Benton Wesley could be as Prussian as the rest of them, but over the years he had won my respect.
Beneath his Bureau boilerplate was a human being worth knowing. He was brisk and energetic, even when he was sitting, and he was typically dapper in his dark suit trousers and starched white shirt. His necktie was fashionably narrow and perfectly knotted, the black holster on his belt lonely for its ten-millimeter, which he almost never wore indoors. I hadn’t seen Wesley in a while and he hadn’t changed. He was fit and handsome in a hard way, with premature silver-gray hair that never failed to surprise me.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Kay,” he said, smiling.
His handshake was reassuringly firm and absent of any
hint of macho. The grip of some cops and lawyers I know are a thirty-pound squeeze on a three-pound trigger that damn near breaks my fingers.
“Marino’s here,” Wesley added. “I needed to go over a few more things with him before we brought you in.”
He held the door and I followed him down an empty hallway. Steering me inside his small office, he left to get coffee.
“The computer finally came up last night,” Marino said. He was leaning back comfortably in his chair and examining a .357 revolver that looked brand new.
“Computer? What computer?” Had I forgotten my cigarettes? No. On the bottom of my purse again.
“At HQ. Goes down all the friggin’ time. Anyway, I finally got hard copies of those offense reports.
Interesting. Least I think so.”
“Beryl’s?” I asked.
“You got it.”
He set the handgun on Wesley’s desk, adding, “Nice piece. The lucky bastard won it as a door prize at the police chiefs’ convention in Tampa last week. Me, I can’t even win two bucks in the lottery.”
My attention drifted. Wesley’s desk was cluttered with telephone messages, reports, videotapes, and thick Manila envelopes containing details and photographs, I assumed, of various crimes police jurisdictions had brought to his attention. Behind panes of glass in the bookcase against one wall were macabre weapons–a sword, brass knuckles, a zip gun, an African spear–trophies from the hunt, gifts from grateful protégés. An outdated photograph showed William Webster shaking hands with Wesley before a backdrop of a Marine Corp helicopter at Quantico. There wasn’t the faintest hint Wesley had a
wife and three kids. FBI agents, like most cops, jealously guard their personal lives from the world, especially if they have gotten close enough to evil to feel its horror. Wesley was a suspect profiler.
He knew what it was to review photographs of unthinkable slaughter and then visit penitentiaries and stare the Charles Mansons, the Ted Bundys, straight in the eye.
Wesley was back with two Styrofoam cups of coffee, one for Marino, one for me. Wesley always remembered I drink my coffee black and need an ashtray within easy reach.
Marino collected a thin stack of photocopied police reports from his lap and began to go through them.
“For starters,” he said, “there’s only three of ’em. Three reports we got a record of. The first one’s dated March eleventh, nine-thirty on a Monday morning. Beryl Madison dialed 911 the night before and requested that an officer come to her house to take a complaint. The call, unsurprisingly, was given a low priority because the street was hopping. A uniform man didn’t swing by until the next morning, uh, Jim Reed, been with the department about five years.”
He glanced up at me.
I shook my head. I didn’t know Reed.
Marino began skimming the report. “Reed reported the complainant, Beryl Madison, was very agitated and stating she’d received a phone call of a threatening nature at eight-fifteen the night before–Sunday night. During this phone call, a voice she identified as male, and possibly white, said the following: ‘Bet you’ve been missing me, Beryl. But I’m always watching over you even though you can’t see me. I see you. You can run but you can’t hide.’ The complainant went on to report that this caller stated he’d observed Miss Madison buying a newspaper in front of a Seven-Eleven earlier that morning. The subject described what she’d been wearing, ‘a red warm-up suit and no bra.’ She confirmed she did drive to the Seven-Eleven on Rosemount Avenue at