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life.”
    “I can understand how angry you must feel.”
    “Anger doesn’t do any damn good at all.”
    “I’ll catch a plane or Lucy can pick me up.”
    I told him that the top priority was for him and his colleagues at the BAU to catch a killer the media has dubbed the Capital Murderer. “Stop the
infamia bastardo
before he kills someone else,” I said. “I’m okay. I can manage. I have the flu, Benton.” I brushed it off. “I won’t be pleasant to be around and I don’t want you or anyone else catching what I’ve got. Don’t come home.”
    “It’s not going well here, from bad to worse,” he said. “I’m worried he’s gone somewhere else and is killing again or will be soon, and everyone at the BAU disagrees with me about everything.”
    “You’re still convinced he’s not local to the D.C. area.”
    “I believe he’s in and out, which would explain why there were no murders between April and Thanksgiving. Seven months of silence and then two in a row. This is someone intimately familiar with certain geographic areas because he has a job that requires travel.”
    What he’s told me makes sense but what doesn’t is why he’s being ignored. Benton has always gotten the respect he deserves but not now in the Washington cases, and I know he’s fed up and aggravated as hell but what he can’t do is worry about me. I know he’s had his fill of sitting around with a group of criminal investigative analysts, what people still call profilers, and listening to theories and psychological interpretations that are being run from Boston and not the BAU. Ed Granby has his fingerprints all over this case and that’s the biggest problem, and Benton needs to deal with all that and not his wife.
     
    Sock follows me into the bathroom and I squint in the overhead light, old subway tile shiny and bright. White bath sheets folded on top of a hamper near the tub remind me of the dead body wrapped in white at MIT.
    Then I think again about the victims in Washington, D.C., and my review of their cases last month after two more women were murdered one week apart. I deliberate whether I should e-mail the MIT photograph to Benton but it’s not for me to do. It’s for Marino to do and it’s premature, and it’s also not up to me to divulge details to him about Benton’s cases. In fact, I can’t possibly.
    I wash my face, freshening up, as I remind myself what he said about repetitive behavior that goes beyond the killing, the bags, the duct tape, each victim wearing the previous victim’s underwear except in the first case, Klara Hembree. She was originally from Cambridge and that’s bothering me, too.
    In the midst of an acrimonious divorce from her wealthy real estate developer husband, she moved to D.C. last spring to be near her family and barely a month later was abducted and dead. DNA on the panties she was wearing came back to an unknown female of European descent, and Benton feels strongly this indicates there are other victims.
    But there’s no opportunity for cases to be compared or connected because the FBI has been miserly about releasing information. Nothing about the bags or the duct tape has made it into the news. There’s not even been a mention of the white cloths or sheets, certainly not about the bags, clear plastic with the hologram of an octopus, an iridescent oblong head and tentacles that shimmer in rainbow hues depending on the angle of light.
    Klara Hembree was murdered last April, and then this past month before Thanksgiving there were two more – Sally Carson, a professor, and Julianne Goulet, a concert pianist. Each of the women, like the first one, is believed to have been suffocated with a plastic bag from the D.C. spa store called Octopus that was burglarized about a year ago, cases of the customized bags and other inventory stolen from the loading dock. Benton is certain the killer is escalating out of control but the FBI’s not listening to him or his repeated suggestion that