“What might you know about Jack your protege that I don’t?” Benton asks me. “Besides that he’s a sick fuck. Because he is. Somewhere some part of you knows it, Kay.”
I’m Briggs’s monster, and Fielding is mine. Going back to the beginning of time.
“I’m well aware of sexual abuse,” Benton says blandly, as if he doesn’t care what happened to Fielding when he was a child, as if Benton really doesn’t give a damn.
Not a psychologist but something else speaking, and I’m sure. Cops, federal agents, prosecutors, those who protect and punish, are hardened to excuses. They judge “subjects” and “persons of interest” by what they do, not by what was done to them. People like Benton don’t give a damn about why or if it couldn’t be helped, doesn’t matter the definitions, distillations, and predictions he so astutely, so skillfully, renders. In his heart Benton has no sympathy for hateful, harmful people, and his years of being a clinician and consultant have been cruel to him, have been unfulfilling and have felt fake, he’s confessed to me more than once.
“That much is a matter of public record since the case went to trial.” Benton feels the need to tell me something I’ve never asked Fielding about.
I don’t remember when and how I first heard of the special school Fielding attended as a boy near Atlanta. Somehow I know, and all that comes to mind is references he’s made to a certain “episode” in his past, that what he experienced with a certain “counselor” makes it excruciatingly difficult for him to handle any tragedy involving children, especially if they were abused. I’m certain I never pushed him to volunteer the details. Back in those days especially, I wouldn’t have asked.
“Nineteen seventy-eight,” Benton says, “when Jack was fifteen, although he was twelve when it started, went on for several years until they were caught having sex in the back of her station wagon parked at the edge of the soccer field as if she wanted to be caught. She was pregnant. Anther pathetic story about boarding schools, this one, thank God, not Catholic but for troubled teens, one of these private treatment center-slash-academies that has ranch in its name. What the therapist did to get convicted of ten counts of sexual battery on a minor isn’t what you haven’t told me about Jack.”
“I don’t know the details,” I finally answer him. “Not all of them or even most of them. I don’t remember her name, if I ever knew it; didn’t know she was pregnant. His child? Did she have it?”
“I’ve reviewed the case transcripts. Yes. She had it.”
“I wouldn’t have had a reason to look at the case transcripts.” I don’t ask why Benton has a reason. He’s not going to reveal that to me right now, and maybe he never will. “What a shame there’s one more child in the world Jack’s raised poorly. Or not at all,” I add. “How sad.”
“Kathleen Lawler hasn’t had such a good life, either,” Benton starts to say.
“How sad,” I repeat.
“The woman convicted of molesting Jack,” he says. “I don’t know about the child, a girl, born in prison, given up for adoption. Considering the mutant genetic loading, probably in prison, too, or dead. Kathleen Lawler was in one mess after another, currently in a correctional facility for female offenders in Savannah, Georgia, serving twenty years for DUI manslaughter. Jack communicates with her, is a prison pen pal, although he uses a pen name, and that’s not what you haven’t told me, because I doubt you know about it. Actually, I can’t imagine you do.”
“Who else was at the meetings last week?” I’m so cold my fingernails are blue, and I wish I’d brought my jacket in here. I notice a lab coat on the back of Fielding’s door.
“It crossed my mind while we were sitting in your office,” says Benton the former FBI agent, the former protected witness and master of secrets, who isn’t acting like a former anything anymore.
He’s acting like he’s investigating a case, not just a consultant on one. I’m convinced that what I suspect is true. He’s back with the Feds. Things end where they begin and begin where they end.
“An affective disorder. I’ve thought hard about it, tried to remember him from the old days. Done a lot of reflecting on the old days.” Benton talks matter-of-factly, as if he has no feelings about what he’s divulging and accusing me of. “He’s never been normal. That’s my point. Jack has significant underlying pathology. That’s why he was sent off to boarding school. To learn to manage his anger. When he was six years old he stabbed another little kid in the chest with a ballpoint pen. When he was eleven he hit his mother in the head with a rake. Then he was sent to the ranch near Atlanta, where he only got angrier.”
“I have no idea what he did when he was growing up,” I reply. “It’s not a common practice to conduct extensive background checks on doctors one might hire, in fact, was unheard of when I was getting started, when he was getting started. I’m not an FBI agent,” I add pointedly. “I don’t dig up everything I can about people and go around questioning neighbors they grew up around. I don’t question their teachers. I don’t track down their pen pals.”
I get up from Fielding’s desk.
“Although I probably should have. I probably will from now on. But I’ve never covered up for him,” I go on. “Never protected him that way. I admit I’ve been too forgiving. I admit I’ve fixed his disasters or tried to. But never covered up something I shouldn’t, if that’s what you’re saying I’ve done. I would never do anything unethical for him or anyone.” Not anymore, I add silently. I did it once but never again, and I never did it for Jack Fielding. Not even for myself but for the highest law of the land.
I walk across the office, cold and exhausted and ashamed of myself. I remove Fielding’s lab coat from the hook at the top of the closed door.
“I don’t know what it is you think I’ve not told you, Benton. I have no idea what he’s involved with or whom. Or his delusions or dissociative states and blackouts. Not in my presence, and he’s never shared information like that, if it’s true.”
I put on the lab coat, and it is huge, and I detect the faint sharp odor of eucalyptus, like Vicks, like Bengay.
“Maybe a mood disorder with a touch of narcissism and intermittent explosive anger,” Benton goes on as if I just said nothing. “Or it could be the drugs, maybe his damn performance-enhancement drugs as usual, the sorry bastard. He doesn’t represent the CFC well, I’m sorry as hell to make the understatement of the century, and it wasn’t lost on Douglas and David, and that got the CFC off on the wrong foot, as long ago as early November, when they got involved in the Wally Jamison kidnapping and murder. You can imagine what’s gotten back to Briggs and others. Jack is one inch from ruining everything, and that opens up a place to opportunists. Like I said, it creates a looting mentality.”
I pause before a window and look down on the dark, snowy street as if I might find something there that will remind me of who I am. Something to give me strength, something to find comfort in.
“He’s done a lot of damage.” Benton’s voice behind me. “I don’t know that it’s been intentional. But I suspect some of it has been because of his complicated relationship with you.”
Snow is blowing at a sharp angle, hitting the window almost horizontally and making rapid clicks that remind me of fingernails tapping, of something restless and disturbed. When I look at the snow as it hits the glass, it makes me dizzy. It gives me vertigo to look at it and then to look down.