The Last Precinct ks-11

by Patricia Cornwell

"One I happened to answer and the person, a guy, asked for you, says he's Benton and then hangs up," Jack reports. "Turk answered the second time. The guy says to tell you he called and will be an hour late to dinner, identifies himself as Benton and hangs up. So add that to the mix. No wonder I'm going bald."

  "Why didn't you tell me?" I absently pick up Polaroid photographs of Benny White's body on the gurney before he was unclothed.

  "Thought you had enough shit going on. I should have told you. I was wrong."

  The sight of this young boy dressed in his Sunday best and inside an unzipped body pouch on top of a steel gurney is so incongruous. I feel deeply saddened as I notice his pants are a little short and his socks don't quite match, one blue, one black. I feel worse. "You find anything unexpected with him?" I have talked enough about my problems. My problems, as a matter of fact, do not seem very important when I look at photographs of Benny and think about his mother in the viewing room.

  "Yeah, one thing puzzled me," Jack says. "The story I got is he came home from church and never went inside the house. He gets out of the car and heads out to the barn, saying he'll be right in and is trying to find his pocket knife_thinks it might be in his tackle box and he forgot to take it out when he came home from fishing the other day. He never comes back to the house. In other words, he never ate Sunday dinner. But this little guy had a full stomach."

  "Could you tell what he might have eaten?" I ask.

  "Yeah. Popcorn, for one thing. And looks like he ate hot-dogs. So I call his house and talk to his stepdad. I ask if Benny might have eaten anything at church and am told no. His step-dad's got no idea where the food came from," Jack replies.

  "That's very odd," I comment. "So he comes home from church and goes out to hang himself, but stops off someplace to eat popcorn and hotdogs first?" I get up from the counter. "Something's wrong with that picture."

  "If it wasn't for the gastric contents, I'd say it's a straightforward suicide." Jack remains seated, looking up at me. "I could kill Stanfield for cutting through the knot. The fuck-head."

  "Maybe we should take a look at where Benny was hanged," I decide. "Go to the scene."

  "They live on a farm in James City County," Jack says. "Right on the river, and apparently the woods where he was hanged are at the edge of the field, not even a mile from the house."

  "Let's go," I tell him. "Maybe Lucy can give us a ride."

  IT IS A TWO-HOUR FLIGHT FROM THE HANGAR IN

  New York to HeloAir in Richmond, and Lucy was more than happy to show off her new company vehicle. The plan is simple. She will pick up Jack and me and land us at the farm, then the three of us will check out where Benny White allegedly killed himself. I also want to see his bedroom. Afterwards, we will drop Jack off in Richmond and I will return to New York with Lucy, where I will stay until the special grand jury hear- ing. This is all planned for tomorrow morning, and Detective Stanfield has no interest in meeting us at the scene.

  "What for?" are the first words out of his mouth. "What you need to go there for?"

  I almost mention the gastric contents that don't make sense. I come close to inquiring as to whether there was anything Stanfield observed that made him suspicious. But I catch myself. Something stops me. "If you can just give me directions to their place," I tell him.

  He describes where Benny White's family lives, just off Route 5, I can't miss it because there is a small country store at the intersection, and I need to turn left at that store. He gives me landmarks that will not be helpful from the air. I finally get it out of him that the farm is less than a mile from the ferry near Jamestown, and that's when I realize for the first time that Benny White's farm is very close to The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground.

  "Oh yeah," Stanfield says when I ask him about this. "He was right there in the same area as the other ones. That's what had him so upset, according to his mom."

  "How far is the farm from the motel?" I ask.

  "Right across the creek from it. It's not much of a farm."

  "Detective Stanfield, is there any possibility Benny knew Bev Kiffin's children, her two boys? I understand Benny liked to fish." I envision the fishing pole leaning against the upstairs window in Mitch Barbosa's townhouse.

  "Now, I know the story about him supposedly getting his pocket knife out of his tackle box, but I don't think that's what he did. I think he just wanted an excuse to get away from everybody," Stanfield replies.

  "Do we know where he got the rope?" I push aside his annoying assumptions.

  "His stepdaddy says there's all kinds of rope in the barn," Stanfield replies. "Well, they call it a barn but it's where they just keep junk. I asked him what was in there, and he said just junk. You know, I got a hunch Benny might have run into Bar-bosa out there, you know, fishing, and we know Barbosa was nice to kids. That sure would help explain it. And his mama did say the boy had been having nightmares and was mighty upset by the killings. Was scared to death, is the way she put it. Now what you're gonna want to do is go straight to the creek. You'll see the barn at the edge of the field, and then the woods right off to the left. There's an overgrown footpath and where he hung himself is maybe fifty feet down that path where a deer stand is. You can't miss it. I didn't climb up it, up the deer stand, to cut down the rope, only cut off the end that was around his neck. So it should still be right where it was. The rope should be right there where it was."

  I refrain from showing my complete disgust with Stan-field's sloppy policing. I don't probe any further or suggest to him he ought to do exactly what he threatened: quit. I call Mrs. White to let her know my plans. Her voice is small and wounded. She is dazed and can't seem to comprehend that we want to land a helicopter on her farm. "We need a clearing. A level field, an area where there are no telephone lines or a lot of trees," I explain.

  "We don't have a runway." She says this several times.

  Finally, she puts her husband on the phone. His name is Marcus. He tells me they have a soybean field between their house and Route 5 and there's a silo painted dark green, too. There isn't another silo in that area, not one painted dark green, he adds. It is fine with him if we land in his field.

  The rest of my day is long. I work at the office and catch my staff before they head home. I explain to them what is happening in my life and assure each person that his job is not in jeopardy. I also make it clear that I have done nothing wrong and am confident my name will be cleared. I don't tell them I have resigned. They have suffered enough tremors and don't need an earthquake. I don't pack items in my office or head out with anything other than my briefcase, as if all is well and I'll see everybody in the morning, as usual.

  Now it is nine P.M. I sit in Anna's kitchen, picking at a thick slice of cheddar cheese and sipping a glass of red wine, going easy, unwilling to cloud my thinking and simply finding it almost impossible to swallow solid food. I have lost weight. I don't know how much. I have no appetite and have developed a wretched routine of going outside periodically to smoke. Every half hour or so, I try to contact Marino with no success. And I keep thinking about the Tlip file. It has hardly been out of my mind since I looked at it on Christmas Day. The telephone rings at close to midnight and I assume it is Marino finally returning my page. "Scarpetta," I answer.

  "It's Jaime," Berger's distinctive, confident voice sounds over the line.

  I pause in surprise. But then I remember: Berger seems to have no hesitation in talking to people she intends to send to jail, doesn't matter the hour.

  "I've been on the phone with Marino," she starts off. "So I realize you know my situation. Or I guess I should say, our situation. And actually you ought to feel all right about it, Kay. I'm not going to coach you, but let me say this. Just talk to the jury the same way you do to me. And try not to worry."

  "I think I'm beyond worrying," I reply.

  "Mainly I'm calling to pass on some information. We got DNA on the stamps. The stamps from the letters in the Tlip file," she informs me as if she is in my min
d again. So now the Richmond labs are dealing directly with her, it occurs to me. "It appears Diane Bray was all over the map, Kay. At least she licked those stamps, and I will assume she wrote the letters and was smart enough not to leave her prints on them. The prints that were left on several of the letters are Benton's, probably from when he opened them before he realized what they were. I assume he knew they were his prints. Don't know why he didn't make a note of it. I'm just wondering if Benton ever mentioned Bray to you. Any reason to think they knew each other?"

  "I don't remember him mentioning her," I reply. My thoughts are locked. I can't believe what Berger has just said.

  "Well, he certainly could have known her," Berger goes on. "She was in D.C. He was a few miles down the road in Quan-tico. I don't know. But it baffles me that she would send this stuff to him, and I'm wondering if she wanted it posted in New York so he would go down the path of believing the crank mail was from Carrie Grethen."

  "And we know he did go down that path," I remind her.

  "Then we also have to wonder if Bray possibly_just possibly_had anything to do with his murder," Berger adds the final touch.

  It flashes in my mind that she is testing me again. What is she hoping? That I will blurt out something incriminating. Good. Bray got what was coming to her or She got what she deserved. At the same time, I don't know. Maybe it is my paranoia speaking and not reality. Maybe Berger is simply saying what is on her mind, nothing more.

  "I don't guess she ever mentioned Benton to you," Berger is saying.

  "Not that I recall," I reply. "I don't remember Bray ever saying a word about Benton."

  "What I just can't get," Berger goes on, "is this Chandonne thing. If we consider that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne knew Bray_saying they were in business together_then why would he kill her? And in the manner he killed her? That strikes me as a non-fit. It doesn't profile right. What do you think?"

  "Maybe you should Mirandize me before you ask me what I think about Bray's murderer," is what I say. "Or maybe you should save your questions for the hearing."

  "You haven't been arrested," she replies, and I can't believe it. She has a smile in her tone. I have amused her. "You don't need to be Mirandized." She gets serious. "I'm not toying with you, Kay. I'm asking for your help. You should be goddamn glad it will be me in that room interviewing witnesses and not Righter."

  "I'm just sorry anyone will be in that room. No one should be. Not on my account," I tell her.

  "Well, there are two key pieces that we've got to figure out." She is impervious and has more to tell me. "The seminal fluid in Susan Pless's case isn't Chandonne's. And now we have this newest information about Diane Bray. It's just instinct. But I don't think Chandonne knew Diane Bray. Not personally. Not at all. I think all of his victims are people he had experienced only from a distance. He watched and stalked and fantasized. And that, by the way, was Benton's opinion, too, when he profiled Susan's case."

  "Was it his opinion that the person who murdered her also left the seminal fluid?" I ask.

  "He never thought more than one person was involved," Berger concedes. "Until your cases in Richmond, we were still looking for that well-dressed, good-looking guy who ate with her in Lumi. We sure weren't looking for some self-proclaimed werewolf with a genetic disorder, not back then we weren't."

  I don't. I fade in and out, now and then picking up the alarm clock to check the time. Hours advance imperceptibly and weightily, like glaciers. I dream I am in my house and have a puppy, an adorable female yellow Labrador retriever with long, heavy ears and huge feet and the sweetest face imaginable. She reminds me of Gund stuffed animals in FAO Schwarz, that wonderful toy store in New York where I used to pick up surprises for Lucy when she was a child. In my dream, this wounded fiction I spin in my semi-conscious state, I am playing with the puppy, tickling her, and she is licking me, her tail wagging furiously. Then somehow I am walking into my house again, and it is dark and chilled and I sense nobody home, no life, absolute silence. I call out to the puppy_ I can't remember her name_and frantically search every room for her. I wake up in Anna's guest room, crying, sobbing, just bawling.

  Chapter 33

  MORNING COMES AND HAZE DRIFTS LIKE SMOKE AS we fly low over trees. Lucy and I are alone in her new machine because Jack woke up with aches and chills. He stayed home, and I have a suspicion that his illness is self-induced. I think he is hung over, and I fear that the unbearable stress I have brought upon the office has encouraged bad habits in him. He was perfectly satisfied with his life. Now everything has changed.

  The Bell 407 is black with bright stripes. It smells like a new car and moves with the smooth strength of heavy silk as we fly east, eight hundred feet above the ground. I am preoccupied with the sectional map in my lap, trying to match depictions of power lines, roads and railroad tracks with those we pass over. It isn't that we don't know exactly where we are, because Lucy's helicopter has enough navigational equipment to pilot the Concorde. But whenever I feel the way I do right now, I tend to obsess over a task, any task.

  "Two antennas about one o'clock." I show her on the map. "Five hundred and thirty feet above sea level. Shouldn't be a factor, but don't see them yet."

  "I'm looking," she says.

  The antennas will be well below horizon, meaning they aren't a danger even if we get close. But I have a special pho- bia of obstructions, and there are more of them going up all the time in this world of constant communication. Richmond air traffic control comes over the air, telling us radar service is terminated and we can squawk VFR. I change the frequency to twelve hundred on the transponder as I barely make out the antennas several miles ahead. They don't have high-intensity strobes and are nothing more than ghostly, straight pencil lines in thick, gray haze. I point them out.

  "Got 'em," Lucy replies. "Hate those things." She pressures the cyclic right, curving well to the north of them, wanting nothing personal with antenna guy wires, for the heavy steel cables are the snipers. They will get you first.

  "The governor going to be pissed at you if he finds out you're doing this?" Lucy's question sounds inside my headset.

  "He told me to take a vacation from the office," I reply. "I'm out of the office."

  "So you'll come to New York with me," she says. "You can stay in my apartment. I'm really glad you're leaving the job, giving up being chief, striking out on your own. Maybe you'll end up in New York working with Teun and me?"

  I don't want to hurt her feelings. I don't tell her I am not glad. I want to be here. I want to be in my home and working my job as usual, and that will never be possible. I feel like a fugitive, I tell my niece, whose attention is outside the cockpit, eyes never straying from what she is doing. Talking to someone who is piloting a helicopter is like being on the phone. The person really doesn't see you. There is no gesturing or touching. The sun is getting brighter, the haze thinning the farther east we fly. Below us, creeks glisten like entrails of the earth, and the James River shines white like snow. We get lower and slower, passing over the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery, the full-size replicas of the ships that carried one hundred and four men and boys to Virginia in 1607. In the distance, I make out the obelisk peeking up through the trees of Jamestown Island, where archaeologists are raising the first English settlement in America from the dead. A ferry slowly carries cars across the water toward Surry.

  "I see a green silo at nine o'clock," Lucy observes. "Think that's it?"

  I follow her eyes to a small farm that backs up to a creek. On the other side of the narrow, muddy lick of water, rooftops and old campers peeking out of thick pines become The Fort James Motel and Camp Ground. Lucy circles the farm at five hundred feet, making sure there are no hazards such as power lines. She sizes up the area and seems satisfied as she lowers the collective and reins us back to sixty knots. We begin our approach to a clearing between woods and the small brick house where Benny White spent his twelve short years. Dead grass storms as Lucy gently sets us down, subtly fee
ling for the ground, making sure it is level. Mrs. White comes out of the house. She stares at us, a hand shielding her eyes from the sun, and then a tall man in a suit joins her. They stay on the porch while we go through the two-minute shutdown. As we climb out and walk toward the house, I realize that Benny's parents have dressed up for us. They look as if they have just come from church.

  "Never thought something like that would land on my farm." Mr. White gazes off at the helicopter, a heavy expression on his face.

  "Do come in," Mrs. White says. "Can 1 get you some coffee or something?"

  We chat about our flight, make small talk, anxiety thick. The Whites know I am here because I must be entertaining ominous scenarios about what really happened to their son. They seem to assume Lucy is part of the investigation and address both of us whenever they speak. The house is very neat and pleasantly furnished with big comfortable chairs, braided rugs and brass lamps. The floor is wide heart of pine, and wooden walls are whitewashed and hung with watercolors of Civil War scenes. By the fireplace in the living room are shelves that are full of cannonballs, minie balls, a mess kit, old bottles and all sort of artifacts that probably are from the Civil War. When Mr. White notices my interest, he explains that he is a collector. He is a treasure hunter and scours the area with a metal detector when he is not busy at the office.

  He is an accountant. His farm is not an active one, but has been in the family for more than a hundred years, he tells Lucy and me.

  "I guess I'm just a history nut," he goes on. "I've even found a few buttons from the American Revolution. Just never know what you're going to find around here."

  We are in the kitchen and Mrs. White is getting a glass of water for Lucy.

  "What about Benny?" I ask. "Was he interested in treasure hunting?"

  "Oh, he sure was," his mother replies. "Of course, he was always hoping to find real treasure. Like gold." She has begun to accept his death and speaks of him in the past tense.