Port Mortuary

by Patricia Cornwell

  Benton and the FBI. One and the same again. Not a street agent again. I can’t imagine that. A criminal investigative analyst, a criminal intelligence analyst, a threat analyst. The Department of Justice has so many analysts, agents who are a combination academic and tactical. If you’re going to go to prison or get shot, may as well be at the hand of a cop who’s got a Ph.D.

  “What might you know about Jack your protégé that I don’t?” Benton asks me. “Besides that he’s a sick fuck. Because he is. Somewhere some part of you knows it, Kay.”

  I’m Briggs’s monster, and Fielding is mine. Going back to the beginning of time.

  “I’m well aware of sexual abuse,” Benton says blandly, as if he doesn’t care what happened to Fielding when he was a child, as if Benton really doesn’t give a damn.

  Not a psychologist but something else speaking, and I’m sure. Cops, federal agents, prosecutors, those who protect and punish, are hardened to excuses. They judge “subjects” and “persons of interest” by what they do, not by what was done to them. People like Benton don’t give a damn about why or if it couldn’t be helped, doesn’t matter the definitions, distillations, and predictions he so astutely, so skillfully, renders. In his heart Benton has no sympathy for hateful, harmful people, and his years of being a clinician and consultant have been cruel to him, have been unfulfilling and have felt fake, he’s confessed to me more than once.

  “That much is a matter of public record since the case went to trial.” Benton feels the need to tell me something I’ve never asked Fielding about.

  I don’t remember when and how I first heard of the special school Fielding attended as a boy near Atlanta. Somehow I know, and all that comes to mind is references he’s made to a certain “episode” in his past, that what he experienced with a certain “counselor” makes it excruciatingly difficult for him to handle any tragedy involving children, especially if they were abused. I’m certain I never pushed him to volunteer the details. Back in those days especially, I wouldn’t have asked.

  “Nineteen seventy-eight,” Benton says, “when Jack was fifteen, although he was twelve when it started, went on for several years until they were caught having sex in the back of her station wagon parked at the edge of the soccer field as if she wanted to be caught. She was pregnant. Anther pathetic story about boarding schools, this one, thank God, not Catholic but for troubled teens, one of these private treatment center-slash-academies that has ranch in its name. What the therapist did to get convicted of ten counts of sexual battery on a minor isn’t what you haven’t told me about Jack.”

  “I don’t know the details,” I finally answer him. “Not all of them or even most of them. I don’t remember her name, if I ever knew it; didn’t know she was pregnant. His child? Did she have it?”

  “I’ve reviewed the case transcripts. Yes. She had it.”

  “I wouldn’t have had a reason to look at the case transcripts.” I don’t ask why Benton has a reason. He’s not going to reveal that to me right now, and maybe he never will. “What a shame there’s one more child in the world Jack’s raised poorly. Or not at all,” I add. “How sad.”

  “Kathleen Lawler hasn’t had such a good life, either,” Benton starts to say.

  “How sad,” I repeat.

  “The woman convicted of molesting Jack,” he says. “I don’t know about the child, a girl, born in prison, given up for adoption. Considering the mutant genetic loading, probably in prison, too, or dead. Kathleen Lawler was in one mess after another, currently in a correctional facility for female offenders in Savannah, Georgia, serving twenty years for DUI manslaughter. Jack communicates with her, is a prison pen pal, although he uses a pen name, and that’s not what you haven’t told me, because I doubt you know about it. Actually, I can’t imagine you do.”

  “Who else was at the meetings last week?” I’m so cold my fingernails are blue, and I wish I’d brought my jacket in here. I notice a lab coat on the back of Fielding’s door.

  “It crossed my mind while we were sitting in your office,” says Benton the former FBI agent, the former protected witness and master of secrets, who isn’t acting like a former anything anymore.

  He’s acting like he’s investigating a case, not just a consultant on one. I’m convinced that what I suspect is true. He’s back with the Feds. Things end where they begin and begin where they end.

  “An affective disorder. I’ve thought hard about it, tried to remember him from the old days. Done a lot of reflecting on the old days.” Benton talks matter-of-factly, as if he has no feelings about what he’s divulging and accusing me of. “He’s never been normal. That’s my point. Jack has significant underlying pathology. That’s why he was sent off to boarding school. To learn to manage his anger. When he was six years old he stabbed another little kid in the chest with a ballpoint pen. When he was eleven he hit his mother in the head with a rake. Then he was sent to the ranch near Atlanta, where he only got angrier.”

  “I have no idea what he did when he was growing up,” I reply. “It’s not a common practice to conduct extensive background checks on doctors one might hire, in fact, was unheard of when I was getting started, when he was getting started. I’m not an FBI agent,” I add pointedly. “I don’t dig up everything I can about people and go around questioning neighbors they grew up around. I don’t question their teachers. I don’t track down their pen pals.”

  I get up from Fielding’s desk.

  “Although I probably should have. I probably will from now on. But I’ve never covered up for him,” I go on. “Never protected him that way. I admit I’ve been too forgiving. I admit I’ve fixed his disasters or tried to. But never covered up something I shouldn’t, if that’s what you’re saying I’ve done. I would never do anything unethical for him or anyone.” Not anymore, I add silently. I did it once but never again, and I never did it for Jack Fielding. Not even for myself but for the highest law of the land.

  I walk across the office, cold and exhausted and ashamed of myself. I remove Fielding’s lab coat from the hook at the top of the closed door.

  “I don’t know what it is you think I’ve not told you, Benton. I have no idea what he’s involved with or whom. Or his delusions or dissociative states and blackouts. Not in my presence, and he’s never shared information like that, if it’s true.”

  I put on the lab coat, and it is huge, and I detect the faint sharp odor of eucalyptus, like Vicks, like Bengay.

  “Maybe a mood disorder with a touch of narcissism and intermittent explosive anger,” Benton goes on as if I just said nothing. “Or it could be the drugs, maybe his damn performance-enhancement drugs as usual, the sorry bastard. He doesn’t represent the CFC well, I’m sorry as hell to make the understatement of the century, and it wasn’t lost on Douglas and David, and that got the CFC off on the wrong foot, as long ago as early November, when they got involved in the Wally Jamison kidnapping and murder. You can imagine what’s gotten back to Briggs and others. Jack is one inch from ruining everything, and that opens up a place to opportunists. Like I said, it creates a looting mentality.”

  I pause before a window and look down on the dark, snowy street as if I might find something there that will remind me of who I am. Something to give me strength, something to find comfort in.

  “He’s done a lot of damage.” Benton’s voice behind me. “I don’t know that it’s been intentional. But I suspect some of it has been because of his complicated relationship with you.”

  Snow is blowing at a sharp angle, hitting the window almost horizontally and making rapid clicks that remind me of fingernails tapping, of something restless and disturbed. When I look at the snow as it hits the glass, it makes me dizzy. It gives me vertigo to look at it and then to look down.

  “Is that what this is about, Benton? My complicated relationship with him?”

  “I need to know about it. It’s better it’s me instead of someone else asking you.”

  “You’re saying everything is damaged and ruine
d because of it. That it’s the root of everything wrong.” I don’t turn around but stare out and down until I can’t look at the flying flakes of ice and the road below and the dark river or the volatile winter night any longer. “That’s what you believe.” I want him to verify what he just said. I want to know if what’s been damaged and ruined while I’ve been gone includes Benton and me.

  “I just need to know anything you haven’t told me,” he answers instead.

  “I’m sure you and others need to know.” I don’t say it nicely as my pulse picks up.

  “I understand things from the past don’t get resolved easily. I understand complications.”

  I turn around and meet his stare, and what I see in it isn’t just cases and dead people or my mutinous office or my deranged deputy chief. I see Benton’s distrust of me and my past. I see him doubting my character and who I am to him.

  “I never slept with Jack,” I tell him. “If that’s what you’re trying to find out so someone else is spared the discomfort of asking me. Or is it my discomfort you’re so worried about? I never did. It won’t come out because it isn’t there. If that’s what you’re trying to ask me, that’s your answer. You can pass it along to Briggs, to the FBI, to the attorney general, to whoever you goddamn want.”

  “I would understand when Jack was your fellow, when both of you were just getting started in Richmond.”

  “I try not to make it a practice to have sex with people I mentor,” I say with a surprising flare of irritability. “I’d like to think I bear no similarity to what’s-her-name Lawler, the former therapist locked up in Georgia.”

  “Jack wasn’t twelve when you met him.”

  “It never happened. I don’t do that with people I mentor.”

  “And when people mentor you?” Benton’s eyes are steady on me as I stand by the window.

  “That’s not why John Briggs and I have a problem,” I answer angrily.

  13

  I return to Fielding’s desk and sit back down in his chair as I finger something slick and filmy inside one of his lab coat pockets. I pull out a square of transparent plastic that is paper-thin.

  “The CFC didn’t need to make a bad first impression with the Feds, but I’m confident you’ll change it.” Benton says it as if he regrets what he’s just asked me, as if he’s sorry about what he just confronted me with in the line of duty.

  I sniff what Fielding must have peeled off a eucalyptus-laced pain-relieving patch, and resentfully think, Yes, indeed, the Feds. I’m so glad I can change what the goddamn Feds must think of me.

  “I don’t want you to feel negative about everything here, every thing you’ve come home to,” Benton continues. “It wouldn’t be helpful if you are. There is a lot to take care of, but we’ll get there. I know we will. I’m sorry our conversation had to move in certain directions. I’m really sorry we had to get into all this.”

  “Let’s talk about Douglas and David.” I remind him of names he referred to moments earlier. “Who are they?”

  “I have no doubt you’ll prevail and make this place work, make it what it was meant to be, which is stellar and unlike anything anywhere. Better than what they have in Australia, in Switzerland, even better than any place where they were doing it first, including Dover, right? I have complete confidence in you, Kay. I don’t want you to ever forget that.”

  The more Benton assures me of his confidence, the less I believe it.

  “Law enforcement respects you, the military does,” he adds, and I don’t believe that, either.

  If it were true, he wouldn’t have to say it. So what? I then think, with hostility that seems to come from nowhere. I don’t need people to like or respect me. It isn’t a popularity contest. Isn’t that what Briggs always says? It’s not a popularity contest, Colonel, or if he’s being more personable, It’s not a popularity contest, Kay, and he smiles wryly, a steely glint of mischief in his eyes. He doesn’t give a shit if anybody likes him, and in fact thrives on people not liking him, and I’m going to start thriving on it, too. The hell with everyone. I know what I need to do, which is something. I will do something, oh, yes, I will. Thinking I’m going to come home to this and just take it, do nothing about it, let whoever it is have his way? No. Hell, no. Not going to happen. Whoever would entertain an idea like that sure as hell doesn’t know me.

  “Who are Douglas and David?” I again ask, and I sound snappish.

  “Douglas Burke and David McMaster,” Benton says.

  “I don’t know them, and who are they to you?” Now I’m the one doing the interrogating.

  “FBI’s Boston Field Office, Metro Boston Homeland Security. You haven’t gotten to know the locals, not key ones, but you will. Including the coast guard. I’m going to help you get to know every one around here if you’ll permit me to. For once I might be useful. I’ve missed being useful to you. I know you’re upset.”

  “I’m not upset.”

  “Your face is flushed. You look upset. I don’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry I have. But it’s something I’ve needed to know for several reasons.”

  “And are you satisfied?”

  “It’s critical to know where you are in all this and who you are in it,” he says as I hold the flimsy plastic backing, a square about the size of a cigarette pack.

  I lift it up to the light and see Fielding’s large fingerprints on the transparent film and smaller ones that must be mine. Fielding is chronically straining muscles, always achy and sore, especially when he’s abusing anabolic steroids. When he’s back to his old, bad tricks he smells like a damn menthol cough drop.

  “What do Homeland Security, the coast guard, have to do with anything we’re talking about?” I’m opening desk drawers, looking for Nuprin, Motrin, or Bengay patches, for Tiger Balm, for anything that might confirm what I suspect.

  “Wally Jamison’s body was floating in the harbor at the coast guard’s ISC, their Integrated Support Command. Right there under their nose. Which I believe was the point,” Benton replies as he watches me.

  “Or the point was the wharf right there that’s deserted after dark. One of the few wharfs in the area that you can drive a car on. I sure as hell know that area. So do you. We know it, and some of the people who work there probably would recognize us, we’ve walked around there so many times, right next door to where we stay once in a blue moon when we can get away and be alone and be civil to each other.” I sound sarcastic and mean.

  “Authorized personnel only. Might I ask what you’re looking for? I’m sure it’s something that will be in plain view.”

  “It’s my office. This entire place is my office. I’ll look at whatever the hell I want. Plain view or not.” My pulse is flying, and I feel agitated.

  “The wharf isn’t open to the public. Not just anybody can drive a car on it,” Benton replies as he watches me carefully, worried. “I didn’t mean to upset you this much.”

  “We walk over there all the time and no one asks for our IDs. They’re not standing around with submachine guns. It’s a tourist area.” I’m argumentative and combative, and I don’t want to be.

  “The coast guard ISC isn’t a tourist area. There’s a guard gate you have to go through to get out on the pier,” Benton says very calmly, very reasonably, and he continues looking at his iPhone. He looks at it and then at me, back and forth, reading both of us.

  “I miss it. Let’s spend a few days there soon.” I try to sound nice because I’m acting awful. “Just the two of us.”

  “Yes. We will. Soon,” he says. “We’ll talk and get everything straight.”

  I imagine it with startling clarity, our favorite suite that reaches out into the water like a fingertip at the Fairmont hotel on Battery Wharf, directly next door to the coast guard ISC. I see the ruffled dark-green water of the harbor and hear it washing against pilings as if I’m there. I hear the creaking of docks, the clanking of rigging lines against masts, and the bass tones of the horns the big ships sound as if all of it is audi
ble inside Fielding’s office.

  “And we won’t answer our phones, and we’ll go for walks and get room service and watch the tall ships, the tugboats, the tankers from our window. I would love that. Wouldn’t you love it?” But I don’t sound nice as I say it. I sound pushy and angry.

  “We’ll do it this weekend if you want. If we can,” he says as he reads something on his iPhone, scrolling down with his thumb.

  I move my coffee away and the corner of the desk looks rounded, not squared. Too much caffeine and my heart is beating hard. I feel light-headed and edgy.

  “I hate it when you look at your phone all the time,” I say before I can stop myself. “You know how much I hate it when we’re talking.”

  “It can’t be avoided right now,” he says as he looks at it.

  “Exit off Ninety-three, get on Commercial Street, and you’re right there,” I resume arguing. “A convenient way to get rid of a body. Drive it there and dump it in the harbor. Nude, so whatever trace evidence there might have been from the car trunk, for example, was probably washed away.” I shut a bottom drawer and sound peculiar to myself as I mutter distractedly, “Pain-relieving patches. None. And I didn’t see any in my desk drawers, either. Only chewing gum. I’ve never been a gum chewer. Well, when I was a little kid. Dubble Bubble at Halloween, with the colorful waxy yellow wrapper that’s twisted on the ends.”

  I see it. I smell it. My mouth waters.

  “Here’s a secret I’ve never told anyone. I’d recycle. Chew it and wrap it up again. For days until there was no flavor left.”

  My mouth is watering, and I swallow several times.

  “I stopped chewing gum when I stopped trick-or-treating. See, you’ve reminded me of trick-or-treating, something I haven’t thought of in so many years I can’t believe it’s just popped into my head. Sometimes I forget I was ever a child. Ever young and stupid and trusting.”

  My hands are shaking.

  “Better not to like something you can’t afford, so I didn’t make a habit of gum.”