Someone setting people up, setting up everything. That’s why it’s not hidden well. That’s why it’s obvious. It’s supposed to be obvious, to make us think certain things are true when maybe they aren’t. I won’t accept that the person behind all this is Fielding until I see it for myself. Be strong. You must take care of it. Don’t cry over him or anyone. You can’t.
“What do I need to bring?” I collect my coat off a chair, the tactical jacket from Dover that isn’t nearly warm enough.
“We have everything there,” he says. “Just your credentials in case someone asks.”
Of course they have everything there. Everything and everyone is there except me. I collect my shoulder bag from the back of my door.
“When did you figure it out?” I ask. “Figure it out enough to get warrants to find him? Or however it’s happened?”
“When you discovered the man from Norton’s Woods was a homicide, that changed things, to say the least. Now Fielding was connected to another murder.”
“I don’t see how,” I reply as we walk out together, and I don’t tell Bryce I’m leaving. At the moment I don’t want to face anyone. I’m in no mood to chat or to be cordial or even civilized.
“Because the Glock had disappeared from the firearms lab. I know you haven’t been told about that, and very few people are aware of it,” Benton says.
I remember Lucy’s comments about seeing Morrow in the back parking lot at around ten-thirty yesterday morning, about a half-hour after the pistol was receipted to him in his lab, and he couldn’t be bothered with it, according to Lucy. If she knew about the missing Glock, she withheld that crucial information, and I ask Benton if she deliberately lied by omission to me, the chief, her boss.
“Because she works here,” I say as we wait for the elevator to climb to our floor. It is stuck on the lower level, as if someone is holding open the door down there, what staff members sometimes do when they are loading a lot of things on or off. “She works for me and can’t just keep information from me. She can’t lie to me.”
“She wasn’t aware of it then. Marino and I knew, and we didn’t tell her.”
“And you knew about Jack and Johnny and Mark. About tae kwon do.” I’m sure Benton did. Probably Marino, too.
“We’ve been watching Jack, been looking into it. Yes. Since Mark was murdered last week and I found out Jack taught him and Johnny.”
I think of the photographs missing from Fielding’s office, the tiny holes in the wall from the hanging hooks being removed.
“It began to make sense that Jack took control of certain cases. The Mark Bishop case, for example, even though he hates to do kids,” Benton goes on, looking around, making sure no one is nearby to overhear us. “What a perfect opportunity to cover up your own crimes.”
Or some other person’s crimes, I think. Fielding would be the sort to cover for someone else. He desperately needs to be powerful, to be the hero, and then I remind myself to stop defending him. Don’t unless you have proof. Whatever turns out to be true, I’ll accept it, and it occurs to me that the photographs missing from Fielding’s office might have been group poses. That seems familiar. I can almost envision them. Perhaps of tae kwon do classes. Pictures with Johnny and Mark in them.
I wonder but don’t ask if Benton removed those photographs or if Marino did, as Benton continues to explain that Fielding went to great lengths to manipulate everyone into believing that Johnny Donahue killed Mark Bishop. Fielding used a compromised, vulnerable teenager as a scapegoat, and then Fielding had to escalate his manipulations further after he took out the man from Norton’s Woods. That’s the phrase Benton uses. Took out. Fielding took him out and then heard about the Glock found on the body and realized he’d made a serious tactical error. Everything was falling apart. He was losing it, decompensating like Ted Bundy did right before he was caught, Benton says.
“Jack’s fatal mistake was to stop by the firearms lab yesterday morning and ask Morrow about the Glock,” Benton continues. “A little later it was gone and so was Jack, and that was impulsive and reckless and just damn stupid on his part. It would have been better to let the gun be traced to him and claim it was lost or stolen. Anything would have been better than what he did. It shows how out of control he was to take the damn gun from the lab.”
“You’re saying the Glock the man from Norton’s Woods had is Jack’s.”
“Yes.”
“It’s definitely Jack’s,” I repeat, and the elevator is moving now, making a lot of stops on its way up, and I realize it is lunch-time. Employees heading to the break room or heading out of the building.
“Yes. The dead man has a gun that could be traced to Fielding once acid was used on the drilled-off serial number,” Benton says, and it’s clear to me that he knows who the dead man is.
“That was done. Not here.” I don’t want to think of yet something else done inside my building that I didn’t know.
“Hours ago. At the scene. We took care of the identification right there.”
“The FBI did.”
“It was important to know immediately who the gun was traced to. To confirm our suspicions. Then it came here to the CFC and is safely locked up in the firearms lab. For further examination,” Benton says.
“If Jack is the one who murdered him, he should have realized the problem with the Glock when he first was called about the case on Sunday afternoon,” I reply. “Yet he waited until Monday morning to be concerned about a gun he knew could be traced to him?”
“To avoid suspicion. If he’d started asking the Cambridge police a lot of questions about the Glock prior to the body being transported to the CFC, or demanded that the gun be brought in immediately when the labs were closed, it would have come across as peculiar. Antennas would have gone up. Fielding slept on it and by Monday morning was probably beside himself and planning what he was going to do once the gun was brought in. He would take it and flee. Remember, he hasn’t been exactly rational. It’s important to keep in mind he’s been cognitively impaired by his substance abuse.”
I think about the chronology. I reconstruct Fielding’s steps yesterday morning, based on information from his desk drawer and the indented writing on his call-sheet pad. Shortly after seven a.m. it seems he talked to Julia Gabriel before she called me at Dover, and about a half-hour later he entered the cooler, and minutes after that he told Anne and Ollie the body from Norton’s Woods was inexplicably bloody. It seems more logical to consider it was at this point that Fielding recognized the dead man and realized the Glock he’d heard about from the police would be traced to him. If he didn’t recognize the dead man until Monday morning, then Fielding didn’t kill him, I say to Benton, who replies that Fielding had a motive I couldn’t possibly know about.
The dead man’s stepfather is Liam Saltz, Benton informs me. It was confirmed a little while ago when an FBI agent went to the Charles Hotel and talked to Dr. Saltz and showed him an ID photograph Marino took of the man from Norton’s Woods. He was Eli Goldman, age twenty-two, a graduate student at MIT and an employee at Otwahl Technologies, working on special micro-mechanical projects. The video clips from Eli’s headphones were traced to a webcam site on Otwahl’s server, Benton tells me, but he won’t elaborate on who did the tracing, if Lucy might have.
“He rigged up the headphones himself?” I ask as the elevator finally gets to us and the doors slide open.
“It appears likely. He loved to tinker.”
“And MORT? How did he get that? And what for? More tinkering?” I know I sound cynical.
I know when people have their damn minds made up, and I’m not ready for my mind to be made up. Not one damn thing should be decided this fast.
“A facsimile, a model he made as a boy,” Benton explains. “Based on photographs his stepfather had taken of the real thing when he was lobbying against it some eight or nine years ago when you and Dr. Saltz testified before the Senate subcommittee. Apparently, Eli was making models of robots and inventin
g things since he was practically in diapers.”
We slowly sink from floor to floor while I ask why Otwahl would hire the stepson of a detractor like Liam Saltz, and I want to know what Otwahl means, because Mrs. Donahue said the name meant something. “O. T. Wahl,” Benton replies. “A play on words, because the last name of the company’s founder is Wahl. On the Wall, as in a fly on the wall, and Eli’s last name isn’t Saltz,” Benton adds, as if I didn’t hear him when he told me it’s Goldman. Eli Goldman. But Otwahl would have done a background check on him, I point out. Certainly they would have known who his step-father is, even if their last names aren’t the same.
“MORT was a long time ago,” Benton says as the elevator doors open on the lower floor. “And I don’t know that Otwahl had a clue Eli and his stepdad were philosophically simpatico.”
“How long had Eli worked there?”
“Three years.”
“Maybe three years ago Otwahl wasn’t doing anything that Eli or his stepfather would have been concerned about,” I suggest as we walk along gray tile while Phil the security guard watches us from behind his glass partition. I don’t wave at him. I’m not friendly.
“Well, Eli was worried and had been for months,” Benton says. “He was about to give his stepfather a demonstration of technology that he wasn’t going to approve of at all, a fly that could be a fly on the wall and spy and detect explosives and deliver them or drugs or poisons or who knows what.”
Nanoexplosives or dangerous drugs delivered by something as small as a fly, I think, as we walk past staff I’ve not seen in months. I don’t stop to chat. I don’t wave or say hello or even have eye contact.
“He’s about to give his stepfather important information like that and conveniently dies,” I reply.
“Exactly. The motive I mentioned,” Benton says. “Drugs,” he says again, and then he tells me more, gives me details the FBI learned from Liam Saltz just a few hours earlier.
I feel sad and upset again as I envision what Benton is saying about a young man so enamored of his famous stepfather that whenever they were to see each other, Eli always set his watch to it, mirroring Dr. Saltz’s time zone in anticipation of their reunion, a quirk that has its roots in Eli’s poignant past of broken homes and parental figures missing in action and adored from afar. I remember what I watched on the video clips, Eli and Sock walking to Norton’s Woods, and then I imagine Dr. Saltz emerging from the building in the near dark after a wedding Eli wasn’t invited to. I imagine the Nobel laureate looking around and wondering where his stepson was, having no idea of the terrible truth. Dead. Zipped up inside a pouch and unidentified. A young man, barely more than a boy. Someone Lucy and I may have crossed paths with at an exhibit in London the summer of 2001.
“Who killed him, and what for?” I say as we pass through the empty bay, the CFC van-body truck gone. “I don’t see how what you’ve just said explains Eli being murdered by Jack.”
“It all points in the same direction. I’m sorry. But it does.”
“I just don’t see why and for what.” I open the door leading outside, and it is too beautiful and sunny to be so cold.
“I know this is hard,” Benton says.
“A pair of data gloves?” I say as we begin to pick our way over snow that is glazed and slick. “A micromechanical fly? Who would stab him with an injection knife, and why?”
“Drugs.” Benton goes back to that again. “Somehow Eli had the misfortune of getting involved with Jack or the other way around. Strength-enhancing, very dangerous drugs. Probably was using and selling, and Eli was the supplier, or someone at Otwahl was. We don’t know. But Eli being killed while he was out there with a flybot and about to meet his stepfather wasn’t a coincidence. It’s the motive, I mean.”
“Why would Jack be interested in a flybot or a meeting?” I ask as we move very slowly, one step at a time, my feet about to go out from under me. “A damn ice-skating rink,” I complain, because the parking lot wasn’t plowed and it needs to be sanded. Nobody has been running this place the way it ought to be run.
“I’m sorry, we’re way over here.” As we head slowly toward the back fence. “But that’s all there was. The drug connection,” Benton then says. “Not street drugs. This is about Otwahl. About a huge amount of money. About the war, about potential violence on an international and massive scale.”
“Then if what you’re saying is right, it would seem to imply Jack was spying on Eli. Rigged up the headphones with hidden recording devices and followed him to Norton’s Woods. That would make sense if the murder was to stop Eli from showing his stepfather the flybot or turning it over to him. How else would Jack know what Eli was about to do? He must have been spying on him, or someone was.”
“I doubt Jack had anything to do with the headphones.”
“My point exactly. Jack wouldn’t be interested in technology like that or capable of it, and he wouldn’t be interested in a place like Otwahl. You’re not talking about the Jack I know. He’s much too limbically driven, too impatient, too simple, to do what you’ve just described.” I almost say too primitive, because that has always been part of his charm. His physicality, his hedonism, his linear way of coping with things. “And the headphones don’t make sense,” I insist. “The headphones make me think someone else might be involved.”
“I understand how you feel. I can understand why you’d want to think that.”
“And did Dr. Saltz know his adoring stepson was into drugs and had an illegal gun?” I ask. “Did he happen to mention the headphones or other people Eli might have been involved with?”
“He knew nothing about the headphones and not much about Eli’s personal life. Only that Eli was worried about his safety. As I said, he’d been worried for months. I know this is painful, Kay.”
“Worried about what, specifically?” I ask as we walk very slowly, and someone is going to get hurt out here. Someone is going to slip and break bones and sue the CFC. That will be next.
“Eli was involved in dangerous projects and surrounded by bad people. That’s how Dr. Saltz described it,” Benton says. “It’s a lot to explain and not what you might imagine.”
“He knew his stepson had a gun, an illegal one,” I repeat my question.
“He didn’t know that. I assume Eli wouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“Everyone seems to be doing a lot of assuming.” I stop and look at Benton, our breath smoking out in the brightness and the cold, and we are at the back of the parking lot now, near the fence, in what I call the hinterlands.
“Eli would know how Dr. Saltz feels about guns,” Benton says. “Jack probably sold the Glock to him or gave it to him.”
“Or someone did,” I reiterate. “Just as someone must have given him the signet ring with the Donahue crest on it. I don’t suppose Eli was also involved in tae kwon do.” I look around at SUVs that don’t belong to the CFC, but I don’t look at the agents inside them. I don’t look at anyone as I shield my eyes from the sun.
“No,” Benton answers. “The football player wasn’t, either, Wally Jamison, but he used the gym where they’re held, used Jack’s same gym. Maybe Eli had been to that gym, too.”
“Eli doesn’t look like someone who uses a gym. Hardly a muscle in his body,” I comment as Benton points a key fob at a black Ford Explorer that isn’t his and the doors unlock with a chirp. “And if Jack killed him, why?” I again ask, because it makes no sense to me, but maybe it’s my fatigue. No sleep and too much trauma, and I’m too tired to comprehend the simplest thing.
“Or maybe the connection has to do with Otwahl and Johnny Donahue and other illegal activities Jack was involved in that you’re about to find out. What he was doing at the CFC, how he was earning his money while you were gone.” Benton’s voice is hard as he says all that while opening my door for me. “Don’t know everything but enough, and you were right to ask what Mark Bishop was doing in his backyard when he was killed. What kind of playing he was doing. I almost couldn’
t believe it when you asked me that, and I couldn’t tell you when you asked. Mark was in one of Jack’s classes, as Mrs. Donahue implied, for three- to six-year-olds, had just started in December and was practicing tae kwon do in his yard when someone, and I think we know who, appeared, and again, you’re probably right about how it happened.”
As he goes around to the driver’s side to get in, and I dig in my bag for my sunglasses, impatient and frustrated as a lipstick, pens, and a tube of hand cream spill on the plastic floor mat. I must have left my sunglasses somewhere. Maybe in my office at Dover, where I can scarcely remember being anymore. It seems like forever ago, and right now I am sickened beyond what I could possibly describe to anyone, and it doesn’t please me to hear I was right about anything. I don’t give a damn who is right, just that someone is, and I don’t think anybody is. I just don’t believe it.
“A person Mark had no reason to distrust, such as his instructor, who lured him into a fantasy, a game, and murdered him,” Benton goes on as he starts the SUV. “And then trumped up a way to blame it on Johnny.”
“I didn’t say that part.” I stuff items back into my bag as I grab my shoulder harness and fasten up, then I decide to take my jacket off, and I undo the seat belt.
“What part?” Benton enters an address in the GPS.
“I never said Jack trumped up a way to make Johnny believe he drove nails into Mark Bishop’s head,” I reply, and the SUV is warm from when Benton drove it here, and the sun is hot as it blazes through glass.
I take off my jacket and toss it in back, where there is a large, thick box with a FedEx label. I can’t tell whom it is for and I’m not interested, probably some agent Benton knows, probably whoever Douglas is, and I suppose I’ll find out soon enough. I fasten my shoulder harness again, working so hard I’m practically out of breath, and my heart is pounding.
“I didn’t mean that part was from you. There are a lot of questions. We need you to help us answer everything we possibly can,” Benton says.