Bentondoesn’t say a word.
“Do you have anything to eat in the house? And I need a drink. I don’t care if it’s the middle of the day. And I need us to talk about something besides work. I didn’t fly up here in a snowstorm to talk about work.”
“It’s not a snowstorm yet,”Bentonsays somberly. “But it will be.”
She stares out her window as he drives towardCambridge.
“I have plenty of food in the house. And whatever you want to drink,” he says quietly.
He says something else. She’s not sure she heard it correctly. What she thinks she heard can’t be right.
“I’m sorry. What did you just say?” she asks, startled.
“If you want out, I’d rather you tell me now.”
“If I want out?” She looks at him, incredulous. “Is that all it takes,Benton? We have a major disagreement and should discuss ending our relationship?”
“I’m just giving you the option.”
“I don’t need you to give me anything.”
“I didn’t mean you need my permission. I just don’t see how it can work if you don’t trust me anymore.”
“Maybe you’re right.” She fights back tears, turns her face away from him, looks out at the snow.
“So you’re saying you don’t trust me anymore.”
“What if I had done it to you?”
“I would be very upset,” he replies. “But I’d try to understand why. Lucy has a right to her privacy, a legal right. The only reason I know about the tumor is because she told me she was having a problem and wondered if I could arrange for her to be scanned atMcLean, if I could make sure nobody knew, could keep it absolutely quiet. She didn’t want to make an appointment at some hospital somewhere. You know how she is. Especially these days.”
“I used to know how she is.”
“Kay.” He glances over at her. “She didn’t want a record. Nothing’s private anymore, not since the Patriot Act.”
“Well, I can’t argue with that.”
“You have to assume your medical records, prescription drugs, bank accounts, shopping habits, everything private about your life might be looked at by the Feds, all in the name of stopping terrorists. Her controversial past career with the FBI and ATF is a realistic concern. She doesn’t trust that they won’t find out anything they can about her, and she ends up audited by the IRS, on a no-fly list, accused of insider trading, scandalized in the news, God knows what.”
“What about you and your not-so-pleasant past with the FBI?”
He shrugs, driving fast. A light snow swirls and seems to barely touch the glass.
“There’s not much else they can do to me,” he says. “Truth is, I’d probably be a waste of their time. I’m much more worried about who’s running around with a shotgun that’s supposed to be in the custody of theHollywoodpolice or destroyed.”
“What is Lucy doing about her prescription drugs? If she’s so anxious about leaving any sort of paper or electronic trail.”
“She should be anxious. She’s not delusional. They can get hold of pretty much anything they want-and are. Even if it requires a court order, what do you suppose happens in reality if the FBI wants a court order from a judge who just so happens to have been appointed by the current administration? A judge who worries about the consequences if he doesn’t cooperate? Do I need to paint about fifty possible scenarios for you?”
“Americaused to be a nice place to live.”
“We’ve handled everything we can in-house for Lucy,” he says.
He goes on and on about McLean, assures her that Lucy couldn’t have come to a better place, that if nothing else, McLean has access to the finest doctors and scientists in the country, in the world. Nothing he says makes her feel better.
They are inCambridgenow, passing the splendid antique mansions ofBrattle Street.
“She hasn’t had to go through the normal channels for anything, including her meds. There’s no record unless somebody makes a mistake or is indiscreet,”Bentonis saying.
“Nothing’s infallible. Lucy can’t spend the rest of her life paranoid that people are going to find out she has a brain tumor and is on some type of dopamine agonist to keep it under control. Or that she’s had surgery, if it comes to that.”
It is hard for her to say it. No matter the statistical fact that surgical extraction of pituitary tumors is almost always successful, there is a chance something can go wrong.
“It’s not cancer,”Bentonsays. “If it were, I probably would have told you no matter what she said.”
“She’s my niece. I raised her like a daughter. It’s not your right to decide what constitutes a serious threat to her health.”
“You know better than anyone that pituitary tumors aren’t uncommon. Studies show that approximately twenty percent of the population has incidental pituitary tumors.”
“Depending on who’s surveying. Ten percent. Twenty percent. I don’t give a damn about statistics.”
“I’m sure you’ve seen them in autopsies. People never even knew they had them-a pituitary tumor isn’t why they ended up in your morgue.”
“Lucy knows she has it. And the percentages are based on people who had micro-not macro-adenomas and were asymptomatic. Lucy’s tumor on her last scan was twelve millimeters, and she’s not asymptomatic. She has to take medication to lower her abnormally high levels of prolactin, and she may have to be on the medication the rest of her life unless she has the tumor removed. I know you’re well aware of the risks, the very least of which is the surgery won’t be successful and the tumor will still be there.”
Bentonturns into his driveway, points a remote and opens the door of the detached garage, a carriage house in an earlier century. Neither of them talks as he pulls the SUV in next to his other powerful Porsche and shuts the door. They walk to the side entrance of his antique house, a dark-red brick Victorian just offHarvard Square.
“Who is Lucy’s doctor?” she asks, stepping inside the kitchen.
“Nobody at the moment.”
She stares at him as he takes off his coat and neatly drapes it over a chair.
“She doesn’t have a doctor? You can’t be serious. What the hell have you people been doing with her up here?” she says, fighting her way out of her coat and angrily throwing it on a chair.
He opens an oak cabinet and lifts out a bottle of single-malt Scotch and two tumblers. He fills them with ice.
“The explanation’s not going to make you feel any better,” he says. “Her doctor’s dead.”
The Academy’s forensic evidence bay is a hangar with three garage doors that open onto an access road that leads to a second hangar where Lucy keeps helicopters, motorcycles, armored Humvees, speedboats and a hot-air balloon.
Reba knows Lucy has helicopters and motorcycles. Everybody knows that. But Reba isn’t so sure she believes what Marino said about the rest of what’s supposed to be in that hangar. She’s suspicious he was setting her up as a joke, a joke that wouldn’t have been funny because it would have made her look stupid if she believed him and went around repeating what he said. He has lied to her plenty. He said he liked her. He said sex with her was the best ever. He said no matter what, they would always be friends. None of it was true.
She met him several months back when she was still in the motorcycle unit and he showed up one day on the Softail he rode before he got his tricked-out Deuce. She had just parked her Road King by the back entrance of the police department when she heard his loud pipes, and there he was.
“Trade ya,” he said, swinging his leg over the seat like a cowboy getting off his horse.