She lets that sink in. My state of mind is the bull’s-eye of Caggiano’s target, should I end up in New York. More immediately, it is what everyone else seems to be questioning.
“Let’s assume if I know something, the opposing counsel does, too,” she adds.
I nod.
“You get this letter out of the blue. From Benton.” She pauses and emotion flickers across her face. “Let me just say…” She looks away from me. “That would have undone me, too, totally. I’m sorry for what you’ve been through.” She meets my eyes. Another ploy to make me trust her, bond with her? “Benton is reminding you a year after his death that you’ve probably not dealt with his loss. You’ve run like hell from the pain.”
“You can’t have seen the letter.” I am stunned and outraged. “It’s locked in a safe. How do you know what it says?”
“You showed it to other people,” she reasonably replies.
I realize with the little bit of objectivity I have left that if Berger hasn’t talked to everyone around me, including Lucy and Marino, she will. It is her duty. She would be foolish and negligent if she didn’t. “December the sixth,” she resumes. “He wrote the letter on December the sixth, nineteen-ninety-six, and instructed Senator Lord to deliver it to you on the December the sixth following Benton’s death. Why was that date special to Benton?”
I hesitate.
“Thick skin, Kay,” she reminds me. “Thick skin.”
“I don’t know the significance of December the sixth, exactlyexcept Benton mentioned in the letter that he knew Christmas is hard for me,” I reply. “He wanted me to get the letter close to Christmas.”
“Christmas is hard for you?”
“Isn’t it hard for everybody?”
Berger is silent. Then she asks, “When did your intimate relationship with him begin?”
“In the fall. Years ago.”
“Okay. In the fall, years ago. That’s when you began your sexual relationship with him.” She says this as if I am avoiding reality. “When he was still married. When your affair with him began.”
“That’s right.”
“Okay. This past December the sixth, you get the letter and later that morning responded to the scene at the Richmond port. Then you came back here. Tell me exactly what your routine is when you come straight home from a crime scene.”
“My scene clothes were double-bagged in the trunk of my car,” I explain. “A jumpsuit and tennis shoes.” I keep staring at the empty space where my car should be. “The jumpsuit went into the washing machine, the shoes into a sink of scalding water with disinfectant.” I show her the shoes. They are still parked on the shelf where I left them to dry more than two weeks ago.
“Then?” Berger walks over to the washing machine and dryer.
“Then I stripped,” I tell her. “I took off everything and put it in the washing machine, started it up and went inside the house.”
“Naked.”
“Yes. I went back to my bedroom, to the shower, without stopping. That’s how I disinfect if I come straight home from a scene,” I conclude.
Berger is fascinated. She has a theory going, and whatever it is, I am feeling increasingly uncomfortable and exposed. “I just wonder,” she muses. “Just wonder if he somehow knew.”
“Somehow knew? And I really would like to go inside, if it’s all right with you,” I say. “I’m freezing.”
“Somehow knew your routine,” she persists. “If he was interested in your garage because of your routine. It was more than setting off the alarm. Maybe he really was trying to get in. The garage is where you take off your death clothesin this instance, clothes sullied by a death he caused. You were nude and vulnerable, even if ever so briefly.” She follows me back kiside and I shut the mud room door behind us. “He might have a real sexual fantasy about that.”
“I can’t see how he could know a damn thing about my routine.” I resist her hypothesis. “He didn’t witness what I did that day.”
She raises an eyebrow as she looks at me. “Can you say that as fact? Any possibility he followed you home? We know he was at the port at some point, because that’s how he got to Richmondaboard the Sirius, where he’d covered himself with a white uniform, shaved visible areas of his body, and stayed in the galley most of the time, working as the cook and keeping to himself. Isn’t that the theory? I certainly don’t buy what he said when I interviewed himthat he stole a passport and wallet and flew coach.”