The Last Precinct ks-11

by Patricia Cornwell

  "Anna?" I whisper. I see her stir. "Anna? It's me. I've brought you coffee."

  She sits up with a start, squinting, her white hair in her face and sticking up in places.

  Merry Christmas, I start to say. I tell her "happy holidays" instead.

  "All these years I celebrate Christmas while I am secretly Jewish." She reaches for her coffee. "I am not known for a sweet disposition early in the morning," she says.

  I squeeze her hand, and in the dark she seems suddenly so old and delicate. "I read your letter. I'm not sure what to say but I can't destroy it, and we must talk about it," I tell her.

  For an instant she pauses. I think I catch relief in her silence. Then she gets stubborn again and waves me off, as if by a mere gesture she can dismiss her entire history and what she has told me about my own life. Night-lights cast exaggerated, deep shadows of Biedermeier furniture and antique lamps and oil paintings in her large, gorgeous bedroom. Thick silk draperies are drawn. "I probably should not have written any of that to you,'' she says firmly.

  "I wish you'd written it to me sooner. Anna."

  She sips her coffee and pulls the covers up to her shoulders.

  "What happened to you as a child isn't your fault," I say to her. "The choices were made by your father, not you. He protected you in one way and didn't protect you at all. Maybe there was no choice."

  She shakes her head. "You do not know. You cannot know,"

  I am not about to argue with that.

  "There are no monsters to compare with them. My family had no choice. My father drank a lot of schnapps. He was drunk most the time on schnapps and they would get drunk with him. To this day I cannot smell schnapps." She clutches the coffee mug in both hands. "They all got drunk, it did not matter. When Reichsminister Speer and his entourage visited installations at Gusen and Ebensee, they came to our schloss, oh yes, our quaint little castle. My parents had this sumptuous banquet with musicians from Vienna and the finest champagne and food, and everyone was drunk. I remember I hid in my bedroom, so afraid of who would come next. I hid under the bed all night and several times there were footsteps in my room and once someone yanked the covers back and swore. I stayed on the floor under the bed all night dreaming of the music and of one young man who made such sweetness flow from his violin. He looked at me often and made me -blush and as I hid under my bed later that night, I thought of him. No one who made such beauty could be unkind. All night I thought of him."

  "The violinist from Vienna?" I asked. "The one you later…?"

  "No, no." Anna shakes her head in the shadows. "This was many years before Rudi. But I think it is when I fell in love with Rudi, in advance, having never met him. I saw the musicians in their black cutaways and was mesmerized by the magic they made, and I wanted them to steal me from the horror. I imagined myself soaring on their notes into a pure place. For a moment, I was returned to Austria before the quarry and the crematorium, when life was simple, the people decent and fun and had perfect gardens and such pride in their homes. On sunny spring days we would hang our goose-down duvets out windows to be scrubbed by the sweetest air I have ever breathed. And we would play in rolling fields of grass that seemed to lead right up to the sky while father would hunt in the woods for boar and mother would sew and bake." She pauses, her face touched by sweet sadness. "That a string quartet could transform the most dreadful of nights. And then later, my magical thinking carries me into the arms of a man with a violin, an American. And I am here. I am here. I escaped. But I have never escaped, Kay."

  DAWN BEGINS TO LIGHT UP THE DRAPES AND TURN

  them the color of honey. I tell Anna I am glad she is here. I thank her for talking to Benton and for finally letting me know. In some ways the picture is more complete because of what I now understand. In some ways, it isn't. I can't sharply outline the progression of moods and changes that preceded Benton's murder, but I do know that about the time he was seeing Anna, Carrie Grethen was looking for a new partner to replace Temple Gault. Carrie had worked in computers earlier in her life. She was brilliant and incredibly manipulative and talked her way into gaining access to a computer at the forensic psychiatric hospital, Kirby. This was how she cast her web back out into the world. She linked up with a new partner_ another psychopathic killer named Newton Joyce. She did this through the Internet, and he helped her escape from Kirby.

  "Perhaps she met certain other people through the Internet, too," Anna suggests.

  "Marino's son. Rocky?" I say.

  "I am thinking it."

  "Anna, do you have any idea what happened to Benton's file? The Tlip file, as he called it?"

  "I have never seen it." She sits up straighter, deciding it is time to get out of bed, and the covers settle around her waist. Her bare arms look pitifully thin and wrinkled, as if someone has let the air out of diem. Her bosom sags low and loose beneath dark silk. "When I helped you sort through his clothing and other personal belongings, I did not see a file. But I did not touch his office."

  I remember so little.

  "No." She pulls back the covers and lowers her feet to the floor. "I would not. That was not something I would go into, His professional files." She is up now and slips on a robe. "I just assumed you would have gone through those." She looks at me. "You have, yes? What about his office at Quantico? He had already retired, so I suppose he had cleaned that out already?"

  "That was cleaned out, yes." We walk down the hallway toward the kitchen. "Case files would have stayed there. Unlike some of his compatriots who retire from the FBI, Benton didn't believe cases he worked belonged to him," 1 add rue- fully. "So I know he didn't take any case files away from Quantico when he retired. What I don't know is if he would have left the Tlip file with the Bureau. If so, I'll never see it."

  "That was his file," Anna points out. "Correspondence to him. When he spoke about it to me, he never referred to what was happening to him as Bureau business. He seemed to take the threats, the crank calls, as something personal, and I am not aware that he ever shared these things with other agents. He was so paranoid, mostly because some of the threats involved you. I was led to believe I am the only person he told. I know this. I said to him many times that I believed he should tell the FBI." She shook her head. "He would not," she says again.

  I empty the coffee filter into the trash and feel a spike of old resentment. Benton kept so much from me. "A shame," I reply. "Maybe if he'd told some of the other agents, none of this would have happened."

  "Would you like more coffee?"

  I am reminded that I did not go to bed last night. "I guess I'd better," I reply.

  "Some Viennese coffee," Anna decides, opening the refrigerator and picking through bags of coffee. "Since I am feeling nostalgic for Austria this morning." She says this with a hint of sarcasm, as if she is silently berating herself for divulging details of her past. She pours beans into the grinder and the kitchen is filled briefly with noise.

  "Benton got disillusioned with the Bureau in the end," I think out loud. "I'm not sure he trusted people around him anymore. Competitiveness. He was the unit chief and knew everybody was going to fight over his job the minute he even mentioned he was ready to retire. Knowing him, he handled his problems in total isolation_the same way he worked his cases. If nothing else, Benton was a master of discretion." I am running through every possibility. Where would Benton have kept the file? Where might it be? He had his own room in my house where he stored his belongings and plugged in his laptop. He had file drawers. But I have been through those and never saw anything even similar to what Anna has described.

  Then I think of something else. When Benton was murdered in Philadelphia, he was checked into a hotel. Several bags of his personal effects were returned to me, including his briefcase, which I opened. I went through it just as the police had. I know I didn't see anything like this Tlip file, but if it is true Benton was suspicious that Carrie Grethen might have had something to do with the crank calls and notes he was getting, might he not
have carried the Tlip file with him when he was working new cases possibly connected to her? Wouldn't he have brought the file to Philadelphia?

  I go to the phone and call Marino. "Merry Christmas," I say. "It's me."

  "What?" he blurts out, half asleep."Oh shit. What time is it?"

  "A few minutes past seven."

  "Seven!" Groan. "Hell, Santa ain't even come yet. What you calling me so early for?"

  "Marino, this is important. When the police went through Benton's personal effects in the hotel room in Philadelphia, did you go through them?"

  A big yawn and he blows out loudly. "Damn, I gotta quit staying up so late. My lungs are killing me, got to quit smoking. Me and some of the guys and Wild Turkey hung out last night." Another yawn. "Hold on. I'm coming to. Let me switch channels. One minute it's Christmas, next you're asking about Philadelphia?"

  "That's right. The stuff you guys found in Benton's hotel room."

  "Yeah. Hell, yeah I went through it."

  "Did you take anything? Anything, for example, that might have been in his briefcase? A file, for example, that might have had letters in it?"

  "He had a couple files in there. Why do you want to know?"

  I am getting excited. My synapses are firing, clearing my head and pumping energy into my cells. "Where are these files now?" I ask him.

  "Yeah, I remember some letters. Weirdo shit that I thought I should pay some attention to. Then Lucy blew Carrie and Joyce out of the air and turned them into fish chum, and that exceptionally cleared the case, I guess you could say. Shit. I still can't believe she had a fucking AR-fifteen in the damn helicopter and…"

  "Where are the files?" I ask him again and I can't keep the urgency out of my voice. My heart is pounding. "I need to see a file that had the weird letters. Benton called it his Tlip file. T-L-P. As in The Last Precinct. Maybe where Lucy got the idea for the name."

  "The Last Precinct. You mean where Lucy's going to work_McGovern's place in New York? What the hell's that got to do with some file in Benton's briefcase?"

  "Good question," I tell him.

  "Okay. It's somewhere. I gotta find it, and I'll be over."

  Anna has gone back to her bedroom, and I occupy myself with thinking about our holiday meal as I wait for Lucy and McGovern to get here. I start pulling food out of the refrigerator as I replay what Lucy told me about McGovern's new company in New York. Lucy said the name The Last Precinct started out as a joke. Where you go when there is nowhere left. And in Anna's letter, she said Benton told her The Last Precinct is where he would end up. Cryptic. Riddles. Benton believed his future was somehow connected to what he was putting in that file. The Last Precinct was death, I then consider. Where was Benton going to end up? He was going to end up dead. Is this what he meant? Where else might he have ended up?

  Days ago, I promised Anna I would cook Christmas dinner if she did not mind an Italian in her kitchen who does not go near a turkey or what people stuff in turkeys during the holidays. Anna has made a valiant effort at shopping. She even has cold-pressed olive oil and fresh buffalo mozzarella. I fill a large pot with water and go back to Anna's bedroom to tell her She can't go to Hilton Head or anywhere else until she has eaten a little cucina Scarpetta and sampled a little wine. This is a family day, I tell her as she brushes her teeth. I don't care about special grand juries or prosecutors or anything else un- til after dinner. Why doesn't she make something Austrian? At this she almost spits out toothpaste. Never, she says. If both of us were in the kitchen at the same time, we would kill each other.

  For a while, the mood seems to lift in Anna's house. Lucy and McGovern appear around nine and gifts are piled under the tree. I start mixing eggs and flour and work it all together with my fingers on a wooden cutting board. When the dough is the right consistency, I wrap it in plastic and start looking for the hand-cranked pasta machine Anna claims to have somewhere as I jump from thought to thought, barely hearing what Lucy and McGovern are chatting about.

  "It's not that I can't fly when it's not VFR conditions." Lucy is explaining something about her new helicopter, which apparently has been delivered to New York. "I have my instrument rating. But I'm not interested in having an instrument-rated single-engine helicopter because with only one engine, I want to see the ground at all times. So I don't want to be flying above the clouds on crappy days."

  "Sounds dangerous," McGovern comments.

  "It's not in the least. The engines never quit in these things, but it pays to always consider the worst-case scenario."

  I begin kneading the dough. It is my favorite part of making pasta, and I always refrain from using food processors because the warmth of the human touch gives a texture to fresh pasta that is unlike anything agitating steel blades can effect. I get into a rhythm, pushing down, folding over, giving half-turns, pressing hard with the heel of my good hand as I, too, think of worst-case scenarios. What might Benton have believed was the worst-case scenario for him? If he was thinking that his metaphorical Last Precinct was where he would end up, what would have been the worst-case scenario? This is when I decide he didn't mean death when he said he would end up in The Last Precinct. No. Benton of all people knew there are far worse things than death.

  "I've given her lessons off and on. Talk about a quick study. But people who use their hands have an advantage," Lucy is saying to McGovern, talking about me.

  It is where I will end up. Benton's words shine my mind.

  "Right. Because it takes coordination."

  "Got to be able to use both hands and both feet at the same time. And unlike fixed wing, a helicopter is intrinsically unstable."

  "That's what I'm saying. They're dangerous."

  It is where I'll end up, Anna.

  "They aren't, Teun. You can lose an engine at a thousand feet and fly it right down to the ground. The air keeps the blades turning. Ever heard of autorotating?You land in a parking lot or someone's yard. You can't do that with a plane."

  What did you mean, Benton. Goddamn it, what did you mean? I knead and knead, always turning the ball of dough in the same direction, clockwise because I am leading with my right hand, avoiding my cast.

  "Thought you said you never lose an engine. I want some eggnog. Is Marino making his famous eggnog this morning?" McGovern says.

  "That's his New Year's Eve thing."

  "What? It's against the law on Christmas? I don't know how she does that."

  "Stubborn, that's how."

  "No kidding. And we're just standing here doing nothing."

  "She won't let you help. No one touches her dough. Trust me. Aunt Kay, isn't that making your elbow hurt?"

  My eyes focus as I look up. I am kneading with my right hand and the fingertips of my left. I glance at the clock over the sink and realize I have lost track of time and have been kneading for almost ten minutes.

  "God, what world were you just in?" Lucy's light spirit turns to lead as she searches my face. "Don't let all this eat you alive. It's going to be all right."

  She thinks I am worrying about the special grand jury, when ironically, I am not thinking about that at all this morning.

  'Teun and I are going to help you, are helping you. What do you think we've been doing these last few days? We've got a plan we want to talk to you about."

  "After eggnog," McGovern says with a kind smile.

  "Did Benton ever talk to you about The Last Precinct?" I am out with it, almost accusing in the fierce way I look at both of them, then realizing by their confused expressions they don't know what I am alluding to at all.

  "You mean what we're doing now?" Lucy frowns. "The office in New York? He couldn't have known about that unless you mentioned to him you were thinking about going into your own business." This she says to McGovern.

  I divide the dough into smaller parts and begin kneading again.

  "I've always thought about going private," McGovern replies. "But I never said anything about it to Benton. We were pretty consumed with the cases up there in
Pennsylvania."

  "Understatement of the century," Lucy adds blackly.

  "Right." McGovern sighs and shakes her head.

  "If Benton didn't have a clue about the private enterprise you planned to start," I then say, "is it possible he'd heard you mention The Last Precinct_the concept, the thing you say you used to joke about? I'm trying to figure out why he would label a file with that name."

  "What file?" Lucy asks.

  "Marino's bringing it over." I finish kneading one portion of dough and wrap it tightly in plastic. "It was in Benton's briefcase in Philadelphia." I explain to them what Anna told me in her letter and Lucy helps clarify at least one point. She feels certain she mentioned the philosophy of The Last Precinct to Benton. She seems to recall that she was in the car with him one day and was asking him about the private consulting he had begun doing in his retirement. He told her it was going all right but it was difficult handling the logistics of running his own business, that he missed having a secretary and someone else answering the phone, that sort of thing. Lucy wistfully replied that maybe all of us ought to get together and form our own company. That was when she used the term The Last Precinct_sort of "a league of our own," she says she told him.

  I spread clean, dry dish toweJs over the countertop. "Did he have any idea you might be serious about really doing that some day?" I ask.

  "I told him if I ever got enough money, I was going to quit working for the fucking government," Lucy replies.

  "Well." I fit thinning rollers in the pasta machine and set them at the largest opening. "Anybody who knows you would figure it was only a matter of time before you made money doing something. Benton always said you were too much a maverick to last in a bureaucracy forever. He wouldn't be the least bit surprised over what's happening to you now, Lucy."

  "In fact, it had already started happening to you from the start," McGovern points out to my niece. "Which is why you didn't last with the FBI."

  Lucy isn't insulted. She has at least accepted that she made mistakes early on, the worst one being her affair with Carrie Grethen. She no longer blames the FBI for backing away from her until she finally quit. I flatten a piece of dough with my palm and crank it through the machine. "I'm wondering if Benton used your concept as the name of his mysterious file because he somehow knew The Last Precinct_meaning us_ would investigate his case some day," I offer. "That we are where he would end up, because whatever was begun with those harassing letters and all the rest of it wasn't going to stop, even with his death." I turn the dough back through the machine again and again until I have a perfect strip of pasta to lay flat over a towel. "He knew. Somehow he did."