“In the grand scheme of things and at the time, it wasn’t. I’m not trying to put you on the defensive.”
“I knew from the records I reviewed that the baby, a girl, was given up for adoption while the mother was in prison the first time. An adoption agency in Atlanta,” he says. “Maybe like some adopted children, she set about to find out who her biological parents were.”
“As smart as she is, that probably wasn’t hard.”
“Christ.” Benton takes a swallow of Scotch. “It’s always the one thing you think doesn’t matter, the one thing you think can wait.”
“I know. That’s almost always how it works out. The detail you don’t want to bother with.”
We sit on the sofa, looking at the fire, and Sock is curled up on top of me. He is attached to me. He won’t let me out of his sight. He has to be touching me, as if he’s certain I’ll disappear and he’ll be abandoned in a run-down house again where horrible things happen.
“I think there is a very good probability that’s what the DNA is going to tell us about Dawn Kincaid,” Benton continues in a flat tone. “I wish we could have known it before, but there wasn’t a reason to look.”
“You don’t have to keep saying that. Why would you have looked? What would a baby he fathered when he was a teenager have to do with what’s gone on?”
“Obviously, it might have.”
“Twenty-twenty hindsight.”
“I knew he was writing Kathleen Lawler, e-mailing her, but there’s nothing criminal about that, nothing even suspicious, and no mention of anyone by the name of Dawn, just an interest they had in common. I recall that phrase, the interest they shared. I thought he fucking meant crime, maybe their old crime and how it changed who they were forever, that was the interest they had in common,” he says ruefully, trying to figure it out as he talks. “Now I have to wonder if the interest they shared might be their child, might even be Dawn Kincaid. Just unfortunate that Jack never got past that part of his life, that he was still connected to Kathleen Lawler, and probably she to him. And then a daughter who got his intelligence, his good parts and his bad parts. And the mother’s good and really bad parts. And who the hell knows all the places that daughter’s been bounced around to but never lived with her father, who I suspect she never knew while she was growing up. Of course, this is complete speculation on our part.”
“Not really. It’s like an autopsy. Most of the time it tells me what I already know.”
“I’m afraid we might know. I’m afraid we really might, and it’s a horror story, really. Talk about bad seed and the sins of the father.”
“Some would say it was the sins of the mother in this case.”
“I should make some phone calls,” Benton says as he drinks and sits in front of the fire, staring into it.
He is angry with himself. He can’t tolerate missing that one thing, as he calls it. In his mind, he should have made it a burning priority to track down a baby born to a woman in prison more than thirty years ago, and that really is unreasonable. Why would he think it mattered?
“Jack never mentioned Dawn Kincaid to me or a daughter who was given up for adoption, absolutely nothing like that. I had no idea.” The whisky has heated me up, and I pet Sock, feeling the bumps of his ribs, like a washboard, and feeling the sadness that has settled inside me and won’t go away. “I seriously doubt she ever lived with him until maybe very recently, don’t see how. Not in Richmond, absolutely not. And it’s unlikely his wives would have allowed a daughter from that early criminal liaison to be part of their lives, assuming they knew. He probably didn’t tell them, except to allude to his difficulty with cases involving dead children. If he even said that much to the women in his life.”
“He said it to you.”
“I wasn’t just a woman in his life. I was his boss.”
“That’s not all.”
“Please not again, Benton. Really. It’s getting to be ridiculous. I know you’re in a mood and both of us are tired.”
“It’s the thought of you not being honest with me. I don’t care what you did back then. I don’t have a right to care about what you did before we were together.”
“Well, you do care, and you have a right to care about anything you want. But how many times do I have to tell you?”
“I remember the first time we socialized.”
“How dated that sounds, no pun intended. Like two people on a Sunday night in the fifties.” I reach for his hand.
“Nineteen eighty-eight, that Italian place in the Fan. Remember Joe’s?”
“Every time I was out with the cops, that’s where we’d end up. Nothing like a big plate of baked spaghetti after a homicide scene.”
“You hadn’t been the chief long.” Benton talks to the fire, and he strokes my hand gently, both of our hands resting on top of Sock. “I asked you about Jack because you were so industrious about him, so vigilant, so focused, and I thought it was unusual. The more I probed, the more evasive you got. I’ve never forgotten it.”
“It wasn’t because of him,” I answer. “It was because of the way I felt about me.”
“Because of Briggs. Not an easy man to be under. And I don’t mean that the way it just came out. Not that you would necessarily be the one under him or anyone. Probably on top.”
“Please don’t be snide.”
“I’m teasing you, and both of us are too tired and frayed around the edges for teasing. I apologize.”
“What happened is my fault, anyway. I won’t blame him or anyone,” I continue. “But he was God back then. To someone like me. I was really very sheltered. I think all I’d ever done was go to school, study, consumed by residencies, Lord, how many years of them, like a long dream of working hard and rarely sleeping, and of course doing what I was told by people in authority. In the early days hardly questioning it. Because I felt I didn’t deserve to be a doctor. I should have run my father’s small grocery store, been a wife and mother, lived simply, like everyone else in my family.”
“John Briggs was the most powerful person you’d ever come across. I can see why,” Benton says, and I sense he might know Briggs better than I’ve imagined. I wonder how much they’ve talked these past six months, not only about Fielding but about everything.
“Please don’t be threatened by him,” I’m saying as I wonder what Benton knows about Briggs and, most of all, what Benton knows about me. “My past with him doesn’t matter anymore. And it was about my perception, anyway. I needed him to be powerful. I needed that back then.”
“Because your father was anything but powerful. All those years he was ill, with you taking care of him, taking care of everyone. You wanted someone who would take care of you for once.”
“And when you get what you want, guess what happens. John took terrible care of me. Or it would be more accurate if I said that I took terrible care of myself. I knew—better yet, was persuaded— to go against my conscience and to be led into something that wasn’t right.”
“Politics,” Benton says as if he knows.
“What would you know about what happened back then?” I look at him, and shadows move on his keenly handsome face in the firelight.
“I think it’s something like two years’ service for every year of medical or law school paid for by the military. So unless my math is really bad, you owed the US government eight years of service with the air force, more specifically, the AFIP, AFME.”
“Six. I finished Hopkins in three years.”
“Okay, that’s right. But you served what, a year? And every time I’ve asked about it, you give me the same song and dance about the AFIP wanting to set up a fellowship program in Virginia and they decided to plant you there as chief.”