Port Mortuary (51 page)

“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.”

“We did start an AFIP fellowship program. In those days there weren’t that many offices if you were AFIP and wanted to specialize in forensics. So we added Richmond. And now, of course, us. The CFC. We’ll be gearing up for that soon. Any minute I’ve got to get that going.”

“Politics,” Benton says again as he takes a drink of Scotch. “You’ve always felt guilty about something, and for the longest time I thought it was Jack. Because you’d had an affair with him, repeating his original injury. A powerful woman in charge of him has sex with him, victimizing him again, returning him to the scene of the original crime. For you? That would have been unpardonable.”

“Except I didn’t.”

“You promise.”

“I promise.”

“Well, you did something.” He’s not going to stop until we have it before us.

“Yes, I did, but it was before Jack,” I answer.

“You did what you were ordered to do, Kay. And you’ve got to let it go,” he says, because he knows. It’s obvious he does.

“I never told their families,” I reply, and Benton doesn’t say anything. “The two women murdered in Cape Town. I couldn’t call their families and tell them what really happened. They think it was racism, Afrikaans gang members during Apartheid. A high crime rate of blacks killing whites suited certain political leaders back then. They wanted it to be true. The more, the better.”

“Those leaders are gone now, Kay.”

“You should make your phone calls, Benton. Call Douglas or whoever and tell them about Dawn Kincaid and who she probably is and the tests I’ve ordered.”

“The Reagan administration is long gone, Kay.” Benton’s going to make me talk about it, and I’m convinced it’s been talked about before. Briggs probably said something to him because Briggs knows damn well how haunted I am.

“What I did isn’t long gone,” I reply.

“You didn’t do a damn thing that was wrong. You have nothing to do with their deaths. I don’t have to know all the details to say that much,” Benton says as he laces his fingers in mine, our joined hands gently rising and sinking in rhythm to Sock’s breathing.

“I feel as if I had everything to do with it,” I answer.

“You didn’t,” he says. “Other people did, and you were forced to be silent. Do you know how often it is I can’t tell what I know? My whole life has been like that. The alternative is to make things worse. That’s the test. Does telling make it worse and cause others to be persecuted and killed.
Primum non nocere.
First, do no harm. That’s what I weigh everything against, and I sure as hell know you do the same.”

I don’t want a lecture right now.

“Do you think she did it?” I ask as Sock breathes slowly, contentedly, as if he’s lived here always and is home. “Killed all of them?”

“Now I’m wondering.” He looks at his drink, and it turns the color of honey in the firelight.

“To put Jack out of his misery?”

“She probably hated him,” Benton says. “That’s why she would have been drawn to him, wanted to get to know him as an adult, if that’s what she did.”

“Well, I don’t think he shackled Wally Jamison in his cellar and hacked him to death. If Wally came to the house in Salem willingly, probably it was upon Dawn’s invitation, to see her. Maybe play out some fantasy, a game, a macabre sex game on Halloween. Maybe she did a similar thing to Mark Bishop, and when she has them under control, under her spell, exactly where she wants them, she strikes. A rush, a thrill, for someone diabolical like that.”

“Liam Saltz’s second wife, Eli’s mother, is South African,” Benton says. “As is her husband from that earlier marriage, Eli’s biological father, and Eli was wearing a ring that likely was taken from the Donahue house, likely taken by Dawn along with the typewriter, the stationery. Maybe used the duct tape to collect fibers, trace evidence, DNA from the Donahue house, while she was at it. Make it look like the letter really did come from the mother, making sure that Johnny’s alibi was weakened further by it.”

“Now you’re thinking irrationally like me,” I reply wryly. “That’s what I believe happened, or close to it.”

“The game,” Benton muses in that tone he has when he hates what someone has done. “Games and more games, elaborate, intricate dramas. I can’t wait to meet the fucking bitch. I really can’t wait.”

“Maybe you’ve had enough Scotch.”

“Not half enough. Who better to manipulate Johnny Donahue than someone like that, some attractive brain trust of a woman who’s older? To plant the idea in that poor kid’s head that he murdered a six-year-old while he was delusional and having memory lapses because of drugs she was spiking his meds with? Spiking Fielding’s meds with. Who knows who else? A poisonous person who destroys the people she’s supposed to love, pays them back for every crime committed against her, and you pile on her genetic predisposition and maybe the same cocktail Fielding was on?”

“That would be the perfect storm, as they say.”

“Let’s see what kind of killing machine I can be and get away with it,” he says in that tone of his, and if I could look into his eyes, I know what would be in them. Complete contempt. “And after it’s ended, no one is left standing but her. Fucking bulletproof.”

“You could be right.” And I remember the box I left in the car. “Why don’t you make your phone calls.”

“Borderline, sadistic, manipulative, narcissistic.”

“I guess some people are everything.” I set down my glass on the coffee table and ease Sock off my lap and onto the rug.

“Some people just about are.”

“I forgot the box Briggs left for me,” I say as I get up from the sofa. “And I’ll take Sock out back. You ready to go potty?” I ask the dog. “Then I’ll warm up pizza. I don’t suppose we have anything for salad. What the hell have you eaten the entire time I’ve been gone? Let me guess. You run over to Chang An for Chinese food and live on that for the next three days.”

“That would be really good right now.”

“You’ve probably been doing it every week.”

“I’d rather have your pizza anytime.”

“Don’t try to be nice,” I reply.

I walk into the kitchen for Sock’s lead and slip it around his neck and find a flashlight in a drawer, an old Maglite that Marino gave me aeons ago, long and black aluminum, powered by fat D batteries, reminding me of the old days, when police used to carry flashlights the size of nightsticks instead of everything being so small, like the SureFire lights Lucy likes and what Benton keeps in his glove box. I disarm the alarm system and worry about Sock, about how cold it is, realizing as we go down the back steps in the dark that I didn’t bother with a coat for me, and I notice that the motion-sensor light attached to the garage is out. I try to remember if it was out an hour or so ago when we got home, but I’m not sure. There is so much to fix, so much to change, so much to do. Where will I start when tomorrow comes?

Benton didn’t lock the door to the detached garage, because what would be the point with an open window the size of a big-screen TV? Inside the remodeled carriage house it is dark and bitterly cold, and air blows in through the open black square that I can barely make out, and I turn on the Maglite and it doesn’t work. The batteries must be dead, and how stupid of me not to check before I left the house. I point the key at the SUV, and the lock chirps but the interior light doesn’t go on because it’s a damn Bureau car, and Special Agent Douglas isn’t about to have an interior light that comes on. I feel around on the backseat for the box, which is quite large, and I realize it won’t be easy to carry it and deal with Sock. In fact, I can’t.

“I’m sorry, Sock,” I say to the dog as I feel him shivering against my legs. “I know it’s cold in here. Just give me a minute. I’m so sorry. But as you’re discovering, I’m a very stupid person.”

I use the car key to slit the tape on top of the box and pull out a vest that is familiar even if I’ve not examined this particular brand, but I recognize the feel of tough nylon and the stiffness of ceramic-Kevlar plates that Briggs or someone has already inserted into the internal pockets. I tear open the Velcro straps on the sides to open up the vest so I can sling it over my shoulder. I feel the weight of the vest draped over me as I shove the car door shut, and Sock jumps away from me like a rabbit. He yanks the lead out of my hand.

“It’s just the car door, Sock. It’s all right, come here, Sock….” I start to call out at the same time something else moves inside the garage near the open window, and I turn around to see what it is, but it is too dark to see anything.

“Sock? Is that you over there?”

The dark, frigid air moves around me, and the blow to my back feels like a hammer hitting me between my shoulder blades, as if a loud hissing dragon is attacking me, and I lose my balance.

A piercing scream and hissing, and a warm, wet mist spatters my face as I fall hard against the SUV and swing with all my might at whatever it is. The Maglite cracks like a bat against something hard that gives beneath the weight of the blow and then moves, and I swing again and hit something again, something that feels different. I smell the iron smell of blood and taste it on my lips and in my mouth as I swing again and again at air, and then the lights are on and the glare is blinding and I’m covered with a fine film of blood as if I’ve been spray-painted with it. Benton is inside the garage, pointing a pistol at the woman in a huge black coat facedown on the rubberized floor. I notice blood pooling under her right bloody hand, and near it, a severed fingertip with a glittery white French nail, and near that, a knife with a thin steel blade and a thick black handle with a release button on the shiny metal guard.

“Kay? Kay? Are you all right? Kay! Are you all right?”

I realize Benton is shouting at me as I crouch by the woman and touch the side of her neck and find her pulse. I make sure she is breathing and turn her over to check her pupils. Neither of them is fixed. Her face is bloody from the Maglite smashing into it, and I am startled by the resemblance, the dark blond hair cut very short, the strong features, and the full lower lip that look like Jack Fielding’s. Even the small ears close to the sides of her head look like his, and I feel the strength in her upper body, her shoulders, although she isn’t a large person, maybe five-foot-six or -seven and slender but with large bones like her dead father. All this is flooding my senses as I tell Benton to rush into the house and call 911, and to bring a container of ice.