downshifts the Tiptronic transmission and lightly touches the brakes.
“Maybe we should pull over.” I can’t see the road as the headlights bounce off whiteness swarming all around us.
“Some freakish storm cell, like a microburst.” He leans close to the steering wheel, peering straight ahead, as angry gusts of wind buffet us. “I think the best thing is to drive out of it.”
“Maybe we should stop.”
“We’re on pavement. I can see which lane we’re in. Nothing’s coming.” He looks in the mirrors. “Nothing’s behind us.”
“I hope you’re right.” I’m not just talking about the snow. Everything seems ominous, as if sinister forces surround us, as if we’re being warned.
“It wasn’t a smart thing for her to do. An emotional thing, maybe even a well-intended thing, but not smart.” Benton drives very slowly through chaotic whiteness. “It’s hearsay, but it won’t be helpful. It’s best you don’t call her.”
“I’ll need to show the letter to the police,” I reply. “Or at least tell them about it, so they can decide what they want to do.”
“She’s just made things worse.” He says it as if he’s the one deciding things. “Don’t get mixed up in this by calling her.”
“Other than her trying to influence the medical examiner’s office, how has she made things worse?” I ask.
“Several key points she incorrectly makes. Johnny doesn’t read horror or supernatural or violent fiction or go to movies like that, at least not that I’m aware of, and that detail won’t help him. Also, Mark Bishop wasn’t murdered mid-afternoon. It was closer to four. Mrs. Donahue may not realize what she just implied about her son,” Benton says as the white squall ends as suddenly as it began.
Flakes are small and icy again, swirling like sand over pavement and accumulating in shallow drifts on the roadsides.
“Johnny was at The Biscuit with his friend, that’s true,” Benton continues, “but according to him, he was there until two, not one. Apparently, he and his friend had been there numerous times, but I’m not aware of him having some rigid regimen of being there every Saturday with her from ten to one.”
The Biscuit is on Washington Street, barely a fifteen-minute walk from our house in Cambridge, and I think of Saturdays when I’ve been home, when Benton and I have wandered into the small cafe with its chalkboard menu and wooden benches. I wonder if Johnny and his friend were ever in there when we were.
“What does his friend say about what time they left the cafe?” I ask.
“She claims she got up from the table around one p.m. and left him sitting there because he was acting strange and refused to leave with her. According to her statement to the police, Johnny was talking about going to Salem to get his fortune read, was talking wildly about that, and was still at the table when she walked out the door.”
I find it interesting that Benton would have looked at a police statement or know the details of what a witness said. His role isn’t to determine guilt or innocence or even to care but to evaluate if the patient is telling the truth or malingering and is competent to stand trial.
“Someone with Asperger’s would have a hard time with the concept of a fortune being read or cards being read or anything of that nature,” Benton is saying, and the more he tells me, the more perplexed I am.
He’s talking to me as if he’s a detective and we’re working the case together, yet he’s cryptic when it comes to Jack Fielding. There’s nothing accidental about it. My husband rarely lets information slip, even if he gives the appearance otherwise. When he thinks I should know information he can’t tell me, he finds a way for me to figure it out. If he decides it’s best I don’t know, he won’t help me. It’s the frustrating way we live, and at least I can say I’m never bored with him.
“Johnny can’t think abstractly, can’t comprehend metaphors. He’s very concrete,” Benton is saying.
“What about other people inside the cafe?” I ask. “Could anybody in the cafe verify what the friend said or what Johnny claims?”
“Nothing more definitive than he and Dawn Kincaid were in there that Saturday morning,” Benton says, and I don’t remember when I’ve seen him so disturbed by someone he has evaluated. “Don’t know about it being a weekly routine, and by the time Johnny confessed, several days had passed. Amazing what shitty memories people have, and then they start guessing.”
“Then all you have is what Johnny says and now what his mother says in this letter,” I reiterate what I’m hearing. “He says he left The Biscuit at two, which might not have given him enough time to get to Salem and commit the murder at around four. And his mother is saying he left at one, which could have given him enough time to do it.”
“As I said, it’s not helpful. What’s in his mother’s letter is quite bad for him. So far the only real alibi anyone can offer that might show his confession is bullshit is a problematic timeline. But an hour makes all the difference, or it could.”
I imagine Johnny getting up from his table at The Biscuit at around one p.m. and heading to Salem. Depending on traffic and when he was actually out of Cambridge or Somerville and heading north on I-95, he could have been at the Bishops’ house in the historic district by two or two-thirty.
“Does he have a car?” I ask.
“He doesn’t drive.”
“A taxi, the train? Not a ferry this time of year. They don’t start running again until spring, and he would have had to board it in Boston. But you’re right. Without a car, it would have taken him longer to get there. An hour would make a difference for someone who had to find transportation.”
“I just don’t understand where she got that detail,” Benton says. “Well, maybe from him. Maybe he’s changed his story yet again. Johnny said he left The Biscuit at two, not one, but maybe he’s changed that rather critical detail because he thinks it’s what someone wants to hear. However, it would be unusual, very unusual.”
“You were just with him this morning.”
“I’m not the one who would influence him to change a detail.”
Benton is saying that the detail is new and he doesn’t believe that Johnny has changed his story about what time he left the cafe. It would seem Mrs. Donahue simply made a mistake, but when I try to imagine that, something feels wrong.
“How would he have gotten to Salem at all?” I ask.
“He could have taken a taxi or a train, but there’s no evidence he did either. No sightings of him, no receipts found, nothing to prove he was ever in Salem or had any connection with the Bishop family. Nothing except his confession,” Benton says as his eyes cut to the rearview mirror. “And what’s important about that is his story is exactly what’s been in the news, and he changes the details as news accounts and theories change. That part of his mother’s letter is accurate. He parrots details word for word. Including if somebody suggests a scenario or information—leads him, in other words. Suggestibility, vulnerable to manipulation, acting in a way that generates suspicion, hallmark signs in Asperger’s.” He glances in the mirror again. “And attention to detail, to minutiae that can seem bizarre to others. Like what time it is. He’s always maintained he left The Biscuit at two p.m. Three minutes past two, to be exact. You ask Johnny what time it is or what time he did something, and he’ll tell you practically to the second.”
“So why would he change that detail?”
“In my opinion, he wouldn’t.”
“Seems like he’d be better off saying he left earlier if he really wants people to believe he murdered Mark Bishop.”
“It’s not that he wants people to believe it. It’s that he believes it. Not because of what he remembers but because of what he doesn’t remember and because of what’s been suggested to him.”
“By whom? Sounds like he confessed before he was ever a suspect and interrogated. So he wasn’t enticed into a false confession by the police, for example.”
“He doesn’t remember. He’s convinced he suffered a dissociative episode after he left The Biscuit at two p.m., somehow got to Salem and killed a boy with a nail gun—”
“He didn’t,” I interrupt. “That much I can tell you with certainty. He didn’t kill Mark Bishop with a nail gun. Nobody did.”
