“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 it is for and I’m not interested, probably some agent Benton knows, probably whoever Douglas is, and I suppose I’ll find out soon enough. I fasten my shoulder harness again, working so hard I’m practically out of breath, and my heart is pounding.
“I didn’t mean that part was from you. There are a lot of questions. We need you to help us answer everything we possibly can,” Benton says.
We begin backing up, pulling out of my parking lot, waiting for the gate to open, and I feel handled. I feel humored. I’m not sure I remember ever feeling so nonessential in an investigation, as if I’m an obstruction and a nuisance people have to be politically correct with because of my position, but not taken seriously and unwanted.
“I thought I’d seen it all. I’m warning you it’s bad, Kay.” Benton’s voice has no energy as he says that. It sounds hollow, like something gutted.
19
The gray frame house with the old stone foundation and a cold cellar in back were built by a sea captain in centuries past. The property is scrubbed and eroded by harsh weather, directly exposed to what blows in from the sea, and sits alone at the end of a narrow, icy street coarsely sanded by city emergency crews. Where branches have snapped, ice is shattered on the frozen earth and sparkles like broken glass in a high sun that offers no warmth, only a blinding glare.
Sand makes a gritty sound against the underside of the SUV while Benton drives very slowly, looking for a place to park, and I look out at the brightness of the sandy road and the heaving deep-blue of the sea and the paler blue of the cloudless sky. I no longer feel the need for sleep or that I could if I tried. Having last gotten up at quarter of five yesterday morning in Delaware, I have been awake some thirty hours since, which isn’t unheard of for me, isn’t really remarkable if I pause to calculate how often it happens in a profession where people don’t have the common courtesy to kill or to die during business hours. But this is a different type of sleeplessness, foreign and unfamiliar, with the added excitement bordering on hysteria from being told or having it implied at least that I’ve lived much of my life with something deadly and I’m the reason it turned deadly.
No one is stating such a thing in exactly those words, but I know it to be true. Benton is diplomatic, but I know. He’s not said it’s my fault people are brutally dead and countless others have been disrespected and defiled, not to mention those harmed by drugs, people whose names we may never know, guinea pigs or “lab rats,” as Benton put it, for a malevolent science project involving a potent form of anabolic steroid or testosterone laced with a hallucinogenic to build strength and muscle mass and enhance aggression and fearlessness. To create killing machines, to turn human beings into monstrosities with no frontal cortex, no concept of consequences, human robots that savagely kill and feel no remorse, feel virtually nothing at all, including pain. Benton has been describing what Liam Saltz told the FBI this morning, the poor man bereft and terrified.