“Do you think Benton found it sexy?” Anna asks.
“No. He witnessed such things weekly, maybe even daily. Sexy, never. He had to hear their screams.” I have begun to ramble. “Had to hear them crying and begging. Those poor people didn’t know. Even if they had, they couldn’t have helped it.”
“Didn’t know? What didn’t these poor people know?”
“That sexual sadists are only more aroused by crying. By begging. By fear,” I reply.
“Do you think Benton cried or begged when his killers abducted him and took him to that dark building?” Anna is about to score.
“I’ve seen his autopsy report.” I slip into my clinical hiding place. “There’s really nothing in it to tell me definitively what happened before death. He was badly burned in the fire. So much tissue burned away, it wasn’t possible to see, for example, if he still had a blood pressure when they cut him.”
“He had a gunshot wound to his head, too, did he not?” Anna asks.
“Yes.”
“Which do you think came first?”
I stare mutely at her. I have not reconstructed what led up to his death. I have never been able to bring myself to do that.
“Envision it, Kay,” Anna tells me. “You know, do you not? You have worked too many deaths not to know what happened.”
My mind is dark, as dark as the inside of that grocery store in Philadelphia.
“He did something, didn’t he?” She pushes, leaning into me, on the very edge of the ottoman. “He won, didn’t he?”
“Won?” I clear my throat. “Won!” I exclaim. “They cut his face off and burned him up and you say he won?”
She waits for me to make the connection. When I offer her nothing further, she gets up and walks to the fire, lightly touching my shoulder as she passes. She tosses on another log and looks at me and says, “Kay, let me ask you. Why would they shoot him after the fact?”
I rub my eyes and sigh.
“Cutting off the face was part of the MO,” she goes on. “What Newton Joyce liked to do to his victims.” She refers to the evil male partner of the evil Carrie Grethena psychopathic pair that made Bonnie and Clyde seem like a Saturday morning cartoon from my youth. “Excise their faces and store them in the freezer as souvenirs, and because Joyce’s face was so homely, so scarred by acne,” Anna goes on, “he stole what he envied, beauty. Yes?”
“Yes, I suppose. As much we can go with any such theory about why people do what they do.”
“And it was important that Joyce do the excisions carefully and not damage the faces. Which is why he did not shoot his victims, certainly not in the head. He did not want to risk causing damage to the face, the scalp. And shooting is too
easy.” Anna shrugs. “Quick. Maybe merciful. Far better to be shot than to have your throat cut. So why did Newton Joyce and Carrie Grethen shoot Benton?”
Anna stands over me. I look up at her. “He said something,” I answer slowly, finally. “He must have.”
“Yes.” Anna sits back down. “Yes, yes.” She encourages me with her hands, as if directing traffic to move across the next intersection. “What, what? Tell me, Kay.”
I reply that I don’t know what Benton said to Newton Joyce and Carrie Grethen. But he said something or did something that caused one or the other to lose control of the game. It was an impulse, an involuntary reaction when one of them pushed the gun to Benton’s head and pulled the trigger. Boom. And the fun was over. Benton felt nothing, was cognizant of nothing after that. No matter what they did to him after that, it didn’t matter. He was dead or dying. Unconscious. He never felt the knife. Maybe he never saw it.
“You knew Benton so well,” Anna says. “You knew his killers, or at least you knew Carrie Grethenyou’d had experiences with her in the past. What do you think Benton said and to whom did he say it? Who shot him?”
“I can’t…”