Then I saw the shape of a belt and its buckle, and the protruding femur that looked like a thick, burned stick. My heart was beating out of my chest as the shape became the burned ruins of a body attached to a blackened head that had no features, only patches of sooty silver hair.
‘Let me see the watch,’ I said, staring wildly at the investigators.
One of them held it out and I took it from his hand. It was a men’s stainless steel Breitling, an Aerospace.
‘No,’ I muttered as I knelt in the water. ‘Please, no.’
I covered my face with my hands. My mind shorted out. My vision failed as I swayed. Then a hand was steadying me. Bile crept up my throat.
‘Come on, Doc,’ a male voice said gently as hands lifted me to my feet.
‘It can’t be him,’ I cried out. ‘Oh, God, please don’t let it be. Please, please, please.’
I couldn’t seem to keep my balance, and it took two agents to get me out as I did what I could to gather the fragments that were left of me. I spoke to no one when I was returned to the street, and I walked weirdly, woodenly, to McGovern’s Explorer, where she was with Lucy in the back, holding a blood-soaked towel around Lucy’s left hand.
‘I need a first aid kit,’ I heard myself say to McGovern.
‘It might be better to get her to the hospital,’ her voice came back as she stared hard at me, fear and pity shining in her eyes.
‘Get it,’ I said.
McGovern reached in back, over the seat to grab something. She set an orange Pelican case on the seat and unfastened the latches. Lucy was almost in shock, shaking violently, her face white.
‘She needs a blanket,’ I said.
I removed the towel and washed her hand with bottled water. A thick flap of skin on her thumb was almost avulsed, and I swabbed it profusely with betadine, the iodine odor piercing my sinuses as all that I had just seen became a bad dream. It was not true.
‘She needs stitches,’ McGovern said.
It had not happened. A dream.
‘We should go to the hospital so she can get stitches.’
But I already had out the steri-strips and benzoin glue, because I knew that stitches would not work with a wound like this. Tears were streaming down my face as I topped off my work with a thick layer of gauze. When I looked up and out the window, I realized Marino was standing by my door. His face was distorted by pain and rage. He looked like he might vomit. I got out of the Explorer.
‘Lucy, you need to come on with me,’ I said, taking her arm. I had always been able to function better when I was taking care of someone else. ‘Come on.’
Emergency lights flashed in our faces, the night and the people in it disconnected and strange. Marino drove away with us as the medical examiner’s van pulled up. There would be X-rays, dental charts, maybe even DNA used to confirm the identification. The process most likely would take a while, but it did not matter. I already knew. Benton was dead.
17
AS BEST ANYONE could reconstruct events at this time, Benton had been lured to his dreadful death. We had no Clue as to what had drawn him to the small grocery store on Walnut Street, or if, perhaps, he simply had been abducted somewhere else and then forced up a ladder into the plenum of that small building in its bad part of town. We believed he had been handcuffed at some point, and the continuing search had also turned up wire twisted into a figure eight that most likely had restrained the ankles that had burned away.
His car keys and wallet were recovered, but not his Sig Sauer nine-millimeter pistol or gold signet ring. He had left several changes of clothing in his hotel room, and his briefcase, which had been searched and turned over to me. I stayed the night in Teun McGovern’s house. She had posted agents on the property, because Carrie was still out there somewhere, and it was only a matter of time.