that Otwahl had a clue Eli and his stepdad were philosophically simpatico.”
“How long had Eli worked there?”
“Three years.”
“Maybe three years ago Otwahl wasn’t doing anything that Eli or his stepfather would have been concerned about,” I suggest as we walk along gray tile while Phil the security guard watches us from behind his glass partition. I don’t wave at him. I’m not friendly.
“Well, Eli was worried and had been for months,” Benton says. “He was about to give his stepfather a demonstration of technology that he wasn’t going to approve of at all, a fly that could be a fly on the wall and spy and detect explosives and deliver them or drugs or poisons or who knows what.”
“He’s about to give his stepfather important information like that and conveniently dies,” I reply.
“Exactly. The motive I mentioned,” Benton says. “Drugs,” he says again, and then he tells me more, gives me details the FBI learned from Liam Saltz just a few hours earlier.
I feel sad and upset again as I envision what Benton is saying about a young man so enamored of his famous stepfather that whenever they were to see each other, Eli always set his watch to it, mirroring Dr. Saltz’s time zone in anticipation of their reunion, a quirk that has its roots in Eli’s poignant past of broken homes and parental figures missing in action and adored from afar. I remember what I watched on the video clips, Eli and Sock walking to Norton’s Woods, and then I imagine Dr. Saltz emerging from the building in the near dark after a wedding Eli wasn’t invited to. I imagine the Nobel laureate looking around and wondering where his stepson was, having no idea of the terrible truth. Dead. Zipped up inside a pouch and unidentified. A young man, barely more than a boy. Someone Lucy and I may have crossed paths with at an exhibit in London the summer of 2001.
“Who killed him, and what for?” I say as we pass through the empty bay, the CFC van-body truck gone. “I don’t see how what you’ve just said explains Eli being murdered by Jack.”
“It all points in the same direction. I’m sorry. But it does.”
“I just don’t see why and for what.” I open the door leading outside, and it is too beautiful and sunny to be so cold.
“I know this is hard,” Benton says.
“A pair of data gloves?” I say as we begin to pick our way over snow that is glazed and slick. “A micromechanical fly? Who would stab him with an injection knife, and why?”
“Drugs.” Benton goes back to that again. “Somehow Eli had the misfortune of getting involved with Jack or the other way around. Strength-enhancing, very dangerous drugs. Probably was using and selling, and Eli was the supplier, or someone at Otwahl was. We don’t know. But Eli being killed while he was out there with a flybot and about to meet his stepfather wasn’t a coincidence. It’s the motive, I mean.”
“Why would Jack be interested in a flybot or a meeting?” I ask as we move very slowly, one step at a time, my feet about to go out from under me. “A damn ice-skating rink,” I complain, because the parking lot wasn’t plowed and it needs to be sanded. Nobody has been running this place the way it ought to be run.
“I’m sorry, we’re way over here.” As we head slowly toward the back fence. “But that’s all there was. The drug connection,” Benton then says. “Not street drugs. This is about Otwahl. About a huge amount of money. About the war, about potential violence on an international and massive scale.”
“Then if what you’re saying is right, it would seem to imply Jack was spying on Eli. Rigged up the headphones with hidden recording devices and followed him to Norton’s Woods. That would make sense if the murder was to stop Eli from showing his stepfather the flybot or turning it over to him. How else would Jack know what Eli was about to do? He must have been spying on him, or someone was.”
“I doubt Jack had anything to do with the headphones.”
“My point exactly. Jack wouldn’t be interested in technology like that or capable of it, and he wouldn’t be interested in a place like Otwahl. You’re not talking about the Jack I know. He’s much too limbically driven, too impatient, too simple, to do what you’ve just described.” I almost say
“I understand how you feel. I can understand why you’d want to think that.”
“And did Dr. Saltz know his adoring stepson was into drugs and had an illegal gun?” I ask. “Did he happen to mention the headphones or other people Eli might have been involved with?”
“He knew nothing about the headphones and not much about Eli’s personal life. Only that Eli was worried about his safety. As I said, he’d been worried for months. I know this is painful, Kay.”
“Worried about what, specifically?” I ask as we walk very slowly, and someone is going to get hurt out here. Someone is going to slip and break bones and sue the CFC. That will be next.
“Eli was involved in dangerous projects and surrounded by bad people. That’s how Dr. Saltz described it,” Benton says. “It’s a lot to explain and not what you might imagine.”
“He knew his stepson had a gun, an illegal one,” I repeat my question.
“He didn’t know that. I assume Eli wouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“Everyone seems to be doing a lot of assuming.” I stop and look at Benton, our breath smoking out in the brightness and the cold, and we are at the back of the parking lot now, near the fence, in what I call the hinterlands.
“Eli would know how Dr. Saltz feels about guns,” Benton says. “Jack probably sold the Glock to him or gave it to him.”
“Or someone did,” I reiterate. “Just as someone must have given him the signet ring with the Donahue crest on it. I don’t suppose Eli was also involved in tae kwon do.” I look around at SUVs that don’t belong to the CFC, but I don’t look at the agents inside them. I don’t look at anyone as I shield my eyes from the sun.
“No,” Benton answers. “The football player wasn’t, either, Wally Jamison, but he used the gym where they’re held, used Jack’s same gym. Maybe Eli had been to that gym, too.”
“Eli doesn’t look like someone who uses a gym. Hardly a muscle in his body,” I comment as Benton points a key fob at a black Ford Explorer that isn’t his and the doors unlock with a chirp. “And if Jack killed him, why?” I again ask, because it makes no sense to me, but maybe it’s my fatigue. No sleep and too much trauma, and I’m too tired to comprehend the simplest thing.
“Or maybe the connection has to do with Otwahl and Johnny Donahue and other illegal activities Jack was involved in that you’re about to find out. What he was doing at the CFC, how he was earning his money while you were gone.” Benton’s voice is hard as he says all that while opening my door for me. “Don’t know everything but enough, and you were right to ask what Mark Bishop was doing in his backyard when he was killed. What kind of playing he was doing. I almost couldn’t believe it when you asked me that, and I couldn’t tell you when you asked. Mark was in one of Jack’s classes, as Mrs. Donahue implied, for three- to six-year-olds, had just started in December and was practicing tae kwon do in his yard when someone, and I think we know who, appeared, and again, you’re probably right about how it happened.”
As he goes around to the driver’s side to get in, and I dig in my bag for my sunglasses, impatient and frustrated as a lipstick, pens, and a tube of hand cream spill on the plastic floor mat. I must have left my sunglasses somewhere. Maybe in my office at Dover, where I can scarcely remember being anymore. It seems like forever ago, and right now I am sickened beyond what I could possibly describe to anyone, and it doesn’t please me to hear I was right about anything. I don’t give a damn who is right, just that someone is, and I don’t think anybody is. I just don’t believe it.
“A person Mark had no reason to distrust, such as his instructor, who lured him into a fantasy, a game, and murdered him,” Benton goes on as he starts the SUV. “And then trumped up a way to blame it on Johnny.”
“I didn’t say that part.” I stuff items back into my bag as I grab my shoulder harness and fasten up, then I decide to take my jacket off, and I undo the seat belt.
“What part?” Benton enters an address in the GPS.
“I never said Jack trumped up a way to make Johnny believe he drove nails into Mark Bishop’s head,” I reply, and the SUV is warm from when Benton drove it here, and the sun is hot as it blazes through glass.
I take off my jacket and toss it in back, where there is a large, thick box with a FedEx label. I can’t tell whom
