Benton doesn’t comment. His attention drifts back to the railroad tracks.
“We’ll check with the Psi and find out if anyone remembers who she was with and if it was Swanson and do they know him,” Marino says.
“You want my personal opinion?” Rooney leans against the hood of his cruiser and digs his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “It’s not politically correct but I feel I should say it. I’m not sure he’s a male. I don’t know the extent of it but if you heard him talk you might think he’s a female. He could pass for one anyway. It wasn’t something I could question him about, obviously. If he had gender reassignment or is taking hormones, I couldn’t exactly ask and it doesn’t have anything to do with anything, I guess.”
“Does he present himself as a female?” Machado inquires.
“All I can tell you is at first I thought he was one. When I questioned him in the projects, I said, ‘What’s a nice young lady like you doing here at this hour?’ He didn’t correct me, and I’m pretty sure he had a bra on. He definitely has breasts. He claimed he has an uncle who lives over there, a Vietnam vet, disabled, right there in the middle of all the drug-related crime we know goes on. And that was my other suspicion. Maybe Swanson’s got a side business going, maybe that’s why he can afford an expensive, brand-new SUV. I pushed him pretty hard about what he was doing there and he said he sometimes drops by to see his uncle before heading into Boston to work and he brings coffee. His story checked out. He does have a disabled uncle who lives there. I got his name, and all of it will be in my report.”
“Get it to me ASAP,” Marino snaps, and he feels foolish.
He talked to Haley Swanson around one a.m. and had no idea about any of this.
“That’s it?” Machado asks Rooney. “He offered no clue why he was driving around Cambridge? Or why he was parked near Harvard on Beacon Street? You sure it’s because he spilled coffee as opposed to him maybe casing the neighborhood? He mention Dr. Scarpetta’s house or knowing where it is?”
“Why would he care about where we live?” Benton asks.
Rooney gives both of us a blank look as he shifts his position on the cruiser’s hood, careful his duty belt doesn’t scratch the paint.
“Someone was prowling around your house this morning and I had units looking, that’s why,” Marino answers before I can, and Benton stares at me and then he stares at the railroad tracks again. “Like maybe this guy’s been spying on the Doc,” Marino adds with satisfaction, pleased he might know something about me that Benton doesn’t.
“It’s not a PR guy who’s possibly dealing drugs in the projects,” Benton says as if there can be no debating it. “That’s not who you need to be worried about. The type of person you’re looking for doesn’t kill people and then report them missing and give his damn name to a detective he asks for by name.”
“And you can’t possibly know that,” Marino replies. “We’re going to find Swanson and he’s got some talking to do.”
“He said he’d had a bad night, was upset and driving around, went home to shower and change clothes, then picked up coffees before heading into Boston,” Rooney summarizes.
“He was upset?” Machado says. “Did he look upset?”
“I thought he seemed nervous and upset. He seemed scared. But then a lot of people do when they’re being questioned by the police.” Rooney turns around as an old white Chevy panel van with ladders on top veers off Vassar Street, heading toward us. “There are no outstanding warrants on him. There was no reason to hold him.”
“Yeah, well now there is,” Marino retorts.
A heavyset man’s tense face stares out at us from the van’s front passenger seat and his door flies open before the van is completely stopped. He trots to the black pickup truck and it’s obvious he’s the owner, Enrique Sanchez, and that he’s frightened. In jeans, a windbreaker, and scarred work boots, he has the red nose and puffiness, the big gut, of a heavy drinker.
“I leave it here when I ride with friends. If we have a beer,” he says loudly in a heavy Spanish accent, his wide eyes darting at each of us.
Benton gives me a signal and we start walking toward the railroad tracks.
“You left here when and had a beer where?” Marino asks Enrique Sanchez, stepping closer to him.
“Yesterday at five o’clock in the afternoon. We go to the Plough. I was there no more than two hours and then my friend drop me at my house and pick me up this morning.”
“The Plough on Mass Ave?” Marino says. “They got a pretty good Cuban sandwich. How often do you leave your truck here overnight, buddy?”
19
We follow railroad tracks past a generator shelter, then a plasma science and fusion center. Next is a sprawling magnet lab. Between chain-link fencing, through parking decks and dumpsters, over broken concrete and dead weeds, we walk. We take our time, looking for any sign of him.
Benton is sure this is the way the killer escaped before dawn. I don’t sense the slightest hesitation or misgiving and it’s difficult for me to imagine someone taking this route in the dark. I can’t envision stepping around mud and glass-slick wet iron and wood and winding past the backs of buildings that would have been deserted with lights out. One could get hurt. How could someone fleeing a crime scene see where he was going?
“You should have told me,” Benton says, not accusingly but quietly and with concern. “If you felt someone was watching you, why wouldn’t you say something?”
“I thought it was my imagination. Then I saw someone this morning and he ran off. Marino assumed at first it was a kid who intended to do a smash-and-grab.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Now he believes it was Haley Swanson.”
“It isn’t, and I think you know the bigger worry. But I’m home and if he didn’t know it before, he knows it now.” Benton says it as if he’s referring to a malevolent old friend.
“Because he’s watching,” I reply.
“That’s what he does. He watches and fantasizes, and of late you’ve been all over the news. This is someone who follows other cases.”
“You’re saying he intended to do something to me.”
“I’ll never give him that chance,” Benton says.
We reach massive HVACs and generators and liquid-nitrogen containers connected to stainless-steel transfer lines wearing thick icy sleeves. Tall light standards on cracked concrete tarmacs look like windmills, and smokestacks rise above flat roofs, tall and conical like missile silos and organ pipes. We give a wide berth to a helium truck as sadness wells up inside me. I don’t know where it’s from.
Benton has been away from home for not quite a month but it seems forever. He’s not the same or maybe it’s me who’s changed and I’m seeing him in a way I haven’t before. I feel shaken to my core. I’m afraid to trust his perceptions. I worry he’s personalizing and paranoid. I think of how many times I’ve warned him about getting too close to what he chases. When you dine with the devil use a long spoon, and I’ve repeatedly preached that to him, too.
I glance over at him and can’t read what might be wrong as he’s careful how he picks his way along in dirty orange rubber boots, his cashmere coat neatly folded over an arm. His suit is charcoal, his shirt deep blue, and his purple silk twill tie has a digital pattern of tiny computer on/off switches, a playful gift from Lucy.
Slanted sunlight on his face shows the smile lines at the corners of his eyes and the folds along the sides of his proud straight nose. The bright morning accentuates the finely etched wear and tear of time and his tall frame looks thinner than it did when I saw him last. He never eats enough when I’m not around.