“Food,” I told my husband, as I was driving alone out of my parking lot. “God, I’m hungry. I’m starved,” I said on my way to handle what no one else can be bothered with, and I check my rearview mirror again and the dark blue Ford LTD is right behind me.
I follow the Charles River as it bends and snakes, curving like the corridors in my building, taking me where I’ve begun and ended, where I’ve been and will go, past the DeWolfe Boathouse again, past the Morse School playground again, heading in the direction of Howard Roth’s neighborhood again, on my way to Fayth House. The dark blue Ford is on my bumper, and I see the face with dark glasses in my rearview mirror.
Watching me, daring me. Brazenly following me.
“Food and wine,” I told Benton over the phone a little while ago, when I didn’t know this would happen, and I’m shocked.
I’m incensed and disbelieving, and at the same time not sure why I’m surprised.
“We will eat together, be together, all of us,” I said, alone and hungry and beginning to feel worn down by it all, a single question burning on the dark horizon of my dark thoughts.
I watch the car behind me, my heart turning hard like something vital dying and petrifying into my own bone bed of emotion. Now you’ve gone too far, I think. You’ve really gone too far, and I imagine dinner with Lucy, Benton, Marino. I’m hungry and angry and want to be with people I care about, and I’ve had enough, because it’s too much now. I turn right on River Street, and Douglas Burke turns, too, her dark glasses staring.
I pull into the parking lot of the Rite Aid at the intersection of Blackstone and River Streets, letting her know I’m aware that she’s been on my tail for the past ten minutes and I’m not going to be harassed by her and I’m not afraid of her, either. I roll down the window of my SUV, and we are driver’s door to driver’s door like two cops, like comrades, which we’re certainly not.
We’re enemies, and she’s openly letting me know it.
“What is it, Douglas?” I’ve never been able to call her Doug or Dougie.
It’s all I can do to call her anything.
“I wasn’t going to say this in front of them.” Her glasses are dark green or black, and the sun is low, the old low buildings of Cambridge casting long shadows, a low late-afternoon well on its way to the lowest time of the year around here, a New England brutal winter.
“Out of professional respect, I didn’t bring it up with them in the room,” she says.
“In front of them?” I ask, and she has no professional respect for anyone, least of all for me.
Her dark glasses stare.
“You mean in front of Benton,” I assume.
“I know about your niece.” She pushes those words out like animals shoved, herded, moved with aggression.
I don’t answer her.
“Exploiting vulnerabilities in websites, harvesting information.” She talks snidely, as if she’s convinced she knows how to hurt me. “I love the way hackers describe what they do. Which in your niece’s case is nothing short of a brute-force attack on whatever server she’s interested in for the express purpose of obstructing justice.”
“‘A brute-force attack’? I wonder who’s really doing that.” I look at her.
She points two fingers at her dark masked eyes and then points at me.
“I’m watching,” she says dramatically. “Tell Lucy she’s not so damn smart after all, and you’re a co-conspirator to go along with her stunts, and for what? So she can find out something five minutes before we do? Before the FBI does? Because she’s jealous.”
“Lucy’s not the sort to get jealous.” I sound perfectly reasonable. “But I think you might be.”
“I’m sure it must be awful to be fired by the very thing you’re constantly surrounded by.”
“Yes, that must be awful,” I say pointedly, because Douglas Burke is constantly surrounded by Benton and reminders of him, and she’s fired.
She’s fired as his partner and he wants her transferred to some distant place, and he may be suggesting more than that behind the scenes. Special Agent Douglas Burke isn’t fit to serve. She shouldn’t be carrying a gun or arresting anyone, and I advise her as diplomatically as I possibly can that it might not be wise for her to engage Lucy. It would not be prudent to simply show up on my niece’s property or to drop by unannounced or to follow her the way she’s just followed me.
“You know her history, so I think you understand what I mean,” I say to Burke, who likely is aware of every firearm Lucy owns, every handgun and large-capacity weapon she has registered in Massachusetts and she has a license to carry.
“Are you threatening me?” She smiles, and that is when I am certain that she is profoundly unstable and unwell and possibly violent.
“It’s not my style to threaten people,” I tell her, and now I’m very concerned.
“I’m not afraid to solve this case, you know,” she then says. “Unlike others, it seems. I’m not afraid, and I can’t be bribed.”
I’m concerned about her, about her safety. I’m concerned about other people, too.
“I’m not intimidated or influenced by someone’s political connections or money,” she says, “not in bed with federal judges and U.S. attorneys, not stupid enough to believe that someone in jail doesn’t have people on the outside doing his bidding. A small price to pay. Locked up half a year in exchange for getting rid of the wife you’ve grown to hate.”
“And you know that. You know he hated her? Where did you get that?” I stop myself from arguing with someone who can’t possibly be logical.
“I just want to know why you’re protecting him. It’s obvious why you’d protect your niece, but why Channing Lott?”
“You need to stop this,” I reply, because she is beyond being reasoned with.
“What has he promised you?”
“You need to stop this before it goes any further.”
“He came to see you,” she says. “Now, isn’t that just perfect. What else did he say to you, Kay? The missing dog? How scared his wife was and on and on, pleading his case with you while your niece is crashing through firewalls and you’re trying to run me out of town, trying to ruin me? And you think you can?”
“I don’t want you to ruin yourself.”
I warn her she’s going to have a serious problem if she continues to follow me, continues to make inflammatory and accusatory statements, that I’m the one feeling threatened.
“You need to go back to your field office,” I say to her, because I have a strong feeling about what she intends to do, and I remember every word Benton said about her and the way she used to act around Lucy, and at the same time I know better.
It isn’t just pseudoephedrine, whatever drugs she’s on. It’s what Douglas Burke has to prove, and she’s not going to listen because she can’t.
“He’s so much better off with me.” She means Benton is.
The ultimate case Douglas Burke must solve in her life isn’t a bank robbery or serial murders but the crime of her own existence. I don’t know what happened to her, probably when she was a child. I also don’t care.
“He knows it, too,” she says to me, through the open window of her Bureau car. “It’s a shame you don’t want what’s best for him. Trying to sabotage me isn’t going to help your pathetic excuse for a marriage, Kay.”
“Go back to your office and talk to someone.” I am careful not to sound provocative. “Tell someone what you just told me, share the information, maybe with your SAC, with Jim.” I say it clinically, dispassionately, almost kindly. “You need to talk to someone.”
She needs help, and she’s not going to get it, and I have a strong feeling about what she’s going to do, and when I drive away toward mid-Cambridge, I let Benton know.