Читать книгу Chaos - Patricia Cornwell - Страница 15

The waiter has returned with a bottle of still water, and we’re quiet as he fills our glasses.

We say nothing unless it’s related to appetizers and how lovely it is to have the dining room all to ourselves for as long as it lasts. Benton always gets the crab cakes with grilled scallions and pickled banana peppers, and I usually indulge in the lobster bisque with lemon brown butter.

But it’s too hot for either, we decide, and instead we pick the Mediterranean salad with heirloom tomatoes and crumbled feta. I ask if we can substitute purple onions for sweet ones and have extra dressing on the side with crushed red pepper to add a kick. I order another bottle of water, this one sparkling with lots of lime. The instant the waiter has moved on I return to what Benton was saying.

“What do you mean you wouldn’t bother?” I ask. “Your wife is the subject of a police complaint and you wouldn’t bother to pay attention? Even if it’s chickenshit?”

“This wouldn’t be the first time unstable people have spotted you in public and called the police and the media.” Benton turns another page in the wine list, and the light catches his gold signet ring engraved with his family coat of arms. “You’re recognizable, Kay, and people associate you with sensational crimes and disasters. I could tell you otherwise but it wouldn’t be the truth. So yes.” He glances up at me. “I might not have paid attention or as close attention as I should have.”

“You’ve listened to the recording.” I won’t let him evade the question. “I’m going to keep asking.”

He silently reads the wine list, and I can see his eyes moving up and down a page of white Burgundies. I’m not sure why. The most he can have is a glass. In a while he has to drive, and I think of Dorothy and get only more adamant with Benton. I can’t seem to help it.

“I want to hear the recording,” I tell him. “Do you have a copy? And I’m not interested in the transcript. I want to hear the bastard lie about me.”

“Marino should play it for you,” Benton says as he turns pages back and forth between different types of wines. “I assume he’s investigating your egregious disturbance of the peace just like any lead detective worth his salt would spend his time doing.”

“I told you he wouldn’t tell me scarcely anything the person said. He wouldn’t discuss it in detail, and legally I can push this, Benton. I have a right to face my accuser, and in this case the accuser is the person who’s lying about me on that recording. I want to hear it for myself—with my own ears. There are no legal grounds for withholding that recording from me unless you think I’m implicated in a federal crime. And last I checked, disturbing the peace wasn’t.”

This is exactly what Benton wants me to do—to threaten him in a confrontational offended way that doesn’t really reflect my true feelings. What I mustn’t do is treat him like my husband when it comes to this particular matter, which ironically he wouldn’t know about in the first place if we weren’t a couple. He needs to be Special Agent Benton Wesley this moment and I need to be the Chief, and we’ve been down this road many times.

He turns another page in the carte des vins. “I think we should have white wine,” he says. “But it depends on what you want to eat. We’ll have just enough to taste and cork the rest for later, after we finally get home.”

“It would take nothing more than a Freedom of Information Act request. But it’s stupid to make me go through that. I was thinking about fish. Something light.” I open my menu without picking it up as he reaches down next to his chair and finds his briefcase.

He places it in his lap, and I hear the bright snap of the locks again.

“Remember what my eighth-grade teacher said to me?” He pulls out his wireless headset in its zip-up case. “Good ol’ Mr. Broadmoor …”

“Who declared that one day you’re going to get what you ask for and be sorry,” I finish the anecdote for Benton, one he repeats often when he’s sure it applies to me.

“It won’t be pleasant and I’d rather spare you.” He unzips the small black case. “But as you know, the laws about nine-one-one recordings are rather murky in Massachusetts. There’s no statute that tells me you can’t listen. You’re right about that.”

He hands the headset to me and I put it on. He places his phone in the middle of the table, and touches several prompts on the display. I hear static and clicking in stereo. Then:

“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?” The dispatcher is a woman, and I recognize her voice from the chronic radio chatter in my life.

“Hello. It’s not exactly an emergency but I think the police should know that one of our esteemed public servants is disturbing the peace in front of God and everyone in Harvard Square.”

The caller’s voice is mellow and flows at a rhythmic slow pace, bringing to mind someone pulling taffy. It’s as if the person is stoned or putting on an act, and I remember what Marino said about not being able to tell if the caller is male or female. I’m not sure either.

“What’s the address of your emergency?” the dispatcher asks.

“I don’t know precisely but I should think a good way to describe the Square is it’s the area around the T station.”

“Is there an address of a business you can give me?”

“No.” The caller coughs several times.

“What number are you calling from?”

“It’s my cell phone so it’s not going to tell you my location. You won’t be able to confirm anything about me like that …”

At this point the caller becomes abusive and argumentative in his slow, languid way, and I think of him as a him. But I honestly can’t say because the voice is low and husky in a pleasant range somewhere between a baritone and a tenor.

As I listen to him describe what he allegedly witnessed it enters my mind that my so-called shit fest with my “boyfriend” isn’t something that was happening while this witness who’s a liar was on the phone with the dispatcher. What he says seems too rehearsed to be happening in real time, and instantly I’m suspicious he’s reporting his made-up story after the fact.

“Do you know where the female subject is now?” The dispatcher is asking about me in the recording as I stare down at the white tablecloth and listen carefully through the headphones.

“No, but she’s a C-U-Next-Tuesday if I ever saw one, and I sure as hell wouldn’t want her showing up at my damn house if somebody died. Jabbing her damn finger, slapping the fool out of some poor sissy kid who looks like a real loser. I can’t imagine what sort of bedside manner a nasty bitch like that would have …”

“Where are you?” the dispatcher asks as the caller coughs and clears his throat again. “Are you outside?”

“With the birds and the bees. Of course I’m outside! How the hell else could I be reporting something that’s going on outside in the elements right before my very eyes?”

This goes on until she lets him know the police are on their way, and she asks the caller’s name.

“You don’t need my name, lady, what you need is to pay attention to their names. You hear me?”

“I need a name so the police can find you—”

“Don’t try that shit with me. I know what you’re doing. You’re going to cover this up just like you do everything about the damn government, and it’s time for the intolerance and fascism to end …”

The vileness goes on for almost a minute total, and it’s difficult to hear such awful things about me. My anger spikes. I take off the headset, returning it to Benton.

“It would seem this individual has a personal problem with me for some reason.” I’m shaken and incensed, and it’s the only thing I can think to say.

“Is the voice familiar?” Benton’s eyes don’t leave mine.

“No it’s not. What time was the call made?”

“Twelve minutes past six.” His stare doesn’t waver as the meaning hits me.

June twelfth or six-twelve is my date of birth. Usually I would assume this is nothing more than a coincidental overlap with my personal life except for a not-so-minor problem. Six-twelve P.M. is also the exact time Tailend Charlie has been e-mailing his recorded threats to me since September 1.

“So it was almost an hour and a half after the fact.” I reach for my water glass. “Bryce and I were talking in front of The Coop at closer to four forty-five. Are we sure there’s no way the time could be faked?”

“I don’t see how, Kay. The time stamp is on the nine-one-one recording.”

“Then the call was definitely made after I’d left the Square. At six-twelve I’m certain I was walking through the Yard. That’s also in the ballpark of when Marino reached me on my cell phone.”

“Can you check?” Benton indicates my phone on the table.

I pick it up and look at the incoming calls. “He tried me first at six-eighteen,” I reply. “I remember what building I was walking past when my phone vibrated, and it was him.”

“What this suggests is he must have been contacted the instant the police got the complaint about you,” Benton says, and I don’t know if he’s asking or telling.

“Don’t forget Rosie’s always been a little sweet on him. They dated a few times. She probably didn’t waste a minute getting hold of him.”

“Rosie?”

“The dispatcher,” I remind him. “I recognized her voice. Her name is actually Rosemary but Marino calls her Rosie.”

“Which brings me back to the same question. Was there anything familiar, anything you noticed about the voice you just listened to in the nine-one-one call? Anything that struck you?” Benton looks down at his phone, but the screen has gone to sleep and there’s nothing to see but a glassy black rectangle.

He unlocks it and the displayed video file reappears with its frozen PLAY arrow.

“Beyond how arrogant and hateful the person sounded?” I’m thinking hard. “Nothing struck me, not really.”

“It sounds like you’re not sure.”

I look up at the plaster ceiling and replay the 911 audio clip in my head. “No,” I decide. “It’s unfamiliar, just a normal pleasant voice. I’m not sure what else to say about it.”

“And you’re equivocal again.” Benton’s not going to tell me why he thinks that.

It’s not his style to lead the witness even if the witness is his wife, and I take another drink of water as I think for a moment. He’s right. I’m uncertain, and then it occurs to me why.

“It’s too uniform, too homogenous,” I explain what I’ve been picking up on but couldn’t identify. “There aren’t the variations I might expect. There’s something stilted and unnatural about it.”

“In other words it sounds artificial or canned. Fake, in other words,” he says, and I wonder if this came from Lucy. “We can’t tell if it’s synthetized.” He answers my unspoken question about my niece. “But Lucy agrees that it’s strangely consistent from one comment to the next. She says that if it’s been enhanced or altered—”

“Wait a minute. If you got the audio file from the police, then how could it have been altered?”

“Lucy introduced the idea of a voice changer similar to what gamers are into. There are a lot of these apps on the market, although not the quality of whatever this person used. The typical voice disguised by software tends to sound obviously fake like a poor animation. It’s within the realm of possibility the caller has proprietary highly sophisticated software that changes your voice as you speak into the phone—”

“And it sounds different from your usual voice but normal to whoever’s on the other end.” I finish his thought because I already know what’s next.

Benton asks if I think it’s possible that my cyber-stalker Tailend Charlie is the one who called 911 and lied about me.

“Indicating this individual is stepping things up,” my husband adds. “Escalating whatever his game is, and we know without question that Tailend Charlie is technically sophisticated.”

“Let’s hope that’s not who placed the nine-one-one call because it would suggest he was in close proximity to me today,” I reply. “And I’ve been hoping whoever the cyber-bully is he’s not in Cambridge. Preferably he’s on the other side of the planet.”

“It strikes me as a little too coincidental that you began getting the e-mailed threats only a week ago, all of them altered audio clips. And now this,” Benton says.

“So tell me, Mr. Profiler.” I press my leg against his, and the fabric of his suit is smooth and cool against my bare skin. “What do you have to say about someone who calls nine-one-one to report your wife for being a C-U-Next-Tuesday?”