He heads toward a black pickup truck parked near a dumpster filled with construction debris. He peers through the truck’s windows and into the open-top bed as if he’s been given information, and he has. He’s directed by his own mind, by the currents of subconscious thoughts that like computer subroutines move him effortlessly.
He walks over to a bright yellow bulldozer, its blade locked in the raised position like a pugilistic crab. Crouching near the rear claw, the ripper, he looks in my direction at the same time my phone rings.
15
“One of them needs to come over here.” Benton’s voice is in my earpiece. “And I need you to listen to me first and listen carefully, Kay.”
I look at him standing up, then moving around in the construction site while he looks at me in the parking lot. I keep an eye on Marino and Machado, making sure they have no idea what’s going on over the phone.
“What I’m about to say must stay with us right now. I can give them guidance but I can’t elaborate. We need to be absolutely sure.” But I can tell he is. “And we don’t know who to trust. That’s the bigger point. One slipup and it’s everything Granby’s been looking for to get me the hell off this case.”
“This case or the others?” I ask.
“All of them. I can’t say for a fact how many, but now there are at least four.”
“There’s an inconsistency, a significant one.” I’m referring to the plastic bags that the three D.C. victims had over their heads.
“Something threw him off this time, that’s the only thing I can think, unless he’s trying to disguise that this one is connected to the others. But I don’t believe that’s it. Cambridge is a familiar hunting ground for him. He’s stalked here before, and I’m not surprised he’s stalking here again, but this victim isn’t random. The first one, Klara Hembree, wasn’t random either. The second and third might have been.”
Benton doesn’t sound excited or frazzled because that’s not who he is. But I know him. I’m sensitive to his every shading, and when he’s getting close to his quarry, his voice is taut as if he’s hooked something big and it’s fighting him. I listen and know what’s coming but there’s something else, the same threat that’s chilling. I feel it with increasing intensity as we talk on the phone a muddy field apart.
Over recent weeks Benton has continued to mention this problem with trust. It’s come up repeatedly since he left for D.C. and he was adamant several nights ago when he’d had a few too many Scotches and said the Capital Murderer case would never be solved. Someone doesn’t want it solved, he said, and I didn’t believe him.
How could I possibly believe such a thing? Three women were brutally slain, and Benton is the FBI and he was implying the FBI didn’t want the killer caught. And now it seems he’s murdered again and Benton has the same worry as with the other ones. Maybe my husband has gotten too close: it enters my mind again. As bad as that would be, what he’s suggesting couldn’t be worse. It’s finally gotten to him. I’ve always worried it could happen.
“The storage locker in the back of a truck has been broken into,” he tells me over the phone. “There’s a tool in the dirt. It’s been rained on but doesn’t appear to have been out here long. It stopped raining completely several hours ago so it was left here before that.”
“What kind of tool?” I inquire.
“A ratcheting cutter of some type, possibly for cutting metal tubing or pipes. It was deliberately left where it is with a rock placed on top of it.”
“A rock?”
“A decent-sized rock that was picked up and placed on top of it.”
“For what reason?”
“Paper, rock, scissors.”
I wait to see if he’s joking. But he’s not.
“Something from a sick, childish mind that was stunted and got even sicker, and now he’s extremely sick and rapidly decompensating, and it seems early for that and I can’t tell you why. But something’s happening to him,” Benton says. “The rock and the tool are an atavistic throwback to a game from his past. It’s a feeling I’ve felt since the first time I saw what he left some distance from the body. You have to think to look for what isn’t obvious and the police usually don’t.”
“But you do.”
“I’m the one who’s found it in each homicide, even as long as two days after the fact, by the time I got there,” he says. “A rock trumps scissors and scissors trump paper and cops are nothing but paper — they’re officials who fill out paperwork, adults who make up rules and are a joke to him. Police aren’t a worthy audience and he places a rock on top of a tool he used to commit his crime, like a rock on top of scissors, to remind the police how unworthy they are compared to him. It’s a rush to him. It’s thrilling and fun.”
“The police are unworthy but not you.”
“He wouldn’t consider me unworthy. He would know I understand what he’s doing as much as it can be understood, far more than he understands himself, which is limited. It always is with offenders like this. They’re morally insane and insanity has very little insight. Maybe none.”
I glance back at Marino digging around the pole, starkly alone with its attached fencing cut free. Already I can foresee him getting very defensive with Benton. Marino has a hair trigger when it comes to him and they will have a real war now that Marino has power again. This will get ugly before it gets easier, and as I stand out here I can’t imagine this getting any better.
I can’t stop thinking about the timing. Benton flies home three days early and the Capital Murderer has struck again here where we live like a tornado suddenly veering off track and slamming right into our house. I continue to think of the person behind the wall, bareheaded in the rain and staring at my back door, and all morning I’ve continued to glance around as if someone is watching.
“Do you think the killer somehow knew you’d be here?” I ask what I don’t want to consider.
“Frankly, it worries me,” Benton says.
Certainly it’s happened before. Violent offenders have left him notes, letters, body parts, photographs, video and audio recordings of their victims being tortured and killed. Vicious reminders, gruesome ones, cooked human flesh, a murdered child’s teddy bear. I’ve seen the grisly threats and heartbreaking taunts and nothing would surprise me anymore except this. I don’t want to believe what Benton is contemplating for a simple reason I can’t get past, maybe because I refuse.
He’s supposed to be in Washington, D.C., until Saturday. Had he not decided to return home early, he wouldn’t be here right now saying these things and finding a tool and a rock.
“How could he possibly know you’d be here, Benton?”
“He’s probably seen me, seen all of us,” he says and I look around at buildings in the sun, at students walking and on bicycles, at light bright on cars in parking lots. “It’s inevitable I’d be here. Maybe not right this minute but as soon as I knew. Hours, a day later, but I’d be here doing what I’m doing right now.”
“Watching is one thing. Knowing you were coming home today is another.”
“He might not have known I was coming home today but he would figure I’d show up soon. I don’t have an answer but I have to consider the possibility, any possibility. What I know for a fact is this scene is like the other three. The tool and the rock are an obvious red flag and the BAU assumes it’s staged, it’s faked. They say it’s like the Beltway Sniper and the tarot card found near a cartridge case where a thirteen-year-old was shot. Ten people killed, a number of the shootings in Virginia around the time you moved from there.”