Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor

She crossed her arms, looking at him, her stance slightly defiant but unafraid.

“You may be the new generation and have briefed yourself up to your eyeballs, but I know more about how it works than you will if you live ten lives,” he said.

“No one questions your experience or your expertise, Benton.”

“You know exactly what I’m saying, Marty. Don’t whistle for me to come like some goddamn dog and then trot me off to a meeting so you can show everybody the tricks the Bureau trained me to perform in the dark ages. The Bureau didn’t train me to do a goddamn thing. I trained myself, and you’ll never begin to understand what I’ve been through and why. And who they are.”

“ ‘Who they are’?” She didn’t seem even slightly put off by him.

“The people Warner was involved with. Because that’s what you’re getting at, isn’t it? Like a moth, Warner took on the shadings of his environment. After a while, you can’t tell entities like him from the polluted edifices they cling to. He was a parasite. An antisocial personality disorder. A sociopath. A psychopath. Whatever the hell you people call monsters these days. And just when I was starting to feel sorry for the deaf son of a bitch.”

“Can’t imagine your feeling sorry for him,” she said. “After what he did.”

It knocked Benton off guard.

“Suffice it to say, if Warner Agee hadn’t lost everything, and I don’t just mean financially, and decompensated beyond his ability to control himself, become desperate, in other words?” she went on. “We’d have a hell of a lot more to worry about. As for his hotel room, Carley Crispin might have been paying, but that’s for a mundanely practical reason. Agee has no credit cards. They’re all expired. He was destitute, and likely was reimbursing Carley in cash, or at least contributing something. I sincerely doubt she has anything to do with this, by the way. For her it was all about the show going on.”

“Who did he get involved with.” It wasn’t a question.

“I have a feeling you know. Find the right pressure points and eventually you disable someone twice your size.”

“Pressure points. As in plural. More than one,” Benton said.

“We’ve been working on these people, not sure who they are, but we’re getting closer to bringing them down. That’s why you’re here,” she said.

“They’re not gone,” he said.

She resumed walking.

“I couldn’t get rid of all of them,” he said. “They’ve had years to be busy, to cause trouble, to figure out whatever they want.”

“Like terrorists,” she said.

“They are terrorists. Just a different sort.”

“I’ve read the dossier on what you did get rid of in Louisiana. Impressive. Welcome back. I wouldn’t have wanted to be you during all that. I wouldn’t have wanted to be Scarpetta. Warner Agee wasn’t completely wrong-you were in the most extreme danger imaginable. But his motives couldn’t have been more wrong. He wanted you to disappear. It was worse than killing you, really.” She said it as if she was describing which was more unpleasant, meningitis or the avian flu. “The rest of it was our fault, although I wasn’t around back then, was a fledgling Assistant U.S. Attorney in New Orleans. Signed on with the Bureau a year later, got my master’s in forensic psychology after that because I wanted to get involved with behavioral analysis, am the NCAVC coordinator for the New Orleans field office. I won’t say I wasn’t influenced by the situation down there or by you.”

“You were there when I was. When they were. Sam Lanier. The coroner of East Baton Rouge,” Benton said. “Related?”

“My uncle. I guess you could say that dealing with the darker side of life runs in the family. I know what happened down there, am actually assigned to the field office in New Orleans. Just got here a few weeks ago. I could get used to this, to New York, if I could ever find a parking place. You should never have been forced out of the Bureau, Benton. I didn’t think so at the time.”

“At the time?”

“Warner Agee was obvious. His evaluation of you ostensibly on behalf of the Undercover Safeguard Unit. The hotel room in Waltham, Mass. Summer of 2003 when he deemed you no longer fit for duty, suggested a desk job or teaching new agents. I’m quite aware. Again, the right thing for the wrong reason. His opinion had to be allowed, and maybe it was for the best. If you’d stayed, just what do you think you would have done?” She looked at him, stopping at the next shut door.

Benton didn’t answer. She entered her code and they walked into the Criminal Division, a rabbit warren of partitioned work spaces, all of them blue.

“Still, it was the Bureau’s loss, a very big loss,” she said. “I suggest we get coffee in the break room, such as it is.” She headed in that direction, a small room with a coffeemaker, a refrigerator, a table, and four chairs. “I won’t say what goes around comes around. About Agee,” she added, pouring coffee for both of them. “He sui cided your career, or tried to, and now he’s done the same to his.”

“He started self-destructing his career long before now.”

“Yes, he did.”

“The one who escaped death row in Texas,” Benton then said. “I didn’t get rid of all of them. I didn’t get rid of him, couldn’t find him. Is he still alive?”

“What do you take in it?” Opening a Tupperware container of creamer, rinsing a plastic spoon in the sink.

“I didn’t get rid of all of them. I didn’t get him,” Benton said it again.

“If we could ever get rid of all of them,” Lanier said, “I’d be out a job.”

The NYPD Firearms and Tactics Section on Rodman’s Neck was surrounded by a ten-foot-high fence topped with coils of razor wire. Were it not for that unfriendly obstruction and the heavy weapons going off and signs everywhere that said DANGER BLASTING and KEEP AWAY and DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING HERE, the south ernmost tip of the Bronx, jutting out like a finger into the Long Island Sound, would be, in Marino’s opinion, the choicest real estate in the Northeast.

The early morning was gray and overcast, eelgrass and bare trees agitated by the wind as he rode with Lieutenant Al Lobo in a black SUV through what was to Marino a fifty-something-acre theme park of ordnance bunkers, tactical houses, maintenance shops, hangars of emergency response trucks and armored vehicles, and firing ranges indoors and out, including one for snipers. Police and FBI and officers from other agencies went through so many rounds of ammunition that metal drums of their spent brass were as common as trash barrels at a picnic. Nothing was wasted, not even police vehicles totaled in the line of duty or simply driven to death. They ended up out here, were shot and blown up, used in urban simulations, such as riots and suicide bombings.

For all its seriousness, the base had its touches of cop humor, a comic-book motif of brightly painted bombs and rockets and Howitzer rounds buried nose-first in the ground and sticking out of the strangest places. During downtime when the weather was nice, the techs and instructors cooked out in front of their Quonset huts and played cards or with the bomb dogs, or this time of year, sat around and talked while fixing anything electrical that was broken in toys donated to needy families who couldn’t afford Christmas. Marino loved the Neck, and as he and Lobo drove and talked about Dodie Hodge, it occurred to Marino that this was the first time he’d ever been here when he didn’t hear gunfire, semiautomatics and full auto MP5s, the noise so constant it was calming to him, like being at the movies and hearing popcorn popping.

Even the sea ducks got used to it and maybe came to expect it, eiders and old-squaws swimming by and waddling up on the shore. No wonder some of the best waterfowl shooting was in these parts. The ducks didn’t recognize danger in guns going off-pretty damn unsportsmanlike, if you asked Marino. They should call it “sitting duck season,” he thought, and he wondered what the constant discharging of weapons and detonations did to fishing, because he’d heard there were some pretty nice black sea bass, fluke, and winter flounder in the sound. One of these days he’d have his own boat and keep it at a marina on City Island. Maybe even live over there.