They walked down a long corridor, passing interview rooms, each bare with a table and two chairs and a steel handcuff rail, everything beige and blue, what Benton called “federal blue.” The blue background of every photo he’d ever seen taken of a director. The blue of Janet Reno’s dresses. The blue of George W. Bush’s ties. The blue of people who lie until they’re blue in the face. Republican blue. There were a hell of a lot of blue Republicans in the FBI. It had always been an ultraconservative organization. No fucking wonder Lucy had been driven out, fired. Benton was an Independent. He wasn’t anything anymore.
“Do you have any questions before we join the others?” Lanier stopped before a beige metal door. She entered a code on a keypad and the lock clicked.
Benton said, “I infer you’re expecting me to explain to Detective Marino why he was told he should be here. And how it came to pass that we’re here for your meeting and he knows nothing about it.” Anger simmered.
“You have a long-standing affiliation with Peter Rocco Marino.”
It sounded odd hearing someone call him by his full name. Lanier was walking briskly again. Another hallway, this one longer. Benton ’s anger. It was beginning to boil.
“You worked a number of cases with him in the nineties when you were the unit chief of BSU. What’s now BAU,” she said. “And then your career was interrupted. I assume you know the news.” Not looking at him as they walked. “About Warner Agee. Didn’t know him, never met him. Although he’s been of interest for a while.”
Benton stopped walking, the two of them alone in the middle of an endless empty corridor, a long monotony of dingy beige walls and scuffed gray tile. Depersonalized, institutionalized. Intended to be unprovocative and unimaginative and unrewarding and unforgiving. He placed his hand on her shoulder and was mildly surprised by its firmness. She was small but strong, and when she met his eyes, a question was in hers.
He said, “Don’t fuck with me.”
A glint in her eyes like metal, and she said, “Please take your hand off me.”
He dropped it to his side and repeated what he’d said quietly and with no inflection, “Don’t fuck with me, Marty.”
She crossed her arms, looking at him, her stance slightly defiant but unafraid.
“You may be the new generation and have briefed yourself up to your eyeballs, but I know more about how it works than you will if you live ten lives,” he said.
“No one questions your experience or your expertise, Benton.”
“You know exactly what I’m saying, Marty. Don’t whistle for me to come like some goddamn dog and then trot me off to a meeting so you can show everybody the tricks the Bureau trained me to perform in the dark ages. The Bureau didn’t train me to do a goddamn thing. I trained myself, and you’ll never begin to understand what I’ve been through and why. And who they are.”
“ ‘Who they are’?” She didn’t seem even slightly put off by him.
“The people Warner was involved with. Because that’s what you’re getting at, isn’t it? Like a moth, Warner took on the shadings of his environment. After a while, you can’t tell entities like him from the polluted edifices they cling to. He was a parasite. An antisocial personality disorder. A sociopath. A psychopath. Whatever the hell you people call monsters these days. And just when I was starting to feel sorry for the deaf son of a bitch.”
“Can’t imagine your feeling sorry for him,” she said. “After what he did.”
It knocked Benton off guard.
“Suffice it to say, if Warner Agee hadn’t lost everything, and I don’t just mean financially, and decompensated beyond his ability to control himself, become desperate, in other words?” she went on. “We’d have a hell of a lot more to worry about. As for his hotel room, Carley Crispin might have been paying, but that’s for a mundanely practical reason. Agee has no credit cards. They’re all expired. He was destitute, and likely was reimbursing Carley in cash, or at least contributing something. I sincerely doubt she has anything to do with this, by the way. For her it was all about the show going on.”
“Who did he get involved with.” It wasn’t a question.
“I have a feeling you know. Find the right pressure points and eventually you disable someone twice your size.”
“Pressure points. As in plural. More than one,” Benton said.
“We’ve been working on these people, not sure who they are, but we’re getting closer to bringing them down. That’s why you’re here,” she said.
“They’re not gone,” he said.
She resumed walking.
“I couldn’t get rid of all of them,” he said. “They’ve had years to be busy, to cause trouble, to figure out whatever they want.”
“Like terrorists,” she said.
“They are terrorists. Just a different sort.”
“I’ve read the dossier on what you did get rid of in Louisiana. Impressive. Welcome back. I wouldn’t have wanted to be you during all that. I wouldn’t have wanted to be Scarpetta. Warner Agee wasn’t completely wrong-you were in the most extreme danger imaginable. But his motives couldn’t have been more wrong. He wanted you to disappear. It was worse than killing you, really.” She said it as if she was describing which was more unpleasant, meningitis or the avian flu. “The rest of it was our fault, although I wasn’t around back then, was a fledgling Assistant U.S. Attorney in New Orleans. Signed on with the Bureau a year later, got my master’s in forensic psychology after that because I wanted to get involved with behavioral analysis, am the NCAVC coordinator for the New Orleans field office. I won’t say I wasn’t influenced by the situation down there or by you.”
“You were there when I was. When they were. Sam Lanier. The coroner of East Baton Rouge,” Benton said. “Related?”
“My uncle. I guess you could say that dealing with the darker side of life runs in the family. I know what happened down there, am actually assigned to the field office in New Orleans. Just got here a few weeks ago. I could get used to this, to New York, if I could ever find a parking place. You should never have been forced out of the Bureau, Benton. I didn’t think so at the time.”
“At the time?”
“Warner Agee was obvious. His evaluation of you ostensibly on behalf of the Undercover Safeguard Unit. The hotel room in Waltham, Mass. Summer of 2003 when he deemed you no longer fit for duty, suggested a desk job or teaching new agents. I’m quite aware. Again, the right thing for the wrong reason. His opinion had to be allowed, and maybe it was for the best. If you’d stayed, just what do you think you would have done?” She looked at him, stopping at the next shut door.
Benton didn’t answer. She entered her code and they walked into the Criminal Division, a rabbit warren of partitioned work spaces, all of them blue.
“Still, it was the Bureau’s loss, a very big loss,” she said. “I suggest we get coffee in the break room, such as it is.” She headed in that direction, a small room with a coffeemaker, a refrigerator, a table, and four chairs. “I won’t say what goes around comes around. About Agee,” she added, pouring coffee for both of them. “He sui cided your career, or tried to, and now he’s done the same to his.”
“He started self-destructing his career long before now.”
“Yes, he did.”
“The one who escaped death row in Texas,” Benton then said. “I didn’t get rid of all of them. I didn’t get rid of him, couldn’t find him. Is he still alive?”
“What do you take in it?” Opening a Tupperware container of creamer, rinsing a plastic spoon in the sink.
“I didn’t get rid of all of them. I didn’t get him,” Benton said it again.
“If we could ever get rid of all of them,” Lanier said, “I’d be out a job.”
The NYPD Firearms and Tactics Section on Rodman’s Neck was surrounded by a ten-foot-high fence topped with coils of razor wire. Were it not for that unfriendly obstruction and the heavy weapons going off and signs everywhere that said DANGER BLASTING and KEEP AWAY and DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING HERE, the south ernmost tip of the Bronx, jutting out like a finger into the Long Island Sound, would be, in Marino’s opinion, the choicest real estate in the Northeast.