My eyelids fly open. Anna is talking to me. Cold sweat crawls down my sides like insects. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”
“Very, very painful.” Her face melts with compassion. “I cannot imagine.”
Benton walks into my mind. He wears his favorite khakis, and his running shoes, Saucony running shoes. Sauconys were the only brand he would wear and I used to call him a fussbudget because he was so particular if he really liked something. And he has on the old UVA sweatshirt Lucy gave him, dark blue with bright orange letters, and over the years it has gotten very faded and soft. He cut off the sleeves because they were too short, and I have always liked how he looks in that old, worn-out sweatshirt, with his silver hair, his clean profile, the mysteries behind his intense, dark eyes. His hands lightly curl around the armrests of his chair. He has the fingers of a pianist, long and slender and expressive when he talks, and always gentle when they touch me, which is less and less with time. I am saying all this out loud to Anna, speaking in the present tense about a man who has been dead for more than a year.
“What secrets do you think he kept from you?” Anna asks. “What mysteries did you see in his eyes?”
“Oh God. Mostly about work.” My breath trembles, my heart flying away in fear. “He kept many details to himself. Details about what he saw in certain cases, things he felt were so awful no one else should be subjected to them.”
“Even you? Is there anything you have not seen?”
“Their pain,” I speak quietly. “I don’t have to see their terror. I don’t have to hear their screams.”
“But you reconstruct it.”
“Not the same thing. No, not the same. Many of the killers Benton dealt with liked to photograph, audiotape and in some instances videotape what they did to their victims. Benton had to watch. He had to listen. I always knew. He’d come home looking gray. He wouldn’t talk much during dinner, wouldn’t eat much, and on those nights he drank more than usual.”
“But he wouldn’t tell you…”
“Never,” I interrupt with feeling. “Never. That was his Indian Burial Ground and no one was allowed to step there. I taught at a death investigation school in Saint Louis. This was early in my career, before I moved here, when I was still a deputy chief in Miami. I was doing a class on drowning and decided since I was already there, I’d go ahead and attend the entire weeklong school. One afternoon, a forensic psychiatrist taught a class on sexual homicide. He showed slides of living victims. A woman was bound to a chair and her assailant had tightly tied rope around one of her breasts and inserted needles in the nipple. I can still see her eyes. They were dark pools filled with hell, and her mouth was wide open as she screamed. And I saw videotapes,” I go on in a monotone. “A woman, abducted, bound, tortured and about to be shot in the head. She keeps whimpering for her mother. Begging, crying. I think she was in a basement, the footage dark, grainy. The sound of the gun going off. And silence.”
Anna says nothing. The fire snaps and pops.
“I was the only woman in a room of about sixty cops,” I add.
“Even worse, then, because the victims were women and you were the only woman,” Anna says.
Anger touches me as I remember the way some of the men stared at the slides, at the videotapes. “The sexual mutilation was arousing to some of them,” I say. “I could see it in their faces, sense it. Same thing with some of the profilers, Ben-ton’s colleagues in the unit. They’d describe the way Bundy would rape a woman from the rear as he strangled her. Eyes bulging, tongue protruding. He would climax as she died. And these men Benton worked with enjoyed the telling a bit too much. Do you have any idea what that’s like?” I fix a stare on her that is as sharp as nails. “To see a dead body, to see photographs, videos, of someone brutalized, of someone suffering and terrified and realize that the people around you are secretly enjoying it? That they find it sexy?”