by Tyler Dilts
“What do you mean?”
“When’s the last time you met a rich guy who didn’t make you want to puke?”
“Funny,” I said. “We have any idea where he is?”
“Yeah,” Ruiz said. “He’s on an airplane flying in from DC. His old man’s coming, too.”
“Does he know?” I asked.
“His attorney does. I imagine he’s spread the word.”
“You made the notification to the lawyer?”
“That’s the play they dealt. Told Benton’s chief of staff I was a cop; he put me straight through to the mouthpiece. He hemmed and hawed so much I just gave up and spit it out.”
“This is going to be a peach,” Jen said.
Ruiz’s cell rang. He checked the caller ID display and took it out of the room.
I went back to the photos on the wall. In one of the few that didn’t include Benton, Sara was standing on a playground between two swings. On her left was Bailey, on her right, Jacob. Her arms were open, and she had one hand on each child’s back and was just beginning to push. The family resemblance shone in their smiles, and the three of them seemed to share some deep and secret happiness.
An hour and a half later, we reconvened in the den. The lieutenant had called in the rest of the Homicide Detail to back us up. Marty Locklin and David Zepeda were the old hands, with almost fifty years on the job between them. Patrick Glenn was the newest addition to the squad. He’d been on loan from Computer Crimes while I was out on medical leave, and Ruiz was trying to make the reassignment permanent. We’d all torn the house apart on the assumption that the Bentons’ attorneys would get in the way once they arrived. We assumed Bradley probably had a whole host of things he’d rather not have the police looking at. The house’s status as a crime scene gave us quite a bit of latitude. Until someone protested, we were allowed to search just about anything. And we wanted to find out as much as we could before we had to start justifying our actions.
Ruiz eyeballed us. “Impressions?”
“It’s a mess,” I said. “The first thought is home invasion. The back door’s been forced. Looks like a safe’s been ripped out of one of the master bedroom closets with pry bars and a sledgehammer. But if you go with that, why torture Sara?”
Jen spoke next. “The combination to the safe?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But it was pretty hard core for that. Looks like these guys enjoyed what they did to her.”
Marty took a turn. “Coincidence? A couple of pervs who take scores see the chance to combine work with pleasure?”
Jen shook her head. “Crossover like that’s pretty rare. Usually the deviants aren’t big on multitasking. Too much of a distraction from the real business.” She’d spent three years in Sex Crimes before transferring to Homicide.
“And what about the kids?” Ruiz asked.
“Looks like a mob hit,” Dave said. “No wits.”
“It does,” I said. “But that doesn’t fit, either. They don’t usually kill kids. Too much heat—the percentages don’t add up.”
“Well,” Ruiz said, “nothing adds up here.” He looked down at his shoes. I thought a speech might be in the offing, but I was wrong. He went for terse. “Figure it out. There’s a storm coming, and it’s moving fast.” Well, terse and clichéd.
“Marty?” I asked.
He hooked a thumb at Dave and said, “We’ll get started on the canvass.”
Patrick held up an external hard drive. “Two computers. I copied both. Going to take them back to the squad and start digging.”
“Should you do that?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “I can do it.” He shrugged.
I let it go.
After everyone else made their way out of the room, Jen and I were left alone.
My gaze drifted back over the photos of Benton. Twenty-two of them. Benton himself in twenty. What kind of man, I wondered, had more pictures of himself than of his children? What kind of ego did that indicate? What kind of narcissism? I moved my eyes down the rows and studied his face. His eyes. His smile. There was something missing in every one.
A slicing pain wound its way up my arm like a twisting chain.
I knew.
I didn’t know how or why, but I knew.
Jen was watching me. “What?” she asked.
“He’s guilty,” I said.
“Well, good,” she said with mock relief. “That’ll save us a lot of work.”
I was working on a comeback when we heard the scream.
Four
I SUPPOSED THE real problem with the pain scale itself as a diagnostic tool was the patient’s capacity for imagination. At one support group for chronic pain sufferers I attended, we spent the first twenty minutes complaining about the folly of the scale and about the incredible extremities of pain we could imagine. Anyone who has dealt with the medical establishment’s treatment of chronic pain in the last few years has encountered this phenomenon. We’re asked to rate our pain on a scale of one to ten. To assign it a numerical value. One: no pain at all. Ten: the worst pain imaginable. So you can see why what we are capable of envisioning is a significant factor in our estimation.
Pain does strange things to you. Chronic pain especially so. It changes you. Your feelings. Your thoughts. Your beliefs. Even your imagination. Things that were once abstractions become tangible. Suffering, true suffering, becomes something that is no longer an only vaguely considered possibility but a palatable, day-to-day reality.
You learn to imagine the unimaginable.
And to live in pain is to encounter the darkest possibilities of your imagination.
When you did what I did every day, those possibilities were very dark indeed.
It turned out that the scream had come from the nanny. By the time Jen and I made our way to the kitchen, she was sitting rigid on a chair at the corner of the breakfast nook. Ruiz was next to her, a fatherly hand on her shoulder and comforting words trickling out of his mouth. We stood back as he eased her into the requisite questions.
Her name was Joely Ryan, and she’d been working for the Bentons for a little over a year. She was blonde and cute, early twenties, and she seemed like someone accustomed to being in the presence of wealth but not someone born to it. Her demeanor held too much deference to the lieutenant’s authority for it to have developed in any kind of excessive privilege. And her distress was almost surely genuine.
Ruiz motioned Jen and me to the table. “Joely,” he said, “this is Detective Tanaka and Detective Beckett. They’re going to ask you some more questions.”
She nodded and removed a fresh tissue from the box on the table to dab at her cheeks.
Jen took Ruiz’s spot at the table as I leaned back against the large granite-topped counter that dominated the kitchen. I noticed a large Post-it note on the stainless refrigerator door. In large black handwriting, it read:
DON’T FORGET!
LUNCH W/CAT
WED 12
I looked at my watch. It was after 2:00. Sara missed her lunch. I made a note and turned my attention back to the table.
“I know this is difficult,” Jen said. “But can you think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Mrs. Benton or the children?”
Joely shook her head.
“How about Mr. Benton?”
She looked up at Jen. “No.”
“Have you noticed anything unusual or out of the ordinary recently?”
“Like what?”
“Changes in anyone’s behavior, changes in schedules or the way the Bentons liked to do things, new people around, strangers. Anything at all.”
“No.” Joely shook her head again and wiped her nose.
Jen let things sit for a moment.
“Well,” Joely went on, “just tiny things. Like today.”
“What happened today?”
“The kids were supposed to be in school. Sara hardly ever keeps them home, but they both had that bug that’s going around, so she asked if I could come early. I wouldn’t even
be here yet—” Her voice caught in her throat.
Jen gave Joely time to compose herself, asked her a few more questions, then told her we’d probably need to talk to her again. Gave her a business card in case she thought of anything in the meantime.
We were back in the den before either of us said it out loud.
I said, “Looks like the kids are dead...”
“...because,” Jen continued, “they had a cold.”
We had the run of the house for another half an hour. Then the weather changed and a cold front blew in. Brad’s lawyers showed up.
The alpha had short, well-tended hair glistening with some sort of product and a gunmetal-gray suit that looked like it cost more than my car.
Ruiz led him and a quarter dozen of his minions out onto the back patio, where Jen and I were tossing out some preliminary ideas. He introduced us as the leads on the investigation.
“I’m Julian Campos,” he said, extending a hand. “I’m the Bentons’ attorney.” His handshake felt like he’d been working on it with a personal trainer. “These are my associates from Sternow and Byrne. We’re here to help in whatever way we can.”
“Is Mr. Benton with you?” I asked.
“Presently, he’s understandably distraught. He’s seeking assistance from the family’s physician.”
“We’ll need to talk to him as soon as possible.”
“Of course. In the meantime, is there any way we can be of assistance?” The pergola overhead cast zebra-striped shadows across him.
“You can stay out of the way.”
“Of course.”
The gaggle of lawyers melted into the background. But as soon as Campos closed his mouth, they spread out through the house and started taking photos and writing down everything they saw.
Jen and I split up and walked the house one more time to make sure we’d caught everything there was to catch. Although they were smart enough to stay away from the rooms in which the murders took place, it seemed like I couldn’t turn around without seeing another attorney.
After we had covered the entire scene again, we met up with Ruiz in the foyer.
“Well?” he said.
“I think we’re covered,” I said. “But I don’t like all the lawyers.”
“Why?” He looked at me. “You got something to hide?”
While I’d been on leave, I’d read an article in Los Angeles magazine about a new trend among high-end Southern California legal practices that the author referred to as “megafirms.” These were top-of-the-line, spare-no-expense organizations that had battled the economic downturn by offering their clients a full array of luxury legal services. They also provided private security, investigative services, and just about anything else imaginable within the realm of on-demand law and order.
Sternow and Byrne was one of these firms. If you signed up with S&B, they’d not only handle all your business’s legal needs, but they’d also do a background check on your potential trophy wife, draft a bulletproof prenup, follow her when she started cheating on you, provide stellar representation during the divorce, and probably even offer up someone to intimidate her when she violated the restraining order. And they’d do your taxes. Not bad if you could afford it.
We leaned against the hood of Jen’s 4Runner as I ran down what I remembered from the article. It seemed to ring a bell for her.
“Sternow and Byrne,” she said. “They’re the ones who got all the press for buying that private military firm that was operating in Afghanistan, right?”
“Yep. They reorganized it and turned it into their new security and investigation division.”
“Nice. Benton’s lawyers have actual mercenaries on the payroll.”
We left the scene and decided to rendezvous back at the squad. None of us had eaten, and by the time we got back it would be close to quitting time. Jen and I would be working through dinner. The overtime had already been approved. I volunteered to take a detour on the way back and stop by Enrique’s for takeout.
“The usual?” I asked as she climbed into her 4Runner.
“You still remember?”
“I’m crushed you even asked.”
Before I started the car, I phoned in an order for carne asada, chicken veracruz, mixed-bean soup, steamed rice, and chips and salsa.
It had been more than a year since my partner and I had worked over dinner. Driving south down the 710, I hit the PLAY button on the steering wheel. Springsteen started in on “Further On (Up the Road),” and I felt like I was going home.
PART TWO: PRESENTATION
Severity is in the eye of the sufferer...Pain is pain.
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Three
PAIN IS RELATIVE. It’s been years since I’ve been able to sleep through the night on any kind of a regular basis. Even before I nearly lost my hand, I was already in a kind of pain. My wife burned to death in a car accident a few years earlier. I’ve killed two teenagers in the line of duty. And as I’ve already mentioned, I’ve been obsessing over homicides for more than a decade. None of these things has ever treaded lightly on my psyche. I was on close personal terms with Grey Goose a good long time before I ever had any major surgery at all.
On occasion, I consider the two varieties of pain I’ve experienced—the physical and the psychological. And I often believe that I prefer the physical. It’s tangible and palpable in a way that the ghosts that haunt my sleepless nights never are and never will be. There’s a hope, too, in the physical pain, a hope of some cure or remedy, of some relief, no matter how distant, that is forever absent in the other. What hope is there, for example, of forgetting the last time I saw my wife, on a stainless-steel autopsy table, her body burned and blackened, her face charred almost beyond recognition?
A few years earlier, the brass had wanted to update the furniture in the Homicide Detail squad room when the building got a top-to-bottom refurbishing. They had planned to install cubicles and fabric-covered partitions to “delineate workspaces” and “facilitate a professional atmosphere,” as they were doing throughout the department. Ruiz hemmed and hawed, stomped his feet, and just generally made a stink until the Detective Division commander threw in the towel and let him keep the traditional squad arrangement—three clusters of two WWII-era steel desks, each facing one another, in the large open space.
I looked at Jen over our gray wood-grain Formica desktops. She’d changed into jeans and an LBPD T-shirt before I’d made it back with the food.
Over dinner, we’d talked about Jen’s hunt for a house. She’d never owned one before but had some money in the bank and thought the time was right to get into the market while home values were bottoming out. She was looking at places in California Heights and even Lakewood. I was pushing her toward Belmont Shore.
“That’s where all the cool people live.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m looking on the other side of town.”
A few hours later, the wastebaskets were full of empty Styrofoam takeout containers, the leftovers were secured in the coffee room fridge, and we were wrapping things up for the night.
It was after nine, and the rest of the squad had drifted out, one by one. We’d spent the last few hours putting together the murder book, setting up the bulletin board that would keep the most significant details of the case in plain sight, running MOs through ViCAP and NCIC to check for possible hits, and probably most importantly, using Sara Gardener-Benton’s calendar and phone and bank records to establish a preliminary record of her movements for the last days of her life. None of it was terribly exciting, but it was the legwork that would, if anything at all did, most likely lead to a break in the case. And so far, there were none of those in sight.
I looked up from the local usage detail report from Verizon with a listing of all of Sara’s calls and text messages for the last month and thought I caught Jen smiling at me.
“What?” I asked.
She looked at me and shook her head but cou
ldn’t completely hide the grin.
Back in the saddle.
Whoopie-ti-yi-yay.
Sometime past midnight, Jen had called it a night and headed home for a few hours of sleep. I was tacking the night’s final crime scene photo on the board when I felt a twinge of pain shoot through my wrist.
“Motherfucker,” I said to the empty room.
In my seventeen sessions with the pain psychologist, we worked on things like creative visualization and guided imagery and mindful meditation. The purpose of these activities was to find a technique that could be successful in occupying my conscious mind to such a degree that it might be possible to direct my thoughts away from focusing on my chronic pain and down more serene and pleasant paths.
“So basically the point is to distract myself,” I said.
“Well...” She danced around the phraseology a bit but ultimately agreed that I was right about the basic idea.
So we imagined peaceful streams and secluded beaches and snow-kissed mountains and tropical islands and suns setting over distant horizons.
Pretty stuff.
It never occurred to either of us that pretty stuff was the exact opposite of what I needed.
I thought back over the previous several hours. The last time I remembered thinking about my pain was early in the evening, picking up dinner at Enrique’s. I had stretched my neck while I was waiting for the takeout. And before that? On the way to the crime scene.
As I felt the awareness of the pain wash over me again, I couldn’t fathom the sensation. I think I might have smiled.
Five hours. Maybe six. Hours I’d spent losing myself in the Benton investigation. With almost no awareness of my pain.
That was the best I’d done in over a year.
Son of a bitch.
The psychologist was on to something, after all. It wasn’t the technique that was wrong. It was the imagery.
