The Pain Scale (30 page)

“Well, I’ve been doing videography for a long time, okay? And I’ve known Sara for a while, too. That’s why I had that first clip. She was helping me with a project for a class.”

“What about this other clip?” Jen asked. “Tell us about it.”

“Okay, well it’s a vérité kind of a thing. Some footage I got at a gallery opening for a grad-student exhibit. Shots of the crowd looking at the paintings and stuff.”

“And stuff?”

“Well,” he said, “I accidentally got a bit of a conversation between Sara and Professor Catanio.”

“Accidentally?” I said.

“Yes. I thought they were talking about art and stuff, but it wasn’t about that.”

“What was it about?” Jen asked.

“Do you want to just watch it?”

We said we did, and he began fumbling with a backpack at his feet. After he unzipped the flap and pulled out a padded sleeve and unzipped that, too, he put a Sony Vaio notebook on the table and turned it on.

We let him stew in the silence as it powered up.

“Okay,” he said. “I had a couple of hours from this, but I picked out the one bit that I thought might help.” He clicked an icon on the desktop and a window opened. An animated hourglass hung in the middle of it for a few seconds; then the clip began.

The shot bounced around a bit and then stopped and zoomed in on Sara Benton and Catherine Catanio in a corner of what appeared to be a small art gallery. There weren’t too many other people in that part of the room, and to my surprise, their conversation could be easily heard.

“Again?” Catherine said. Her voice was louder and more forceful than the others in the room, and while Catherine didn’t seem to notice, Sara did. She looked around, as if to make sure no one else was listening.

Catherine spoke again. “You know what you said.”

“I know,” Sara said.

“Well?”

“I don’t know.” She bit at her lip and shook her head. “The kids...I can’t afford the kind of lawyer I’ll need to go up—” Sara paused while someone walked through the frame between the camera and the two women. When the dark figure had passed, Sara continued. “You know what kind of lawyers he has, his connections. What’s going to happen with the kids?”

“With what you know,” Catherine said, “he won’t stand a chance. You’ve got the evidence on your side. You can end—”

Sara shook her head and raised her hand to quiet her friend. “Not here. Can we go someplace else?”

Catherine nodded, and the camera panned quickly to the left, focusing on a red-and-black abstract painting that looked like a bleeding wound.

“So you just stood there and shot that?” I asked Oliver. “I thought you said Sara was your friend.”

“She was,” he said, lifting his chin to a defiant angle.

“She must have been if she let you record that,” Jen said. We were double-teaming him, pushing him off balance.

“Well, she—”

“How’d you get that footage?” I asked.

“She knew I was shooting the—”

“But she didn’t know you were shooting her.”

“No, but—”

“But you shot her anyway,” I said.

“I—”

“You what?”

“She didn’t know.”

“She didn’t know?”

“No.” He hung his head. His sense of shame filled the small room.

Jen softened her tone. “How’d you do it?”

“There’s a temporary wall in the middle of the room, paintings hanging on it. I shot around the corner of it. They didn’t know.”

I snorted with as much contempt as I could muster, and his shoulders slumped even more. What he brought us was genuinely useful. It was Sara adding even more confirmation to our suspicions about the state of the Bentons’ relationship in her voice.

Her own voice.

But I wasn’t going to let a douchebag like Oliver have the satisfaction of knowing that.

I left the room and let Jen and the lieutenant wrap things up.

“Remember what I said when we were at the crime scene? In the den, looking at the family pictures?”

“Yes,” Jen said.

“So far, he’s the only one with motive.”

“Could be his father, too.”

“Maybe. What do you want to do now?” I asked.

“See if we can find out who they were talking about in the video.”

Catherine Catanio wasn’t on campus that day, but when Jen called her, she agreed to come in to the squad and look at the video clip.

While we were waiting, I used my throwaway to call Patrick and see if he’d made any progress.

“I’ve got a source who can give us all of the congressman’s cell phone records. Kroll’s, too,” Patrick said. “Do we want to go that far?”

“Think we’ll get caught?”

“I don’t think so. But I can’t guarantee we won’t.”

“Let’s do it,” I said. “We’ve got some cover. If it goes bad, we’ve got enough ugly shit on Bradley to leak if it comes to that.”

“Mutually assured destruction?” he said.

“If it’s good enough for the Cold War—”

“You’re forgetting something.”

“I am? What?”

“For that to work, the other guys have to know about your missiles.”

I thought for a moment about how good it would feel to phone in a few anonymous tips to the
Press Telegram
, the
LA Times
, maybe even Channel 4. “They’ll know,” I said. “They’ll know soon enough.”

“Really?” Patrick sounded puzzled.

“Well, no, not really. I just thought it would be fun to say that.”

“That fucking creep,” Catherine said as soon as we began playing Oliver’s clip for her. “I can’t believe he did that.”

“Remember the other clips of Sara and the kids on the news?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Apparently, Oliver sold those to KNBC.”

“Really?”

“At least one of them.”

Jen said, “Thanks again for coming in. We just needed to show that to you and ask you a few questions about it.”

“What can I help you with?” she asked.

“Well, in the video, you say ‘not again,’” I said. “What exactly did you mean by that?”

“Sara had just told me that she found out Bradley had been involved with someone else.”

“Did she tell you who?” Jen asked.

“No,” Catherine said. “Just that it was someone he worked with.”

“Is there anything else she might have said about it?” I asked. “Any details at all? Anything could be helpful.”

“Nothing I can think of.”

“Bradley’s been working in Washington lately, hasn’t he?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you know if the woman he was involved with was here or back east?”

“Here, I think. Sara answered Bradley’s cell phone one day when he was in the shower. A woman was on the other end. Sara said she knew from the awkwardness of the caller’s voice what was going on.”

“What makes you think she was local?”

“Sara said the caller’s number was in the seven-one-four area code. ‘That figures,’ she said to me. That’s why I remember.” Catherine smiled sadly at the memory of the dig at the Orange County area code.

“Thank you. This is very helpful,” I said.

“Let me know if there’s anything else I can do,” Catherine said.

“We will.” Jen extended her hand.

Before she let go, Catherine said, “I want to help you nail that fuck to the wall.”

After she was gone, I said to Jen, “Do you think that’s some kind of an art thing?”

She smiled. “What do you make of the OC number?”

“I have an idea. Let me check my notes.”

M
OLLY
F
IELDS LIVED
in Huntington Beach, about three miles from the congressman’s office. Her cell phone was a 714 number.

Patrick ran their phone records—illegally, of course—and found that, several months before the murders, Bradley had called Molly thirty-seven times over a three-week period. She’d called him only six times. The last call was nine days before Oliver had shot the video of Sara and Catherine at the art exhibit.

“That sounds like something,” Jen said.

“It is.”

“Where should we interview her?”

She had a good question. Did we want to be friendly or intimidating? Which would get us better results?

“Look at the numbers,” I said. “Think she didn’t want to talk to him? Maybe he was harassing her?”

“That’s a possibility,” Jen said. “But it could have just been a practical thing; he told her not to call him at home, when he was with Sara. Could be he just likes to be in charge, to control things.”

We decided to bring her in. It would give us more options. She’d never be as relaxed as she would be at her home, but if Jen was right and she was enthusiastically involved with Bradley, we’d have a better shot with her in the interview room. We could pursue a harsher interview strategy if we needed to.

Jen thought I should make the call because I’d had the chance to build a bit of rapport with her.

“Hi, Molly,” I said when she answered her cell. “This is Danny Beckett. How are you doing?”

“I’m well,” she said. I could hear both surprise and curiosity in her voice. “How are you?”

Good, I thought. She was treating the call like a conversation and not an interrogation. “I’m good, thanks. How’s the congressman holding up?”

“Better than I would have believed. I don’t know how anyone could take that kind of loss.”

“It’s amazing what people are able to withstand,” I said. “I never cease to be surprised.”

“You must see a lot of it.”

“I do. I do.” I let the weight of that thought play for a moment and then went on. “Molly, I was hoping you might be able to help us out with something.”

“Of course, Detective Beckett.”

“Call me Danny, please.” She was quiet, and I wondered if I’d gone too far with that familiarity.

But she broke the silence. “What can I do, Danny?”

“Do you think you could answer a few more questions for us?”

“Yes.”

“Would you mind coming into the station? We’d like you to look at a few video clips and get your take on them.”

“Video clips?” she said. Was it still curiosity in her voice, or something else?

“Yes,” I said, trying to sound as mundane as possible. “Just a few public events. We wanted to get a staffer’s opinion on a few things. We know how busy Mr. Kroll is.” Technically, none of that was untrue. Only misleading. I wondered why I was hesitant to tell Molly outright lies. I think I wanted to trust her. To believe that she’d help us close the case.

“Oh, okay. When do you want me to come in?”

“The sooner we can get these questions cleared up, the better. What’s your schedule like today?”

Virtually no one is at ease in a police interview room. Molly certainly wasn’t. But we went out of our way to make her feel as comfortable as we could. We got her a fresh cup of coffee. Chatted with her, making small talk. Our aim was to create a sense of cognitive dissonance. For her to feel nothing but friendliness and support from us, while at the same time letting her feel the distress and anxiety that the harsh fluorescent lighting and cold metal brought out in her.

After we tossed ten minutes’ worth of questions to her about the congressman and his work and her work and their work and her relationship with the rest of the Benton family, I had a very strong sense of how she behaved in normal conversation and of how she sounded and acted when she told the truth. Then I asked, “How well do you know the congressman’s son, Bradley?”