Point of Origin

My message light was blinking, and I listened to Benton's recorded voice saying that he was staying at my same hotel, and should be arriving as soon as he could break free of New York and its traffic. I was to expect him around nine. Lucy had left me her new phone number and didn't know if she'd see me or not. Marino had an update that he would relay when I called, and Fielding said the Quinns had gone on the television news earlier this evening to say they were suing the medical examiner's office and me for violating the separation of church and state and causing irreparable emotional damage.

I sat on the edge of the bed and took off my shoes. My pantyhose had a run, and I wadded them and hurled them into the trash. My clothes had bitten into me because I had worn them too long, and I imagined the stench of cooking human bones lingering in my hair.

'Shit!' I exclaimed under my breath. 'What kind of goddamn life is this?'

I snatched off my suit, blouse, and slip and flung them inside out on the bed. I made sure the deadbolt was secure and began filling the tub with water as hot as I could stand it. The sound of it pouring on top of itself began to soothe me, and I dribbled in foaming bath gel that smelled like sun-ripened raspberries. I was confused about seeing Benton. How had it all come to this? Lovers, colleagues, friends, whatever we were supposed to be had blended into a mixture, like paintings in sand. Our relationship was a design of delicate colors, intricate and dry and easily disturbed. He called as I was drying off.

'I'm sorry it's so late,' he said.

'How are you?' I asked.

'Are you up for the bar?'

'Not if the Braves are there. I don't need a riot.'

'The Braves?' he asked.

'Why don't you come to my room? I have a mini-bar.'

'In two minutes.'

He showed up in his typical uniform of dark suit and white shirt. Both showed the harshness of his day, and he needed to shave. He gathered me in his arms and we held each other without speaking for a very long time.

'You smell like fruit,' he said into my hair.

'We're supposed to be in Hilton Head,' I muttered. 'How did we suddenly end up in Philadelphia?'

'It's a bloody mess,' he said.

Benton gently pulled away from me and took off his jacket. He draped it over my bed and unlocked the mini-bar.

'The usual?' he asked.

'Just some Evian.'

'Well, I need something stronger.'

He unscrewed the top of a Johnnie Walker.

'In fact, I'll make that a double, and the hell with ice,' he let me know.

He handed me the Evian, and I watched him as he pulled out the desk chair and sat. I propped up pillows on the bed and made myself comfortable as we visited each other from a distance.

'What's wrong?' I asked. 'Besides everything.'

'The usual problem when ATF and the Bureau are suddenly thrown together on a case,' he said, sipping his drink. 'It makes me glad I'm retired.'

'You don't seem very retired,' I said wryly.

'That's the damn truth. As if Carrie isn't enough for me to worry about. Then I'm called in on this homicide, and to be honest, Kay, ATF has its own profilers and I don't think the Bureau should be poking its nose into this at all.'

'Tell me something I don't know, Benton. And I don't see how they're justifying their involvement, for that matter, unless they're saying this lady's death is an act of terrorism.'

'The potential link to the Warrenton homicide,' he told me. 'As you know. And it wasn't hard for the unit chief to call state police investigators to let them know the Bureau would do anything to help. So then the Bureau's invited in, and here I am. There were two agents at the fire scene earlier today, and already everybody's pissed off.'

'You know, Benton, supposedly we're all on the same side,' I said, and this same old subject made me angry again.

'Apparently this one FBI guy who's with the Philly field office hid a nine-millimeter cartridge at the scene to see if Pepper would hit on it.'

Benton slowly swirled Scotch in his glass.

'Of course Pepper didn't because he hadn't even been told to go to work yet,' he went on. 'And the agent thought this was funny, saying something about the dog's nose needing to go back to the shop.'

'What kind of fool would do something like that?' I asked, incensed. 'He's lucky the handler didn't beat the hell out of him.'

'So here we are,' he went on with a sigh. 'Same old shit. In the good ole days, FBI agents had better sense than that. They weren't always flashing their shields in front of the camera and taking over investigations they aren't qualified to handle. I'm embarrassed. I'm more than embarrassed, I'm enraged that these new idiots out there are ruining my reputation along with their own, after I worked twenty-five years… Well. I just don't know what I'm going to do, Kay.'

He met my eyes as he drank.

'Just do your good job, Benton,' I said to him quietly. 'Trite as that may sound, it's all any of us can do. We're not doing it for the Bureau, not for ATF or the Pennsylvania state police. It's for the victims and potential victims. Always for them.'

He drained his glass and set it on the desk. The lights of Penn's Landing were festive outside my window, and Camden, New Jersey, glittered on the other side of the river.

'I don't think Carrie's in New York anymore,' he then said as he stared out into the night.

'A comforting thought.'

'And I have no evidence for that beyond there being no sightings or any other indicators that she is in the city. Where is she getting money, for example? Often that's how the trail begins. Robbery, stolen credit cards. Nothing so far to make us think she's out there doing things like that. Of course, that doesn't mean she isn't. But she has a plan, and I feel quite confident that she's following it.'

His profile was sharp in shadows as he continued staring out at the river. Benton was depressed. He sounded worn out and defeated, and I got up and went to him.

'We should go to bed,' I said, massaging his shoulders. 'We're both tired, and everything seems worse when we're tired, right?'

He smiled a little and closed his eyes as I worked on his temples and kissed the back of his neck.

'How much do you charge per hour?' he muttered.

'You can't afford me,' I said.

We did not sleep together because the rooms were small and both of us needed rest. I liked my shower in the morning and he liked his, and that was the difference between being new with each other versus comfortable. There had been a time when we stayed up all night consuming each other, because we worked together and he was married and we could not help our hunger. I missed feeling that alive. Often when we were with each other now, my heart was dull or felt sweet pain, and I saw myself getting old.

The skies were gray and the streets were wet from washing when Benton and I drove through downtown on Walnut Street a little past seven the following morning. Steam rose from grates and manholes, the morning damp and cool. The homeless slept on sidewalks or beneath filthy blankets in parks, and one man looked dead beneath a No Loitering sign across from the police department. I drove while Benton went through his briefcase. He took notes on a yellow legal pad and thought about matters beyond my ken. I turned onto Interstate 76 West, where taillights were strung like red glass beads as far ahead as I could see, and the sun behind us was bright.

'Why would someone pick a bathroom as a point of origin?' I asked. 'Why not some other area of the house?'

'Obviously, it means something to him, if we're talking about serial crimes,' he said, flipping a page. 'Symbolic, perhaps. Maybe convenient for some other reason. My guess is that if we're dealing with the same offender, and the bathroom is the point of origin that all of the fires have in common, then it is symbolic. Represents something to him, perhaps his own point of origin for his crimes. If something happened to him in a bathroom when he was a young child, for example. Sexual abuse, child abuse, witnessing something terribly traumatic.'