Chaos. Patricia Cornwell

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       9

      We’re calm and reserved as we walk with purpose through the dining room, avoiding the curious glances of other couples being seated.

      Benton and I are together but separate, each of us on the phone. To look at us, you’d never know anything out of the ordinary was going on. We could be talking to our Realtors, our bankers, our brokers, our pet sitters.

      We could be a well-heeled couple getting calls from our adoring children, and Benton would be the rich handsome breadwinner. While in comparison I’d be the hardworking rather peculiar and difficult wife who always looks shopworn and halfway blown together. Our eyes are slightly downcast as we weave between tables, and I recognize the fixed stare, the flexing of his jaw, the tenseness of his hands.

      I know the way he gets when something is serious. He’s probably listening to his employer, the U.S. Department of Justice. Not his divisional office but Washington, D.C., possibly someone high up in the FBI or the director himself, and it could be the White House. It’s not Quantico, where Benton got his start and used to work. That’s not the area code I just saw on his phone when it vibrated.

      My husband’s special power is his ability to get into the mind of the offender, to discover the why and the what for, and unearth whatever traumas and bad wiring unleashed the latest monster into our midst. Benton’s quarry could be one individual. It could be several or a group of them, and when he goes after them, he must become an empathic Method actor. He has to think, anticipate and even feel what evildoers feel if he’s to catch them. But it’s not without a price.

      “Yes, speaking,” Benton says, and he listens. Then, “I understand. No, I’m not aware of it.” He glances at me. “It’s the first I’ve heard.” He looks down at the red carpet. “Please explain. I’m listening.”

      “I’m walking out,” I quietly tell Marino.

      Something has happened, and my imagination is getting the better of me. I sense a presence that’s suffocating, heavy and dark. It’s palpable like ozone in the air, like the eerie vacuum right before a massive storm breaks. I feel it at a visceral level.

      “What is it exactly that you’d like me to do?” Benton turns his head away from people looking at us.

      “Should be there … in three.” Marino’s voice is fractured in my earpiece, another bad connection, and everything that’s weirdly unfolded in the past few hours suddenly is crashing around me. “No one saw anything … that we know of. But two girls, these two twins found her …” he says, and I do my best to decipher.

      But it’s as if I’ve walked into a tornado. There’s so much flying around I can’t tell what’s up, down, inside out or backward.

      “Hold on,” I again say to him because I won’t discuss a case until no one can overhear me.

      “Turning off Kennedy … On Harvard Street now,” his voice is choppy.

      “Give me two more seconds. I’m finding someplace quiet,” I reply, and I can hear the sound of his engine as sirens wail in the background.

      Past Mrs. P’s empty station, Benton takes a right at the entryway’s round table with its sumptuous fragrant arrangement of cut lilies and roses. I keep going back to what he said just moments ago about an anticipated terrorist attack on the East Coast, possibly in the Boston area again. Now something has happened here in Cambridge, and he’s on the phone with Washington, D.C., as the terror alert is off the charts. I don’t like what I’m feeling.

      I don’t like the way Benton glanced at me as he said over the phone that he wasn’t aware of something, that he hadn’t been informed of whatever it is. As if there’s something happening in the here and now that he should know about, that both of us should. Whatever’s going on isn’t simply a local problem, and as I think this I also know I’m ahead of myself. The two of us getting important if not urgent calls simultaneously doesn’t mean they’re related. It could be a coincidence.

      But I can’t shake the ominous signals I’m picking up. I have a feeling I’m going to discover soon enough that Benton and I are about to have the same problem but won’t be able to discuss it much if at all. In our different positions we won’t handle it the same way, and we could even end up at odds with each other. It wouldn’t be the first time and certainly won’t be the last.

      “Doc …? Did you get the part about …? Interpol calling …?” Marino says, and I must have misheard him.

      “I can hardly understand you,” I reply in a loud whisper. “And I can’t talk. One second please.”

      Benton heads into the drawing room, and I wish the drapes had been pulled across the tall expansive windows. It’s completely dark out with only vague smudges of distant lamps pushing back the inkiness, and I’m conscious of the night and what might be in it, possibly close by, possibly watching. Maybe right under our very noses. I detect something sinister has been tampering with us all day and probably for longer than that.

      I return to the entrance, where I avoid the old corroded mirror on the wall, and I stand with my head bent, facing the front door but not really seeing anything as I listen to Marino over the phone.

      It’s difficult to hear everything he’s saying. We have at best a spotty connection, and I’m beginning to get jumpy. I don’t know СКАЧАТЬ