I hear an engine idling, and Benton wouldn’t leave his expensive Audi running with no one in it—not even for two minutes. He didn’t come here alone, not that I’m surprised, and I wonder which agents are with him.

“I’m heading to Norwood, and from there to Baltimore,” he says, and Lucy keeps her helicopter in Norwood, just outside of Boston, where she has her own hangar.

“I see. That’s why she’s in a flight suit. She’s taking you,” and I think about the timing of her showing up as I emerged from the trailer.

Benton must have let her know about Briggs’s death hours ago.

“When I’m done here I’ll come meet you,” I promise as we approach a black Tahoe with dark-tinted windows and government plates.

The back door on the passenger’s side opens, and I watch an unfamiliar man climb out.

“It will be at least a day or two,” I say to Benton, “but I’ll help Ruthie, do anything I can.”

Off to our left the Kennedy School of Government hulks against the night, and for an instant it’s hard to breathe.

CHAPTER 37

ROGER MAHANT IS THE assistant special agent in charge, the ASAC of the FBI’s Boston division.

He’s driving the black Tahoe. Benton’s riding shotgun, and I’m in the backseat sitting next to a man I’ve never met before. He could be FBI but acts more like the CIA, quiet, unreadable, self-contained. I don’t trust him or anyone at the moment, not even my husband, not professionally. He has to take their side in here. He has to be one of them.

So Benton can’t tell me everything that’s going on—not in front of them. He can’t act like my husband or much of a friend. It’s nothing new but feels more lonely than usual as he sits in the front seat, his back to me, saying little or nothing, in his sponge mode. You forget he’s there while he soaks in everything around him, and I can tell when he’s doing it.

“Something else to drink?” Mahant’s brooding dark eyes look at me in the rearview mirror.

“I’m fine for now.” I have my messenger-bag briefcase in my lap, and my arms are wrapped around it as if someone might try to take it.