Blow Fly (Kay Scarpetta #12)(17)
It is not lost on Jean-Baptiste that the several minutes separating his birth from his brother's is how long it is supposed to take for Jean-Baptiste to die on May 7. Several minutes is about how long his chosen ones lived, as blood spattered walls in peaks and valleys that looked very much like an abstract painting he once saw and wished badly he could buy, but had no money and no place to hang it. "Who's there!" he screams.
15
THE CHARLES RIVER reflects the fledgling green of spring along Bostons embankment, and Benton Wesley watches young men row a racing shell in perfect rhythm.
Muscles ripple like the gentle current, paddles dip in whispered plashes. He could watch and say nothing all afternoon. The day is perfect, without a cloud, the temperature seventy-five degrees. Benton has become a close companion of isolation and silence, and craves them to the extreme that conversation fatigues him and is weighted by long pauses that intimidate some people and irritate others. He rarely has more to say than the homeless people who sleep in rag piles beneath the Arthur Fiedler footbridge. He even managed to offend the loud, gregarious Max, who works in the Caf? Esplanade, where Benton on occasion buys root-beer and Cracker Jacks or a soft pretzel. The first comment Benton ever made to Max was taken the wrong way.
"Change." That was all Benton muttered with a shake of his head.
Max, who is German and often mistranslates English and takes umbrage easily, interpreted the cryptic remark to mean that that smart-ass in running clothes and dark sunglasses thinks all foreigners are inferior and dishonest and was demanding the change due him from the five-dollar bill Max tucked inside the till. In other words, the hardworking Max is a thief.
What Benton meant was that Cracker Jacks at the Caf? Esplanade are served in bags, not boxes, and cost a dollar instead of a quarter. The toy-surprises inside are games printed on folded white paper, cheap as hell, and require the IQ of a pigeon. Gone are the days of Benton s childhood, when his sticky fingers dug through caramel-glazed popcorn and peanuts for treasure, such as a plastic whistle or BB game or, best of all, the magic decoding ring that little Benton wore on his index finger, pretending it empowered him to know what people thought, what they would do and which monster he would defeat on his next secret mission.
The irony isn't lost on him that he grew up to wear a special ring-this one gold and engraved with the FBI crest-and became the champion of decoding the thoughts, motivations and actions of people the public calls monsters. Benton was born with a special gift for channeling his intuition and intellect into the neurological and spiritual abysses of the worst of the worst. His quarry was the elusive offenders whose violent sexual acts were so heinous that panicking police from the United States and abroad used to wait in line to review their cases with him in the FBI Academy's Profiling Unit in Quantico, Virginia. Benton Wesley was the legendary unit chief who wore conservative suits and a large gold ring.
It was believed that from reports and nightmarish photographs, he could divine some clue that investigators missed, as if there was a magic prize to be rooted out during sessions inside the dank, windowless space where the only sounds were grim voices, papers sliding across the conference room table, and distant muffled shots from the indoor firing range. Benton's world for most of his FBI career was J. Edgar Hoover's former bomb shelter, an airless bunker belowground where pipes from the Academy's upper-level toilets sometimes leaked on worn carpet or ran in stinking trickles down cinder-block walls.
Benton is fifty and has reached the bitter belief that psychological profiling isn't psychological in the least, but is nothing more than forms and assumptions based on decades-old data. Profiling is propaganda and marketing. It is hype. It is just one more sales pitch that helps rake in federal dollars as FBI lobbyists stalk Capitol Hill. The very word profiling makes Wesley grit his teeth, and he can't abide the way what he used to do is misunderstood, abused, has become a hackneyed Hollywood device drawn from worn-out and faulty behavioral science, anecdotes and deductive assumptions. Modern profiling is not inductive. It is as specious and misleading as physiognomy and anthropometry-or the dangerous and ridiculous beliefs from centuries past that murderers looked like cavemen and could be unequivocally identified by the circumference of their heads or the length of their arms. Profiling is fool's gold, and for Benton to come around to that conviction is akin to a priest deciding there is no God.
No matter what anybody says, no matter what statistics and epidemiological studies suggest and intellectual gurus pontificate, the only constant anymore is change. Human beings today commit more murders, rapes, pedophilia, kidnapings, hate crimes, acts of terrorism and just plain dishonest, dishonorable, self-serving sins against all forms of life than the free world has ever seen. Benton obsesses about it a lot. He has plenty of time to do so. Max thinks Benton, whose name he does not know, is a wacko intellectual snob, probably a professor at Harvard or MIT, and a humorless one at that. Max does not catch the occasional irony or dry-ice wit that Benton was known for when he was known, and he is known by virtually no one anymore.
Max no longer speaks a word to him, just takes his money and makes a big production of counting Benton's change before shoving it and a slice of cheese pizza or a soda or a bag of Cracker Jacks to the "Scheiáe Arsch."
He talks about Benton every chance he gets.
"The other day he buy a pretzel," Max told Nosmo King, the delivery man whose mystical-sounding name is the mundane result of his mother seeing No Smoking divided into No Smo king when double doors parted as she was being rolled into the delivery room to give birth to him.