Port Mortuary (27 page)

“I’m afraid nonstop. I’m afraid there’s more than I thought,” and then he doesn’t continue. That’s all he’s going to say about it. He’s headed out somewhere, has someplace to go. It’s not a good place. He’s been talking to people and not about anything good and he’s not going to inform me right now. Full disclosure and joy. When there is such a thing, it is only a taste, a hint of what we don’t have the rest of the time.

“You met on Wednesday and then on Thursday. Discussing the Wally Jamison and Mark Bishop cases here at the CFC.” I go back to that. “And I assume Jack was in on the Mark Bishop discussion as well. He was involved in both discussions. And you didn’t mention this a little while ago when we were talking in the car.”

“Not such a little while ago. More than five hours ago. And a lot has happened. There have been developments since we were in the car, as you know. Not the least of which is what we now realize is another murder. Number three.”

“You’re linking the man from Norton’s Woods to Mark Bishop and Wally Jamison.”

“Very possibly. In fact, I’d say yes.”

“What about the meetings last week? With Jack? He was there,” I push.

“Yes. Last Wednesday and Thursday. In your office.”

“What do you mean my office? This building? This floor?”

“Your personal office.” Benton indicates my office next door.

“In my office. Jack conducted meetings in my office. I see.”

“He conducted both meetings in your office. At your conference-room table in there.”

“He has his own conference table.” I look at the black lacquered oval table with six ergonomic chairs that I got at a government auction.

Benton doesn’t respond. He knows as well as I do that Fielding’s inappropriate decision to use my personal office has nothing to do with the furniture. I think of what Lucy mentioned about sweeping my office for covert surveillance devices, although she never directly said who might be doing the spying or if anyone was. The most likely candidate for the sort of individual who might bug my office and get away with it is my niece. Maybe motivated by the knowledge that Fielding was helping himself to what isn’t rightfully his. I wonder if what’s been going on in my private space during my absence has been secretly recorded.

“And you never mentioned this to me at that time,” I continue. “You could have told me when it happened. You could have fully disclosed to me that he was using my damn office as if he’s the damn chief and director of this goddamn place.”

“The first I knew of it was last week when I met with him. I’m not saying I hadn’t heard things about the CFC and about him.”

“It would have been helpful if I’d known these things you were hearing.”

“Rumors. Gossip. I didn’t know certain things for a fact.”

“Then you should have told me a week ago when you knew it for a fact. On the Wednesday you had your first meeting and discovered it was in my office, in an office Jack didn’t have permission to use. What else haven’t you told me? What new developments?”

“I’m telling you as much as I can and when I can. I know you understand.”

“I don’t understand. You should have been telling me things all along. Lucy should have. Marino should have.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Betrayal is very simple.”

“No one is betraying you. Marino and Lucy aren’t. I’m certainly not.”

“Implying that somebody is. Just not the three of you.”

He is quiet.

“You and I talk every day, Benton. You should have told me,” I then say.

“Let’s see when I might have overwhelmed you with all this, overwhelmed you with a lot of things while you’ve been at Dover. When you’d call at five a.m. before you’d head over to Port Mortuary to take care of our fallen heroes? Or at midnight when you’d finally log out of your computer or quit studying for your boards?”

He doesn’t say it defensively or unkindly, but I get his not-so-subtle point, and it’s justified. I’m being unfair. I’m being hypocritical. Whose idea was it that when we have virtually no time for each other we shouldn’t dwell on work or domestic minutiae or they will be all that’s left? Like cancer, I’m quick to offer my clever medical analogies and brilliant insights when he’s the psychologist, he’s the one who used to head the FBI’s profiling unit at Quantico, he’s the one on the faculty of Harvard’s Department of Psychiatry. But it’s me with all the wisdom, all the profound examples, comparing work and niggling domestic details and emotional injuries to cancers, to scarring, to necrosis, and my prognostications that if we’re not careful, one day there’s no healthy tissue left and death will follow. I feel embarrassed. I feel shallow.

“No, I didn’t approach certain subjects until we were driving here, and now I’m telling you more, telling you what I can,” Benton says to me with stoical calm, as if we are in a session of his and any moment he will simply announce we have to stop.

I won’t stop until I know what I must. Some things he must tell me. It’s not just fairness, it’s about survival, and I realize I’m feeling unsure of Benton as if I don’t quite know him anymore. He’s my husband, and I’m touched by a perception that something has been altered, a new ingredient has been added to the house special.

What is it?

I study what I’m intuiting as if I can taste what has changed.

“I mentioned my concern that Jack’s interpretation of Mark Bishop’s injuries is problematic,” Benton goes on, and he’s guarded. He’s calculating every word he says as if someone else is listening or he will be reporting our conversation to others. “Well, based on what you’ve described about the hammer marks on the little boy’s head, Jack’s interpretation is just damn wrong, couldn’t be more wrong, and I suspected it at the time when he was going over the case with us. I suspected he was lying.”

“‘Us’?”

“I told you I’ve heard things, but I honestly haven’t been around Jack.”

“Why do you say ‘honestly’? As opposed to
dishonestly,
Benton?”

“I’m always honest with you, Kay.”

“Of course you aren’t, but now is not the time to go into it.”

“Now isn’t. I know you understand.” And he holds my stare for a long moment. He’s telling me to please let it go.

“All right. I’m sorry.” I will let it go, but I don’t want to.

“I hadn’t seen him for months, and what I saw for myself was… Well, it was pretty obvious during those discussions last week that something’s off with him, severely off,” Benton resumes. “He looked bad. His thoughts were racing all over the map. He was hyperfluent, grandiose, hypomanic, aggressive, and red-faced, as if he might explode. I certainly felt he wasn’t being truthful, that he was deliberately misleading us.”

“What do you mean ‘us’?” And it begins to occur to me what I’m picking up.

“Has he ever been in a psychiatric hospital, been in treatment, maybe been diagnosed with a mood disorder? He ever mentioned anything like that to you?” Benton questions me in a way that I find unexpected and unnerving, and I’m reminded of what I sensed in the car when we were driving here. Only now it’s more pronounced, more recognizable.

He is acting the way he used to when he was still an agent, when he was empowered by the federal government to enforce the law. I detect an authority and confidence he hasn’t manifested in years, a sure-footedness he lacked after his reemergence from protective deep cover. He came back feeling lost, weak, like nothing more than an academician, he often complained.
Emasculated,
he would say.
The FBI eats its young, and they’ve eaten me,
he would say.
That’s my reward for going after an organized-crime cartel. I finally get my life back and don’t want what’s left of it,
he would say.
It’s a husk. I’m a husk. I love you, but please understand I’m not what I was.

“He ever been delusional or violent?” Benton is asking me, and it isn’t just a clinician talking.

I’m feeling interrogated.

“He had to expect you would tell me he’s been using my office as if it’s his. Or that I’d find out.” I think of Lucy again, of spying and covert recordings.

“I know he has a temper,” Benton says, “but I’m talking about physical violence possibly accompanied by dissociative fugue, disappearing for hours, days, weeks, with little or no recall. What we’re seeing with some of these men and women who return from war, disappearances and amnesia triggered by severe trauma and often confused with malingering. The same thing Johnny Donahue is supposedly suffering from, only I’m not sure how much of it has been suggested to that poor damn kid. I wonder where the idea came from, if someone’s suggested it to him.”

He says it as if he really doesn’t wonder it.

“Jack’s certainly famous for coming across as a malingerer, of avoiding his responsibilities going back to the beginning of time,” Benton then says.

I created Fielding.

“What haven’t you told me about him?” Benton goes on.

I made Fielding what he is. He is my monster.

“A psychiatric history?” Benton says. “Off-limits even to me, even to the FBI. I could find out, but I won’t violate that boundary.”

Benton and the FBI. One and the same again. Not a street agent again. I can’t imagine that. A criminal investigative analyst, a criminal intelligence analyst, a threat analyst. The Department of Justice has so many analysts, agents who are a combination academic and tactical. If you’re going to go to prison or get shot, may as well be at the hand of a cop who’s got a Ph.D.

“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.