“What is it I can’t trust exactly?” I look at him. “I think it’s time you spell it out.”
“I’m not sure I can spell it out. But I can tell you what worries me and that I’m alone in it.” Sticks break as he steps farther from the tracks. “I don’t want you hurt and I don’t want Lucy hurt. Granby will hurt you if he can. He’ll hurt all of us and I hope to hell Marino doesn’t say anything about the phone to him or to anyone at my office. Dammit. Why does he have to stick his nose in it? He shouldn’t have called my office and there will be hell to pay if he turns over the phone to them.”
“He won’t. Marino hates the FBI.”
“Maybe he should.”
“I need to know what you’re alone in.” I will make him tell me. “Whatever you’re up against, I’m up against. All of us are.”
“Now that he’s murdered here, you’re up against it, that’s for sure.”
“There can’t be any secrets, Benton. The hell with the FBI. This is us. This is people who are dying. Fuck the FBI.” I can’t believe I said it but I did.
“Marino probably just got me fired but I don’t give a shit. We can’t let Granby get away with this.”
“We won’t, whatever it is, but you have to talk to me.”
Benton sits on his heels, his back against the fence, about to tell me what he believes he shouldn’t.
“They think they know who it is and I’m going to give you the information because anything you hear from them you can’t trust. It’s probably a lie.” He continues to refer to the FBI as if he isn’t the FBI. “These cases now involve you directly and I’m not going to let the Bureau do this to you. You’re right. I promised that would never happen again and it won’t.”
“Do what?”
“They’ve done enough to you, to both of us.”
“What’s happened, Benton?”
He goes on to explain that his colleagues at the BAU are certain they know who the Capital Murderer is and Benton is just as certain that they’re badly mistaken. Or, as he puts it, dead wrong, because the theory is more wrong than mistaken, that’s what he’s getting at, and the implication is what he’s been alluding to for weeks. It’s about trust. It’s about a possibility that couldn’t be more shocking or disheartening.
“It’s too damn obvious, too good to be true,” he says. “Someone this calculating wouldn’t leave his DNA, leave it so conspicuously you could see it. You didn’t need any special lights or presumptive tests to find it right away. It doesn’t feel right and it’s been my experience that when something doesn’t feel right almost always it isn’t.”
“Who does the FBI think it is?”
“Martin Lagos,” Benton replies, and hearing the name gives me a strange feeling at first. “He disappeared seventeen years ago after murdering his mother, I should say ‘allegedly.’ He was fifteen at the time. The Bureau has his name but not him because nobody can find him. I’m the only one who’s not convinced, not even slightly. Warren, Stewart, Butler, Weir, all of them think I’m nuts,” he says, referring to colleagues at the BAU.
I feel astonished and I feel something else. I realize the name Lagos is familiar. I don’t know why. I can’t conjure it up.
“How could the FBI know his identity and not release it to the public?” I ask. “If the public is informed about who you’re looking for, someone might come forward and tell you where he is.”
“He can’t be tipped off that he’s been connected to the D.C. murders. That’s the reasoning, not mine but Granby’s. Martin Lagos has no clue the FBI knows it’s him; that’s the operational theory. When the timing is right Granby will hold a press conference, a big one.”
“Why Ed Granby and what will make the timing right?” I stare down the long stretch of empty railroad tracks, looking for Marino.
“His reasoning is the first victim was from Cambridge so there’s a strong local interest and our division has been involved from the beginning. When enough time has passed and no one else is caught and he doesn’t strike again information will be released to the public.”
“It appears he’s already struck again.”
“That’s the problem Granby faces. Assuming I’m right, the evidence won’t point to Martin Lagos because it can’t,” Benton says. “Not in this case or any other, if there are more.”
“I have no idea what you mean by that.”
“Nothing else will come up to divert attention away from Martin, not now or down the road or even in the past. His DNA won’t be found again but nobody else’s will either. That’s what I’m afraid of. The three D.C. cases will be exceptionally cleared and closed and certain parties can move on to what’s next because I believe that’s what Granby wants for reasons I don’t understand. But I sense it. And I’ve been looking into it on my own while I’ve been gone these past three weeks.”
“And what have you discovered?” I ask.
“There’s no record of Martin Lagos, not a trace of him.” Benton picks up a stick and starts breaking it into pieces. “He’s a Red Notice and has been since he disappeared. For seventeen years Interpol has circulated information about him and not one sighting or lead has turned out to be legitimate.”
“Then it’s been considered from the start that he might be living in another country.” I can’t imagine any other reason for Interpol to be involved.
“It’s supposed he was well equipped to manage abroad in Europe or South America,” Benton replies. “A substantial amount of money was missing from the house, and Martin spoke French, Spanish, and Italian in addition to English.”
“By the time he was fifteen?” Lagos. I know the name but am drawing a blank.
“It’s how his mother raised him. They spoke several languages at home and he was an experienced traveler. Extremely bright but troubled. Isolated, bullied at school, didn’t participate in group sports or anything social. Straight A’s, a computer nerd until his freshman year of high school when his grades began to suffer. He became more withdrawn, depressed, got into alcohol, and then his mother was murdered.”
“He’s believed to have killed her where and when?”
“Fairfax, Virginia, in July of 1996.” Benton flicks pieces of wood, kicks them with his finger like tiny footballs.
“His mother had something to do with rare art and the White House.” It comes back to me and I’m confronted with images of her suddenly vivid in my memory.
Bloated and discolored by decomposition, her skin and hair slipping off her body. Her teeth bared in a face that was blackish red and grotesquely swollen. Nude and partially submerged in scummy water.
“Gabriela Lagos was your case,” Benton says.
21
I was the chief medical examiner of Virginia then but I didn’t do her autopsy. My northern district office took care of Gabriela Lagos and I didn’t realize there was a significant problem until her body had been autopsied and released.
I remember driving to a Fairfax, Virginia, funeral home and the displeasure of the people who worked there when I showed up with a crime scene case. The body wasn’t viewable but that didn’t mean I should further mutilate it by incising reddish areas that I suspected were bruises.
I spent long hours with Gabriela Lagos, looking at her body after reviewing the reports and photographs of what was a sensational death, an incredibly troubling one, and I felt the way Benton does right now. I was the odd person out. I was convinced she was a homicide disguised to look like a natural death or an accident.
“She was a Washington insider, divorced from a former minister of culture at the Argentinian embassy, an art historian who was vibrant and quite beautiful,” Benton says. “A curator at the National Gallery, and she also oversaw exhibits at the White House, authenticating new acquisitions for the First Family, which at the time was the Clintons.”