“Where were you before you picked me up at Hanscom?” I ask him. “What were you doing?”
“We have a lot to deal with, Kay. I’m afraid more than I thought.”
“Were you dressed in field clothes when you picked me up at the airport?” It occurs to me that he might not have been. He’s changed his clothes. Maybe he hasn’t done anything yet but is about to.
“I keep a bag in my car. As you know,” Benton says. “Since I never know when I might get called.”
“To go where? You’ve been called to go somewhere?”
He looks at me, then out the window at the chalky skyline of Boston in the snowy dark.
“Lucy says you’ve been on the phone.” I continue to prod him for information I can tell I’m not going to get right now.
“I’m afraid nonstop. I’m afraid there’s more than I thought,” and then he doesn’t continue. That’s all he’s going to say about it. He’s headed out somewhere, has someplace to go. It’s not a good place. He’s been talking to people and not about anything good and he’s not going to inform me right now. Full disclosure and joy. When there is such a thing, it is only a taste, a hint of what we don’t have the rest of the time.
“You met on Wednesday and then on Thursday. Discussing the Wally Jamison and Mark Bishop cases here at the CFC.” I go back to that. “And I assume Jack was in on the Mark Bishop discussion as well. He was involved in both discussions. And you didn’t mention this a little while ago when we were talking in the car.”
“Not such a little while ago. More than five hours ago. And a lot has happened. There have been developments since we were in the car, as you know. Not the least of which is what we now realize is another murder. Number three.”
“You’re linking the man from Norton’s Woods to Mark Bishop and Wally Jamison.”
“Very possibly. In fact, I’d say yes.”
“What about the meetings last week? With Jack? He was there,” I push.
“Yes. Last Wednesday and Thursday. In your office.”
“What do you mean my office? This building? This floor?”
“Your personal office.” Benton indicates my office next door.
“In my office. Jack conducted meetings in my office. I see.”
“He conducted both meetings in your office. At your conference-room table in there.”
“He has his own conference table.” I look at the black lacquered oval table with six ergonomic chairs that I got at a government auction.
Benton doesn’t respond. He knows as well as I do that Fielding’s inappropriate decision to use my personal office has nothing to do with the furniture. I think of what Lucy mentioned about sweeping my office for covert surveillance devices, although she never directly said who might be doing the spying or if anyone was. The most likely candidate for the sort of individual who might bug my office and get away with it is my niece. Maybe motivated by the knowledge that Fielding was helping himself to what isn’t rightfully his. I wonder if what’s been going on in my private space during my absence has been secretly recorded.
“And you never mentioned this to me at that time,” I continue. “You could have told me when it happened. You could have fully disclosed to me that he was using my damn office as if he’s the damn chief and director of this goddamn place.”
“The first I knew of it was last week when I met with him. I’m not saying I hadn’t heard things about the CFC and about him.”
“It would have been helpful if I’d known these things you were hearing.”
“Rumors. Gossip. I didn’t know certain things for a fact.”
“Then you should have told me a week ago when you knew it for a fact. On the Wednesday you had your first meeting and discovered it was in my office, in an office Jack didn’t have permission to use. What else haven’t you told me? What new developments?”
“I’m telling you as much as I can and when I can. I know you understand.”
“I don’t understand. You should have been telling me things all along. Lucy should have. Marino should have.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Betrayal is very simple.”
“No one is betraying you. Marino and Lucy aren’t. I’m certainly not.”
“Implying that somebody is. Just not the three of you.”
He is quiet.
“You and I talk every day, Benton. You should have told me,” I then say.
“Let’s see when I might have overwhelmed you with all this, overwhelmed you with a lot of things while you’ve been at Dover. When you’d call at five a.m. before you’d head over to Port Mortuary to take care of our fallen heroes? Or at midnight when you’d finally log out of your computer or quit studying for your boards?”
He doesn’t say it defensively or unkindly, but I get his not-so-subtle point, and it’s justified. I’m being unfair. I’m being hypocritical. Whose idea was it that when we have virtually no time for each other we shouldn’t dwell on work or domestic minutiae or they will be all that’s left? Like cancer, I’m quick to offer my clever medical analogies and brilliant insights when he’s the psychologist, he’s the one who used to head the FBI’s profiling unit at Quantico, he’s the one on the faculty of Harvard’s Department of Psychiatry. But it’s me with all the wisdom, all the profound examples, comparing work and niggling domestic details and emotional injuries to cancers, to scarring, to necrosis, and my prognostications that if we’re not careful, one day there’s no healthy tissue left and death will follow. I feel embarrassed. I feel shallow.
“No, I didn’t approach certain subjects until we were driving here, and now I’m telling you more, telling you what I can,” Benton says to me with stoical calm, as if we are in a session of his and any moment he will simply announce we have to stop.
I won’t stop until I know what I must. Some things he must tell me. It’s not just fairness, it’s about survival, and I realize I’m feeling unsure of Benton as if I don’t quite know him anymore. He’s my husband, and I’m touched by a perception that something has been altered, a new ingredient has been added to the house special.
What is it?
I study what I’m intuiting as if I can taste what has changed.
“I mentioned my concern that Jack’s interpretation of Mark Bishop’s injuries is problematic,” Benton goes on, and he’s guarded. He’s calculating every word he says as if someone else is listening or he will be reporting our conversation to others. “Well, based on what you’ve described about the hammer marks on the little boy’s head, Jack’s interpretation is just damn wrong, couldn’t be more wrong, and I suspected it at the time when he was going over the case with us. I suspected he was lying.”
“‘Us’?”
“I told you I’ve heard things, but I honestly haven’t been around Jack.”
“Why do you say ‘honestly’? As opposed to
“I’m always honest with you, Kay.”
“Of course you aren’t, but now is not the time to go into it.”
“Now isn’t. I know you understand.” And he holds my stare for a long moment. He’s telling me to please let it go.
“All right. I’m sorry.” I will let it go, but I don’t want to.
“I hadn’t seen him for months, and what I saw for myself was… Well, it was pretty obvious during those discussions last week that something’s off with him, severely off,” Benton resumes. “He looked bad. His thoughts were racing all over the map. He was hyperfluent, grandiose, hypomanic, aggressive, and red-faced, as if he might explode. I certainly felt he wasn’t being truthful, that he was deliberately misleading us.”
“What do you mean ‘us’?” And it begins to occur to me what I’m picking up.
“Has he ever been in a psychiatric hospital, been in treatment, maybe been diagnosed with a mood disorder? He ever mentioned anything like that to you?” Benton questions me in a way that I find unexpected and unnerving, and I’m reminded of what I sensed in the car when we were driving here. Only now it’s more pronounced, more recognizable.
He is acting the way he used to when he was still an agent, when he was empowered by the federal government to enforce the law. I detect an authority and confidence he hasn’t manifested in years, a sure- footedness he lacked after his reemergence from protective deep cover. He came back feeling lost, weak, like nothing more than an academician, he often complained.
