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.
Dr. Saltz suspects Eli got involved with a treacherous and unauthorized technology at Otwahl, found himself in the midst of DARPA research
gone bad, gone frighteningly wrong, and was about to warn his humanitarian Nobel laureate stepfather and to offer proof and to beg him to put a
stop to it. Fielding put a stop to Eli because Fielding was using these dangerous drugs, perhaps helping to distribute them, but mostly my deputy
chief with his lifelong lust for strength and physical beauty and his chronic aches and pains was addicted. That’s the theory behind Fielding’s vile
crimes, and I don’t believe it is that simple or even true. But I do believe other comments Benton has continued to make. I was too good to Fielding.
I’ve always been too good to him. I’ve never seen him for what he is or accepted his potential to do real harm, and therefore I enabled him.
Snow turned to freezing rain where the ocean warms the air, and the power is still out from downed lines in this area of Salem Neck called
Winter Island, where Jack Fielding owns a historic investment property I had no idea about. To get to it you have to pass the Plummer Home for
Boys, a lovely mossy green mansion set on a gracious spread of lawn overlooking the sea, with a distant view of the wealthy resort community of
Marblehead. I can’t help but think about the way things begin and end, the way people have a tendency to run in place, to tread water, to really not
get beyond where and how it all started for them.
Fielding stopped his life where it took off for him so precipitously, in a picturesque setting for troubled youths who can no longer live with their
families. I wonder if it was deliberate to pick a spot no more than a stone’s throw from a boys’ home, if that factored into his subconscious when he
decided on a property I’m told he intended to retire to or perhaps sell for a profit in the future when the real-estate market turns around and after
he’d finished much-needed improvements. He’d been doing the work on the house and its outbuilding himself and doing it poorly, and I’m about to
see the manifestation of his disorganized, chaotic mind, the handiwork of someone profoundly out of control, Benton has let me know. I’m about to
see the way my enabled protege lived and ended.
“Are you still with us? I know you’re tired,” Benton says as he touches my arm.
“I’m fine.” I realize he’s been talking and I tuned him out.
“You don’t look fine. You’re still crying.”
“I’m not crying. It’s the sun. I can’t believe I left my sunglasses somewhere.”
“I’ve said you can have mine.” His dark glasses turn toward me as he creeps along the sandy, gritty-sounding road in the glaring sun.
“No, thank you.”
“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on with you, because we’re not going to have a chance to talk for a while,” he says. “You’re angry with me.”
“You’re just doing your job, whatever it is.”
“You’re angry with me because you’re angry at Jack, and you’re afraid to be angry at him.”
“I’m not afraid of what I feel about him. I’m more afraid of everyone else,” I reply.
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“It’s something I sense, and you don’t agree with me, so we should leave it at that,” I say to him as I look out the window at the cold, blue ocean
and the distant horizon, where I can make out houses on the shore.
“Maybe you could be a little more specific. What do you sense? Is this a new thought?”
“It isn’t. And it’s nothing anybody wants to hear,” I answer him as I stare out at the bright afternoon while we continue to troll for a place to park.
I’m not really helping him look for a spot. Mostly I’m sitting and staring out the window while my mind goes where it wants to, like a small animal
darting about, looking for a safe place. Benton probably thinks I’m pretty useless. He’s aided and abetted my uselessness by waiting this long to
come get me for something that’s been going on for hours. I’m showing up in medias res, as if this is a musical or an opera and it’s no big deal for
me to wander in during the middle or toward the end, depending on which act we’re in.
“Christ, this is ridiculous. You would think someone would have left us something. I should have had Marino put cones out, save us something.”
Benton vents his anger at parked cars and the narrow street, then says to me, “I want to hear whatever it is. New thought or not. Now, while we have
a minute alone.”
There is no point in saying the rest of it, of telling him again what I sense, which is a calculating, cruel logic behind what was done to Wally
Jamison, Mark Bishop, and Eli Goldman, behind what happened to Fielding, behind everything, a precisely formulated agenda, even if it didn’t turn
out as planned. Not that I know the plan in its entirety, maybe not even most of it, but what I sense is palpable and undeniable, and I won’t be talked
out of it. Trust your instincts. Don’t trust anything else. This is about power. The power to control people, to make them feel good or frightened or
to suffer unbearably. Power over life and death. I’m not going to repeat what I’m sure sounds irrational. I’m not going to tell Benton yet again that I
sense an insatiable desire for power, that I feel the presence of a murderous entity watching us from a dark place, lying in wait. Some things are
over, but not everything is, and I don’t say any of this to him.
“I’m just going to have to tuck it in here, and the hell with it.” He isn’t really talking to me but to himself, easing as close to a rock wall as he can
so we don’t stick halfway out into the slick, sandy street. “We’ll hope some yahoo doesn’t hit me. If so, he’ll be in for an unpleasant surprise.”
I suppose he means it wouldn’t be fun to realize the door you just dinged or the bumper you just scraped or the side you just swiped is the
property of the FBI. The SUV is a typical government vehicle, black with tinted glass and cloth seats, and emergency strobes hidden behind the
grille, and on the floor in back are two coffee cups neatly held in place inside their cardboard to-go box along with a balled-up food bag. The war
wagon of a busy agent who is tidy but not always in a convenient spot to toss out trash. I didn’t know that Douglas was a woman until Benton
referred to the special agent who’s assigned this car as “she” a little while ago while he was telling me about her running the license plate of the
Bentley that met us at Hanscom last night, a 2003 four-door black Flying Spur personally owned by the CEO of a Boston-based niche service
company that supplies “discreet concierge-minded chauffeurs” who will drive any vehicle requested, explaining why the Bentley didn’t have a livery
license plate.
The reservation was made online by someone using an e-mail address that belongs to Johnny Donahue, an inpatient at McLean with no
Internet access when the e-mail was sent yesterday from an IP address that is an Internet cafe near Salem State College, which is very close to
here. The credit card used belongs to Erica Donahue, and as far as anybody knows, she doesn’t do anything online and won’t touch a computer.
Needless to say, the FBI and the police don’t believe she or her son booked the Bentley or the driver.
The FBI and the police believe Fielding did, that he likely got access to Mrs. Donahue’s credit card information from payments she made to
the tae kwon do club for lessons her son took until he was told not to come back after he tried to kick his instructor, my deputy chief, a grandmaster
with a seventh-degree black belt. It isn’t clear how Fielding might have gained access to Johnny’s e-mail account unless he somehow manipulated
the vulnerable and gullible teenager into giving him the password at some point or learned it by some other means.
The chauffeur, who isn’t suspected of anything except not bothering to research Dr. Scarpetta before he delivered something to her, received
the assignment from dispatch, and according to dispatch, no one who works at the elite transportation company ever met the alleged Mrs. Donahue
or talked to her over the phone. In the notes section of the online reservation, an “exotic luxury car” was requested for an “errand” with the
explanation that further instructions and a letter to be delivered would be dropped off at the private driving company’s headquarters. At
approximately six p.m., a manila envelope was slipped through the mail slot in the front door, and some four hours later, the chauffeur showed up at
Hanscom Field with it and decided that Benton was me.
We get out into the cold, clean air, and ice is everywhere, lit up by the sun as if we are inside an illuminated crystal chandelier. Shielding my
eyes with my hand, I watch the dark-blue sea as it rolls and contracts like muscle, pushing itself inland to smash and boil against a rock-strewn
shore where no one lives. Right here a sea captain once looked out at a view that I doubt has changed much in hundreds of years, acres of rugged
coastline and beach with copses of hardwood trees, untouched and uninhabitable because it is part of a marine recreational park, which happens
to have a boat launch.
A little farther down, past the campground, where the Neck wraps around toward the Salem Harbor, is a yacht yard where Fielding’s twentyfoot
Mako was shrink-wrapped and on a jack stand when police found it this morning. I’m vaguely aware he has a dive boat because I’ve heard him
mention it, but I didn’t know where he keeps it. I never would have imagined twenty-four hours ago that it might become the focus of a homicide
investigation, or that his dark-blue Navigator SUV with its missing front license plate would, or that his Glock pistol with its drilled-off serial number
would, or that everything Fielding owns and has done throughout his entire existence would.
Overhead, an orange Dauphin helicopter, an HH-65A, also known as a Dolphin, beats low across the cold, blue sky, its enclosed Fenestron
ten-bladed tail rotor making a distinctive modulated sound that is described as low noise but to me has a quiet high pitch, is ominously whiny,
