Skeleton Key(41)

Bennis stopped doing e-mail and shut down her machine. Then she came across the room to sit in the small armchair next to the couch.

“So,” she said. “Is that what we’re doing today? Thinking about J. Edgar Hoover? Have you thought about Kayla Anson at all?”

“I haven’t had much to think about. Except that I’ve been wondering about people—about how many people seem to need to fight other people off. How many of them need to be isolated. Not that they’re forced to be, but that they want to be.”

Bennis got out a cigarette. There was an ashtray on the little writing table next to the laptop. Gregor hadn’t noticed it before, although he had noticed the smell of smoke in the room. It hadn’t registered as smoke, because it was the smell he’d come to recognize as part-of-Bennis, along with the lavender sachet that she put in all her underwear drawers. Now Bennis lit up and then went back across the room to get the ashtray. She dumped the small pile of butts into the wastebasket next to the table and brought it back almost clean. Gregor could see traces of ash in the bottom of it.

“I wish you’d stop doing that,” he said.

“You were telling me about people being isolated.”

Bennis was coughing. It was a sort of underground cough, held back, not full-throated, but it was there. Gregor pumped the volume on the television even higher.

“I was just thinking what I was telling you I was thinking. About how so many people seem to want to chase off anybody who might be close to them. Anybody who even tries to get close to them. I keep trying to come to some sort of understanding about why people kill each other. Not people on the street—not killings in the middle of a robbery, or drive-by shootings, or that kind of thing. I don’t even mean serial killers. Do you remember Ginny Marsh?”

“Ginny Marsh who killed her baby.”

“That’s right And all the others, really. The people who do it deliberately. Who do it out of some sense of connection, out of wanting to get rid of that sense of connection. I suppose I’m not making much sense of anything, myself.”

Bennis blew smoke into the air. “Did you know they’d set the date for execution?” she asked abruptly. “They sent me an invitation for it in the mail. The twenty-fourth of November. Less than a month away.”

Gregor watched the smoke of Bennis’s cigarette curl into the air. He had forgotten this part, of course. He always forgot this part His relationship to murder was professional. He always had a certain amount of detachment when he approached it. Bennis’s relationship to murder could never be truly detached at all.

“Her lawyers will make another appeal,” he said carefully—but Bennis’s head was already shaking, and his voice hadn’t carried much conviction. It had, after all, been almost ten years.

“They’re finished with the appeals. I got a letter from her lawyers, too.”

“And?”

“She’s still refusing to speak to us. To any of us. She’s still—herself. My brother Teddy sent her a little crate full of holiday jellies last Christmas. She sent it back without opening the package. I keep wondering if she’ll change her mind when it gets closer to the day.”

“You don’t have to go see it. You don’t have to go see her, if you don’t want to.”

“I know.” Bennis had smoked her cigarette to the filter. She stubbed it out and reached for another one. “I don’t even know what I want. Except that I don’t want her to be dead. That just seems wrong to me. Even though I know she’s—what she is. That’s she’s not safe. That she would do it again. To me, if she had the chance.”

“She almost did.”

“Do you get like this? With the people you work on, the people who get arrested in the cases that you do? Do you ever just not want them to die?”

“I don’t want anyone to die,” Gregor said. “I don’t believe in capital punishment.”

“Oh, I know. But that’s not what I mean. I’m being as idiotic about this as you were being about Hoover. Maybe it’s a sign that we’re both getting old.”

“I’m a lot older than you are. When is this dinner with the resident trooper?”

“Eight-thirty. We could go downstairs and get some appetizers, if you want. Bar food, really, but it’s not bad. Hot nibbles. That kind of thing.”

“Hot nibbles would be fine. I don’t suppose they have a television in the bar.”

“I don’t know.”

Gregor leaned forward and squinted at the television set. It was a large one, really, but the focus seemed to be off. The woman named Ann had been replaced by another one, named Diane. She was a blonde, too, but she had bigger teeth.