Around the time I thought you were dead. It enters my mind weirdly, painfully, and for a flash I think of my dream. Then I don’t. Benton begins stalking the construction site near the bright yellow bulldozer. He’s talking uncharacteristically fast and fluently now.
“‘Call me God, do not release to the press’ was written on the tarot card,” he says. “Staged to screw with police, to lead them down the wrong track, to make them think the killer had something to do with magic shops or the occult. It was bullshit, the FBI said, and in those cases maybe it really was bullshit. This is what I’ve been hearing for weeks about the tools and the rocks and the white cloths, the bags from Octopus, all of it, that they’re bullshit. But they aren’t. I promise you they’re not. They mean something to him. A game. He’s showing off. I worry he’s driven by delusions.”
“Including ones about you?”
“He might delude himself into believing he impresses me.” Benton says it easily, the way zookeepers speak of their most dangerous animals. “I can’t possibly know for sure but I believe he’s familiar with my work. He’s narcissistic enough to fantasize that I would admire him.”
“Maybe he struck now for another reason,” I say calmly, sensibly, “and it has nothing to do with you happening to be here. It has nothing to do with you at all.”
“It worries me,” he repeats. “He might have heard something, I don’t know but he has a connection to this area, a powerful one. He left her body here because the location means something to him and I’m not ready to mention this to anyone, not specifically or directly,” he emphasizes. “I will but not yet. There are phone calls I have to make first. The decision isn’t up to me — that’s the way they think — it’s not about the case. It’s about some agenda that is extremely troubling. I have to notify Granby. That’s the protocol and it will be a problem.”
He will brief his boss, the special agent in charge, Ed Granby, who is an obstructionist and can’t stand him, and I know how that will go. As poorly as anything can go.
“I presume Granby will take over this investigation,” I reply.
“We can’t let him, Kay.”
“How could the killer have heard something that might lead him into believing you were coming back to Cambridge now?”
“Exactly. If he did, how could he? It’s possible he’s connected to someone close to the investigation.”
I remember what Carin Hegel said about corruption that reaches into high places, as high up as it gets, and I think of the Department of Justice, the FBI, and then I don’t want to think any of it at all. My thoughts retreat to the safer ground of what Benton told me after climbing out of Lucy’s helicopter several hours ago. He said his coming home a few days early for his birthday was her suggestion.
“Exactly when was the idea of your coming home today first discussed?” I retrieve my field case again.
I move farther away from Marino and Machado so they can’t hear what I’m saying.
“Three days ago,” Benton tells me. “Sunday morning was when the subject first came up. Lucy knew what you’d been through over the weekend in Connecticut. She worried that’s what made you sick.”
“A virus made me sick.”
“She wanted me to come home and I did too and had basically threatened I was going to, but you said it wouldn’t work. I was certain if you knew, you’d say no as you already had — to me at least.”
To hear it stated so starkly reminds me unhappily of other revelations of late. I don’t always show what I feel or say what I want and that’s not fair. It’s hurtful.
“We agreed it had to be a surprise,” he adds.
“Who else knew?”
“Internally it was known.”
He tells me that on Sunday the FBI was aware that he was leaving Washington, D.C., earlier than planned. In fact, his Boston division had to approve his return to Cambridge and Ed Granby was more than happy for Benton to do just that, to get out of Washington. He encouraged it, Benton says, and next I think of the hotel where he was staying.
People working there also would have been aware of what Benton was doing. I imagine he changed his reservation in advance, possibly as early as this past Sunday, the minute he knew. Of course Lucy was in the loop and my thoughts continue drifting back to her. I wonder if she happened to mention the birthday surprise to Gail Shipton and, if so, why and what that might mean.
Lucy had to file a flight plan before she flew out of Massachusetts with the destination of Dulles International Airport. For security reasons, private aircraft aren’t allowed to land in the D.C. area without permission and a filed Federal Aviation Administration flight plan. Hotel and FBI personnel, flight service and air traffic controllers, I ponder those who would have had reason to know details such as times, locations, aircraft type, and even Lucy’s helicopter’s tail number and what equipment she has on board. Who had access to information about what she and Benton were doing and where and when?
It’s possible someone might know personal minutiae about our lives and perhaps passed information on to the wrong person. I can’t rule out that there could be a deranged, cunning killer fixated on Benton and committing deviant, violent acts for his benefit or to best him. Such a thing rarely happens. I’m not sure I know of any instance when a serial killer has developed an erotomaniacal obsession with a forensic psychologist or profiler. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t occurred somewhere. It probably has.
With human behavior anything is possible, and I’ve been witness to sadistic violent gestures that I couldn’t have imagined in a vacuum. There is no outrageous crime I can invent that’s original, nothing new that hasn’t been done, and Benton isn’t just anyone. He’s published books and papers and often is in the news and has been linked publicly to the Capital Murderer cases, with great frequency after the most recent two. If the killer has been following the media, he knows Benton’s been in D.C., that the search there has been intense even as the details of the crimes remain out of sight, tightly wrapped in the FBI’s cloak of secrecy.
It would have been a very good time for the killer to do what Benton has suggested, to move on, and maybe this cunning, cruel individual anticipates what Benton might deduce and intuit next. My husband has believed from the start the Capital Murderer is connected to Cambridge, that it’s a location he knows and a safe harbor for him.
That’s what Benton has said and he’s been saying it since April when Klara Hembree was murdered not even a month after she moved from here. He said she was stalked in Cambridge for a while and her stalker followed her to D.C. and he wouldn’t have done that if he wasn’t comfortable with Cambridge and familiar with the Washington area. He knows his turf, that’s what Benton has continued to believe. The killer is on a whistle-stop murder tour, jumping off where he’s in control, hitting in places we might not know about, and that’s what I’ve been hearing since my husband left before Thanksgiving.
I could understand it if Benton worries he’s being targeted by this killer or any killer he pursues even if it isn’t true. How much can he subject himself to before his barriers begin to break down, before what he does gets under his skin like a parasite, like an infection? The question has lingered for as long as I’ve loved him.
“Obviously I would look over here,” Benton says on his phone a muddy field away from me. “Maybe the police would have gotten around to it. They probably would have even though it’s remote from where her body was.”