The Last Precinct

A

"I have to be clinical, objective. You of all people should understand."

She studies me before replying. "Is it that? Or might it be that you are avoiding the unbearable suffering you most certainly would invite if you allowed your imagination to get involved in your cases?" She leans closer, resting her elbows on her knees, gesturing. "What if, for example"_she pauses dramatically_"you could take the facts of science and medicine and use your imagination to reconstruct in detail the last minutes of Diane Bray's life? What if you could conjure it up like the footage of a film and watch_watch her being attacked, watch her hemorrhage, watch her being bitten and beaten? Watch her die?"

"That would be unspeakably awful," I barely reply.

"How powerful if a jury could see a film like that," she says.

Nervous impulses boil beneath my skin like thousands of mi

"But if you went through that looking glass, as you refer to it," she goes on, "then where might it end?" She throws her hands up. "Ah. Maybe it would not end, and you would be forced to watch the footage of Benton's murder."

I shut my eyes. I resist her. No. Please, Lord, don't make me see that. A flash of Benton in the dark, a gun trained on him and the ratcheting sound, the snap of steel as they handcuff him. Taunts. They would taunt him, Mister FBI, you 're so smart, what are we go

My eyelids fly open. A

"Very, very painful." Her face melts with compassion. "I ca

Benton walks into my mind. He wears his favorite khakis, and his ru

"What secrets do you think he kept from you?" A

"Oh God. Mostly about work." My breath trembles, my heart flying away in fear. "He kept many details to himself. Details about what he saw in certain cases, things he felt were so awful no one else should be subjected to them."

"Even you? Is there anything you have not seen?"

"Their pain," I speak quietly. "I don't have to see their terror. I don't have to hear their screams."

"But you reconstruct it."

"Not the same thing. No, not the same. Many of the killers Benton dealt with liked to photograph, audiotape and in some instances videotape what they did to their victims. Benton had to watch. He had to listen. I always knew. He'd come home looking gray. He wouldn't talk much during di

"But he wouldn't tell you…"

"Never," I interrupt with feeling. "Never. That was his Indian Burial Ground and no one was allowed to step there. I taught at a death investigation school in Saint Louis. This was early in my career, before I moved here, when I was still a deputy chief in Miami. I was doing a class on drowning and decided since I was already there, I'd go ahead and attend the entire weeklong school. One afternoon, a forensic psychiatrist taught a class on sexual homicide. He showed slides of living victims. A woman was bound to a chair and her assailant had tightly tied rope around one of her breasts and inserted needles in the nipple. I can still see her eyes. They were dark pools filled with hell, and her mouth was wide open as she screamed. And I saw videotapes," I go on in a monotone. "A woman, abducted, bound, tortured and about to be shot in the head. She keeps whimpering for her mother. Begging, crying. I think she was in a basement, the footage dark, grainy. The sound of the gun going off. And silence."

A

"I was the only woman in a room of about sixty cops," I add.

"Even worse, then, because the victims were women and you were the only woman," A

Anger touches me as I remember the way some of the men stared at the slides, at the videotapes. "The sexual mutilation was arousing to some of them," I say. "I could see it in their faces, sense it. Same thing with some of the profilers, Ben-ton's colleagues in the unit. They'd describe the way Bundy would rape a woman from the rear as he strangled her. Eyes bulging, tongue protruding. He would climax as she died. And these men Benton worked with enjoyed the telling a bit too much. Do you have any idea what that's like?" I fix a stare on her that is as sharp as nails. "To see a dead body, to see photographs, videos, of someone brutalized, of someone suffering and terrified and realize that the people around you are secretly enjoying it? That they find it sexy?"

"Do you think Benton found it sexy?" A

"No. He witnessed such things weekly, maybe even daily. Sexy, never. He had to hear their screams." I have begun to ramble. "Had to hear them crying and begging. Those poor people didn't know. Even if they had, they couldn't have helped it."

"Didn't know? What didn't these poor people know?"

"That sexual sadists are only more aroused by crying. By begging. By fear," I reply.

"Do you think Benton cried or begged when his killers abducted him and took him to that dark building?" A

"I've seen his autopsy report." I slip into my clinical hiding place. "There's really nothing in it to tell me definitively what happened before death. He was badly burned in the fire. So much tissue burned away, it wasn't possible to see, for example, if he still had a blood pressure when they cut him."

"He had a gunshot wound to his head, too, did he not?" A

"Yes."

"Which do you think came first?"

I stare mutely at her. I have not reconstructed what led up to his death. I have never been able to bring myself to do that.

"Envision it, Kay," A

My mind is dark, as dark as the inside of that grocery store in Philadelphia.

"He did something, didn't he?" She pushes, leaning into me, on the very edge of the ottoman. "He won, didn't he?"

"Won?" I clear my throat. "Won!" I exclaim. "They cut his face off and burned him up and you say he won?"

She waits for me to make the co