I realize how much I need to talk. I can’t stop thinking about Granby’s outrageous suggestion that the Capital Murderer is influenced by what Benton has published and therefore these sadistic deaths are partly Benton’s fault. So he should retire and the Bureau shouldn’t be involved in profiling anymore; it’s outdated and dangerous. Granby is trying to poison him and he knows how to do it, and I’m trying to be my objective, calm self but I’m seething inside.
“People here knew Lucy was flying Benton home today,” I say to Anne. “His FBI colleagues knew, his damn boss knew, and his hotel in northern Virginia and whoever saw the flight plan Lucy filed also knew.”
I try to work through it, any possibility of how the killer might have been aware that Benton was flying home today, but I’m as unconvinced as I was when he first suggested it. He’s upset and bruised. He’s blaming himself. I have to understand but I can’t listen to it. And it doesn’t matter anyway. Whatever the killer knew doesn’t make any of this Benton’s fault. How dare Granby suggest anything to the contrary? How dare he invalidate Benton’s accomplishments and real sacrifices?
“Why?” Anne asks.
“Lucy knew Gail Shipton.”
“I’ve gathered that.”
“Benton is concerned that whoever killed her may have had some idea he would be here when her body was found, that maybe he timed it with Benton in mind.”
“That’s creepy.” I can tell she doesn’t buy it, not even slightly.
“I’m wondering if Lucy may have said something to Gail.”
“And then Gail told the person who intended to murder her? Said hey, Benton’s coming home, why don’t you do it now? And is this Benton’s theory?”
“Obviously it sounds silly when you put it like that.” I press the wall button with my elbow and the steel doors swing open wide. “It may be one of those questions that’s never answered but I can’t stand what it’s doing to him.”
“You know what I have no doubt about?” Anne follows me inside. “He looks stressed. He looks tired and strung-out and a little bit down. Sometimes when I get that way I think everything’s my fault. I worry something’s hiding in my closet and under my bed. I get weird, to be honest.”
“Yes, well, Granby’s certainly doing his best to make Benton feel that way.”
“You need to sort it out for him, Dr. Scarpetta. Or he’ll torture himself.”
“I’m trying to figure out how to do that.”
“Ask Lucy,” she says. “Just ask her who she may have told and then you’ll know for sure.”
“I don’t want her to feel I’m blaming her.”
“You’re not blaming her or anyone and you need to stop being responsible for everybody’s feelings.”
“That will never happen,” I reply.
I excise the puncture wound and wait for Lucy to respond to a question that’s uncomfortable for her. It’s a question I didn’t ask earlier because there was so much to ask and now priorities have shifted and I also know how she’ll react.
Lucy hesitates before deciding, “In passing, I think I did. I wouldn’t have supposed it mattered.”
My brilliant, clever niece is obvious when she perceives that I think she screwed up. It’s as if she suddenly has on wooden shoes. I pick up forceps from the surgical cart.
“Vaguely I remember saying something,” she adds, not defensively but indifferently, and she doesn’t like what I’m asking and I knew she wouldn’t.
So she rationalizes out loud that it would make sense if she referenced Benton’s birthday surprise during the telephone conversation with Gail when she was behind the Psi Bar. Lucy had just flown into Dulles when she made that call. She was there to pick up Benton and bring him home the next day.
“I said where I was and why,” she adds from the other side of the steel table, talking to me while she stares at her dead former friend, someone she once trusted, someone who was lying to her and robbing her, someone she won’t miss.
“You’re sure it didn’t come up before.” I drop the sectioned wound into a bottle of formalin.
“It probably did,” Lucy admits and that doesn’t bother her but she resents the question.
The helicopter flight to pick up Benton was a subject that could have been introduced earlier. In fact, she’s fairly certain it did. Lucy does her best not to show what she feels. Anger, embarrassment, picked on, and hurt that I don’t trust her. If I did, I wouldn’t ask questions like this. That’s how it goes through her mind, the way she thinks and reacts as if I’m her mother belittling her and I’m certainly not. A circle of emotions as old as her history, one causing the next one and the next. A circle I know like the circles in my building, like the corridors that begin where they end in this place of life and death.
What she doesn’t feel is responsible. Whatever I’m implying isn’t something she caused and she’s not going to pretend to care that this woman who intended to screw her isn’t around anymore. Lucy doesn’t give a damn about what she might have said to her and I’d always rather that Lucy be honest, but when I witness her most basic programming it’s sobering. It’s close to unbearable. I call her a little sociopathic and Benton never fails to remind me you can’t be a little of that. Like a little pregnant or a little raped or a little dead.
She goes on to mention that Gail visited her this past Sunday, the day the birthday surprise was decided. Gail, Lucy, and Carin Hegel met that late morning at Lucy’s Concord home to discuss the upcoming trial and review depositions and other documents. It’s possible that during this visit she mentioned Benton’s birthday and her concern about me being home alone after returning from Connecticut.
“I just think it’s significant she was killed soon after that.” Lucy shrewdly makes what she believes is the most important point and one I’ve completely missed. “It was all over the news that you helped out the ME’s office in Connecticut.”
“Bryce and his big mouth,” Anne says.
He had to mention it to the Armed Forces chief medical examiner, my ultimate boss, and then the public information officer decided it would be good PR. The CFC is subsidized by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Department of Defense and I get reminded from time to time that the buck doesn’t stop with me unless something goes wrong.
“It went viral on the Internet last Friday that you responded to the school and assisted with the autopsies.” Lucy doesn’t take her eyes off the wan dead face, lips drying, eyes duller.
Gail Shipton’s rigor is beginning to relax. Soon it will pass like a fist too tired to clench anymore.
“I don’t believe this is about me,” I reply.
“And I don’t believe we should assume it’s about Benton,” Lucy says. “Or if it is, maybe that’s just part of it. Maybe your role in Connecticut is the rest of it.”
“I see what she’s getting at.” Anne agrees with a theory that is new and not what I expected. “Benton’s worried the timing is about him when it may very well be about you.”
Creating a spectacle, Benton keeps saying. A violent drama that I don’t want to imagine for a moment could include me.
“Anybody keeping up with the news would have known when you were in Connecticut and when you came back,” Lucy points out. “The second-worst school shooting in U.S. history, second only to Virginia Tech. That would turn the head of some psycho who craves attention.”
A narcissist with borderline traits, Benton said. The killer has to watch the drama he creates.
“All of the publicity might have lit his powder keg,” Lucy adds.
“Gail Shipton wasn’t murdered because I helped out in Connecticut,” I state flatly. “That makes no sense at all.”
“Would you rather blame it on Benton?” She looks coolly at me.