junk and never throwing anything out. This is a new compulsion.”
“Fear,” Benton says, a computer notebook in his lap, his phone on the table next to his chair. “Afraid he might get rid of something or lose sight of it and then he needs it.”
“Well, I’m texting him again. No excuses, he’s coming home with us. I don’t want him down here by himself when he’s not thinking clearly and in the throes of some new compulsion. We’re landing in Charleston, no matter what he says, and if need be, I’ll go to his condo and haul him out of there.”
“Not many compulsions left for him to choose from,” Benton says, as he skims through electronic files. “No booze, no cigarettes. He doesn’t want to get fat, so he’s not going to turn to food, and he starts hoarding. Sex is a better compulsion. Relatively inexpensive and requires no storage space.” He opens another e-mail that I can tell from where I sit is from the FBI, possibly an agent named Phil whom Benton was on the phone with a short while ago.
It has been a busy morning inside the living room of our hotel suite, our camp with its dramatic view of the river and the port. Since the sun came up, Benton and I have been preparing to return north while processing information that continues to be gathered at what seems the speed of light. I’m not accustomed to an investigation being worked like a war, with multiple attacks on multiple fronts made by different branches of the military and law enforcement, all of it executed with a force and pace that is dazzling. But most cases I work aren’t a threat to national security and of interest to the president, and labs and investigative teams have pulled full pitch, as Lucy put it.
So far information has been well contained and kept out of the news as the FBI and Homeland Security continue their relentless quest to make sure that nothing Roberta Price was tampering with might have found its way into a military base exchange, on a destroyer or airlifter loaded with troops, in a submarine armed with nuclear missiles, in the hands of soldiers in combat or anywhere. DNA and fingerprint analyses and comparisons have been confirmed, and it is a fact that Roberta Price and Dawn Kincaid are different sides of the same evil, identical twins, or clones, as some investigators have been referring to siblings who grew up without each other and then reunited to form a catalyst that created hideous technologies and caused untold numbers of deaths.
“The fear of it,” I say. “That’s what has Marino running in circles and out of town. He sees death every day, but when it’s cases you work, you are deluded into feeling you can control it or that if you understand it well enough, it won’t happen to you.”
“Smoking that cigarette at Monck’s Pharmacy got too close for comfort,” Benton says, as his cell phone rings.
“After what he saw in the root cellar? I guess so,” I agree. “He certainly knows what could have happened.”
“I can give you a suggested approach,” Benton says to whoever’s just called. “Based on the fact that this is someone who feels completely justified. She’s done the world a favor by getting rid of bad people.”
I recognize he’s talking about Tara Grimm, who’s been arrested but not yet charged with any crime. The FBI is making deals, willing to negotiate with her in exchange for information about others at the GPFW, such as Officer Macon, who might have assisted her in meting out the punishment she decided certain inmates deserved, and doing so hand in glove with a diabolically clever poisoner who needed to practice.
“You have to appeal to her truth,” Benton says over the phone. “And her truth is she did nothing wrong. Giving Barrie Lou Rivers a last smoke with a cigarette that had a filter impregnated with … Yes, I would say it that directly, but couching it in your understanding of why she wouldn’t think it was wrong…. Yes, a good way to put it. About to be executed, was going to die anyway, a merciful ending compared to what she did to all those people she chronically poisoned with arsenic. Well, right. It wasn’t merciful, smoking something with botulinum toxin, a horrible way to die, but leave out that part.”
Benton finishes his coffee, listening, staring out at the river, and says, “Stick with what she wants to believe about herself. Right, you hate bad people, too, and can understand the temptation to take justice into your own hands…. That’s the theory. Maybe Tara Grimm, whom you should refer to as Warden Grimm, to acknowledge her power … It’s always about power, you got it. Maybe she will offer it up, that it was a cigarette or the last meal, whatever, but all she did was ensure that Barrie Lou Rivers and the others got what they deserved, had done unto them what they’d done to their victims, an eye for an eye with a little something extra. A twist of the knife for good measure.”
“I don’t know what’s going to give him insight about it,” I say when Benton gets off the phone, because as bad as Marino feels about what happened to Jaime, it’s his nature for him to feel worse about what might have happened to him.
“He’s not exactly strong in the insight department,” Benton replies. “He took a stupid chance. It’s like drinking and getting into a car and then driving on a highway that’s had a lot of accidents. I hope Phil does what I said,” he then says, and Phil is one of many agents I’ve met these past two days. “Someone like that and you have to appeal to their belief in what they’ve done. Feed right into their narcissism. They were doing the world a favor.”
“Yes, people who believe that. Hitler, for example.”
“Except Tara Grimm wasn’t obvious,” Benton says. “Came across as the great humanitarian who ran such an exemplary prison she was held up as a model. Job offers, officials showing up for tours.”
“Yes, I saw all the awards on her walls.”
“The day you were there,” he adds, “a group from a men’s prison in California had gotten the royal tour and were thinking of hiring her as their first female warden.”
“Would be an irony if she ended up in Bravo Pod. Maybe in Lola Daggette’s former cell,” I reply.
“I’ll pass it along,” Benton says drily. “That and Lucy’s suggestion about Gabe Mullery being the next of kin who decides to pull Dawn Kincaid’s plug.”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” I answer, although Gabe Mullery won’t be the one deciding to disconnect Dawn Kincaid’s life support.
Apparently he’d never heard of her beyond a vague recollection of the name or a similar one that was in the news, relating to murders in Massachusetts. He knew his wife, Roberta Price, had been raised by a family in Atlanta that they sometimes saw on the holidays, but he knew nothing about a sister.
“My guess is she’ll be transferred to a different facility,” I suppose. “A ward of the state, kept alive on a ventilator until the day comes she’s clinically dead.”
“More consideration than any of the victims got,” Benton says. “That’s usually the case. I just feel bad I didn’t listen to Marino when he pointed out the elevated adrenaline and CO levels, and that smoking has been banned from prisons, so why might Barrie Lou Rivers have had that, and I didn’t pay attention because I wasn’t interested at the time. I was focused on something else. Maybe if I tell him that, he won’t be so hard on himself for not paying attention when he stopped by Monck’s Pharmacy and bummed a cigarette.”
“Maybe you won’t be so hard on me for the same reason.” Benton looks up and meets my eyes, because we’ve had a few cross words about it. “You told me something important, and I had my mind on something else. Understandably.”
“I can make us another coffee,” I decide.
“May as well. It’s not putting a dent. I’m sorry I wasn’t nice.”
“So you’ve said.” I get up from my chair as a container ship glides by our windows, stacked high and pushed by tugs. “You don’t have to be nice when it’s work. Just take me seriously. That’s all I ask.”
“I always take you seriously. I was just taking other things more seriously at the time.”
“Jaime, and then he bums a cigarette that could have killed him, and yes, he’s traumatized,” I say, because I don’t want to discuss Benton’s apologies anymore, and the kitchenette suddenly seems starkly bare and lonely, as if we’re already gone from here. “And he’s going to have to figure it out or he’ll do something else that’s not very smart, like drinking again or quitting work completely and spending the rest of his days fishing with that charter boat captain friend of his.”
I place a hotel coffee pod in the hotel brewer, because Marino appropriated the Keurig I bought.
“Smoking outside the drugstore where a poisoner works,” I go on. “Not that anyone was certain of that yet, but he was asking questions about her. He was thinking about it.”
“What did you tell him? Don’t eat or drink anything unless we’re damn sure about it,” Benton says, as I carry in his coffee.
“Like the Tylenol scare. When you realize what’s possible, it makes you not want to trust anything anymore. Either that or you go into denial. After what we’ve seen, denial’s probably my choice.” I return to the kitchenette as
