"What secrets do you think he kept from you?" Anna asks. "What mysteries did you see in his eyes?"
"Oh God. Mostly about work." My breath trembles, my heart flying away in fear. "He kept many details to himself. Details about what he saw in certain cases, things he felt were so awful no one else should be subjected to them."
"Even you? Is there anything you have not seen?"
"Their pain," I speak quietly. "I don't have to see their terror. I don't have to hear their screams."
"But you reconstruct it."
"Not the same thing. No, not the same. Many of the killers Benton dealt with liked to photograph, audiotape and in some instances videotape what they did to their victims. Benton had to watch. He had to listen. I always knew. He'd come home looking gray. He wouldn't talk much during dinner, wouldn't eat much, and on those nights he drank more than usual."
"But he wouldn't tell you…"
"Never," I interrupt with feeling. "Never. That was his Indian Burial Ground and no one was allowed to step there. I taught at a death investigation school in Saint Louis. This was early in my career, before I moved here, when I was still a deputy chief in Miami. I was doing a class on drowning and decided since I was already there, I'd go ahead and attend the entire weeklong school. One afternoon, a forensic psychiatrist taught a class on sexual homicide. He showed slides of living victims. A woman was bound to a chair and her assailant had tightly tied rope around one of her breasts and inserted needles in the nipple. I can still see her eyes. They were dark pools filled with hell, and her mouth was wide open as she screamed. And I saw videotapes," I go on in a monotone. "A woman, abducted, bound, tortured and about to be shot in the head. She keeps whimpering for her mother. Begging, crying. I think she was in a basement, the footage dark, grainy. The sound of the gun going off. And silence."
Anna says nothing. The fire snaps and pops.
"I was the only woman in a room of about sixty cops," I add.
"Even worse, then, because the victims were women and you were the only woman," Anna says.
Anger touches me as I remember the way some of the men stared at the slides, at the videotapes. "The sexual mutilation was arousing to some of them," I say. "I could see it in their faces, sense it. Same thing with some of the profilers, Ben-ton's colleagues in the unit. They'd describe the way Bundy would rape a woman from the rear as he strangled her. Eyes bulging, tongue protruding. He would climax as she died. And these men Benton worked with enjoyed the telling a bit too much. Do you have any idea what that's like?" I fix a stare on her that is as sharp as nails. "To see a dead body, to see photographs, videos, of someone brutalized, of someone suffering and terrified and realize that the people around you are secretly enjoying it? That they find it sexy?"
"Do you think Benton found it sexy?" Anna asks.
"No. He witnessed such things weekly, maybe even daily. Sexy, never. He had to hear their screams." I have begun to ramble. "Had to hear them crying and begging. Those poor people didn't know. Even if they had, they couldn't have helped it."
"Didn't know? What didn't these poor people know?"
"That sexual sadists are only more aroused by crying. By begging. By fear," I reply.
"Do you think Benton cried or begged when his killers abducted him and took him to that dark building?" Anna is about to score.
"I've seen his autopsy report." I slip into my clinical hiding place. "There's really nothing in it to tell me definitively what happened before death. He was badly burned in the fire. So much tissue burned away, it wasn't possible to see, for example, if he still had a blood pressure when they cut him."
"He had a gunshot wound to his head, too, did he not?" Anna asks.
"Yes."
"Which do you think came first?"
I stare mutely at her. I have not reconstructed what led up to his death. I have never been able to bring myself to do that.
"Envision it, Kay," Anna tells me. "You know, do you not? You have worked too many deaths not to know what happened."
My mind is dark, as dark as the inside of that grocery store in Philadelphia.
"He did something, didn't he?" She pushes, leaning into me, on the very edge of the ottoman. "He won, didn't he?"
"Won?" I clear my throat. "Won!" I exclaim. "They cut his face off and burned him up and you say he won?"
She waits for me to make the connection. When I offer her nothing further, she gets up and walks to the fire, lightly touching my shoulder as she passes. She tosses on another log and looks at me and says, "Kay, let me ask you. Why would they shoot him after the fact?"
I rub my eyes and sigh.
"Cutting off the face was part of the MO," she goes on. "What Newton Joyce liked to do to his victims." She refers to the evil male partner of the evil Carrie Grethen_a psychopathic pair that made Bonnie and Clyde seem like a Saturday morning cartoon from my youth. "Excise their faces and store them in the freezer as souvenirs, and because Joyce's face was so homely, so scarred by acne," Anna goes on, "he stole what he envied, beauty. Yes?"
"Yes, I suppose. As much we can go with any such theory about why people do what they do."
"And it was important that Joyce do the excisions carefully and not damage the faces. Which is why he did not shoot his victims, certainly not in the head. He did not want to risk causing damage to the face, the scalp. And shooting is too
easy." Anna shrugs. "Quick. Maybe merciful. Far better to be shot than to have your throat cut. So why did Newton Joyce and Carrie Grethen shoot Benton?"
Anna stands over me. I look up at her. "He said something," I answer slowly, finally. "He must have."
"Yes." Anna sits back down. "Yes, yes." She encourages me with her hands, as if directing traffic to move across the next intersection. "What, what? Tell me, Kay."
I reply that I don't know what Benton said to Newton Joyce and Carrie Grethen. But he said something or did something that caused one or the other to lose control of the game. It was an impulse, an involuntary reaction when one of them pushed the gun to Benton's head and pulled the trigger. Boom. And the fun was over. Benton felt nothing, was cognizant of nothing after that. No matter what they did to him after that, it didn't matter. He was dead or dying. Unconscious. He never felt the knife. Maybe he never saw it.
"You knew Benton so well," Anna says. "You knew his killers, or at least you knew Carrie Grethen_you'd had experiences with her in the past. What do you think Benton said and to whom did he say it? Who shot him?"
"I can't…"
"You can."
I look at her.
"Who lost control?" She pushes me farther than I ever thought I could go.
"She did." I pull this up from the deep. "Carrie did. Because it was personal. She'd been around Benton from the old days, from the start, when she was at Quantico, at the Engineering Research Facility."
"Where she also met Lucy long years ago, maybe ten years ago."
"Yes, Benton knew her, knew Carrie, knew her probably as well as you can know any reptilian mind like hers," I add.
"What did he say to her?" Anna's eyes are riveted to me.
"Something about Lucy, probably," I say. "Something about Lucy that would insult Carrie. He insulted Carrie, taunted her about Lucy, that's what I believe." I have a direct shunt from my subconscious to my tongue. I don't even have to think.
"Carrie and Lucy were lovers at Quantico," Anna adds another piece. "Both working on the artificial intelligence computer in the Engineering Research Facility."
"Lucy was an intern, just a teenager, a kid, and Carrie seduced her. They were working on the computer system together. I got Lucy that internship," I bitterly add. "I did. Me, her influential, powerful aunt."