“What the hell?” Marino exclaims. “Your FBI assholes are just trying to trap her in anything you can possibly come up with? Because that’s what it’s sounding like.”

Benton has no answer for that. At least not one he’s going to offer. Instead he brings up what we’ve suspected all along. I’m not surprised but it’s brutal to hear him confirm it so bluntly. The FBI believes Carrie Grethen is a fabrication, a diabolically ingenious one that Lucy conjured up when she went rogue. Pressure points. Triggers. Turbulence in a domestic life that’s already shaky, and Lucy is unstable. She’s always been unstable. And let’s face it she’s a sociopath, Kay.

Chapter 45

CHAPTER 45

THIS ISN’T ME TALKING,” BENTON ADDS AS IF IT will make me feel better. “It’s everyone else.”

By everyone else he means the same people he always does. His people. The Feds. I’m aware of Marino next to me in the passenger’s seat, his portable radio upright on his thigh. He’s gotten interested in something and is turning up the volume.

“This is wrong beyond words and you know it, Benton.” I continue glancing at him in the rearview mirror.

“I don’t disagree.”

Then I remind him of the H&K machine gun, an early model with a wooden forestock. I remember it was at my house in Richmond once.

“You had it in a briefcase that I assumed you locked inside the gun safe. You must have let Lucy borrow it at some point,” I explain what I vaguely recall.

“Why would I let a child borrow anything I might keep in a gun safe?”

“Lucy wasn’t a child,” I reply but it’s nagging at me that the chronology is off.

“If you’re talking about the MP5K? Then Lucy would have been about ten. At the most twelve when it was presented to my unit,” Benton says and I think back to when he showed up with the ominous briefcase, which he said was straight out of James Bond. “I happened to have it with me one night when I came to your house. I showed it to you because it was a novelty.”

“Did you ever report it missing from my house after you locked it in the gun safe?”

“I never locked it in your gun safe, and it was never mine, Kay.”

“But it was in your possession at one time.”

“Me personally?” His face is unreadable in the rearview mirror.

“Yes.”

“Only once. Very briefly in 1990, which was when I brought it to your house.” He has that look he gets when he knows that what I’m about to say is incorrect.

“Because ultimately it was connected to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto,” I tell him, and I’m distracted by Marino’s radio.