I’ve observed the absurd carnival of Marino tilting at a fence post and hiding bits of putrid cloth but mostly I’ve watched Benton wander and prowl. It’s rare we’re at a scene together and I’m moved and amazed in a deeply unsettled way. He seems guided by what the rest of us can’t see as if he’s his own divining rod, walking purposefully here and there with his suit pants tucked inside a pair of orange rubber boots several sizes too big. First he slogged out to the body before it was wrapped up like statuary and carried away on the spine board. Speaking to no one, not even to me, Benton slowly circled the dead woman like a big cat sizing up a kill.
He didn’t offer opinions about the glittery residue or what it might be. He made no comment and asked no questions as he listened silently, inscrutably, to what I said about her postmortem artifacts, about her time of death, which I project was within three hours of her disappearance at most, possibly around eight or nine o’clock last night. He barely looked at the curious crowd assembling in front of Simmons Hall, dazed young students in every state of dress on the other side of the fence. It was as if he’d already made up his mind about them, as if he already knows the devil in the dance with him.
I watched in a mixture of amazement and unsettledness, mesmerized by Benton’s dark theater, his behavior as ritualized as the evil people he pursues. He stalked after the body as it was carried across the field, through the open gate, and loaded into the back of the van, which he followed on rubber-booted feet to Memorial Drive. From there he retraced his steps, reentering the campus alone in the gray day’s first light, along the alley, back to the empty parking lot, where he stood perfectly still for a while, taking in the vista from the perspective of the “subject,” as he calls those he hunts.
14
I watch Benton now, emerging from Simmons Hall. He strides toward us again.
He doesn’t speak to Marino or Machado. He says nothing to me but sets out through the gate again, across the grass and mud again. He heads to where the body had been as if he’s learned or intuited information that has caused him to return yet again to the spot where someone left the dead body of a brilliant young woman whose fatal error may be as random as stepping outside a bar after dark to hear her phone better. Except Benton doesn’t think such a thing. That’s not what his inner voice is telling him. I recognize that much about his behavior, which at the moment is reminiscent of a heat-seeking missile.
I’m vividly reminded of what guides him, a necessary but dangerous programming that comes from tasting the forbidden fruit of original sin. The abuse of power, Benton says. It all comes back to that. We want to be like God. If we can’t create, we’ll destroy, and once we’ve done it, once is not enough. That’s the way it goes, simple and predictable, he believes. He has to understand the cravings without giving in to them. He has to make part of him what he will never allow to overtake him, and while I’ve known this about Benton from the beginning of our time together, when I’m face-to-face with it I’m ambivalent about what I see. I worry about poison eroding the vessel it’s in.
Benton positions himself exactly where the yellow tarp was anchored by evidence flags. He crouches in the red mud and looks around, his forearms resting on his thighs. Then he gets up. He moves a short distance away, where he notices something at the edge of the infield, and he bends down. He crouches and looks. He pulls on a pair of black nitrile gloves.
He touches whatever he’s found and lifts a gloved finger to his nose. Standing up, he looks across the field and meets my eyes. He nods to summon me and I know by his refusal to look at Marino and Machado that he expects me to come alone.
I carry my big case back out into the field, setting it down when I reach Benton. He shows me what looks like petroleum jelly, an irregular translucent glob about the size of a penny.
It shimmers on blades of coarse brown grass at the edge of the red mud, and he shows me a slick of what I presume is the same substance on his glove. He holds it close so I can smell the strong, penetrating odor of menthol.
“Vicks,” he says.
“Or something like it.” I open my black plastic case.
“It’s not water-soluble, which is why it survived the wet conditions.” He scans the soggy playing field. “Even so, a downpour would have pushed it deeper into the grass. We probably wouldn’t have found it.”
I get out a photographic scale and my camera. “You’re concluding it was deposited here after the rain stopped.”
“Or when it had let up considerably. What was it doing around two or three a.m.?”
“Pouring, at least at our house.” I have no idea what he’s getting at.
“Do any of the cops put Vicks up their nose?” Benton watches me take photographs. “Are any of them still into that numbskull trick?” He glances in the direction of Marino and Machado.
The body isn’t decomposing. There was no stench at all, I remind him, and I would have smelled Vicks or some other mentholated ointment. I would detect it a mile away, I add. Certainly Marino didn’t swipe Vicks up his nose. He knows better by now. I corrected him of that bad habit after the first time I saw him do it in the morgue. Now you’ve just trapped all those molecules of putrefaction inside your nose like flies on flypaper, I remember saying to him, and then he didn’t do it anymore.
“I was with Marino from the moment he first got here,” I explain to Benton. “I’ve been in close range of him the entire time and I haven’t seen him carrying Vicks around in twenty years.” I pull on fresh gloves. “And Machado wouldn’t. There’s no way he would. With rare exception, this generation of cops knows better than to do things like that. They’re trained that odors give us information and using any substance at a crime scene, whether it’s petroleum jelly or smoking a cigarette, can introduce contamination.”
“And there was nothing like this on the body.” Benton wants to make sure.
“I noticed a faint scent of perfume and that’s it. I certainly would have smelled Vicks.”
“He didn’t use it on her,” Benton decides as if it might be reasonable to wonder if a killer smeared vapor rub on his victim.
“I didn’t smell menthol and I would have. It’s an overpowering odor pretty hard to miss.”
“Then how the hell did it get here?” He asks a question that sounds ominously rhetorical.
“The police have been on the scene since around four a.m.,” I remind him. “If somebody suspicious was out here in this spot, he would have been very close to the body and certainly would have been seen.”
“What was it doing around that time? The weather?” Benton stares off, deep in thought.
I call Marino. I watch him answer his phone and turn in my direction as I ask him what time it was when the police responded to the scene this morning. He talks to Machado and then gets back to me.
“It was close to four,” he says. “Maybe ten of four when the first cruiser rolled up.”
“How hard was it raining out here in this exact location? I know it was heavy on the other side of Cambridge about the time you came to the house. It was pouring when I took Sock out,” I recall, and he turns to Machado again.
“It was raining on and off, not too bad here on this side of town,” Marino lets me know. “Just the conditions were bad by then. You see how much mud there is.”
I thank him and end the call. I relay to Benton what I was told.
“It probably was left not long before the police got here, could be minutes before they got here,” he deduces, “by which time the rain was light and not a factor.”