‘Good morning,’ I said.
‘Not yet,’ he mumbled.
He turned over and punched the pillow to submission under his head. He wore blue boxer shorts and an undershirt that stopped six inches short of covering his swollen belly, and I always marveled that men were not shy about fat the way women were. In my own way I very much cared about staying in shape, and when my clothes starting feeling tight around the waist, both my general disposition and libido turned much less agreeable.
‘You can sleep a few more minutes,’ I said to him.
I gathered up the blanket and spread it across him. He resumed snoring like a wounded wild boar, and I moved to the kitchen table and called Benton at his New York hotel.
‘I hope I didn’t wake you,’ I said.
‘Actually, I was almost out the door. How are you?’
He was warm but distracted.
‘I’d be better if you were here and she were back behind bars.’
‘The problem is, I know her patterns and she knows I know them. So I may as well not know them, if you see what I mean,’ he said in that controlled tone that meant he was angry. ‘Last night, several of us disguised ourselves as homeless people and went down into the tunnels in the Bowery. A lovely way to spend the evening, I might add. We revisited the spot where Gault was killed.’
Benton was always very careful to say where Gault was killed instead of where you killed Gault.
‘I am convinced she’s gone back there and will again,’ he went on. ‘And not because she misses him, but that any reminder of the violent crimes they committed together excites her. The thought of his blood excites her. For her it’s a sexual high, a power rush that she’s addicted to, and you and I both know what that means, Kay. She’ll need a fix soon, if she hasn’t already gotten one that we just haven’t found out about yet. I’m sorry to be a doomsayer, but I have a gut feeling that whatever she does is going to be far worse than what she did before.’
‘It’s hard to imagine anything could be worse than that,’ I said, though I really did not mean it.
Whenever I had thought that human beings could get no worse, they did. Or perhaps it was simply that primitive evil seemed more shocking in a civilization of highly evolved humans who traveled to Mars and communicated through cyberspace.
‘And so far no sign of her,’ I said. ‘Not even a hint.’
‘We’ve gotten hundreds of leads going nowhere. NYPD’s set up a special task force, as you know, and there’s a command center with guys taking calls twenty-four hours a day.’
‘How much longer will you stay up there?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Well, I’m sure if she’s still in the area, she knows damn well where you are. The New York Athletic Club, where you always stay. Just two buildings from where she and Gault had a room back then.’ I was upset again. ‘I guess that’s the Bureau’s idea of sticking you in a shark cage and waiting for her to come and get it.’
‘A good analogy,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope it works.’
‘And what if it does?’ I said as fear cut through my blood and made me angrier. ‘I wish you’d come home and let the FBI do its job. I can’t get over it, you retire and they don’t give you the time of day until they want to use you for bait . . . !’
‘Kay . . .’
‘How can you let them use you . . .’
‘It’s not like that. This is my choice, a job I have to finish. She was my case from the start, and as far as I’m concerned, she still is. I can’t just relax at the beach knowing she’s loose and going to kill again. How can I just look the other way when you, Lucy, Marino — when all of us are very possibly in danger?’
‘Benton, don’t turn into a Captain Ahab, okay? Don’t let this become your obsession. Please.’