“Is her ID confirmed?” His sharply handsome face turns to me, the set of his jaw serious, his thick silver hair mussed by the wind.
“Not officially.” I walk us toward the alley so we can leave his bags by Marino’s SUV. “But there’s little doubt. We’re working under the assumption that it’s the woman who disappeared last night, Gail Shipton.”
“Lucy says it looks like her. Of course that was from a distance but she zoomed in.” Benton buttons his long cashmere coat with one hand. “She caught it on film, the position of the body, the way it’s draped, which is significant, very much so. You’ll have an aerial if you want it. I realize there’s a lot to explain but we won’t get into it here. We can’t.”
“At least tell me why we can’t.”
“Marino picked up Gail Shipton’s phone from the bar and apparently still has it.”
“I don’t understand how you could know…” I start to say as we near the SUV and Quincy begins to whimper.
“Not now, Kay,” Benton says calmly. “We can’t mention this in front of Marino, not the part about the phone or him finding it and that Lucy knows he did. She literally saw him do it because she’d been monitoring the phone remotely since she learned that Gail was missing. Lucy knew since midnight that Gail’s phone was still at the Psi Bar outside where she’d used it last.”
“Lucy was working with her.” I’m sure of it now. “The phone in a military-grade case, the same type of case Lucy and I have.”
“It’s a problem.”
What he means is that Lucy is a problem or she’s about to become one. If Gail Shipton’s smartphone is of proprietary interest to my niece, then it’s related to some project she’s been working on. She’ll interfere with the police investigation. Maybe she already has.
“You’re aware of the timing. Gail Shipton was supposed to be in court in less than two weeks.” I have no doubt he knows that too and my uneasiness returns with a vengeance.
What has Lucy gotten herself into this time?
“There’s a lot to talk about, Kay.” Benton strokes the back of my neck but I’m not reassured.
“Is she involved in the lawsuit?” I have to know that much. “Is she involved in Gail Shipton’s hundred-million-dollar war with Double S, a money-management firm headquartered very close to her place in Concord?”
We stop at the rear of Marino’s SUV and set down his bags as Quincy begins to whine louder and bark.
“Lucy’s a witness,” Benton says. “The defendants’ counsel deposed her last summer.”
“And she never told us?” I wonder if this is what Carin Hegel wants to talk to me about.
“I think you know by now that she handles things her own way.”
“What she’s handled her own way now involves a homicide that could be connected to the ones you’re working,” I reply. “Maybe the timing of the trial is nothing more than a coincidence but it’s troubling, extremely troubling. And I know her attorney Carin Hegel has been sufficiently worried about her safety to not live at home right now. She feels the Double S people are dangerous and hinted they may be in bed with people in high places.”
“The position of the bodies, the cloths haven’t been leaked that I know of,” Benton says as Quincy’s barking and crying crescendo.
“Then it’s unlikely we’re talking about a copycat.”
“Probably not the real reason Granby’s withholding every damn thing about the cases but it’s a good thing in this instance,” Benton says with the hard edge his tone takes when he’s talking about his boss.
I text Harold to come unlock the CFC van.
“The mud will pull your shoes right off your feet. Hopefully, we’ve got an extra pair of rubber boots you can wear. It’s okay.” I do my best to comfort Quincy, patting the back windshield of Marino’s SUV. “Everything’s fine,” I promise.
Benton stares at Marino’s puppy, barking and pawing, unhappy inside his crate.
“Poor damn dog,” he says.
13
The scene is a churned-up muddy vacancy in the middle of an academic empire that has begun to stir. It is a few minutes past eight, the body transported to my office a while ago as it began to get light.
The sun is low behind brick buildings where the Charles runs languidly into the river basin and then becomes the Boston Harbor and empties into the sea. Patches of blue peek through cumulus clouds as they change shape and move and the wind has died down. There is no threat of rain as I wait in the parking lot by the open gate, waiting for Benton. I won’t leave while he’s here doing what he does, alone and in the place he gets, a painful place, a barely tolerable one.
I pace the wet asphalt, on and off my phone as I witness his isolation while he works, and I remember why I’ve always been drawn to him even when I didn’t know I was. I watch him and feel how much I love him. I no longer remember not loving him, and it didn’t start out like that. My dislike of him was intense at first when I was the brand-new chief medical examiner of Virginia and he was the Wizard of Odd as Marino snidely called him. I found Benton Wesley’s handsomeness and acumen a little too sharp, instantly deciding he was austere like his expensive, understated suits, his demeanor lightly starched like his shirts.
At that time of my life I was into wash-and-wear men who required no effort to maintain with no harm done. I wanted men who were easy to clean up after, cheap men, simple men to have sex with, to be served and serviced by, so I could forget what I know for a while. I had no interest in a Bureau big-shot profiler, certainly not an elitist married one whose legend preceded him through the door like the earthy fragrance of his aftershave.
I’d been in Richmond but a brief time, up against odds I couldn’t possibly have foreseen, when I took the job in a commonwealth overrun by men in charge. I was prepared to dislike and dismiss Benton Wesley. I’d heard about his privileged New England upbringing. He was considered gifted and glib, the gun-toting special agent with a crystal ball who was quoted in Time magazine as saying that violent sexual psychopaths are the Rembrandts of killers.
The analogy was offensive to me. I remember thinking What a pedantic narcissist, and in retrospect it surprises me we didn’t become lovers sooner. It took the first time we worked a case together out of town, hundreds of miles southwest in rural Blue Ridge foothills, in a cheap motel where I would go back with him a thousand times were it still there and exactly as I remember it.
Our lying and sneaking was worthy of drug addicts and drunks. We stole any private moment we could find, shameless and bold, extremely skilled at getting away with our crime. We rendezvoused in parking lots. We used pay phones. We didn’t leave voice mails or write letters. We conferred on cases we didn’t need to discuss, attended the same conferences, invited each other to lecture at academies we ran, and checked into hotels under pseudonyms. We left no evidence and created no scenes, and after he was divorced and his daughters no longer spoke to him we continued our addictive relationship as if it were illegal.
On Vassar Street now, Benton disappears inside Simmons Hall, a honeycomb of cubed windows that brings to mind a metal sponge. I have no idea what he’s doing or why, although I suspect he wants to get an emotional reading of the galactic-looking monolith. He wants it to tell him if it’s involved in what I don’t doubt is a homicide, one that could easily mislead, but I know her death wasn’t quiet or gentle. I can see it in her bloodred eyes and imagine the roaring in her head and the building of pressure.
I glance down at my phone as a text lands from my technician Anne, a sensible, pleasant radiologic expert who has managed to cross-train herself in many disciplines. The body is in the CT scanner and Anne has discovered a curiosity.