“She could have,” he says and right now I know my husband and I don’t.

I’m reminded I couldn’t do what he does for a living. I’ve never been motivated to form alliances and détentes with miscreants, with monsters. I don’t pretend to understand them. I don’t want to be their friend and tend to resist the temptation of believing I can think like them. I probably can’t. Maybe I wouldn’t if I could or maybe I already can and refuse to face it. But the love of my life, the man I sleep with is a very different story.

“How the hell has this happened?” I talk very quietly, scarcely audibly as I listen for a boom or bang, what might be a bomb going off.

“It’s happened exactly according to plan,” Benton says, and he channels people like Carrie or at least he comes disturbingly close to it.

In his own baffling way he doesn’t judge those he pursues and he doesn’t hate them either. They’re nothing more than sharks or snakes or other deadly creatures in the grand pecking order and food chain of things. He accepts that their behavior is predetermined as if they have no will of their own. He has no feelings about them. Not feelings the rest of us can begin to understand.

“She presents us with a choice and believes she knows exactly what we’ll decide,” he says as I head to the office. Finally at almost five-thirty.

At least at the CFC I’m only minutes from the River Basin should the worst happen and in typical fashion I begin to envision what that scene would look like. Then I stop myself. I can’t bear to imagine Marino dead, much less blown apart. He’s always joked about knowing far too much about death and how humiliating it can be. He wouldn’t want people laughing at his autopsy pictures.

You’ll make sure they don’t pass them around and make fun of me, right Doc? Because I’ve sure as hell seen them do it with other people …

“Who’s at the Gilbert house? Anybody yet?” I ask Benton as he scrolls through something on his phone.

“We’ve got agents on location.”

“Ernie wonders if there’s an area of the house we don’t know about that might explain some of the evidence we’re identifying. Your agents might want to look around the property for some area that isn’t readily visible,” I’m saying when his phone rings.

“Yes,” he says and then he listens. “It has to be coming from somewhere,” he finally replies curtly, not particularly nicely.

He gives the cross street address of where we are and ends the call.