This can’t have been a good day for him and I see the hints of stress and fatigue in the messiness of his thick silver hair and the tightness around his eyes and mouth. The suit is one of my favorites, pearl gray with a very narrow cream stripe, and it’s badly wrinkled. His white shirt is wrinkled. Probably from the five-point harness he was wearing inside the helicopter it occurs to me.

“We have to make sure they’re fine,” I persist. “She’ll want you to think they are, and when everyone is feeling safe you know what happens.”

“I do know what happens. I know how she thinks,” he says, and I realize it’s not the FBI that has Chanel Gilbert’s house under surveillance.

If the Bureau were spying on this place then Benton would know about it. He wouldn’t talk freely. He would talk in an off-tilt scripted way—the same way Janet has been talking. Or he’d say nothing at all. If anyone is spying it’s Carrie, and I’m fast reaching the point of not caring. She seems to know everything about us anyway.

Chapter 42

CHAPTER 42

HE SHUTS THE DOOR, AND WE’RE ALONE INSIDE Chanel Gilbert’s bedroom.

Or someone’s bedroom.

I can’t be sure whose.

“I know you’re upset,” Benton says. “I can understand how you might feel abandoned and misinformed by me right now.”

“I’m upset? Words I might use are unhappy, confused, concerned, manipulated.” I don’t want to sound like this. “Who was she, Benton? I saw the dive pictures in the library. Who the hell was she?”

He doesn’t say a word.

“I saw the tactical wet suit she had on. Black with a chest zipper, and that’s what I saw in the video my dive mask took. You and I don’t wear chest zippers. Our wet suits don’t have two white stripes on the leg but it appears hers did based on what I noticed in the framed photos of her wreck diving in the Bermuda Triangle. Do I need to refresh your memory further?” I continue to talk despite a presumed lack of privacy.

I have to know if the person who saved my life in Fort Lauderdale this past June is dead. Murdered. Probably beaten to death by Carrie.

“Her dental records have confirmed her identification,” I say to Benton. “But that doesn’t mean anything. Who was she?”

“I understand how things might look,” Benton finally answers.

“Maybe you’d like to tell me who Doug Wade is while we’re at it.”

“I’m not sure who you mean.”

“I mean the man I met on Lucy’s property who isn’t really with the IRS. He’s with the Department of Defense, and DoD wouldn’t be involved unless this is more about national security than some trumped-up criminal case against Lucy …”