He got out dishes and opened wine as I arranged chilled shrimp on plates and spooned Bev’s Kicked By A Horse Cocktail Sauce into a bowl. I halved lemons and wrapped them in gauze diapers, and fashioned crab cakes. Wesley and I ate shrimp cocktail as night drew closer and cast its shadow over the east.
‘I’ve missed this,’ he said. ‘Maybe you don’t want to hear it, but it’s true.’
I did not say anything because I did not want to get into another big discussion that went on for hours, leaving both of us drained.
‘Anyway.’ He set his fork on his plate the way polite people do when they are finished. ‘Thank you. I have missed you, Dr Scarpetta.’ He smiled.
‘I’m glad you’re here, Special Agent Wesley.’
I smiled back at him as I got up. Turning on the stove, I heated oil in a pan while he cleared dishes.
‘I want to tell you what I thought of the photograph that was sent to you,” he said. ‘First, we need to establish that it is, in fact, of the victim you worked on today.’
‘I’m going to establish that on Monday.’
‘Assuming it is,’ he went on, ‘this is a very dramatic shift in the killer’s M.O.’
‘That and everything else.’ Crab cakes went into the pan and began to sizzle.
‘Right,’ he said, serving coleslaw. ‘It’s very blatant this time, as if he’s really trying to rub our noses in it. And, of course, the victimology’s all wrong, too. That looks great,’ he added, watching what I was cooking.
When we were seated again, I said with confidence, ‘Benton, this is not the same guy.’
He hesitated before replying, ‘I don’t think it is, either, if you want to know the truth. But I’m not prepared to rule him out. We don’t know what games he might be into now.’
I was feeling the frustration again. Nothing could be proven, but my intuition, my instincts, were screaming at me.
‘Well, I don’t think this murdered old woman has anything to do with the earlier cases from here or Ireland. Someone just wants us to assume she does. I think what we’re dealing with is a copycat.’
‘We’ll get into it with everybody. Thursday. I think that’s the date we set.’ He tasted a crab cake. ‘This is really incredibly good. Wow.’ His eyes watered. ‘Now that’s cocktail sauce.’
‘Staging. Disguising a crime that was committed for some other reason,’ I said. ‘And don’t give me too much credit. This was Bev’s recipe.’
‘The photograph bothers me,’ he said.
‘You and me both.’
‘I’ve talked to Lucy about it,’ he said.
Now he really had my interest.
‘You tell me when you want her here.’ He reached for his wine.
‘The sooner the better.’ I paused, adding, ‘How is she doing? I know what she tells me, but I’d like to hear it from you.’
I remembered we needed water, and got up for it. When I returned, he was quietly staring at me. Sometimes it was hard for me to look at his face, and my emotions began clashing like instruments out of tune. I loved his chiseled nose with its clean straight bridge, his eyes, which could draw me into depths I had never known and his mouth with its sensuous lower lip. I looked out the window, and could not see the river anymore.
‘Lucy,’ I reminded him. ‘How about a performance evaluation for her aunt?’
‘No one’s sorry we hired her,’ he dryly said of someone we all knew was a genius. ‘Or maybe that’s the understatement of the century. She’s simply terrific. Most of the agents have come to respect her. They want her around. I’m not saying there aren’t problems. Not everybody appreciates having a woman on HRT.’
‘I continue to worry that she’ll try to push it too far,’ I said.
‘Well, she’s fit as hell. That’s for sure. No way I’d take her on.’
‘That’s what I mean. She wants to keep up with them, when it really isn’t possible. You know how she is.’ I gave him my eyes again. ‘She’s always got to prove herself. If the guys are fast-roping and running through the mountains wearing sixty-pound packs, she thinks she’s got to keep up, when she should just be content with her technical abilities, her robots and all the rest of it.’