The Bone Bed

tall and straight in a dark suit, his silver hair damp and combed straight back.
    He doesn’t answer me about Douglas Burke.
    “I’ll send Bryce to get her at some point today, get her checked from stem to stern.” I open a can of dog food. “Are you coming by my office to see what we find with the car?”
    “I have to deal with the Marino problem.”
    “You’ll talk to him?”
    “Talking to him doesn’t help anything. He’s been talked to enough, and there’s nothing else. And nothing happened, Kay,” Benton then says, and he’s referring to something else entirely. “Nothing happened, but not because of her. But because of me.”
    He lets me know that Douglas Burke is attracted to him and has tried to do something about it. She might be in love with him, and when he says that, I know she is. I know she has it bad.
    “That could be part of the problem.” He sips coffee and looks at me as I set Sock’s bowl on his mat, which is a safe distance from Shaw’s mat, although the two of them seem at peace with each other, as if they know what they’ve been through and wouldn’t deny any creature the courtesy of rescue.
    “What do you mean, ‘
could
be’?”
    “When we first started working together I really thought she was gay. So it’s been very confusing.” He hands me a coffee.
    “How did you suddenly become so obtuse? What is it you do for a living? Suddenly you’re a blockhead?”
    He smiles. “Not so astute when it comes to myself, maybe. I’m always the last to know.”
    “Bullshit, Benton.”
    “Maybe I didn’t want to know.”
    “That’s the more likely story.”
    “I would have bet you money she was gay.”
    “Whatever she is, she shouldn’t have done what she did last night.”
    “She knows that, Kay. And as bad as it was for you, it’s pretty terrible to be an FBI agent and lose control like that. She’s lost control. She has. Badly. And it will have to be addressed beyond my giving her hell about it.”
    “You don’t want her.” I give him another chance to confess.
    “I don’t want her like that, and in fact I was sure she wanted Lucy. She’d get unbelievably flustered around Lucy,” he says.
    “Lucy could fluster Mother Teresa.”
    “No, I mean it.” Benton opens the refrigerator and retrieves a jug of blood-orange juice and pours each of us a glass. “I’m trying to think of the last time when it was so obvious I was almost embarrassed. Doug was dropping me off at Hanscom, where Lucy was meeting me. She’d just shut down the helicopter and was walking across the tarmac, and Doug was so distracted I thought she might hit a parked plane.”
    “When Lucy flew you to New York this past June, right before my birthday,” I recall. “That recently you didn’t get what was going on?”
    “Her face was flushed, her hands were shaking, agitated, and she stared holes in her.”
    “Sounds like Sudafed, or whatever else she’s on.”
    “Now I’m wondering,” he says. “Now I’m really wondering.”
    “It could be Lucy, too. She might have been reacting to Lucy,” I consider, as I get eggs from the refrigerator and begin cracking them in a bowl. “People aren’t always one thing. Almost never, if they’re honest about it. I’m not aware they really know each other, beyond Lucy making a point to avoid her and every other FBI agent if possible.”
    “Could be something conflicted there.” Benton refills his cup and checks mine. “She’s asked me about her.”
    “She’s asked you about Lucy?”
    “She’s curious about Lucy’s FBI past. Why she left the Bureau. Why she left ATF.”
    “What did you tell her?” I turn on the stovetop.
    “Nothing.”
    “She’s just curious, or are her questions an attempt to be critical? Maybe she wants to find out information that might make her feel superior to Lucy.”
    “Doug’s competitive.”
    “You probably don’t know the half of it.” I open a cabinet, deciding on cookware.
    “I don’t talk about us, don’t confide in her, never have and wouldn’t.”
    “I’m not surprised. You barely confide in me.”
    “I know Doug takes all sorts of stuff, has real problems with allergies, but I’d never really given it a second thought.”
    “Have you seen symptoms and behavior like this from the beginning?” I whisk eggs and melt butter in a saucepan. “What about when you first started working with her closely?”
    “On and off and then on. These past few months? On all the time. Revved up like