“Did you do this with the others?” I’m going to dig it out of him.
This morning I’ve been witness to what I usually don’t watch and I insist on knowing all of it. Did he retrace the killer’s steps in the Washington, D.C., cases? Did he do exactly what he’s doing now?
“We’re talking very different settings.” His voice is more subdued than it was earlier. “In the first one, Klara Hembree, he pulled off a major road and cut through a security chain.” Benton keeps looking at his phone, a part of him in some other place that’s not a happy one.
“And he left a tool with a rock on top of it.”
“Yes.”
“Stolen?”
“A golf course shed was broken into.” He types a reply to someone as he walks, his expression vaguely angry. “A small metal shed where maintenance and landscaping equipment are kept. That’s where he got the tool, a cable cutter, meaning he knew what was inside the shed.”
“What’s the matter?” Something is.
“I’m not dropping everything and heading back into work right now. As if what I’m doing isn’t work.”
Ed Granby must be e-mailing him or someone on his behalf is.
“The killer knew his way around.” Benton glances at his phone again, irritably, then with no expression on his face. “He cut the security chain and drove along a cart path to the edge of the wooded picnic area where he posed her body. When I visited the scene several days later I found the tool with a rock on top of it behind the picnic area near railroad tracks.”
“He drove his vehicle through a golf course? That seems beyond risky. It strikes me as reckless.”
“There are security cameras in the parking lots of each location he picked and he would have been aware of that.” Benton bends down to pull up his socks inside the boots. “He thinks the way the police do. He knows what to look for and avoid. He does exactly what the police assume he won’t, such as breaking into a tool shed and driving through a golf course after dark because, as you put it, that would be interpreted as reckless. The police wouldn’t anticipate it or think to look.”
“But you would.” I watch him fuss with his pants cuffs, tucking them in.
“What I’m describing is exactly what I believe he did.” Benton straightens up and glances at his phone again and a spark of anger glints, then is gone. “I could see where his tires went over the path and into the grass. Goodyear mud tires associated with trucks and off-road sporting and that told me something about him.”
“Which is?”
“Late twenties, early thirties. White,” Benton says. “Engages in high-risk activities, possibly extreme sports, has a career that isn’t regimented so he can come and go at irregular hours without attracting notice. He lives alone, has an IQ in the superior range but didn’t finish school. Charming, attractive, entertaining but easily offended if he thinks you’ve slighted him. In summary, a violent sexual psychopath with narcissistic and borderline traits. The ritualistic way he captures, controls, and kills his victims takes the place of sex with them. But the last two a week apart and now this one? He’s losing it, Kay.”
“And your colleagues don’t concur with you.”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“You found the tire tracks because you looked for the unexpected, because you’re not the police.”
“I think differently from them,” he says, and his pants are bunching up again. “Christ, I can’t believe I’m walking around in these.” He bends down and tucks his cuffs back in.
“You think differently from the police, differently from your colleagues. But you can think like this killer.”
“Someone has to.” He resumes walking. “Someone has to honestly.”
“You sound awfully sure.”
“I am.”
“Does he do what you assume he won’t?”
“Not anymore.”
“You know what he’ll do. Like the Vicks.”
“That’s a hypothesis. It hasn’t been found at the other scenes but I can imagine the utility of him using it and I know where he could have gotten the idea.” Benton is having a hard time in the boots or maybe his aggravation has to do with me as I continue to question, digging deeper relentlessly.
“You can imagine it why?” I have to know how far down he’s sunk into his dark ugly hole.
“You’ve read the journal articles I’ve written about Albert Fish and before that my master’s thesis. Pain is ecstasy. A perfume that burns. Rubbing a mentholated vapor rub on your genitals so you don’t rape anyone. He prided himself on his self-control. All he did was strangle her and cook her into a stew with vegetables and potatoes but he didn’t sexually molest her and he made sure he told her mother that. The buttocks were the tastiest part but at least he didn’t rape her.”
“You’re entertaining the possibility the killer used a vapor rub on his genitals.”
“It’s a reference I made to Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, the flowers of evil, specifically to menthyl salicylate used in perfume, a fragrance of pain, which was what Albert Fish craved. Pain was his evil perfume. It gave him sexual pleasure to insert needles into his groin and rose stems into his penis. He loved being beaten with a nail-studded paddle. Why? Because at the age of five he was placed in an orphanage in Washington, D.C., stripped naked, and whipped in front of the other boys who bullied and teased him because the beatings gave him an erection. He rewired himself to enjoy pain. It was erotic to him.”
“Washington, D.C.” I point out the connection. “Are you considering that the Capital Murderer may be influenced by one of the most notorious killers in history?”
“We don’t know who’s read what I’ve published about a psychiatric phenomenon the likes of which no one had ever seen. He got away with his crimes for decades, was married the entire time with six kids. It’s suspected he enjoyed his own execution.” Benton recites all this as if it’s normal.
“I hope we’re not dealing with someone like that.”
“He would crave being that infamous. It would make sense he reads about notorious killers and vicariously lives the violent atrocities they’ve committed,” Benton says. “This is someone who spends most of his time in a deviant and violent fantasy world that’s rooted in events from his past. He’s wired to enjoy and be aroused by what most people would find appalling. Maybe he was born that way or maybe something happened in his childhood or more likely it’s both.”
“And you’ve told your colleagues what you’ve just told me.”
“They think I should quit while I’m ahead. I’m rich enough to do whatever the hell I want. That’s what they tell me. Enjoy your hard-earned family money is what they say. Spend more time in Aspen. Get a place in Hawaii.”
“They know about your concern that the killer might be reading what you’ve published and getting ideas from it.” I can’t imagine the reaction Benton would have gotten to such a suspicion.
“It didn’t start out my concern. Granby suggested it first, which makes matters worse,” Benton says to my surprise.
“That’s a terrible thing to accuse you of,” I reply.
“It feeds right into what he preaches, that the Bureau no longer should be involved in the, quote, profiling of the eighties and nineties, and the BAU should be absorbed into the Joint Terrorism Task Force,” Benton says. “Everything should be about combating terrorism and the types of mindless mass murders we’re seeing and not individual serial offenders. I’m obsolete and maybe I’m compounding the problem. People get my publications off the Internet. There’s no telling who sees them and we shouldn’t be in the business of dispensing provocative information that could inspire copycats.”