Point of Origin

'Well, this isn't.'

'Shit. Where the fuck's the medical examiner?'

'I'll take care of this,' I said to McGovern as if this were my scene. 'Get Lucy out and wrap a clean towel around her hand. I'll tend to her shortly. Lucy,' I then said to my niece. 'You're going to be fine.'

I unlocked her arms from my neck, and I was beginning to tremble. Somehow I knew.

'Kay, don't go over there,' McGovern raised her voice. 'Don't!'

But by now I knew I must, and I abruptly left them for that corner, splashing and almost tripping as I got weak in the knees. The investigators grew quiet with my approach, and at first I did not know what I was looking at as I followed the beams of their flashlights to something charred that was mingled with soggy paper and insulation, something on top of fallen plaster and chunks of blackened wood.

Then I saw the shape of a belt and its buckle, and the protruding femur that looked like a thick, burned stick. My heart was beating out of my chest as the shape became the burned ruins of a body attached to a blackened head that had no features, only patches of sooty silver hair.

'Let me see the watch,' I said, staring wildly at the investigators.

One of them held it out and I took it from his hand. It was a men's stainless steel Breitling, an Aerospace.

'No,' I muttered as I knelt in the water. 'Please, no.'

I covered my face with my hands. My mind shorted out. My vision failed as I swayed. Then a hand was steadying me. Bile crept up my throat.

'Come on, Doc,' a male voice said gently as hands lifted me to my feet.

'It can't be him,' I cried out. 'Oh, God, please don't let it be. Please, please, please.'

I couldn't seem to keep my balance, and it took two agents to get me out as I did what I could to gather the fragments that were left of me. I spoke to no one when I was returned to the street, and I walked weirdly, woodenly, to McGovern's Explorer, where she was with Lucy in the back, holding a blood-soaked towel around Lucy's left hand.

'I need a first aid kit,' I heard myself say to McGovern.

'It might be better to get her to the hospital,' her voice came back as she stared hard at me, fear and pity shining in her eyes.

'Get it,' I said.

McGovern reached in back, over the seat to grab something. She set an orange Pelican case on the seat and unfastened the latches. Lucy was almost in shock, shaking violently, her face white.

'She needs a blanket,' I said.

I removed the towel and washed her hand with bottled water. A thick flap of skin on her thumb was almost avulsed, and I swabbed it profusely with betadine, the iodine odor piercing my sinuses as all that I had just seen became a bad dream. It was not true.

'She needs stitches,' McGovern said.

It had not happened. A dream.

'We should go to the hospital so she can get stitches.'

But I already had out the steri-strips and benzoin glue, because I knew that stitches would not work with a wound like this. Tears were streaming down my face as I topped off my work with a thick layer of gauze. When I looked up and out the window, I realized Marino was standing by my door. His face was distorted by pain and rage. He looked like he might vomit. I got out of the Explorer.

'Lucy, you need to come on with me,' I said, taking her arm. I had always been able to function better when I was taking care of someone else. 'Come on.'

Emergency lights flashed in our faces, the night and the people in it disconnected and strange. Marino drove away with us as the medical examiner's van pulled up. There would be X-rays, dental charts, maybe even DNA used to confirm the identification. The process most likely would take a while, but it did not matter. I already knew. Benton was dead.

17

AS BEST ANYONE could reconstruct events at this time, Benton had been lured to his dreadful death. We had no Clue as to what had drawn him to the small grocery store on Walnut Street, or if, perhaps, he simply had been abducted somewhere else and then forced up a ladder into the plenum of that small building in its bad part of town. We believed he had been handcuffed at some point, and the continuing search had also turned up wire twisted into a figure eight that most likely had restrained the ankles that had burned away.

His car keys and wallet were recovered, but not his Sig Sauer nine-millimeter pistol or gold signet ring. He had left several changes of clothing in his hotel room, and his briefcase, which had been searched and turned over to me. I stayed the night in Teun McGovern's house. She had posted agents on the property, because Carrie was still out there somewhere, and it was only a matter of time.

She would finish what she had started, and the important question, really, was who would be next and if she would succeed. Marino had moved into Lucy's tiny apartment and was keeping watch from her couch. The three of us had nothing to say to each other because there was nothing to say, really. What was done was done.

McGovern had tried to get through to me. Several times the previous night she had brought tea or food into my room with its blue-curtained window overlooking the old brick and brass lanterns of the row houses in Society Hill. She was wise enough not to force anything, and I was too ruined to do anything but sleep. I continued to wake up feeling sick and then remember why.

I did not remember my dreams. I wept until my eyes were almost swollen shut. Late Thursday morning, I took a long shower and walked into McGovern's kitchen. She was wearing a Prussian blue suit, drinking coffee and reading the paper.

'Good morning,' she said, surprised and pleased that I had ventured out from behind my closed door. 'How are you doing?'

'Tell me what's happening,' I said.

I sat across from her. She set her coffee cup on the table and pushed back her chair.

'Let me get you coffee,' she said.

'Tell me what is going on,' I repeated. 'I want to know, Teun. Have they found out anything yet? At the morgue, I mean?'

She was at a loss for a moment, staring out the window at an old magnolia tree heavy with blossoms that were limp and brown.

'They're still working on him,' she finally spoke. 'But based on indications so far, it appears his throat may have been cut. There were cuts to the bones of his face. Here and here.'

She pointed to her left jaw and space between his eyes.

'There was no soot or burns in his trachea, and no CO. So he was already dead when the fire was set,' she said to me. 'I'm sorry, Kay. I… Well, I don't know what to say.'

'How can it be that no one saw him enter the building?' I asked as if I had not comprehended the horror of what she had just said. 'Someone forces him inside at gunpoint, maybe, and no one saw a thing?'

'The store closed at five P.M.,' she answered. 'There's no sign of forcible entry and for some reason the burglar alarm hadn't been set, so it didn't go off. We've had trouble with these places being torched for insurance money. Same Pakistani family always involved one way or another.'

She sipped her coffee.

'Same MO,' she went on. 'Small inventory, the fire starts shortly after business hours, and no one in the neighborhood saw a thing.'

'This has nothing to do with insurance money!' I said with sudden rage.

'Of course, it doesn't,' she answered quietly. 'Or at least not directly. But if you want to hear my theory, I'll tell you.'

'Tell me.'

'Maybe Carrie was the torch…'

'Of course!'

'I'm saying she might have conspired with the owner to torch the place for him. He may have even paid her to do it, not having any idea what her real agenda was. Granted, this would have taken some planning.'

'She's had nothing to do for years but plan.'

My chest tightened again and tears formed a lump in my throat and filled my eyes.