MARINO COULDN’T BE MORE DISTRACTED. IT’S worse as we approach the old warehouses, the storage bins, the defunct belt conveyors and bucket elevators up ahead.

A high fence and foothills of gravel and sand rise above rusty railroad tracks and soaring stretches of I-93 and U.S. 1. Beyond are the cable-stayed Zakim Bridge and the Boston skyline, the tops of the towers and buildings dissolving in the fog. The rain isn’t hard but it’s constant. The basin will be muddy and low-lying areas will be underwater.

I glance in the rearview mirror at Benton. He meets my eyes and his are lusterless and grim. If he’s in contact with his FBI colleagues I can’t tell.

“What’s going on with your division?” I ask him as Marino looks out his side window, on a call with the head of his department’s bomb squad.

“Fifteen, twenty minutes?” Marino says. “Yeah usually we don’t need to touch nothing and can stand there until we turn into skeletons. But not when a cop might be dying inside the damn trunk. Yeah get here ASAP but I’m going to start without you. Yeah you heard me loud and clear.” He ends the call and drops his phone into his lap.

“Should I expect to see some of your compatriots here?” I ask Benton. “Because I hope not.”

“I haven’t told them anything,” he says, and Marino whips around long enough to glare at him.

“Bullshit.” Marino stares out his window again and says, “One of my guys is missing or dead and your Boston Field Office doesn’t know?”

“It’s not up to me to notify them unless you ask,” Benton says to the back of Marino’s head. “If you’re inviting me to help and thereby inviting my office to assist, that’s a different matter.”

“When do I ever invite and when the hell do you ever wait for an invitation? The answer is you guys do whatever the hell you want.”

“This isn’t about you guys. It’s about me trying to help,” Benton says. “And what I’ll tell you in no uncertain terms is this is a game. That doesn’t mean it’s not a deadly one.”

“You’ve already been so much damn help today I don’t know how I’ll ever thank you,” Marino says sarcastically, rudely. “I mean flying around watching Lucy’s place get raided and her belongings hauled off. And all the planning that went into that because you guys had to know where she was and when and what would be the best time to spring a little ambush like that. Assuming the DEA didn’t get her first.”

I turn onto an unpaved access road, and emergency lights are a rolling wave of red and blue.