DAWN BEGINS TO LIGHT UP THE DRAPES AND TURN
them the color of honey. I tell Anna I am glad she is here. I thank her for talking to Benton and for finally letting me know. In some ways the picture is more complete because of what I now understand. In some ways, it isn’t. I can’t sharply outline the progression of moods and changes that preceded Benton’s murder, but I do know that about the time he was seeing Anna, Carrie Grethen was looking for a new partner to replace Temple Gault. Carrie had worked in computers earlier in her life. She was brilliant and incredibly manipulative and talked her way into gaining access to a computer at the forensic psychiatric hospital, Kirby. This was how she cast her web back out into the world. She linked up with a new partner another psychopathic killer named Newton Joyce. She did this through the Internet, and he helped her escape from Kirby.
“Perhaps she met certain other people through the Internet, too,” Anna suggests.
“Marino’s son. Rocky?” I say.
“I am thinking it.”
“Anna, do you have any idea what happened to Benton’s file? The Tlip file, as he called it?”
“I have never seen it.” She sits up straighter, deciding it is time to get out of bed, and the covers settle around her waist. Her bare arms look pitifully thin and wrinkled, as if someone has let the air out of diem. Her bosom sags low and loose beneath dark silk. “When I helped you sort through his clothing and other personal belongings, I did not see a file. But I did not touch his office.”
I remember so little.
“No.” She pulls back the covers and lowers her feet to the floor. “I would not. That was not something I would go into, His professional files.” She is up now and slips on a robe. “I just assumed you would have gone through those.” She looks at me. “You have, yes? What about his office at Quantico? He had already retired, so I suppose he had cleaned that out already?”
“That was cleaned out, yes.” We walk down the hallway toward the kitchen. “Case files would have stayed there. Unlike some of his compatriots who retire from the FBI, Benton didn’t believe cases he worked belonged to him,” 1 add rue- fully. “So I know he didn’t take any case files away from Quantico when he retired. What I don’t know is if he would have left the Tlip file with the Bureau. If so, I’ll never see it.”
“That was his file,” Anna points out. “Correspondence to him. When he spoke about it to me, he never referred to what was happening to him as Bureau business. He seemed to take the threats, the crank calls, as something personal, and I am not aware that he ever shared these things with other agents. He was so paranoid, mostly because some of the threats involved you. I was led to believe I am the only person he told. I know this. I said to him many times that I believed he should tell the FBI.” She shook her head. “He would not,” she says again.
I empty the coffee filter into the trash and feel a spike of old resentment. Benton kept so much from me. “A shame,” I reply. “Maybe if he’d told some of the other agents, none of this would have happened.”
“Would you like more coffee?”
I am reminded that I did not go to bed last night. “I guess I’d better,” I reply.
“Some Viennese coffee,” Anna decides, opening the refrigerator and picking through bags of coffee. “Since I am feeling nostalgic for Austria this morning.” She says this with a hint of sarcasm, as if she is silently berating herself for divulging details of her past. She pours beans into the grinder and the kitchen is filled briefly with noise.
“Benton got disillusioned with the Bureau in the end,” I think out loud. “I’m not sure he trusted people around him anymore. Competitiveness. He was the unit chief and knew everybody was going to fight over his job the minute he even mentioned he was ready to retire. Knowing him, he handled his problems in total isolationthe same way he worked his cases. If nothing else, Benton was a master of discretion.” I am running through every possibility. Where would Benton have kept the file? Where might it be? He had his own room in my house where he stored his belongings and plugged in his laptop. He had file drawers. But I have been through those and never saw anything even similar to what Anna has described.