unmarked wooden door. The location of Richmond's FBI field office was one of the city's best-kept secrets, its presence as unannounced and unobtrusive as its plainclothes agents. A young man sitting behind a counter that stretched halfway across the back wall glanced at me as he talked on the phone. Placing his hand over the mouthpiece, he raised his eyebrows in a "May I help you?" expression. I explained my reason for being here, and he invited me to take a seat.
The lobby was small and decidedly male, with furniture upholstered in sturdy dark-blue leather, the coffee table stacked with various sports magazines. On paneled walls were a rogue's gallery of past directors of the FBI, service awards, and a brass plaque engraved with the names of agents who had died in action. The outer door opened occasionally, and tall, fit men in somber suits and sunglasses passed through without a glance in my direction.
Benton Wesley could be as Prussian as the rest of them, but over the years he had won my respect. Beneath his Bureau boilerplate was a human being worth knowing. He was brisk and energetic, even when he was sitting, and he was typically dapper in his dark suit trousers and starched white shirt. His necktie was fashionably narrow and perfectly knotted, the black holster on his belt lonely for its ten-millimeter, which he almost never wore indoors. I hadn't seen Wesley in a while and he hadn't changed. He was fit and handsome in a hard way, with premature silver-gray hair that never failed to surprise me.
"Sorry to keep you waiting, Kay," he said, smiling.
His handshake was reassuringly firm and absent of any hint of macho. The grip of some cops and lawyers I know are a thirty-pound squeeze on a three-pound trigger that damn near breaks my fingers.
"Marino's here," Wesley added. "I needed to go over a few more things with him before we brought you in."
He held the door and I followed him down an empty hallway. Steering me inside his small office, he left to get coffee.
"The computer finally came up last night," Marino said. He was leaning back comfortably in his chair and examining a.357 revolver that looked brand new.
"Computer? What computer?" Had I forgotten my cigarettes? No. On the bottom of my purse again.
"At HQ. Goes down all the friggin' time. Anyway, I finally got hard copies of those offense reports. Interesting. Least I think so."
"Beryl's?" I asked.
"You got it."
He set the handgun on Wesley's desk, adding, "Nice piece. The lucky bastard won it as a door prize at the police chiefs' convention in Tampa last week. Me, I can't even win two bucks in the lottery."
My attention drifted. Wesley's desk was cluttered with telephone messages, reports, videotapes, and thick Manila envelopes containing details and photographs, I assumed, of various crimes police jurisdictions had brought to his attention. Behind panes of glass in the bookcase against one wall were macabre weapons-a sword, brass knuckles, a zip gun, an African spear-trophies from the hunt, gifts from grateful proteges. An outdated photograph showed William Webster shaking hands with Wesley before a backdrop of a Marine Corp helicopter at Quantico. There wasn't the faintest hint Wesley had a wife and three kids. FBI agents, like most cops, jealously guard their personal lives from the world, especially if they have gotten close enough to evil to feel its horror. Wesley was a suspect profiler. He knew what it was to review photographs of unthinkable slaughter and then visit penitentiaries and stare the Charles Mansons, the Ted Bundys, straight in the eye.
Wesley was back with two Styrofoam cups of coffee, one for Marino, one for me. Wesley always remembered I drink my coffee black and need an ashtray within easy reach.
Marino collected a thin stack of photocopied police reports from his lap and began to go through them.
"For starters," he said, "there's only three of 'em. Three reports we got a record of. The first one's dated March eleventh, nine-thirty on a Monday morning. Beryl Madison dialed 911 the night before and requested that an officer come to her house to take a complaint. The call, unsurprisingly, was given a low priority because the street was hopping. A uniform man didn't swing by until the next morning, uh, Jim Reed, been with the department about five years."