The Last Precinct

"I left the bedroom and quietly shut the door and went down the hall to my office," I say. "As you know, when I do autopsies, I take sections of every organ and sometimes of wounds, as well. The tissue goes to the histology lab where it's made into slides I must review. I can never keep up with micro-dictations and routinely take slide folders home, and of course the police asked me all about this. It's fu

"Why do you think the police wanted to know about slides you might have in your house?" A

"Because they wanted to know about everything." I go back to my story about Benton, describing being in my office, bent over my microscope, lost in heavy metal-stained neurons that looked like a swarm of one-eyed purple and gold creatures with tentacles. I felt a presence behind me and turned to find Benton standing in my open doorway, his face filled with an eerie, ominous glow, like St. Elmo's fire before lightning strikes.

Can't sleep! he asked me in a mean, sarcastic tone that didn't sound like him. I pushed my chair back from my powerful Nikon microscope. If you could teach that thing to fuck, you wouldn 't need me at all, he said, and his eyes flew at me with the bright fury of the cells I was looking at. Dressed in pajama bottoms, Benton was pale in the partial light spreading out from the lamp on my desk, his chest heaving and shiny with sweat, veins roping in his arms, his silver hair plastered to his forehead. I asked him what in the world was the matter, and he ordered me back to bed, jabbing his finger at me.

At this point, A

"Nothing," I answer her. "No warning." I rock slowly, nonstop. Smoldering wood pops. "The last place I wanted to be with him that moment was in bed. He may have been the FBI's star psychological profiler, but for all of his prowess at reading others, he could be as cold and uncommunicative as a stone. I had no intention of staring up at the dark all night while he lay with his back to me, mute, hardly breathing. But what he wasn't was violent or cruel. He had never talked to me in such a demeaning, abusive way. If we had nothing else, A

"And did he tell you what was wrong?" She presses me on this.

I smile bitterly. "When he made the crude comment about teaching my microscope to fuck, that told me." Benton and I had grown comfortable living in my house, yet he never stopped feeling like a guest. It is my house and everything about it Is me. The last year of his life, he was disillusioned with his career, and as I look back on it now, he was tired and without purpose and feared getting old. All of it eroded our intimacy. The sexual part of our relationship became an aban- doned airport that looked normal from a distance but had no one in the tower. No landings, no takeoffs, only an occasional touch-and-go because we thought we should, because of the accessibility and old habit, I guess.

"When you did have sex, who usually initiated it?" A

"Eventually, just him. More out of desperation than desire. Maybe even frustration. Yes, frustration," I decide.

A

"Let's go back to the night he got so angry," A

"Just weeks before his murder." I talk calmly, mesmerized by coals that look like glowing alligator skin. "Benton knew my space needs. Even on nights when we made love, it wasn't unusual for me to wait until he fell asleep and get up with the stealth of an adulterer to slip inside my office down the hall. He was understanding about my infidelities." I feel A

"Was it really your nocturnal habits?" A

"I don't think of myself as aloof."

"Do you think of yourself as someone who co

I analyze, searching everywhere inside me for a truth I have always feared.

"Did you co

"Did I co

"But did you? I get the impression you didn't." A

I sigh. "I'm not sure I've ever talked to anybody about absolutely anything."

"Perhaps Benton was safe," she suggests.

"Perhaps," I reply. "I do know there were deep places in me he never reached. I also never wanted him to, didn't want to get that intense, that close. I suppose starting out as we did may be part of the explanation. He was married. He always went home to his wife, to Co

"Guilt?"

"Of course," I answer. "Every good Catholic feels guilt. In the begi

It is here that she leans forward and holds up a hand. This is her signal. I have said something important. "Rules," she says. "What are rules?"

"A definition? You want a definition of rules?"

"What are rules to you? Your definition, yes."

"Right and wrong," I reply. "What is legal versus illegal. Moral versus immoral. Humane versus inhumane."

"Sleeping with a married person is immoral, wrong, inhumane?"

"If nothing else, it's stupid. But yes, it's wrong. Not a fatal error or unforgivable sin or illegal, but dishonest. Yes, definitely dishonest. A broken rule, yes."

"Then you admit you are capable of dishonesty."

"I admit I'm capable of being stupid."

"But dishonest?" She won't let me evade the question.

"Everyone is capable of anything. My affair with Benton was dishonest. I indirectly lied because I hid what I was doing. I presented a front to others, including Co

"What about homicide? What is the rule about homicide? Wrong? Immoral? Is it always wrong to kill? You have killed," A

"In self-defense." On this point I feel strong and certain. "Only when I had no choice because the person was going to kill me or someone else."

"Did you commit a sin? Thou shall not kill''

"Absolutely not." Now I am getting frustrated. "It's easy to make judgments about matters one looks at from the distant vantage point of morality and idealism. It's different when you're confronted by a killer who's holding a knife to another person's throat or reaching for a pistol to shoot you. The sin would be to do nothing, to allow an i