“I hope you’ll get your chance with him,” Benton said.
The saying was, if a broken window were the victim, Berger could get a confession from the rock.
“I’m fascinated by his cooperation with a group of people he certainly doesn’t trust,” she said. “Yet he’s rather much given us free rein. Biological samples and his statement, as long as Kay’s the one he gives them to. His clothing, his car, apartment, as long as Kay is right there. Why?”
“Based on his fears?” Benton said. “I would venture to say that he wants to prove there’s no evidence linking him to Terri Bridges’s murder. Most of all, prove this to Kay.”
“He should be more worried about proving it to me.”
“He doesn’t trust you. He does trust Kay. Trusts her irrationally, and that worries me a lot. But back to his mind-set. He wants to prove to her he’s a good guy. He didn’t do anything wrong. As long as she believes in him, he’s safe. Physically, and in how he views himself. At this point, he needs her validation. Without her, he almost doesn’t know who he is anymore.”
“Guess what. We do know who he is and what he probably did.”
Benton said, “You need to understand this fear of mind control is very real to thousands of people who believe they are victims of mind weapons. That the government is spying on them, reprogramming them, controlling their thoughts, their entire lives, through movies, computer games, chemicals, microwaves, implants. And the fears have gotten exponentially worse in the past eight years. I was walking through Central Park not so long ago, and here’s this guy talking to the squirrels. I watched him for a while, and he turns around and tells me he’s a victim of the very thing we’re discussing. One of the ways he copes is to visit the squirrels, and if he can get them to eat peanuts out of his hands, then he knows he’s still grounded. He’s not letting the bastards get him.”
“That’s New York, all right. And the pigeons wear homing devices.”
“And Tesla gravity radar waves are being used to brainwash the woodpeckers,” Benton said.
Berger frowned. “Do we have woodpeckers here?”
“Ask Lucy about advances in technology, about experiments that sound like a schizophrenic’s bad dreams,” he said. “Only this stuff is real. I don’t doubt Oscar thinks it’s real.”
“I don’t think anybody doubts that. They just think he’s crazy. And they worry his craziness led him to murder his girlfriend. I alluded to his rather unusual protection devices. A plastic shield glued to the back of his cell phone. Another plastic shield in the back pocket of his jeans. A magnet-mounted external antenna on his SUV that seems to have no purpose. Investigator Morales—you haven’t met him yet—says this is anti-radiation stuff. That— and let me see if I can remember this right. A TriField meter?”
“To detect frequency-weighted electric fields in the ELF and VLF range. A detector, in other words. An electromagnetic measurement tool,” Benton said. “You hold it up in the middle of a room to see if you get readings that might indicate you’re being electronically monitored.”
“Does it work?”
“It’s popular in ghost hunting,” Benton said.
For the third time, Investigator P. R. Marino refused tea, coffee, soda, or a glass of water. She tried harder.
“It’s five o’clock somewhere,” she parroted her husband’s old quip. “How about a little spot of bourbon?”
“I’m all set,” Investigator Marino said.
“You sure? It’s no trouble. I might have a taste of it myself.”
She returned to the living room.
“No, thanks.”
She sat back down and there was no might about it. She’d poured herself a generous one. Ice rattled as she set down the glass on a coaster.
“I’m not usually like this,” she said from the corduroy couch. “I’m not a drunk.”
“I don’t go around judging people,” Investigator Marino said, his eyes lingering on her drink as if it were a pretty woman.
“Sometimes a person needs something for the nerves,” she said. “I’d be dishonest if I pretended you didn’t scare me a little.”
She was still shaky after a good ten minutes of back and forth about whether he really was the police. Holding up a badge to the peephole was a trick she’d seen numerous times in violent movies, and had the 911 operator not stayed on the line, assuring her that the man at her door was legitimate, and continued to stay on the line while she let him in, he wouldn’t be sitting in her living room right now.
Investigator Marino was a big man, with weathered skin and a red hue to his complexion that caused her concern about his blood pressure. Mostly bald with unfortunate wisps of gray hair in a crescent moon around his pate, he had the look and demeanor of one who did everything the hard way, listened to no one, and certainly wasn’t to be trifled with. She was quite sure he could pick up two thugs by the scruff of the neck, one in each hand, and simultaneously toss them across the room as if they were made of hay. She suspected he’d cut quite a figure when he was young. She also suspected he was single at this time, or would be better off if he were, because if he had a sweetheart and she let him out the door looking the way he did, either she didn’t care about him or she was of questionable breeding.
Oh, how Shrew would love to give him a tip or two about the way he dressed. If a man was large-boned, then the rule was that cheap, skimpily cut suits, especially black ones, and white cotton shirts without a tie, and rubber-bottomed black leather lace-up shoes tended to make him look a bit like Herman Munster. But she wasn’t about to offer him advice, for fear he would react the same way her husband had, and she was careful not to study the investigator too closely.
Instead, she continued to make nervous comments and to reach for her drink, and to ask him if he wanted something as she sipped and set her drink back down. The more she talked and reached for her drink, the less he said as he occupied her husband’s favorite leather recliner.
Investigator Marino had yet to tell her the purpose of his visit.
Finally she said, “Well, enough about me. I’m sure you’re very busy. What kind of investigator did you say you are? Burglary, I imagine. This is the time of year for it, and if I had my way about it, I’d certainly live in a full- service building with a doorman. What happened across the street. I suppose that’s why you’re here.”
“I’d appreciate whatever you can tell me about it,” Investigator Marino said, and his huge presence in the recliner seemed to shrink the image she had of her husband sitting there. “You find out from the Post, or did a neighbor say something?”
“Neither one.”
“I’m curious because nothing much about it’s made the news yet. We’re not releasing details, for good reason. The less known at this time, the better. You can see the logic in that, right? So you and me having this private little conversation’s between the two of us. Nothing said to the neighbors or anyone. I’m a special investigator for the DA’s office. That translates into court. I know you wouldn’t want to do anything that might mess up a case in court. You ever heard of Jaime Berger?”
“Yes, I certainly have,” Shrew replied, regretting she’d implied she knew something, and worrying what trouble she’d just caused herself. “I appreciate her advocacy of animal rights.”
He looked silently at her. She looked silently at him until she couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Did I say something wrong?” she asked, reaching for her drink.
His glasses glinted as his attention poked around her apartment like a flashlight searching for something hidden or lost. He seemed especially interested in her extensive collection of porcelain and crystal dogs, and photographs of her with her husband and the various dogs they had owned throughout their lives together. She loved dogs. She loved them far more than her children.
Then the investigator stared down at the tan-and-blue braided rug under the old cherry coffee table.
“You got a dog?” he asked.
Obviously he’d noticed the tiny white-and-black dog hairs embedded in the rug, which weren’t really her fault. She’d had no success vacuuming them up, and didn’t feel like getting on her hands and knees, plucking them out, one at a time, as she continued to mourn the untimely death of Ivy.
