ten seconds, and I’m quite sure the muffins must be done,” I say. “She tries to seduce my husband, wants Marino to go to jail and basically accuses me of being a liar and resorts to interrogation methods reminiscent of rubber hoses.”
“She probably needs a leave of absence.”
“It was her intention to degrade if not annihilate the competition.”
“She probably needs to see someone.” He pops up the muffins and quickly drops them on a plate and butters them. “She needs to be away from Boston and, quite frankly, away from me. I need her away from me.”
Lightly brown on top, the frittata is done, and I slide it out of the saucepan and onto a platter and slice it like pizza while Benton continues telling me his concerns about Douglas Burke.
“The problem is, you seek counseling, especially if you need to be on meds, it’s not just your own private business.” He carries our coffees and silverware to the breakfast table by the window. “With the Bureau, nothing is just your own private business. So she doesn’t want help even though she needs it.”
“Are you worried she might be a danger to herself?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you don’t know, that’s the same as saying yes.” I pull out a chair, and the morning beyond the window is getting light and a car going by on the street is moving slowly, carefully, because of ice. “If you don’t know if she’s safe for herself or maybe others, then you have to assume she isn’t. What do you do about that?”
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to talk to Jim.”
Jim Demar is the special agent in charge of the Boston Field Office.
“Unfortunately, it will give a life to something.” He spreads fig preserves on half a muffin, which he offers to me. “She could be put on administrative leave with pay, which wouldn’t be the worst thing if it gives her time to get her head straight, maybe get her moved and let her start fresh.”
“Where?”
“I’m going to recommend Louisville, Kentucky, where she’s from. A new office there, a great facility and lots of opportunity. Maybe the Joint Terrorism Task Force or the Intelligence Fusion Center or foreign counterintelligence or public corruption.”
“Whatever gets her mind off of you,” I reply.
“I’m sure she’ll be fine. It’s just not a good fit for her around here.”
• • •
I think about that as I drive back to the CFC, not a good fit, and yet Douglas Burke’s problem has nothing to do with Boston and everything to do with Benton. He’s being naïve, and it concerns me, and I contemplate how strange it might seem to almost anyone that my husband the profiler can be thick, downright dense. I’ve never been in this exact predicament. I’ve never had to deal with someone obsessed with my husband quite to this degree, and he doesn’t see it the way I do. Douglas Burke is dangerous to herself and I’m not sure to whom else.
twenty-eight
I PULL IN BEHIND MY BUILDING AND CAN DETERMINE BY the cars in the lot the key people who are here, the ones I will need. Luke and Anne, and Ernie, George and Cybil, and I notice Toby’s pickup truck. He’s on call tonight and is supposed to be off today. His red Tacoma is parked in an Investigation space next to the white Tahoe I was in yesterday, and I think of what Lucy said when we talked at one a.m.
She told me the reason she was still up at that hour, as if it required an explanation, is that she and Marino had been arguing rather fiercely. He refused to stay in her house and she refused to drive him to the CFC to get his car, and she wouldn’t drive him to his home in Cambridge, either. From that I inferred he’d been drinking or wasn’t to be trusted for one reason or another, and as she was telling me this I could hear someone in the background who wasn’t him.
The person was speaking in a low, quiet voice I couldn’t make out while Lucy went on to say that Marino finally agreed to stay in the stable, an outbuilding that really isn’t a stable anymore because she’s converted it into a washing and detailing bay with an underground firing range. Upstairs on the second floor is a guest quarters, an efficiency apartment, and she was moving about as she described this, and I couldn’t hear the other person anymore, and that