—”
“Ben,” I heard a voice say behind me. “Please.” David was back with the leash.
Ben looked away, but couldn’t hide the effort required to keep his anger in check. He scowled at his gloved hands for a long moment, then went back to scraping soil.
David leashed Bingle and made sure that the dog would heel at my command, then he walked with us toward the forest. He seemed preoccupied.
“Bingle won’t stay with me without a leash?” I asked.
“Hmm? Oh — no, sorry. He understands that when I give his lead to someone else, he has to stay with that person. Otherwise, I couldn’t depend on him not to take a notion to come and see what I was up to. He might run off and leave you in the middle of the woods.” He smiled. “I could probably make him find you, of course, but it’s easier on everybody if we just give him the message ahead of time.”
“I see — so the leash is to make sure I don’t get lost.”
He laughed. “Exactly.”
I thought he would stop at the edge of the forest, but he continued a little way into it. “About Ben,” he said suddenly. “He has this problem with reporters. I know he can be abrupt—”
“Abrupt?”
“Rude.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, rude,” he admitted. “But you shouldn’t take it personally. I know that outside of your profession, he thinks you’re okay.”
“I’ll have to remember to congratulate myself!”
“I’m not doing a very good job with this, am I?”
“You’re doing fine. Sorry. I shouldn’t take my anger at him out on you. If you’re going to tell me that he’s good-hearted, I already know that.”
“You do?” he asked, incredulous.
“Yes, and not just because Parrish is here to hold up for comparison. I think I first really noticed it when Ben asked you to have Bingle sleep with me — on a night when I think he had come to borrow the dog to ease his own nightmares.”
David nodded.
“Besides, Judge Bingle likes Ben,” I said.
David went down to eye level with Bingle, and caressed the dog’s ruff and ears. Bingle lowered his head, butted it against David’s chest, and held it there, making soft, low sounds of pleasure. “Bingle’s a good judge,” David said. “He likes you, too.”
“The feeling is mutual. But I suspect you were going to try to make a few excuses for your other friend?”
“Not excuses, really. I just thought if you knew — he has his reasons for mistrusting the press.”
“Such as?”
“Just this year, he—” He halted, shook his head, then thought for a moment before saying, “A couple of years ago, when he was working on a plane crash, a TV reporter overheard Ben talking to someone — using one of those spy-type microphones.”
“A parabolic mike.”
“Yes. She went on the air, and misquoted him. That happens to all of us, but this was misinformation that led the victims’ families to hope that they’d be — that the remains would be relatively intact. Do you know what really happens — in a high-impact crash, I mean?”
“Yes,” I said. “The physics aren’t in anybody’s favor.”
“Right. Most of the time, we make identifications on fragments.”
“So the families were upset with him.”
“Yes. I don’t think the thing that bothered him most was that the families were angry with him. He just hated seeing them tormented. People who were grieving, already unable to really accept what had happened, and then this expectation — Ben said it amounted to a form of public torture. I think he was right.”
“So this one incident has tarred all reporters with the same brush?”
“I wish I could tell you it was one incident. There have been photos taken in temporary morgues by hidden cameras. Misinformation about missing persons — you can’t imagine how painful that is for the victims’ families!”
“If you want me to say that I’m proud of everyone in my profession—”
“No, no, of course not. I can tell you about colleagues of ours who make us shake our heads. I’m just trying to help you understand Ben, I guess. Like I said, I don’t want you to take it personally.”
“I don’t,” I said. “But over the long run, Ben won’t be doing you any favors if he’s so openly hostile to the press.”
“There’s more to it than — well, I don’t have any business talking about him in this way, I suppose. I should get back to help him out.”
“Wait a minute, David — please.”
