I wish she wouldn’t act like this, and of course she knows me far too well. She knows I’m thinking about him, wondering what he’s been doing while his employer pillages his family’s privacy and possessions. While the FBI eviscerates the lives of the people he loves. While we are out here miserable and about to get rained on, and I’m hurt in a way I won’t say. Right this moment I’m unhappy with him. I feel abandoned by him, possibly betrayed. I feel I might yell at him if I got him on the phone, and the wind gusts hard, sending pollen, dirt and leaves skittering over the blacktop.

“Are you crying?” Lucy looks over at me.

“It’s all this stuff blowing around out here,” I explain as I wipe my eyes with my shirtsleeve.

“Go ahead and call him,” she encourages, and I don’t respond. “Really. Go ahead. You might not have gotten him a half hour ago but I’ll bet you will now.”

“As if you have reason to know.”

“Go on. I’ll bet you twenty bucks you get him.”

I try Benton’s cell phone and he answers.

I DON’T SAY HELLO. I tell him I’m on Lucy’s property. I’ve been here for the past hour and a half, and will be heading back to Cambridge shortly.

“I know where you are, Kay.” Benton’s mild baritone voice is quiet and friendly but I know when he’s not alone. “I’m well aware of what you’ve been doing. Are you all right?”

“Where are you?”

“We landed at Hanscom. We were forced to with this weather moving in. Conditions have deteriorated extremely fast and you shouldn’t be out in it either.”

Benton was up in the helicopter, and Lucy suspected or knew it for some reason. It explains her cryptic comment to me about his ability to answer the phone right now when he might not have been able to a while ago. He’s with his FBI colleagues, the same agents who followed Marino and me from Chanel Gilbert’s house in Cambridge.

“Yes I’m aware of the chopper,” I say next, and I’m answered with silence. “Can you offer an explanation?” I ask and he says nothing.

When Benton is like this there’s no point in my probing because he’s not going to respond in a helpful way, not over the phone, not with other agents within earshot. What I generally resort to is making statements. Now and then he’ll address those, and my thought process picks up speed and I concentrate more intensely. I have to worry about what both of us say because people are listening.

“You’re not going to tell me what’s going on,” I try again.

“No.”

“You’re not alone.”

“I’m not.”