“Yes. The one in my neighborhood,” McGovern says, her eyes getting wide. She comes over to my side of the table to get a closer look.
“I’ve had cases where people try to create alibis,” I say, shining the light from different angles. “An obvious, shopworn one is you were in a different, very distant location at the time of the murder and therefore couldn’t have done it. An easy way to do that is have mail posted from some remote location at or around the time the murder happens, thereby making it seem the killer couldn’t be you because you can’t be in two places at once.”
“Third Avenue,” McGovern says. “That’s where the FDR post office is.”
“We’ve got part of a street address; some of it’s obliterated by the flap. Nine-something. Three A-V. Yes, Third Avenue. What you do is address the letter, put on the appropriate postage, then enclose it in another envelope addressed to the postmaster of whatever post office you want your letter mailed from. The postmaster is obliged to mail your letter for you, postmarked in that city. So what this person did was tuck this letter inside another envelope, and when he addressed that outer envelope, the impressions of what he wrote were left on the envelope underneath.”
Lucy has come behind me, too, and is leaning close to see. “Susan Pless’s neighborhood,” she says.
Not only that, but the letter, which is by far the most vile, is dated December 5, 1997—the same day Susan Pless was murdered:
Hey Benton,
How are you, soon-to-be-ugly boy. Just wondering—Got any idea what it’s like to look in the mirror and want to commit suicide? No? Will soon. Wiiiilllll soooonnnn. Gonna carve you up like a Christmas turkey and same goes for the Chief Cunt you screw when you got time off from trying to figure out people like me & you. Can’t tell you how much I’m-a-gonna (to quote Southerners) like using my big blade to open her seams. Quid pro quo, right? When you gonna learn to mind your own business?
I imagine Benton receiving these sick, crude missives. I imagine him in his room at my house, sitting at the desk with laptop opened and plugged into a modem line, his briefcase nearby, coffee within reach. His notes indicate he determined the font was Ransom and then contemplated the significance. To obtain release by paying a price. To buy back. To deliver from sin, I read his scribbles. I might have been down the hallway in my study or in the kitchen at the very moment he was reading this letter and looking up “ransom” in the dictionary, and he never said a word. Lucy volunteers that Benton wouldn’t have wanted to burden me, and nothing helpful would have come from my knowing. I couldn’t have done anything about it, she adds.
“Cactus, lilies, tulips,” McGovern goes through pages of the file. “So someone was anonymously sending him flower arrangements at Quantico.”
I start picking through dozens of message slips that simply have “hang-up” written on them and the date and time. The calls were made to his direct line at the Behavioral Science Unit, all tracing back to out of area on Caller ID, meaning they were probably made on a cell phone. Benton’s only observation was pauses on the line before hanging up. McGovern informs us that flower orders were placed with a Lexington Avenue florist that Benton apparently checked out, and Lucy calls directory assistance to see if that same florist is still in business. It is.
“He makes a note here about payment.” It is so hard for me to look at Benton’s small, snarled penmanship. “Mail. The orders were placed by mail. Cash, he has the word ‘cash.’ So it sounds like the person sent cash and a written order.” I flip back to the table of contents. Sure enough, exhibits fifty-one through fifty-five are the actual orders received by the florist. I turn to those pages. “Computer-generated and unsigned. One small arrangement of tulips for twenty-five dollars with instructions to send it to Benton’s Quantico address. One small cactus for twenty-five dollars, and so on, envelopes postmarked New York.”
“Probably the same thing,” Lucy says. “They were mailed through the New York postmaster. Question is, where were they mailed from originally?”
We can’t know that without the outer envelopes, which certainly would have been tossed into the trash the instant post office employees opened them. Even if we had those envelopes, it is highly unlikely the sender wrote out his return address. The most we could have hoped for was a postmark.
“Guess the florist just assumed he was dealing with some nutcase who doesn’t believe in charge cards,” McGovern comments. “Or someone having an affair.”
“Or an inmate.” I am, of course, thinking of Carrie Grethen. I can imagine her sending out communications from Kirby. By slipping the letters in an outer envelope addressed to a postmaster, at the very least she prevented the hospital staff from seeing who she was sending the letters to, whether it was to a florist or to Benton directly. Using a New York post office makes sense, too. She would have had access to various office branches through the telephone directory, and in my gut I don’t think Carrie was concerned about anyone’s supposing the mail originated in the same city where she was incarcerated. She simply didn’t want to alert Kirby staff, and she was also the most manipulative person on this planet. Everything she did had its reason. She was just as busy profiling Benton as he was her.
“If it’s Carrie,” McGovern somberly remarks, “then you do have to wonder if she in any form or fashion was at least privy to Chandonne and his killings.”
“She would get off on it,” I reply with anger as I push back from the table. “And she would know damn well that by writing a letter to Benton dated the same day as Susan’s murder, it would send him through the ceiling. He’d make that connection, all right.”
“And picking a post office located in Susan’s neighborhood,” Lucy adds.
We speculate, postulate and go on until late afternoon, when we decide it is time for Christmas dinner. After rousing Marino, we tell him what we have discovered and continue to talk as we eat greens, sweet onions and tomatoes drenched in sweet red vinegar and cold-pressed olive oil. Marino shovels in food as if he hasn’t eaten in days, stuffing lasagna into his mouth while we debate and speculate and beg the question: If Carrie Grethen was the person harassing Benton and she had some link to the Chandonne family, was Benton’s murder more than a simple act of psychopathy? Was his slaying an organized crime hit disguised to seem personal, senseless, deranged, with Carrie the lieutenant who was more than eager to carry it out?
“In other words,” Marino says to me with his mouth full, “was his death like what you’re accused of.”
The table falls silent. None of us quite get his meaning, but then I do. “You’re saying, if there was a real motive for his murder but it was disguised to look like a serial killing?”
He shrugs. “Just like you being accused of murdering Bray and disguising it to look like Wolfman did it.”
“Maybe why Interpol got so hot and bothered,” Lucy considers.
Marino helps himself to excellent French wine he gulps down like Gatorade. “Yeah, Interpol. Maybe Benton got all tangled up with the cartel somehow and . . . ”
“Because of Chandonne,” I interrupt as my focus sharpens and I think I am on the trail that might just lead to the truth.
Jaime Berger has been our uninvited Christmas guest. She has shaded my thoughts all afternoon. I can’t stop thinking about one of the first things she asked when we met in my conference room. She wanted to know if anyone had profiled Chandonne’s Richmond murders. She was so quick to bring that up and so clearly believes profiling is important. Certainly, she would have had someone profile Susan Pless’s murder and I am increasingly suspicious that Benton very well may have known about that case.
I get up from the table. “Please be home,” I say out loud to Berger, and I experience a growing sense of desperation as I dig in my satchel for her business card. On it is her home number and I call from Anna’s kitchen where no one can hear what I say. A part of me is embarrassed. I am also frightened and mad. If I am wrong, I will sound foolish. If I am right, then she should have been mo
re open with me, damn it, damn her.
“Hello?” A woman answers.
“Ms. Berger?” I say.
“Hold on.” The person calls out, “Mom! For you!”
The minute Berger gets on the line I say, “What else don’t I know about you? Because it’s becoming patently clear that I don’t know much.”
“Oh, Jill.” She must mean the person who answered the phone. “Actually, they’re from Greg’s first marriage. Two teenagers. And today I’d sell them to the first bidder. Hell, I’d pay someone to take them.”
“No, you wouldn’t!” Jill says in the background and laughs.
“Let me get to a quieter spot.” Berger talks as she moves into some other area of wherever it is she lives with a husband and two children she has never mentioned to me, even after all the hours we spent together. My resentment simmers. “What’s up, Kay?”
“Did you know Benton?” I ask her straight up.
Nothing.
“Are you there?” I speak again.
“I’m here,” she says and her tone has gotten quiet and serious. “I’m thinking how best to answer you. . . . ”
“Why not start with the truth. For once.”
“I’ve always told you the truth,” she replies.
“That’s ridiculous. I’ve heard even the best of you lie when you’re trying to manipulate someone. Suggesting lie detectors, or the big needle truth serum to get people to ’fess up, and there’s also such a thing as lying by omission. The whole truth. I demand it. For God’s sake, did Benton have something to do with the Susan Pless case?”
“Yes,” Berger replies. “Absolutely yes, Kay.”
“Talk to me, Ms. Berger. I’ve just spent the entire afternoon going through letters and other weird things he received before he was murdered. They were processed in the post office located in Susan’s neighborhood.”
A pause. “I’d met Benton numerous times and my office has certainly availed itself of the services the behavioral science unit has to offer. Back then, at least. We actually have a forensic psychiatrist we use now, someone here in New York. I’d worked with Benton on other cases over the years, that’s my point. And the minute I learned about Susan’s murder and went to the scene, I called him and got him up here. We went through her apartment, just as you and I went through the Richmond crime scenes.”
“Did he ever indicate to you that he was getting strange mail and phone calls and other things? And that just possibly there was a connection between whoever was doing it and whoever murdered Susan Pless?”
“I see,” is all she says.
“See? What the hell do you see?”
“I see you know,” she answers me. “Question is, how?”
I tell her about the Tlip file. I inform her that it appears Benton had the documents checked for fingerprints and I am wondering who did that and where and what the results might have been. She has no idea but says we should run any latent prints through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, known as AFIS. “There are postage stamps on the envelopes,” I inform her. “He didn’t remove them and he would have had to if he wanted them checked for DNA.”
It has only been in recent years that DNA analysis has become sophisticated enough, because of PCR, to make it worthwhile to analyze saliva, and just maybe whoever affixed postage stamps to the envelopes did so by licking them. I am not sure that even Carrie would have known back then that licking a stamp might give up her identity to us. I would have known. Had Benton showed these letters to me, I would have recommended he have the stamps examined. Maybe we would have gotten results. Maybe he wouldn’t be dead.
“Back then a lot of people, even those in law enforcement, just didn’t think about things like that,” Berger is still talking about the postage stamps. “Seems like all cops do these days is follow people for their coffee cups or sweaty towels, Kleenex, cigarette butts. Amazing.”
I have an incredible thought. What she is saying has brought to mind a case in England where a man was falsely accused of a burglary because of a cold hit on the Birmingham-based National DNA Database. The man’s solicitor demanded a retest of the DNA recovered from the crime, this time using ten loci, or locations, instead of the standard six that had been used. Loci, or alleles, are simply specific locations on your genetic map. Some alleles are more common than others, so the less common they are and the more locations used, the better your chances for a match—which isn’t literally a match, but rather a statistical probability that makes it almost impossible to believe the suspect didn’t commit the crime. In the British case, the alleged burglar was excluded upon retesting with additional loci. There was a one-in-thirty-seven-million chance of a mismatch, and sure enough, it happened.
“When you tested the DNA from Susan’s case, did you use STR?” I ask Berger.
STR is the newest technology in DNA profiling. All it means is we amplify the DNA with PCR and look at very discriminating repeated base pairs called Short Tandem Repeats. Typically, the requirement for DNA databases these days is that at least thirteen probes or loci be used, thus making it highly improbable that there will be any mismatches.
“I know our labs are very advanced,” Berger is saying. “They’ve been doing PCR for years.”
“It’s all PCR unless the lab is still doing the old RFLP, which is very reliable but just takes forever,” I reply. “In 1997, it was a matter of how many probes you used—or loci. Often in first screening of a sample, the lab may not do ten, thirteen or fifteen loci. That gets to be expensive. If only four loci were done in Susan’s case, for example, you could come up with an unusual exception. I’m assuming the ME’s office still has the extraction left in their freezer.”
“What sort of bizarre exception?”
“If we’re dealing with siblings. Brothers. And one left the seminal fluid and the other left the hair and saliva.”
“But you tested Thomas’s DNA, right? And it was similar to Jean-Baptiste’s but not the same?” I can’t believe it. Berger is getting agitated.
“We also did that just days ago with thirteen loci, not four or six,” I reply. “I’m assuming the profiles had a lot of the same alleles, but also some different ones. The more probes you do, the more you come up with differences. Especially in closed populations. And when you think of the Chandonne family, theirs is probably a very closed population, people who have lived on Île Saint-Louis for hundreds of years, probably married their own kind. In some cases, inbreeding—marrying cousins, which might also account for Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s congenital deformity. The more people inbreed, the more they up their chances for genetic glitches.”
“We need to retest the seminal fluid from Susan’s case,” Berger decides.
“Your labs would do that anyway, since he’s up on murder charges,” I reply. “But you might want to encourage them to make it a priority.”
“God, let’s hope it doesn’t turn out to be someone else,” she says in frustration. “Jesus, that would be awful if the DNA doesn’t match when they do the retest. Talk about really screwing up my case.”
She is right. It certainly would. Even Berger might have a hard time making a jury believe that Chandonne killed Susan if his DNA doesn’t match the DNA of the seminal fluid recovered from her body.
“I’ll get Marino to submit the stamps and any latent prints to the Richmond labs,” she then says. “And Kay, I need to ask you not to look at anything in that file unless it’s witnessed; don’t look any further. That’s why it’s best you don’t submit any evidence yourself.”
“I understand.” Another reminder that I am under suspicion for murder.
“For your own protection,” she adds.
“Ms. Berger, if you knew about the letters, about what was happening to Benton, then what did you think when he was murdered?”
“Aside from the obvious shock and grief? That he was killed by whoever was harassing him. Yes, first thing that came to mind. However, when it became clear who his killers were a
nd then they were gunned down, there didn’t seem to be anything to pursue further.”
“And if Carrie Grethen wrote those harassing letters, she wrote the worst one, it seems, on the very day Susan was killed.”
Silence.
“I think we must consider there could be a connection.” I am firm on this point. “Susan may have been Chandonne’s first victim in this country, and as Benton started poking around he might have started getting too close to other things that point to the cartel. Carrie was alive and in New York when Chandonne came there and killed Susan.”
“And maybe Benton was a hit?” Berger sounds doubtful.
“More than maybe,” I reply. “I knew Benton and the way he thought. For starters, why was he carrying the Tlip file in his briefcase—why did he take it with him to Philadelphia if he didn’t have some reason to think that the weird stuff in it was connected to what Carrie and her accomplice were doing? Killing people and cutting their faces off. Making them ugly. And the notes Benton was getting made it clear he was going to be made ugly, and he sure as hell was. . . .”
“I need a copy of that file,” Berger dismisses me. It is obvious by her tone that she suddenly wants to get off the phone. “I’ve got a fax machine here in the house.” She gives me the number.
I GO INTO Anna’s study and spend the nextt half hour photocopying everything in the Tlip file because I can’t feed laminated documents into the fax machine. Marino finished the burgundy and is asleep on the couch again when I return to the living room, where Lucy and McGovern sit in front of the fire talking, continuing to paint scenarios that are only getting wilder the more they are influenced by alcohol. Christmas speeds away from us. We finally get around to opening gifts at half past ten, and Marino groggily plays Santa, handing out boxes and trying to be festive. But his mood has gotten only darker and any attempts at humor have a bite. At eleven o’clock, Anna’s phone rings. It is Berger.
“Quid pro quo?” she launches in, referring to the letter dated December 5, 1997. “How many non-legal-minded people use that term? Just a crazy idea, but wonder if there’s a way we could get hold of Rocky Caggiano’s DNA. May as well turn over every stone and not be so quick to assume Carrie wrote these letters. Maybe she did. But maybe she didn’t.”
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