“What about people who exchange blood-vial jewelry? They wear it around their necks.” Benton is looking for any possible explanation because he has misgivings, sinister ones that he’s not going to verbalize.
He doesn’t want to openly accuse. He wants me to figure it out.
“What if he’d exchanged something like that with someone?” he asks.
“And seventeen years later this person uses it to frame him in multiple homicides?”
“I just know DNA from a blood sample was identified as Martin Lagos’s and I’m coming up with anything I can think of to explain how that could have happened, Kay. Besides the obvious.”
“The obvious being a problem with CODIS and your fear that people like Granby are lying to you.”
“I wish I’d never mentioned it to him.”
“Who else could you mention it to?”
“To you, to someone I trust with my life.” He doesn’t mention Lucy because he won’t. “I’m going around him every chance I get.”
Ahead of us a dark brick warehouse looms, its hundreds of windows blanked out by the sun.
“Saying someone was wearing Martin Lagos’s blood in a vial on a necklace and then decided to use it to frame him?” I play it out. “Days, not to mention years, without being air-dried or properly stored and you can forget it. The blood would have decomposed, the DNA destroyed by bacteria or UV light if it was exposed to the sun.”
“What if it had been kept in a lab for some reason?”
“Not our labs in Virginia or Washington either,” I remind him. “There would have been no blood drawn, obviously, because there was no case, no autopsy, not if Martin Lagos jumped off the Fourteenth Street Bridge and his body was never found. When the police worked his mother’s murder and realized he was missing, I assume they got his DNA profile from a toothbrush, his hairbrush, something like that.”
“Yes,” Benton answers. “I’m not saying it isn’t his blood. I’m saying I don’t understand how it got there and I don’t trust it worth a damn. It’s what someone wants us to think.”
“What does the BAU say about what you’re suggesting?” I can only imagine the reaction.
“They think I’ve been doing this too long.”
“You won’t retire. That’s not you.”
He’s not going to teach somewhere or be one more former FBI profiler out there who’s a hired gun or on TV whenever there’s a big crime or a big trial.
“I’m pissing everybody off and talking to you without authorization. I’ve talked to Lucy and you know that without my saying it,” Benton says. “If they find out, well why should I even care anymore? As far off course as this has gotten and what it very likely means…Christ, Granby and all of them can go to hell.”
23
It’s almost eleven a.m. when we reach the back parking lot of my seven-story, titanium-skinned building that is shaped like a bullet with a geodesic glass roof.
The anti-climb fence is tall and PVC-coated black, and above it satellite dishes and antennas bloom silvery white from the rooftops of MIT labs that back up to the CFC on three sides. Transmissions travel invisibly nearly at the speed of light, many of them classified, a lot of them military and related to secret government projects.
My phone rings and I look up at Bryce’s window bright with sunlight as if I might spot him, which isn’t possible. But old habits don’t die easily. The glass in my building is one-way. We can see out but no one can see in. My chief of staff may have us in his sights but I can’t tell.
“The Tooth Whisperer left about twenty minutes ago,” he says of Dr. Adams. “It’s Gail Shipton, all right. One of these people with a great mouth because there’s so much wrong with it? I guarantee she was picked on in school just like me.”
I enter my code at the electric gate. It beeps and for a moment nothing happens. I’ve been out five days and Marino no longer works here and I’m reminded that it took the two of us to run this place. I try my code again.
“Possibly an exposure to tetracycline as a child, causing tooth discoloration. You know those ugly spotted and pitted teeth that make you hate school because kids are so mean?” Bryce says as the gate shivers to life.
It begins to slide open on its track slowly, shakily, still not working properly since the last time it was repaired several weeks ago. There’s no one to supervise the security engineer now that Marino isn’t here. He used to hover over whoever answered the service call but those days are gone. I’m having a hard time believing it.
“I had a tooth like that because of a fever. Of course it was a front tooth and my nickname was chalk tooth. ‘Bryce can write on the blackboard with his tooth.’ I didn’t smile the entire time I was growing up.”
On the other side of the limping-open gate our white vans and crime scene trucks are parked haphazardly and I notice they’re dirty. The mobile mass casualty trailer is grimy, too. Marino would throw a fit if he hadn’t quit and I suppose we’ll have to find an affordable washing and detailing company that can be trusted and is willing to service our equipment on-site. It’s just one more housekeeping concern to take up with Bryce, who’d rather talk than breathe.
“Plenty of restorations, all of it costing a pretty penny. But then again she was rich enough to sue someone for a hundred mil, according to what’s all over the news,” he’s saying. “I don’t mean it disrespectfully.”
“Benton and I are here,” I remind Bryce, who manages to find something in common with almost every dead body passing through. “Why don’t we have this conversation inside, preferably a little later? I have evidence rounds to make, then I need to get started on her and check on everybody else.”
I unbutton my coat and remember I’m carrying a gun. Only law enforcement can be armed inside my building. All CFC personnel, including me, are supposed to leave firearms at the security desk, where they’re locked inside a ten-gauge steel pistol cabinet. Not that everybody complies. Marino never did. I have no doubt Lucy doesn’t. I release the fanny pack’s clip in back.
“Of course you’re here. I can see you on closed-circuit camera and out the window, take your pick. The gate is alllll-mossst oppp-en” — he exaggerates how slow it is — “and there you and Benton are, the happy couple walking through, and you’re pushing the button to close it behind you, which will take an hour. Get a load of those big, bad blaze-orange boots. Let me guess. He’s got nothing to change into because his luggage is in Marino’s car, am I right? Benton flew in with Lucy and landed at the scene and you asked Marino to hang on to his belongings, which are now held hostage. Meaning he’ll be in those awful boots all day. Tell him to come upstairs and see me.”
I switch my phone to speaker so Benton can hear.
“I’ve got extra sneakers he can borrow. Black leather that won’t look too terrible,” Bryce’s voice sounds in the parking lot and I wonder who else knew about Benton’s flight home.
I’m not surprised Bryce was informed. The question is when did he find out and from whom?
“I think we wear the same size or close enough,” he says.
“You knew he was coming home today?” I look at Benton busy e-mailing with his phone.
He’s preoccupied with conveying information that his colleagues may disagree with or ignore and he’s being extremely careful, more so than he’s ever had to be. Agents, most of them young, who started out regarding him as a legend and now want to take his place, want to show they’re more fit for the job he does, and that’s to be expected. But the other isn’t. Benton suspects conspiracy and sabotage and it very well may not be his imagination.